Open Access – Page 78

"Open Access Infrastructure: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go"

Cynthia Hodgson has published "Open Access Infrastructure: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go" in Information Standards Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

There's no doubt that open access is here to stay, but the underlying infrastructure needed to support and sustain OA publishing is still very much in its development stages. This article, through a series of interviews with experts in the OA arena, highlights some of the major areas of infrastructure that are needed including institutional policies, compliance tracking and reporting, publishing tools, new economic models and licensing, and sustainability.

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"The Need for Research Data Inventories and the Vision for SHARE"

Clifford Lynch has published "The Need for Research Data Inventories and the Vision for SHARE" in Information Standards Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

There is a major movement calling for public access to the results of funded research, both in the US and globally. In parallel with these developments has been a growing focus on the importance of research data management across all fields of scholarship- essentially the idea that appropriate stewardship of data used in or arising from research is essential to preserving, communicating, and replicating scholarship. SHARE (Shared Access Research Ecosystem) is a joint project of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the two key higher education presidential associations, the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU); ARL, with generous grant funding from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation and the US Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), is leading the implementation effort. This article briefly summarize the potential role of SHARE in the overall scheme of managing research data, with some emphasis on the importance of standards (both existing and to be developed) for making this vision a reality.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Open Access"

Alexis Seeley et al. have published "A Scalable and Sustainable Approach to Open Access" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

Funded by tertiary institutions rather than individual researchers, this new model seeks to provide open access not just to traditional academic publications but to all forms of scholarly output.

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"Putting Open Science into Practice: A Social Dilemma?"

Kaja Scheliga and Sascha Friesike have published "Putting Open Science into Practice: A Social Dilemma?" in First Monday.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Digital technologies carry the promise of transforming science and opening up the research process. We interviewed researchers from a variety of backgrounds about their attitudes towards and experiences with openness in their research practices. We observe a considerable discrepancy between the concept of open science and scholarly reality. While many researchers support open science in theory, the individual researcher is confronted with various difficulties when putting open science into practice. We analyse the major obstacles to open science and group them into two main categories: individual obstacles and systemic obstacles. We argue that the phenomenon of open science can be seen through the prism of a social dilemma: what is in the collective best interest of the scientific community is not necessarily in the best interest of the individual scientist. We discuss the possibilities of transferring theoretical solutions to social dilemma problems to the realm of open science.

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Open Access Advocate Robin Peek Retires

Noted open access advocate Robin Peek has retired from the Simmons GSLIS.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"Robin Peek was one of the earliest advocates for open access to research, one of the first to write about it regularly, and one of the first to teach a course about it, which she taught at Simmons." said Dr. Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, the Harvard Open Access Project and co-founder of the Open Access Directory. "She is also the editor and co-founder of the Open Access Directory, a globally recognized encyclopedia of open access hosted by Simmons. The Open Access Directory is unique in that it is hosted and preserved by a library school, open to public contributions, edited for quality, and featured on every major list of essential resources on the topic." The six-year old Open Access Directory, a wiki managed by the OA community that provides reference lists about open access to scientists and scholars and has had more than four million views. Peek will continue to be the editor of the Open Access Directory.

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"The Big Picture: Scholarly Publishing Trends 2014"

Pippa Smart has published "The Big Picture: Scholarly Publishing Trends 2014" in Science Editing.

Here's an excerpt:

Technical solutions have attempted to address the growth in research but have sometimes added to the tsunami of information and increased the need to manage quality. To this end experiments with the traditional quality control and dissemination systems have been attempted, but news of improvements are frequently overshadowed by alarms about ethical problems. There is particular concern about some of the new publishers who are not adhering to established quality control and ethical practices. Within a potentially fragmenting system, however, there are also emerging collaborative projects helping to knit together the different elements of the publishing landscape to improve quality, linkages and access.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"STM’s New Publishing Licenses Raise Antitrust Concerns Amid Wider Efforts to Pollute Open Access Standards"

Ariel Katz has published "STM's New Publishing Licenses Raise Antitrust Concerns Amid Wider Efforts to Pollute Open Access Standards" in LSE Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

For antitrust purposes, when a group of publishers adopts a set of uniform licenses, or when it recommends that its members adopt them, they tread in the area of antitrust law's core concern: "price fixing". In antitrust lingo the term price fixing is not limited to coordinating on price, but applies to any coordination that affects the quantity, quality, or any other feature of the product. Indeed, "[t]erms of use are no less a part of 'the product,'"[1] and competition between publishers is supposed to ensure optimal license terms just as it is expected to guarantee competitive prices. Therefore, when a group of publishers coordinates license terms, their concerted action is not conceptually different for antitrust purposes from a decision to coordinate subscription fees (downstream) or submission fees (upstream), and when the group represents the leading publishers and affects the majority of publications, antitrust concerns are further heightened.

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U.S. Department of Energy Public Access Plan

U.S. Department of Energy has released its Public Access Plan.

Here's an excerpt:

The Department proposes to host, a portal and a search interface tool, the Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science (PAGES), to enhance the discoverability of unclassified and otherwise unrestricted scholarly publications resulting from DOE funding. PAGES will provide metadata and abstracts for such publications in a way that is open, readable, and available for bulk download. The PAGES metadata catalog will be included in the Department's Enterprise Data Inventory and Public Data Listing. PAGES will also link to the full text VoR hosted by the publisher when the article is available on the publisher's site openly and without charge. In instances where this is not the case, PAGES will link to a full-text version of the accepted manuscript twelve months from the article publication date and then link to the VoR when and if it becomes available. Metadata accompanying the accepted manuscript, e.g., author name, journal title, and digital object identifier (DOI) for the VoR, ensures that attribution to authors, journals, and original publishers will be maintained.

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"The Development of Open Access Repositories in the Asia-Oceania Region: A Case Study of Three Institutions"

IFLA has released "The Development of Open Access Repositories in the Asia-Oceania Region: A Case Study of Three Institutions."

Here's an excerpt:

In recent years, open access models of publishing have transcended traditional modes thus enabling freer access to research. This paper takes a trans-regional approach to examining open access publishing in the Asia and Oceania region focusing on three institutions—Charles Darwin University in Australia, University of Hong Kong, and University of Malaya in Malaysia—reflecting on how each is rising, in its own individual way, to meet the range of challenges that its research communities are facing. Specifically, it focuses on open access and institutional repository development, and traces their development at each of the aforementioned institutions.

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"A Current Snapshot of Institutional Repositories: Growth Rate, Disciplinary Content and Faculty Contributions"

Ellen Dubinsky has published "A Current Snapshot of Institutional Repositories: Growth Rate, Disciplinary Content and Faculty Contributions" in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

Mean and median growth rates of IRs have increased since measured in 2007, with variance depending upon size and type of academic institution and age of the IR. Disciplinary content in IRs is unevenly distributed, with the Sciences predominantly represented. IR administrators remain actively involved in the submission process and in the promotion of their IRs. Personal contact with individuals or groups of faculty is the most used and successful interaction method.

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"Degrees of Openness: Access Restrictions in Institutional Repositories"

Hélène Prostand Joachim Schöpfel have published "Degrees of Openness: Access Restrictions in Institutional Repositories" in D-Lib Magazine.

Here's an excerpt:

Institutional repositories, green road and backbone of the open access movement, contain a growing number of items that are metadata without full text, metadata with full text only for authorized users, and items that are under embargo or that are restricted to on-campus access. This paper provides a short overview of relevant literature and presents empirical results from a survey of 25 institutional repositories that contain more than 2 million items. The intention is to evaluate their degree of openness with specific attention to different categories of documents (journal articles, books and book chapters, conference communications, electronic theses and dissertations, reports, working papers) and thus to contribute to a better understanding of their features and dynamics. We address the underlying question of whether this lack of openness is temporary due to the transition from traditional scientific communication to open access infrastructures and services, or here to stay, as a basic feature of the new and complex cohabitation of institutional repositories and commercial publishing.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

STM Releases Its Own Open Access Licenses

The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has released its own collection of open access licenses.

Here's an excerpt:

STM believes that publishers should have the tools to offer a wide variety of appropriate licensing terms dependent on their economic model and business strategy. To that end, the Association has produced sample licences for a variety of uses within open access publishing.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Journal Collection Management and Open Access—Relationship Status: It’s Complicated"

Miriam Lorenz has published "Journal Collection Management and Open Access—Relationship Status: It's Complicated" in IFLA WLIC 2014—Lyon.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this study is to analyze how journal management in academic libraries (selection, cost organization and allocation) changes through the influence of Open Access and in what form the Open Access movement could be supported by established structures and processes of journal management. In the empirical part, the hypotheses will be verified through an international survey (Germany, Europe (mainly Great Britain), North America (mainly US)) of libraries' journal management staff in March and April 2014. . . . In this article, the first results of the survey will be presented and we will try to find out of how Open Access and journal collection management can be in a stable relationship and what challenges harmonic processes.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"Implementing CHORUS: Big Decisions Loom for Publishers"

Angela Cochran has published "Implementing CHORUS: Big Decisions Loom for Publishers" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

The implementation is not without complications. Publishers need to make some pretty serious decisions on how to proceed. The biggest decision may be exactly what to expose in order to comply with any forthcoming public access mandates. The options are to make the accepted manuscripts (AM) publicly available for papers derived from federal funds or to allow access to the final PDF or version of record (VoR). Either is acceptable under federal requirements.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

NARA Open Government Plan

The National Archives and Records Administration has released its Open Government Plan.

Here's an excerpt:

NARA has been engaging the Wikipedia community since 2011, when we welcomed a Wikipedian in Residence and began holding events to build awareness of the records of the National Archives. In 2013, we welcomed a full-time employee devoted to engaging the Wikipedia community along with NARA staff members to promote greater access, reuse, and context for our records on Wikipedia.

Our work strengthening digitization and description fuels our ability to make records available on external platforms like Wikipedia. In 2012, we shared 100,000 digital images from our holdings to Wikimedia Commons. This work enabled digital copies of our records to be incorporated into Wikimedia projects and Wikipedia articles. The 4,000 Wikipedia articles featuring our records received more than one billion page views in Fiscal Year 2013. Over the next two years we will work to increase the number of National Archives records available on Wikimedia Commons, which furthers our strategic goal to "Make Access Happen" and expands re-use of our records by the public.

We are continuing our work to engage local communities of volunteer Wikipedians with on-site events, including skills-building workshops and "edit-a-thons" for improving Wikipedia content related to our holdings. In addition, we are establishing a model for "scan-a-thons" to enable citizen archivist stakeholder groups to digitize our records for access.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

SCOAP3 Has Published 2,000 Articles

The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP³) has published 2,000 articles.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Two thousand Open Access articles have been published with SCOAP³ funding since January 2014 in 10 journals from 11 publishers and learned societies. These articles are released under a CC-BY license, and openly accessible on publishers websites. In addition, articles are also immediately available on the SCOAP³ repository at repo.scoap3.org in several formats, including PDF/A and XML for text-mining and other purposes. Scientists from over 80 countries have freely published in SCOAP journals so far.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

Taylor & Francis Open Access Survey June 2014

Taylor & Francis has released the Taylor & Francis Open Access Survey June 2014.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In the first few months of 2014 Taylor & Francis carried out a worldwide survey, with the aim of exploring journal authors' views on open access.

Having previously conducted a survey on open access in 2013, we have been able to see how authors' opinions have developed, and whether the discussion and debate on open access has helped to inform and shape views.

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"The Subversive Proposal at 20"

Richard Poynder has published "The Subversive Proposal at 20" in Open and Shut?

Here's an excerpt:

Twenty years ago yesterday, cognitive scientist Stevan Harnad posted a message on a mailing list, a message he headed "A Subversive Proposal." This called on all researchers to make copies of the papers they published in scholarly journals freely available on the Internet. . . .

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Subversive Proposal, I emailed Harnad nine questions yesterday. These questions are published below, with Harnad's answers attached.

Digital Scholarship | "A Quarter-Century as an Open Access Publisher"

"The Determinants of Open Access Publishing: Survey Evidence from Countries in the Mediterranean Open Access Network (MedOANet)"

Thomas Eger et al. have self-archived "The Determinants of Open Access Publishing: Survey Evidence from Countries in the Mediterranean Open Access Network (MedOANet)."

Here's an excerpt:

We discuss the results of a survey conducted between April 2013 and May 2014 in six Mediterranean countries and covering 2,528 researchers from Spain (1,291), Portugal (142), France (380), Italy (596), Turkey (131) and Greece (130). We compare the results to our German survey with 1,913 respondents. We show that there are significant differences between the scientific disciplines with respect to researcher's awareness of and experience with both open access (OA) journals and self-archiving. Accordingly, the publishing culture (e.g. reputation, publishing language) but also other issues like age and certain policies (MedOANet) may explain why researchers make more frequent use of OA publishing in some countries and disciplines.

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"Liberating the Publications of a Distinguished Scholar: A Pilot Project"

Julie Kelly has published "Liberating the Publications of a Distinguished Scholar: A Pilot Project" in Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship.

Here's an excerpt:

Many distinguished scholars published the primary corpus of their work before the advent of online journals, which makes it more challenging to access. Upon being approached by a distinguished Emeritus Professor seeking advice about getting his work posted online, librarians at the University of Minnesota worked to gain copyright permissions to scan and upload older works to the University's Digital Conservancy (UDC). This project then uniquely took the process one step further, using the sharing option of RefWorks to make these works accessible to the widest possible audience while concurrently offering the sophisticated functionality of a citation manager. With open access repositories gaining acceptance as an authoritative long-term venue for making resources available online, including older content that can be digitized, the methods developed in this pilot project could easily be followed by others, thus greatly increasing access to older literature from distinguished scholars.

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"The Dark Side of Open Access in Google and Google Scholar: The Case of Latin-American Repositories"

Enrique Orduña-Malea et al. have self-archived "The Dark Side of Open Access in Google and Google Scholar: The Case of Latin-American Repositories."

Here's an excerpt:

The main objective of this study is to ascertain the presence and visibility of Latin American repositories in Google and Google Scholar through the application of page count and visibility indicators. For a sample of 137 repositories, the results indicate that the indexing ratio is low in Google, and virtually nonexistent in Google Scholar; they also indicate a complete lack of correspondence between the repository records and the data produced by these two search tools. These results are mainly attributable to limitations arising from the use of description schemas that are incompatible with Google Scholar (repository design) and the reliability of web indicators (search engines). We conclude that neither Google nor Google Scholar accurately represent the actual size of open access content published by Latin American repositories; this may indicate a non-indexed, hidden side to open access, which could be limiting the dissemination and consumption of open access scholarly literature.

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"Research Data Sharing: Developing a Stakeholder-Driven Model for Journal Policies"

Paul Sturges et al. have self-archived "Research Data Sharing: Developing a Stakeholder-Driven Model for Journal Policies."

Here's an excerpt:

The Journal Research Data (JoRD) Project was a JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) funded feasibility study on the possible shape of a central service on journal research data policies. The objectives of the study included, amongst other considerations: to identify the current state of journal data sharing policies and to investigate the views and practices of stakeholders to data sharing. The project confirmed that a large percentage of journals do not have a policy on data sharing, and that there are inconsistencies between the traceable journal data sharing policies. Such a state leaves authors unsure of whether they should deposit data relating to articles and where and how to share that data. In the absence of a consolidated infrastructure for the easy sharing of data, a journal data sharing model policy was developed. The model policy was developed from comparing the quantitative information gathered from analysing existing journal data policies with qualitative data collected from the stakeholders concerned. This article summarises the information gathered, outlines the process by which the model was developed and presents the model journal data sharing policy in full.

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"PLOS Data Policy: Catalyst for a Better Research Process"

Emma Ganley has published "PLOS Data Policy: Catalyst for a Better Research Process" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

PLOS is seeking to ensure the ongoing utility of research, as making a paper openly accessible is enhanced enormously if that paper is linked seamlessly to the data from which it was constructed. In a time when post-publication peer review is more prevalent and data frequently come under intense public scrutiny, with whistle-blowers, blogs, and websites dedicated to investigating the validity and veracity of scientific publications, requiring access to the relevant data leads to a more rigorous scientific record.

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Learned Society Attitudes towards Open Access: Report on Survey Results

EDP Open has released Learned Society Attitudes towards Open Access: Report on Survey Results.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Key findings include:

Learned societies overwhelmingly agree that Open Access will inevitably place some learned societies' journals into financial jeopardy.

Competing with large Open Access specialist publishers was also considered a significant challenge for learned societies.

Gold Open Access is the Open Access method that is least offered by learned society journals, however nearly two-thirds of learned societies indicated that they would like to be offering this option.

More than ever before, with so many journals being published Open Access of dubious origin, learned societies should look to endorse content with a stamp of quality and authority.

Collaboration between learned societies could help in the transition to Open Access, by pooling resources and sharing complex tasks.

Two-thirds of all learned societies are also looking for support on best approach to OA, and compliance with funder mandates.

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Open Access: Markup of Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology Act Reduces Embargo Period

The House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology has marked up the Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science and Technology Act (FIRST Act), significantly reducing the embargo period for making works open access.

Here's an excerpt from "FIRST Act Amended to Make Open Access Provision Actually Pretty Good":

Calling this [Section 303 in the prior version of the bill] a "public access" section is a charitable reading: it extended embargo periods to up to three years, it allowed for simple linking to articles rather than the creation of an archive, and it delayed implementation unnecessarily long. (We've ranted about this bill time and again.)

But a glimmer of hope appeared at yesterday's markup. Reps. Jim Sensenbrenner and Zoe Lofgren, introduced an amendment that radically changed Section 303. The new amendment [pdf] maps closely onto Sensenbrenner's Public Access to Public Science Act (H.R. 3157). It sets the embargo period at 12 months (like the NIH's current policy), though it allows stakeholders to extend this by 6 months if they can show a "substantial and unique harm." The amendment was also designed to facilitate long-term preservation, broad analysis of works, and closer investigation of broad copyright licenses. The current version is not perfect, but it is much improved—huge kudos to Sensenbrenner and Lofgren for standing up for open access.

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