Category: Open Access

Elsevier Says Its 2009 Journal Price Increases Average Six Percent or Less

Elsevier has made public a letter to librarians stating that it is targeting "a global average list price increase of not more than six percent" for its journals in 2009. It notes that "the 2008 average list price increase across all STM publishers was 8.70% in Europe and 10.10% in the U.S."

Elsevier is taking author publication fees into account for pricing a subset of its journals: "For individual journals, we are realigning prices to reflect a number of factors, including differences in the number of articles made available, quality, and usage, as well as new factors such as Sponsored Articles." (The Sponsored Articles program allows authors publishing articles in over 40 journals to pay a $3,000 fee to make them open access.)

The letter also states that there were over 386 million articles downloaded from ScienceDirect in 2007, with over 460 million downloaded articles being anticipated in 2008.

SPARC Europe and DRIVER to Collaborate on Promoting Repositories

SPARC Europe and DRIVER have signed a Memorandum of Agreement to collaborate on promoting digital repositories in Europe.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SPARC Europe and DRIVER today confirmed a need for cooperation in order to progress and enhance the provision, visibility and application of European research outputs through digital repositories, in systems providing access to texts, data or other types of content. DRIVER is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by the European Commission, setting up a technical infrastructure for digital repositories and facilitating the building of an umbrella organisation for digital repositories. DRIVER relies on research libraries for the sustainable operation of repositories and provision of high quality content through digital repositories. SPARC Europe and DRIVER share the vision that research institutions should contribute actively and cooperatively to a common, pan-European data and service infrastructure based on digital repositories. . . .

Collaboration between SPARC Europe and DRIVER is framed by their joint support for an Open Access model for repositories in research institutions. They will present a common lobby at a national and international level to leverage change through the scholarly community within respective institutions and countries. Their reciprocal support will ensure wider access to standards for interoperability between repositories, and the adoption of emerging technical standards to facilitate open archiving. This agreement demonstrates their joint commitment to promote a European network of repositories offering access to research outputs across institutional and national boundaries.

David Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe, said "Europe is well placed to take a leading role internationally in the development of institutional repositories. A combination of institutional interest, progressive polices from funding bodies, and strong support from the European Commission creates the perfect conditions to foster an open research environment. DRIVER is a key component in underpinning the European repository infrastructure and we are very pleased to cement our already close relationship by signing this agreement."

OAK Law Project Publishes Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors

The Open Access to Knowledge Law Project has published Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors.

Here's an excerpt:

This guide aims to provide practical guidance for academic authors interested in making their work more openly accessible to readers and other researchers.

The guide explains, in detail, the principles and features of the open access movement and outlines the benefits of open access, particularly those relating to dissemination, citation impact and academic reputation. It examines institutional repositories and open access journals as tools for implementing open access, and explains how they operate and how they can be best utilised by academic authors. The guide further considers how moves by funding bodies and academic institutions to mandate the deposit of research output into institutional repositories affects authors in today's publishing environment.

The underlying law of copyright is also explained, with a practical emphasis on how authors can best deal with their legal rights to enable open access to their academic work. The guide outlines authors' options for providing open access to their work, including the use of copyright licences and open content models such as Creative Commons licences. A Copyright Toolkit is provided to further assist authors in managing their copyright.

Importantly, the guide addresses how open access goals can affect an author's relationship with their commercial publisher. It provides guidance on how to negotiate a proper allocation of copyright interests between an author and publisher in order to allow an author to deposit their work into an institutional repository and reuse their work. The guide addresses both legal and non-legal issues related to maintaining a positive relationship with publishers while still ensuring that open access can be obtained.

Critique of the National Archives' The Founders Online Report

Peter Hirtle has posted a sharp critique of the National Archives' The Founders Online report on the LibraryLaw Blog that, among other points, questions whether the digitized works that result from the project will be free of copyright and access restrictions.

Here's an excerpt:

5. Perhaps the most problematic issues in the report surround its use of the term "open access." For some, open access means "digital, online, and free of charge." The report, while saying it wants to provide open access to the material, appears to recommend that all material be given to UVA's Rotunda system for delivery. Rotunda follows a subscription model—not open access—that is remarkably expensive considering that citizens have already paid for all of the editorial work on these volumes. How could this be open access? Apparently Rotunda might be willing to give up its subscription approach if a foundation were willing to pay for all of its costs. Unless such a commitment is in place, I find it disingenuous to describe a Rotunda delivery option as "open access." There is no discussion of other, free, delivery options, such as the willingness expressed by Deanna Marcum of the Library of Congress at the Senate Hearing to make all of the Founding Fathers papers accessible through LC (which already has a good site pointing to currently accessible papers).

6. Others argue that for true open access, information must be accessible outside of specific delivery systems (such as Rotunda) and made available in bulk. Open data and open interfaces allow for all sorts of interesting uses of material. For example, someone might want to mashup George Washington's papers to Google Maps in order to be able to easily visual geographically the spread of information. Others might want to mesh manuscript material with published secondary literature. Rather than anticipating the widespread dispersal and re-use of the Founding Fathers papers, however, and hence the need for harvestable data, open APIs, distributed access, etc., the report calls instead for "a single, unified, and sustainable Web site"—apparently the locked-down Rotunda system.

Stanford University School of Education's Open Access Mandate—Harvard Medical School Next?

On June 26, Stevan Harnad and Leslie Carr broke the story that John Willinsky had announced an open access mandate for Stanford University's School of Education in a speech at ELPub 2008. Peter Suber then posted a link to the video of the speech.

Today, Willinsky posted the Stanford University School of Education Open Access Motion on the SPARC-OAForum, noting that it "was passed unanimously by the faculty of the School of Education, Stanford University on June 10, 2008, and was cleared by the Provost's Office and Stanford University's legal counsel on June 25th, 2008."

Here's the text of the motion:

In recognition of its responsibility to make its research and scholarship as widely and publicly available as possible, the faculty of the Stanford University School of Education is determined to take advantage of new technologies to increase access to its work among scholars worldwide, educators, policymakers, and the public. In support of greater openness in scholarly and educational endeavors, the faculty of the School of Education agree to the following policy:

Faculty members grant to the Stanford University permission to make publicly available their scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. They grant to Stanford University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to their scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are properly attributed to the authors not sold for a profit.

The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while a faculty member of the School of Education, beginning with articles for which the publisher's copyright agreement has yet to be signed. The Dean or the Dean's designate will waive application of the policy upon written request from faculty who wish to publish an article with a publisher who will not agree to the terms of this policy (which will be presented to the publishers in the form of an addendum to the copyright agreement).

No later than the date of publication, faculty members will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Dean of Education's Office, who will make the article available to the public in an open-access repository operated by Stanford University.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending policy changes to the School of Education from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented on the policy to the School of Education.

Willinsky also posted on the list "Questions and Answers on Harvard’s Open Access Motion," which is "a series of questions and responses that arose as part of a discussions of passing such a motion at the Stanford University School of Education (SUSE) by Claude Goldenberg, Roy Pea, Sean Reardon, and John Willinsky."

Peter Suber has commented on these Stanford documents in his "Details on the Stanford OA Mandate" posting.

In a Library Journal article ("At SPARC Forum, News of the University of California’s Open Access Near Miss") published today, a "representative of Harvard Medical School" is quoted as saying: "I think we’re going to be the next school to go for OA." (This article provides some brief additional information about the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences and Law School mandates and discusses as yet unsuccessful efforts at the University of California to pass a mandate.)

Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences Named as SPARC Innovators

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has recognized Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences as SPARC Innovators.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A February 12 vote made the Harvard faculty the first in the U.S. to embrace an Open Access directive and the first to grant permission to the university to make their articles openly available. The policy, drafted by a 10-member provost’s committee, was ratified by unanimous vote of a quorum of faculty members.

The Harvard FAS vote and Open Access policy emerged at a time when there is growing concern among faculty that traditional publishing processes are not ensuring maximum access to their research.

"The FAS vote confirms that broadening access to their collective output is of fundamental importance to our faculty, and that they are willing to take strong and decisive action to ensure the accessibility of their works," adds Stuart M. Shieber, professor of computer science at Harvard, Chair of the provost’s committee, and recently named director of the university’s new Office of Scholarly Communication.

The new SPARC Innovator profile details the process that led to the faculty’s ultimate vote. It explores motivations behind the decision to take action, looks at how members of the faculty were informed and engaged, why the Open Access requirement and its opt-out provision emerged, and how Harvard has paved the way for other institutions to follow suit.

"People think Harvard can do this kind of thing because Harvard is so rich," said Shieber. "The irony is that the reason people here got involved was the financial unsustainability—even at Harvard—of the current scholarly publishing regime, which has led to a steady erosion of access as we and other institutions must cancel subscriptions. The goal of this and future policies we will develop is not to save money. The goal is to broaden access."

"Harvard’s leadership on this issue is an inspiration to academic institutions across the country," said Diane Graves, University Librarian at Trinity University in San Antonio. "Thanks to Harvard’s prestigious reputation and the unanimous vote by the Arts and Sciences faculty, colleges and universities throughout North America have the incentive to start—or strengthen—similar conversations between their libraries and the faculty. This landmark vote—and the votes that are sure to follow—signals the beginning of a new, sustainable model for scholarly communication."

"Harvard’s success was possible because of the determination of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to ensure the widest exposure of their research. We hope their forward-looking step will serve as invitation to other campuses and departments of all kinds to explore their own policies for research access," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "It is SPARC’s pleasure to highlight their achievement in as many ways as we can. . . ."

The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication propelled by an individual, institution, or group. Typically, these advances exemplify SPARC principles by challenging the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public.

New ACRL Publications Agreements FAQ

ALA's Association College & Research Libraries has made available a new ACRL Publications Agreements FAQ, which covers serials, book chapters, book editors, and podcasts.

The FAQ's statement about Creative Commons licenses and serials is of special interest:

We didn’t want to require our authors to publish their works using a Creative Commons license, but you are welcome to attach the CC license of your choosing to your work after it is published by ACRL. Visit the Creative Commons website (http://creativecommons.org/) to learn more about their licensing options.

This is welcome news, and ACRL is to be applauded for supporting the use of Creative Commons licenses.

It is very helpful to have a concise and clear explanation of ACRL's copyright and other publication policies regarding serials, and the information about book chapters, book editors, and podcasts is very helpful as well. It would be highly desirable for other ALA divisions to follow ACRL's lead in this matter.

Note that ACRL's copyright forms are on the ACRL Forms page.

Code4Lib Journal Adopts Creative Commons Attribution License

Starting with its just released third issue, the Code4Lib Journal is using the Creative Commons Attribution License for its articles, making this freely available journal an open access journal under the strictest definition of that term (sometimes called "full open access").

Here's an excerpt from the editorial that discusses this change:

In order to facilitate the ability of our readers to build upon the ideas presented in the Journal, beginning with Issue 3 all articles are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. The CC-BY license lets you reuse, share, and build upon the work presented in the article, as long as you credit the author for the original creation. This licensing is required for inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and to receive a SPARC Europe Seal. Code snippets included in the text are included under the CC-BY license. For other code included with an article, we recommend, but don’t require, an open source license. We are contacting all authors with articles published in previous issues to request they license their previously published Code4Lib Journal articles under the CC-BY license.

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology Goes Green

In a forthcoming "Early View" editorial in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology ("JASIST Open Access"), Donald H. Kraft announces that JASIST will permit self-archiving "on the Contributor's personal Web site or in the Contributor's institution's/employer's institutional repository or archive" (institutional intranets are also permitted). This excludes disciplinary archives, such as dLIST and E-LIS, which are global in nature.

Such self-archiving can occur for both preprints and postprints. The author cannot "update the submission version [version submitted for consideration that has not undergone peer review] or replace it with the published Contribution." However, the author can "update the preprint [accepted version that has undergone peer review] with any corrections."

JASIST is the research journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, which "counts among its membership some 4,000 information specialists from such fields as computer science, linguistics, management, librarianship, engineering, law, medicine, chemistry, and education; individuals who share a common interest in improving the ways society stores, retrieves, analyzes, manages, archives and disseminates information, coming together for mutual benefit."

Association of College and Research Libraries Sends a Letter of Support to SCOAP3

The Association of College and Research Libraries has sent a letter of support to SCOAP3.

Here's an excerpt:

On behalf of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA) representing over 13,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals, I am writing to express interest and support for SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics’ effort to facilitate open access publishing in High Energy Physics (HEP). . . .

ACRL believes that SCOAP3 is a valuable addition to the heterogeneous mix of strategies being undertaken by scholars, publishers, libraries, and others to ensure the future of high-quality journals. SCOAP3 is unique in its explicit goals to unite researchers and libraries and to partner with publishers so that aggregated financial contributions will support HEP publishing, make the results available at no cost to any reader any where, and serve as a potential model to other disciplines.

Therefore ACRL encourages its members to consider joining the SCOAP3 effort when appropriate, e.g. through an institutional or consortial "expression of interest" (as outlined at http://www.scoap3.org/), providing education and outreach about SCOAP3 to their faculty, library staff and administrators, and finding other ways to analyze and support SCOAP3 where possible.

2007 Impact Factors for PLoS Journals Released

The Public Library of Science has reported the 2007 impact factors for its journals as calculated by Thomson Reuters:

  • PLoS Biology: 13.5
  • PLoS Medicine: 12.6
  • PLoS Computational Biology: 6.2
  • PLoS Genetics: 8.7
  • PLoS Pathogens: 9.3

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

As we and others have frequently pointed out, impact factors should be interpreted with caution and only as one of a number of measures which provide insight into a journal’s, or rather its articles’, impact. Nevertheless, the 2007 figures for PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine are consistent with the many other indicators (e.g. submission volume, web statistics, reader and community feedback) that these journals are firmly established as top-flight open-access general interest journals in the life and health sciences respectively.

The increases in the impact factors for the discipline-based, community-run PLoS journals also tally with indicators that these journals are going from strength to strength. For example, submissions to PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens have almost doubled over the past year—each journal now routinely receives 80-120 submissions per month of which around 20-25 are published. . . .

Although Thomson is yet to index our two youngest journals, other indexing databases are. The subscription-only Scopus citation index (owned by Elsevier and, incidentally, including many more journals than Thomson’s offering) is already covering PLoS ONE (though so far, only as far back as June 2007). But authors don’t need to rely on subscription-only indexes such as those owned by Thomson and Elsevier, and can instead use the freely-available Google Scholar. Using Google Scholar, for example, one can find that the article by Neal Fahlgren and coauthors, about the cataloguing of an important class of RNA in plants and one of the most highly cited PLoS ONE articles so far has been cited 42 times—strong evidence that good research, even if published in a new journal, will rapidly find its place in the scientific record when it’s made freely available to all.

More about ALA, CLA, and Open Access

Peter Suber has commented on my "On ALA, CLA, and Open Access" posting:

PS: For background, see Charles' previous report on OA for ALA publications (July 2006). In my comment at the time, I pointed out some of the ALA's public statements in support of OA: "(1) the ALA Washington office has a page on OA, (2) the ALA Council adopted a resolution in support of FRPAA at its June 2006 annual meeting, and (3) the ALA has signed on to several public statements in support of OA, most recently a July 12 letter in support of FRPAA and a May 31 letter in support of the EC report on OA."

Of course, I had reviewed Peter's prior comment before writing the new post. Here's a further analysis:

A good summary of other ALA joint statements, along with those of ACRL, can be found at "ACRL Taking Action."

Here's more information on ALA's "green" and "gold" policies.

Let's assume that both ALA copyright agreements are in effect for all journals. The Copyright Assignment Agreement explicitly supports limited self-archiving ("The right to use and distribute the Work on the Author’s Web site"). The Copyright Assignment Agreement further says that the author has: "The right to use and distribute the Work internally at the Author’s place of employment, and for promotional and any other non-commercial purposes." While "any other non-commercial purposes" seems to permit broad self-archiving, the specification of the "distribute the Work internally at the Author's place of employment" right seems to imply that the right to distribute the work outside of the author's place of employment is in question, which would mean that self-archiving in digital repositories could be done only in the author's institutional repository and only if access to the work was limited to institutional users. Moreover, if broad self-archiving is permitted, why single out the right to self-archive on the author's Web site? I find the wording ambiguous, and I would not recommend that anyone who wants to self-archive use this license. If its intent is to allow broad self-archiving, this should be spelled out. The Copyright License Agreement supports all types of self archiving ("Copyright of the Work remains in Author’s name, and the Author reserves all other rights"). Consequently, we can say that ALA supports "green" self-archiving, but this may be very weak under the Copyright Assignment Agreement.

Without further information, it is not possible to say that any of ALA's major journals are "gold," although Public Libraries and School Library Media Research might be. If this were true, ALA's Public Library Association and its American Association of School Librarians divisions would be ALA's gold journal publishers, with the Association of College & Research Libraries division nearly being one.

On ALA, CLA, and Open Access

The Canadian Library Association recently issued a new, strongly worded open access statement ("Position Statement on Open Access for Canadian Libraries"). Peter Suber commented on this statement, saying "Many organizations have called on their governments to mandate OA for publicly-funded research, but the CLA is first I've seen to regard embargo periods as a temporary compromise, justified only to help publishers adapt during a transition period."

The American Library Association is a member of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access and the Open Access Working Group, and. as such, has signed a variety of targeted statements about free access to government-funded research. The most active ALA Division in terms of open access support is the Association of College and Research Libraries, which has a number of activities geared towards promoting it.

Such statements and activities are praiseworthy, but the question remains: What kind of open access to these associations provide to their own journals?

CLA appears to embargo the current issue of Feliciter. If so, CLA cannot be said to be providing full free access to the journal; however, as embargoes go, it is a generous one.

Since it publishes more journals, the situation for ALA is more complex, and it is summarized below in a discussion of its major journals.

ALA Journal Free Access?
Children and Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children No
College & Research Libraries Embargo (current volume?), with e-prints that are removed on issue publication leaving a free access gap
Information Technology and Libraries Six month embargo
Library Administration and Management No
Library Resources & Technical Services Embargo? (last complete issue listed on site is from 2006 and last free volume is from 2006)
Public Libraries Embargo? (last listed issue on site is from 2007)
RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage Embargo? (last listed issue on site is from 2006)
School Library Media Research Embargo? (last listed issue on site is from 2007)
Reference & User Services Quarterly No (there are no issues listed on site)
Young Adult Library Services No

Given that several journals are far behind in listing back issues, some have no listed 2008 issues, and one has no back issues whatsoever, it is difficult to make definitive statements about their open access policies. It is possible that this confusion arises from difficulties in the timely maintenance of ALA journal Websites. What can be said is that, as of today, those missing digital issues are not accessible to anyone from the ALA site.

One thing is clear: it would be very helpful if ALA journals would clearly and prominently state their open access policies. Although it will not be discussed here in any detail, several journals have conflicting or unclear copyright agreement policies. It is assumed that ALA offers its two copyright agreements (Copyright Assignment Agreement and Copyright License Agreement.) for all journals, but this cannot be verified from all journal Websites.

While it is not uniform, ALA is making progress towards providing more free journal content; however, it cannot be said that ALA fully supports free access to all of its major journals. Moreover, to my knowledge, ALA itself has never made an open access position statement that is similar to CLA's and those of other library organizations, such as IFLA's (this excludes any statements by ALA divisions or joint statements). As the open access movement nears the decade point, it would seem desirable for it to unambiguously do so.

ALA is a major voice in the library community, and, if its open access efforts are to be taken seriously by publishers and scholars, it should state whether it supports green access (self-archiving), gold access (open access journals), or both. If it wants to support gold access, it should first reform its own journal publishing business model. If not, it would be helpful for it to clarify and make consistent the terms of its embargo access at an organizational vs. a divisional level.

JISC Becomes SCOAP3 Partner

JISC has become a SCOAP3 partner, pledging to redirect funds from member UK institutions now used for high-energy physics journals to the project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

With JISC, SCOAP3 now counts partners from 14 countries in Europe and Oceania, as well as an international organisation and a number of institutes in the United States. In total, these partners have pledged 37.4% of the SCOAP3 budget envelope, corresponding to 3.7 million Euros (5.8 million $).

Microsoft Releases Beta of Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007

Microsoft has released a beta version of its Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007.

Here's an excerpt from the product's home page:

Beta 1 of Word add-in to enhance the authoring of scientific and technical articles, including support for the National Library of Medicine XML format This Beta 1 release enables reading and writing of XML-based documents in the format used by the National Library of Medicine for archiving scientific articles.

Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources: An Ithaka Report Released

The Strategic Content Alliance has released Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources: An Ithaka Report.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This paper was commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is the first step in a three-stage process aimed at gaining a more systematic understanding of the mechanisms for pursuing sustainability in not-for-profit projects. It focuses on what we call 'online academic resources' (OARs), which are projects whose primary aim is to make content and scholarly discourse available on the web for research, collaboration, and teaching. This includes scholarly journals and monographs as well as a vast array of new formats that are emerging to disseminate scholarship, such as preprint servers and wikis. It also includes digital collections of primary source materials, datasets, and audio-visual materials that universities, libraries, museums, archives and other cultural and educational institutions are putting online.

This work is being done as part of the planning work for the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA), so it emphasises the development and maintenance of digital content useful in the networked world. In this first stage, we have conducted an initial assessment of the relevant literature focused on not-for-profit sustainability, and have compared the processes pursued in the not-for-profit and education sectors with those pursued by commercial organisations, specifically in the newspaper industry. The primary goal of this initial report is to determine to what extent it would make sense to conduct a more in-depth study of the issues surrounding sustainability.

Presentations from the 152nd ARL Membership Meeting

ARL has released presentations from its 152nd membership meeting, which was titled "Institutional Strategies Supporting E-Scholarship & Multidisciplinary Research."

Here's a selection of the presentations:

Repositories Support Project Briefings Released

The Repositories Support Project has released several new or updated briefings:

Key Services [ Paper ]

This briefing paper gives an overview of some of the
key services currently available to repository managers and provides further details on how to access and use them.

Metadata [ Paper ]

This paper explores the topic of metadata in the repository and includes advice and information on metadata schemas and application profiles.

Making Effective Use of Your Repository [ Paper ]

Repositories are both part of an institution’s local information provision and part of the developing global open access information environment. This briefing paper discusses these contexts, helping the repository to serve the institution’s business needs effectively.

Repository Policy Framework – Updated [Paper]

Updated information about giving structure to your repository planning through the implementation of a policy framework.

Open Access Directory, a Factual Wiki, Launched

The Open Access Directory, a Wiki for factual information (vs. narrative descriptions) about the open access movement has been launched.

Here's the press release:

Peter Suber and Robin Peek have launched the Open Access Directory (OAD), a wiki where the open access community can create and maintain simple factual lists about open access to science and scholarship. Suber, a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Peek, an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, conceived the project in order to collect OA-related lists for one-stop reference and searching.

The wiki will start operating with about half a dozen lists—for example, conferences devoted to open access, discussion forums devoted to open access, and journal "declarations of independence"—and add more over time.

The goal is to harness the knowledge and energy of the open access community itself to enlarge and correct the lists. A list on a wiki, revised continuously by its users, can be more comprehensive and up to date than the same list maintained by an individual. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about open access.

The URL for the Open Access Directory is oad.simmons.edu.

The wiki is represented by an editorial board consisting of prominent figures in the open access movement. The Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at Simmons College hosts and provides technical support to the OAD.

Editors and administrators

Robin Peek. Editor, Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College
Athanasia Pontika. Assistant Editor, Doctoral Student, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College
Terry Plum. Technical Coordinator, Assistant Dean for Technology and Director, Simmons College

Editorial board members

Charles Bailey. Publisher, Digital Scholarship
Leslie Chan. Program Supervisor for New Media Studies, University of Toronto Scarborough
Heather Joseph. Executive Director, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
Melissa Hagemann. Open Society Institute
Peter Suber. Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, and Senior Researcher at SPARC
Alma Swan. Key Perspectives Ltd
John Wilbanks. Vice President, Creative Commons

Read more about it at "Launch of the Open Access Directory."

Report Released: Strategies for Open and Permanent Access to Scientific Information in Latin America

CRIA has released Strategies for Open and Permanent Access to Scientific Information in Latin America: Focus on Health and Environmental Information for Sustainable Development, a report about the 2007 workshop of the same name.

Read more about it at "Workshop Report: Strategies for Open, Permanent Access to Scientific Information."

Interview with Microsoft's Pablo Fernicola about Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007

Jon Udell has posted an interview ("Word for Scientific Publishing") with Pablo Fernicola, a Microsoft Group Manager, about the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 (see my prior posting "Microsoft Developing Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007 with NLM DTD Support"). (Warning: there is a very annoying Silverlight download pop-up that obscures part of the post.)

Udell has also posted a screencast of Fernicola demonstrating the add-in ("Pablo Fernicola Demonstrates the Word Add-In for Scientific Authors").

JorumOpen, UK Repository for Creative Commons Licensed Educational Materials, Announced

JISC has announced JorumOpen, a national repository of open access educational materials under Creative Commons licenses.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

It was announced today that Jorum, the UK national repository for learning and teaching materials funded by JISC, is to offer open educational resources. This will make it easier for lecturers and teaching staff to share and re-use each other's teaching resources. JorumOpen—as it will be called—will also provide a showcase for UK universities and colleges on the international stage. . . .

Jorum is managed jointly by EDINA and Mimas, the two National Academic Data Centres funded by JISC at the Universities of Edinburgh and Manchester. During the first phase of Jorum's development, the focus has been on building a system that safeguards investment in digital learning resources and offers controlled access to licensed materials. The result is a service that supports access to over 2,500 learning resources for download for direct use in the classroom and within virtual learning environments (VLEs).

Through the development of JorumOpen, lecturers and teachers will be able to share materials under the Creative Commons licence framework: this makes sharing easier, granting users greater rights for use and re-use of online content and easier to understand. Importantly, it does not require prior registration. As a result availability is global as well as across UK universities and colleges. JorumOpen will run alongside a 'members only' facility, JorumEducationUK, that will support sharing of material just within the UK educational sector; this will be available only to registered users and contributors, as is currently the case.