Category: Open Access

University of North Texas Adopts an Open Access Policy

The University of North Texas has adopted an open access policy.

Here's the policy:

UNT Community Members agree to the following: In support of greater access to scholarly works, UNT Community Members agree to the following process for peer-reviewed, accepted-for-publication journal article:

—Deposit: Each UNT Community Member deposits a digital copy of his/her accepted manuscript or version of record of the journal article (as allowed by the publisher’s policy) no later than the date of its publication. Deposit is made into the UNT Libraries scholarly works repository. The Provost or Provost’s designate (e.g., the Scholarly Communication Officer) will waive deposit of articles by Community Members as requested.

—Open Access/Optional Delayed Open Access: The author is encouraged to make the deposit available to the public by setting access to the deposit as Open Access Immediately Upon Deposit (the default). Upon express direction by a UNT Community Member for an individual article, the Provost or Provost’s designate (e.g., the Scholarly Communication Officer) will adjust the Open Access Immediately Upon Deposit requirement to align with the UNT Community Member’s request and/or to align with publisher’s policies regarding open access of self-archived works. This policy supports broad dissemination of UNT scholarly works, but for various reasons, not all individual works will be accessible in whole or in part.

The following three levels of access will be implemented:

  • Open access to the public (default)
  • Limited access in either time (e.g., an embargo period) or to specific groups (e.g., UNT Community Members)
  • Closed, No Access

—Licensing: Each UNT Community Member grants to UNT permission to make scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles to which he or she made intellectual contributions publicly available in the UNT Libraries scholarly works repository for the purpose of open dissemination and preservation, subject to publishers’ restrictions. In legal terms, each UNT community member grants to UNT for each of his or her scholarly articles a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise those rights under copyright that the author retains in any agreements with the article’s publishers. The Provost or Provost’s designate (e.g., the Scholarly Communication Officer) will waive application of the license for articles by Community Members as requested.

—Who Deposits: In the case of multiple authors from multiple institutions, where a UNT Community Member has made intellectual contributions to the article, the UNT Community Member deposits a copy of the article. In the case of multiple UNT authors, and where the lead author is from UNT, the lead author (or designate) deposits a copy of the article. The UNT Community Member should inform all co-authors of deposit in the UNT Libraries scholarly works repository.

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"Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship"

James M. Donovan and Carol A. Watson have self-archived "Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship" in UKnowledge.

Here's an excerpt:

To date, there have been no studies focusing exclusively on the impact of open access on legal scholarship. We examine open access articles from three journals at the University of Georgia School of Law and confirm that legal scholarship freely available via open access improves an article's research impact. Open access legal scholarship – which today appears to account for almost half of the output of law faculties – can expect to receive 50% more citations than non-open access writings of similar age from the same venue.

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Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses

The Association of American University Presses has released Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Within the scholarly communications ecosystem, scholarly publishers are a keystone species. University presses—as well as academic societies, research institutions, and other scholarly publishers—strive to fulfill the mission of making public the fruits of scholarly research as effectively as possible within that ecosystem. While that mission has remained constant, in recent years the landscape in which it is carried out has altered dramatically.

"Sustaining Scholarly Publishing" explores many current scholarly publishing experiments and initiatives, defines characteristics of effective business models and the challenges of transitioning from a traditional sales-based model, and presents several recommendations for sustaining high-quality scholarly publishing throughout this time of change. The AAUP report was prepared by the Task Force on Economic Models for Scholarly Publishing, chaired by Lynne Withey, now-retired director of the University of California Press. . . .

Among the report's recommendations:

  • Active and open sharing of lessons learned by participants in existing digital publishing projects should be an ongoing process.
  • The support of foundations, libraries, and university administrations in providing funds to work toward the digital future has been, and will remain, crucial.
  • Open access is a principle to be embraced, if publishing costs can be supported by the larger scholarly enterprise. University presses, and nonprofit publishers generally, should be fully engaged in these discussions.
  • Proposals and plans for new business models should explicitly address the potential impact of the new model on other parts of a press's programs, as well as explicitly address the requirements, both operational and financial, for making the transition to a new model.

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Open Access: "Recent Watershed Events"

Peter Suber has published "Recent Watershed Events" in the latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter.

Here's an excerpt:

OA has the momentum of thousands of forward steps every year, in every academic field and every part of the world. But some developments are larger than others, and some are large enough to count as watershed events. I've noticed an upswing in watershed events recently and want to point out half a dozen of them. Pointing them out doesn't amount to a prediction, any more than tremors predict earthquakes. But if you were too preoccupied with local noise to notice these tremors, take a moment to notice them.

(1) The Publishers Association (PA) and Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) announced a meeting to take place in London at the end of this month: "PA-ALPSP Journal Publishers' Forum: Open access: the next ten years" (London, March 31, 2011)
http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?aid=341706 . . . .

(2) The world's largest peer-reviewed journal is now an OA journal, PLoS ONE. . . . .

3) PLoS ONE's success in attracting submissions, revenue, and reputation inspired a raft of imitators from high-quality, high-prestige publishers.
http://blogs.plos.org/plos/files/2011/01/Welcome-Nature2.pdf
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2011/01/plos-one-now-worlds-largest-journal.html. . . .

(4) In the same month that the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) launched Scientific Reports, its PLoS ONE rival, it issued an important new statement on OA in general.
http://www.nature.com/press_releases/statement.html . . . .

(5) In October 2010, Ten major institutions founded the UK Open Access Implementation Group to "coordinate evidence, policies, systems, advice and guidance, to make open access an easy choice for authors and one that benefits all universities…."

(6) The three largest commercial publishers now publish full OA journals, not just hybrid OA journals.

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Results of the SOAP Survey: A First Overview of the Dutch Situation

Marnix van Berchum and Annemiek van der Kuil have released Results of the SOAP Survey: A First Overview of the Dutch Situation.

Here's an excerpt:

Based on the results above, the following conclusions can be made on the "Dutch situation"

  • A high number of researchers thinks the publishing of Open Access articles is beneficial to their discipline (90%)
  • Main reasons why Open Access publishing is beneficial are the scientific community benefit and benefit for outside the scientific community ("public good")
  • Quality, impact and prestige are still very important in making choices on Open Access publishing in journals
  • Publication fees for Open Access articles are for a large part covered by the institutions (40%)
  • There is no strong feeling on how easy or difficult it is to obtain funding

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Results of the SOAP Survey: A Preliminary Overview of the Situation in EIFL Partner Countries

EIFL has released Results of the SOAP Survey: A Preliminary Overview of the Situation in EIFL Partner Countries.

Here's an excerpt:

The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has run a large-scale survey of the attitudes of researchers on, and the experiences with, open access publishing. In the SOAP Symposium on 13 January 2011 in Berlin, the results of the SOAP Survey were made publicly available. "Highlights from the SOAP project survey. What Scientists Think about Open Access Publishing" article is available in arXiv:1101.5260v2 presenting preliminary analysis of the survey responses. To allow a maximal re-use of the information collected by this survey, the data were released under a CC0 waiver, so to allow libraries, publishers, funding agencies and academics to further analyse risks and opportunities, drivers and barriers, in the transition to open access publishing. . . .

We followed the approach of the SURFfoundation and made the first overview of the SOAP survey results, tailored to the situation in 11 EIFL partner countries: Bulgaria, China, Egypt, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Thailand and Ukraine.

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Author-Pays Open Access Option Using CC-By License Now Available for Many Physical Review Journals

Authors who publish in many Physical Review journals now have the option to pay an article-processing fee in order to have their articles published as open access articles under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-By License). Two Physical Review journals (Physical Review Special Topics—Accelerators and Beams and Physical Review Special Topics—Physics Education Research) have been fully converted to open access under the CC-By License. The APS announced a new open access journal in January, Physical Review X.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The new article-processing charges, which will cover all costs and provide a sustainable funding model, have been set at $1700 for papers in the Physical Review and $2700 for those in Physical Review Letters. The resulting open access articles will appear alongside and mixed in with subscription-funded articles, converting these journals into "hybrid" open access journals.

"The most selective of our journals must have higher article-processing charges for their open access articles," said Gene Sprouse, APS Editor in Chief. "Physical Review accepts about 60% of articles submitted and Physical Review Letters roughly 25%, so the costs are higher than in less selective journals."

Revenue from the article-processing charges will decrease the need for subscription income and help to keep the APS subscription price-per-article among the lowest of any physics journals. "We'd like to reduce the pressure on library subscriptions, while opening access more widely. Article-processing charges are a means to accomplish both," said Joseph Serene, APS Treasurer/Publisher.

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"The Durham Statement Two Years Later: Open Access in the Law School Journal Environment"

Richard A. Danner, Kelly Leong, and Wayne V. Miller have published "The Durham Statement Two Years Later: Open Access in the Law School Journal Environment" in the latest issue of the Law Library Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

The Durham Statement on Open Access to Legal Scholarship, drafted by a group of academic law library directors, was promulgated in February 2009. It calls for two things: (1) open access publication of law school–published journals; and (2) an end to print publication of law journals, coupled with a commitment to keeping the electronic versions available in "stable, open, digital formats." The two years since the Statement was issued have seen increased publication of law journals in openly available electronic formats, but little movement toward all-electronic publication. This article discusses the issues raised by the Durham Statement, the current state of law journal publishing, and directions forward.

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Creative Commons and Public Sector Information: Flexible Tools to Support PSI Creators and Re-Users

The European Public Sector Information (PSI) Platform has released Creative Commons and Public Sector Information: Flexible Tools to Support PSI Creators and Re-Users.

Here's an excerpt:

Public sector information (PSI) is meant for wide re-use, but this information will only achieve maximum possible impact if users understand how they may use it. Creative Commons tools, which signify availability for re-use to users and require attribution to the releasing authority, are ideal tools for the sharing of public sector information. There is also increasing interest in open licenses and other tools to share publicly funded information, data, and content, including various kinds of cultural resources, educational materials, and research findings; Creative Commons tools are applicable here and recommended for these purposes too.

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Major Changes Could Be Ahead for JISC: HEFCE Review of JISC

The Higher Education Funding Council for England has released the HEFCE Review of JISC.

Here's an excerpt from the recommendations:

• JISC activity should be focused on achieving a large impact:

  • Activities need to be clearly linked to the sectors’ priorities
  • JISC should offer sector leadership through "routes to best practice," wherever such practice resides
  • Research and development activity should focus on horizon-scanning and thought leadership
  • Services and projects should be rationalised, with a view to significantly reducing their number

• JISC should be funded through a combination of grants and subscriptions/user charges

• It should become a separate legal entity and the implications of this for the four companies should be reviewed

• Governance arrangements should be clarified, to ensure that the Board takes clear overall strategic control

• The internal structure should be clarified and simplified, to improve efficiency and control

• A plan for the proposed internal structure and operations should estimate the savings to be achieved

• There should be discussions between JISC, the funders, sector representatives and other bodies, to determine an overall funding strategy for ICT in the HE and FE sectors.

Read more about it at "Questions and Answers—HEFCE's Review of JISC."

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"Did Online Access to Journals Change the Economics Literature?"

Mark J. McCabe and Christopher M. Snyder have self-archived "Did Online Access to Journals Change the Economics Literature?" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

Does online access boost citations? The answer has implications for issues ranging from the value of a citation to the sustainability of open-access journals. Using panel data on citations to economics and business journals, we show that the enormous effects found in previous studies were an artifact of their failure to control for article quality, disappearing once we add fixed effects as controls. The absence of an aggregate effect masks heterogeneity across platforms: JSTOR boosts citations around 10%; ScienceDirect has no effect. We examine other sources of heterogeneity including whether JSTOR benefits "long-tail" or "superstar" articles more.

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Europeana Libraries Project Will Add 5 Million Digital Objects to Europeana

Europeana has launched the Europeana Libraries Project.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Work begins this week to add over 5 million digital objects, ranging from Spanish civil war photographs and handwritten letters from philosopher Immanuel Kant, to Europeana from 19 of Europe's leading research and university libraries.

The project is called Europeana Libraries and it will put many of these treasures online for the first time. It will also add extensive collections from Google Books, theses, dissertations and open-access journal articles to the 15 million items amassed in Europeana to date. Providers include some of Europe's most prestigious universities and research institutes, including the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library, Trinity College Dublin and Lund University.

The assembled objects span centuries of European history. Manuscripts from Serbia date back as far as 1206 and relate to the Ottoman Empire's European territories. Written in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Persian, they are being digitised by the University Library of Belgrade. There will also be significant film additions. Footage of talks from 10 Nobel prize winners will be contributed by the University of Vienna and the Wellcome Trust Library in London will add 900 clips from medical science films produced over the past 100 years.

Europeana Libraries is notable not only for the content it will make available online but also because this project brings together national, research and university libraries under one umbrella, to make their materials available via Europeana.

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Open Access: Report on the Implementation of Open Content Licenses in Developing and Transition Countries

The EIFL-OA advocacy program has released Report on the Implementation of Open Content Licenses in Developing and Transition Countries.

Here's an excerpt:

The survey attempted to gather information from a broad spectrum of research institutions in developing and transition countries in order to get a better understanding of the current state of the implementation of open content licenses. We looked at the web sites of 2,489 open access journals and 357 open access repositories from EIFL network countries. And this report highlights the best practices in using open content licenses by open access journals and open access repositories in developing and transition countries.

Some general findings of the survey:

Using open content licenses by open access journals:

  • We identified 556 open access journals that are licensed under open content licenses.
  • There are four types of Creative Commons licenses, which are used – the most liberal Creative Commons Attribution license, Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial license, Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license and the most restrictive Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative Works license.
  • 94% of the access journals we surveyed are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license (524 open access journals in Armenia, Bulgaria, China, Egypt, Lithuania, Macedonia, Nigeria, Poland, Russia, South Africa and Thailand).
  • Nine open access journals in China, Russia and South Africa are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial license.
  • Three open access journals in Ghana, Nigeria and Ukraine are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license.
  • And twenty open access journals in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Estonia, Serbia, South Africa, Thailand and Ukraine are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivative Works license.

Using open content licenses by open access repositories:

  • We identified nine open access repositories that are licensed under open content licenses.
  • A repository of open educational materials in South Africa is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution license
  • A repository of open educational materials in Kenya is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
  • One repository in China, two repositories in Poland and two repositories in Thailand are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share Alike license.
  • A repository in South Africa is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
  • A repository hosted in Argentina is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works license.
  • Some repositories in Botswana, Poland and South Africa recommend the depositors to use Creative Commons licenses. As a result a number of publications in these repositories are licensed under Creative Commons licenses.

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Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Adopts Open Access Resolution

Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has adopted an open access resolution.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Columbia University is joining a growing movement among universities and research institutions to make scholarly research available free to the public online. Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is the first program at the university to adopt an open access resolution, which calls for faculty and other researchers to post their scientific papers in online repositories such as Columbia's Academic Commons.

The resolution was adopted by a unanimous vote of Lamont-Doherty's Executive Committee on Dec. 22, 2010, and will be effective on March 1. Similar resolutions have been adopted at Harvard, MIT, Duke, Stanford, and many other universities in the U.S. and several foreign countries.

Lamont-Doherty researchers typically publish scores of articles annually in many of the leading scientific journals. One of the challenges for scientific research, however, is that articles are often available only to researchers at universities and other organizations that pay substantial subscription fees. By posting articles in an open-access repository, authors are able to make their works freely and widely accessible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. . . .

In addition to increasing the availability of research, the resolution has implications for agreements between authors and publishers regarding the copyrights of the individual articles. According to Dr. Kenneth Crews, director of Columbia's Copyright Advisory Office, the resolution underscores the connection between publication agreements and the ability to use and share one's own scholarly works. "While nothing in the resolution will upend publication conventions, the movement toward open access is raising awareness of the need to draft better agreements and for authors to be good stewards of their own copyrights," he observed. . . .

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is a key component of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and is one of the world's leading research centers seeking fundamental knowledge about the origin, evolution and future of the natural world. More than 300 research scientists and students study the planet from its deepest interior to the outer reaches of its atmosphere, on every continent and in every ocean. From global climate change to earthquakes, volcanoes, nonrenewable resources, environmental hazards and beyond, observatory scientists provide a rational basis for the difficult choices facing humankind. For more on Lamont's research, visit the web site at http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/.

Wiley Open Access Launched

John Wiley & Sons has launched Wiley Open Access.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Wiley Open Access will provide authors wishing to publish their research outcomes in an open access journal with a range of new high quality publications which meet the requirements of funding organizations and institutions where these apply. . . .

The new journals are being launched in collaboration with a group of international professional and scholarly societies with which Wiley currently partners.  Each journal will appoint an Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board responsible for ensuring that all articles are rigorously peer-reviewed, and each journal will be offered with the full functionality of Wiley Online Library.

The new Wiley Open Access journal Brain and Behavior will publish open access research across neurology, neuroscience, psychiatry and psychology.  Brain and Behavior’s newly appointed Editor-in-Chief, Andrei V. Alexandrov, Professor of Neurology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, comments:

"With the launch of Brain and Behavior, the Editorial Board and I, along with the support of many international societies, will offer the research community a high quality peer-reviewed journal that meets the needs of those authors who wish to publish their work in an open access environment. I am delighted to be working with Wiley to deliver this important new service."

Professor Allen Moore, University of Exeter and newly appointed Editor-in-Chief of Ecology and Evolution comments:

"I am excited to be involved with this new open access journals initiative.  Ecology and Evolution will deliver rapid decisions and fast publication of research in all areas of ecology, evolution and conservation science.  By working in collaboration with leading societies to deliver open access to all, this new journal offers authors an ideal place to publish their work quickly to the broadest possible audience." . . .

Wiley Open Access journals will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.  A publication fee will be payable by authors on acceptance of their articles.  Wiley will introduce a range of new payment schemes to enable academic and research institutions, funders, societies, and corporations to actively support their researchers and members who wish to publish in Wiley Open Access journals. 

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"Highlights from the SOAP Project Survey. What Scientists Think about Open Access Publishing"

Suenje Dallmeier-Tiessen et al. have self-archived "Highlights from the SOAP Project Survey. What Scientists Think about Open Access Publishing" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has run a large-scale survey of the attitudes of researchers on, and the experiences with, open access publishing. Around forty thousands answers were collected across disciplines and around the world, showing an overwhelming support for the idea of open access, while highlighting funding and (perceived) quality as the main barriers to publishing in open access journals. This article serves as an introduction to the survey and presents this and other highlights from a preliminary analysis of the survey responses. To allow a maximal re-use of the information collected by this survey, the data are hereby released under a CC0 waiver, so to allow libraries, publishers, funding agencies and academics to further analyse risks and opportunities, drivers and barriers, in the transition to open access publishing.

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Presentations from the Marketplace: Open Access and the Changing State of Scholarly Publishing Meeting

Presentations from the Marketplace: Open Access and the Changing State of Scholarly Publishing meeting on 1/8/11 are now available.

Here's an excerpt from the meeting announcement:

This forum will paint a picture of the rapidly changing – and maturing – open-access publishing sphere, illustrate the growing range of options and approaches that are emerging, and help the library community to make sense of what it all means for you and your campus. Guest presenters will include:

  • Caroline Sutton, President of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and Publisher and Co-Founder, Co-Action Publishing
  • Wim van der Stelt, Executive Vice President of Corporate Strategy for Springer
  • Catriona McCallum, Senior Editor for PLoS Biology and Consulting Editor for PLoS ONE

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$500 Million in U.S. Department of Labor Grants Will Include Support for Open Educational Resources under Creative Commons BY License

The White House has announced the solicitation of the initial grants in the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program. About $500 million in grant funding will be available in the first round of grants.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan ushered in a new era of hope and opportunity for millions of Americans today when they revealed the innovative application criteria for the first $500 million in grants under the four-year, $2 billion Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training Grant Program. Grants will support the development and improvement of a new generation of free, post-secondary educational programs of two years or less that prepare students for successful careers in emerging and expanding industries.

This effort, which was developed and designed in consultation with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, sets the stage for what promises to become one of the most significant expansions in access to high-quality education and job training opportunities ever. These new investments will also play a major role in helping the Nation achieve the goal set by President Obama last year that by 2020 the United States will once again have the most highly educated workforce in the world.

But what matters most is what these new freely-available resources will mean to individuals.

By relying on evidence-based approaches and requiring that all materials produced be openly licensed for free use, adaptation, and improvement by others, this groundbreaking federal effort will bring free, high-quality curriculum and employment training opportunities within reach of anyone who has access to the Internet.

Open Educational Resources are learning materials that have been released under an intellectual property license that allows their free use by others. The materials produced as a result of these grants will carry the Creative Commons BY license, which also permits their free derivative use for commercial purposes. That means companies, schools, entrepreneurs, and others will be free to bundle,adapt, or customize the learning materials to create new offerings, products, and services. Schools will be able to affordably offer courses in subject areas and at levels of expertise previously beyond their reach. Students will be able to access free educational materials, including complete courses, and supportive services designed to help them accomplish their educational and job-training goals.

Millions of students around the world have already benefited from Open Educational Resources in the decade since then-Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) President Charles Vest established MIT's pioneering OpenCourseWare project, the first of its type, based on a proposal from members of his faculty. The goal, Vest explained in 2001, was to make all of the learning materials used by MIT's faculty in the school's 1,800 courses available via the Internet, where they could be used and repurposed as desired by others without charge.

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Open Content Licensing Tool: Risk Management Calculator

The OER IPR Support Project has released the Risk Management Calculator.

Here's an excerpt from the press release :

As more and more open content finds its way online, licensing and rights have become a key issue on a global level.

Licensing is complex and the more open you make content under an end user licence the greater the risk if you haven't sought the necessary permissions. In partnership with the Higher Education Academy, JISC is funding a support project on IPR and licensing issues for Open Educational Resources. The latest addition to their suite of support resources is a new tool—the Risk Management Calculator—designed to help understand levels of risk associated with publishing open educational materials. Typical examples of this might include materials which are still in copyright, but for which the rights holders cannot be traced or are unknown (so called "Orphan Works"). The calculator helps those relatively new to licensing to make the right decisions when creating open content. . . .

More and more organisations are realising the benefits of releasing their content under Creative Commons Licences, or similar open content licences such as the Open Government Licence, which explicitly grant the end-user permission to use materials, modify or redistribute them. Institutions like the British Library are releasing their bibliographic records to be reused without attribution and Creative Commons Licences are increasingly used by developing countries to open up content.

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Unchartered Waters—The State of Open Data in Europe

CSC has released Unchartered Waters—The State of Open Data in Europe

Here's an excerpt:

This study analyses the current state of the open data policy ecosystem and open government data offerings in nine European Member States. Since none of the countries studied currently offers a national open data portal, this study compares the statistics offices’ online data offerings. The analysis shows that they fulfill a number of open data principles but that there is still a lot of room for improvement. This study underlines that the development of data catalogues and portals should not be seen as means to an end.

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Research Communications Strategy: 3rd Report to JISC—December 2010

The Research Communications Strategy project has released Research Communications Strategy: 3rd Report to JISC—December 2010.

Here's an excerpt:

Section 1 takes as its starting point the apparent reluctance of individual academics fully to embrace OA, and suggests that the potential offered by OA for various kinds of added value might be an effective tool in advocacy.

Section 2 considers the relation of OA to services such as Mendeley, and wonders whether our established view of OA as a way to distribute traditional research outputs more efficiently might come to seem outmoded in the face of new, non-traditional ideas about how to conduct and disseminate research.

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America COMPETES Act Establishes Interagency Public Access Committee

The signing of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 by President Obama establishes a new Interagency Public Access Committee. The International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has issued a press release that "applauds the efforts of US legislators in crafting the charter of the Interagency Public Access Committee."

Here's an excerpt from the Act:

SEC. 103. INTERAGENCY PUBLIC ACCESS COMMITTEE.

(a) ESTABLISHMENT.—The Director shall establish a working group under the National Science and Technology Council with

the responsibility to coordinate Federal science agency research and policies related to the dissemination and long-term stewardship of the results of unclassified research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications, supported wholly, or in part, by funding from the Federal science agencies.

(b) RESPONSIBILITIES.—The working group shall—

(1) identify the specific objectives and public interests that need to be addressed by any policies coordinated under (a);

(2) take into account inherent variability among Federal science agencies and scientific disciplines in the nature of research, types of data, and dissemination models;

(3) coordinate the development or designation of standards for research data, the structure of full text and metadata, navigation tools, and other applications to maximize interoperability across Federal science agencies, across science and engineering disciplines, and between research data and scholarly publications, taking into account existing consensus standards, including international standards;

(4) coordinate Federal science agency programs and activities that support research and education on tools and systems required to ensure preservation and stewardship of all forms of digital research data, including scholarly publications;

(5) work with international science and technology counterparts to maximize interoperability between United States based unclassified research databases and international databases and repositories;

(6) solicit input and recommendations from, and collaborate with, non-Federal stakeholders, including the public, universities, nonprofit and for-profit publishers, libraries, federally funded and non federally funded research scientists, and other organizations and institutions with a stake in long term preservation and access to the results of federally funded research;

(7) establish priorities for coordinating the development of any Federal science agency policies related to public access to the results of federally funded research to maximize the benefits of such policies with respect to their potential economic or other impact on the science and engineering enterprise and the stakeholders thereof;

(8) take into consideration the distinction between scholarly publications and digital data;

(9) take into consideration the role that scientific publishers play in the peer review process in ensuring the integrity of the record of scientific research, including the investments and added value that they make; and

(10) examine Federal agency practices and procedures for providing research reports to the agencies charged with locating and preserving unclassified research.

(c) PATENT OR COPYRIGHT LAW.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to undermine any right under the provisions of title 17 or 35, United States Code.

(d) APPLICATION WITH EXISTING LAW.—Nothing defined in section

(b) shall be construed to affect existing law with respect to Federal science agencies’ policies related to public access.

(e) REPORT TO CONGRESS.—Not later than 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, the Director shall transmit a report to Congress describing—

(1) the specific objectives and public interest identified under (b)(1);

(2) any priorities established under subsection (b)(7);

(3) the impact the policies described under (a) have had on the science and engineering enterprise and the stakeholders, including the financial impact on research budgets;

(4) the status of any Federal science agency policies related to public access to the results of federally funded research; and

(5) how any policies developed or being developed by Federal science agencies, as described in subsection (a), incorporate input from the non-Federal stakeholders described in subsection (b)(6).

(f) FEDERAL SCIENCE AGENCY DEFINED.—For the purposes of this section, the term ‘‘Federal science agency’’ means any Federal agency with an annual extramural research expenditure of over $100,000,000.

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Digital Scholarship’s 2010 Publications

Digital Scholarship's 2010 publications are listed below:

Digital Scholarship publications are under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.

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NISO Will Make Information Standards Quarterly Open Access in 2011

The National Information Standards Organization has announced that Information Standards Quarterly will become open access in 2011.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"ISQ has undergone a significant transformation over the past three years as it moved from a newsletter to a full-color magazine," states Cynthia Hodgson, NISO Managing Editor. "With the support of a new ISQ Editorial Board and guest content editors, the contributed content has expanded significantly. Our goal with ISQ is to educate and inform our readers on standards, present practical and replicable implementations of standards-based technologies and best practices, and identify areas where standards could help to solve problems."

"ISQ provides a unique perspective with its overlapping interests to the library, publisher, and information systems and services audience," explains Todd Carpenter, NISO Managing Director and Publisher of ISQ. "NISO's Board of Directors strongly believes that providing the information in ISQ via open access will enhance the visibility and reach of the work of our community. We also intend to migrate the archives to open access and convert much of the backfile to electronic format."

The print version of ISQ will still be available by subscription or free to NISO members who opt-in to receive it in print. This approach, combined with the open access of the electronic version, will reduce the environmental impact and costs of print publishing while increasing the accessibility of the magazine to everyone in the NISO community and in related standards and technology arenas.

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Virginia Commonwealth University Resolution Supporting Open Access Publishing in Tenure Decisions

The Virginia Commonwealth University Faculty Senate has passed a resolution supporting recognition of open access publishing in the tenure process.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Whereas, the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University are dedicated to achieving the greatest public good by making their research and scholarship as widely available as possible;

Whereas, commercial publishers of scholarly journals have drastically increased subscription prices to many of the journals where VCU faculty now publish their research and scholarship beyond the affordability of many individuals and institutions; and

Whereas, faculty have many options for publishing their research and scholarship in open access journals, hybrid journals, or in open access repositories so that the world can have free access to it if they negotiate to retain their copyright of their work;

Therefore, the Faculty Senate of Virginia Commonwealth University recommends:

VCU Promotion and Tenure committees should recognize that publication and editorial effort in open access, peer-reviewed journals or republication of peer-reviewed articles in an open access repository offers added value and greater public good than scholarship made only available in expensive journal publications.

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