University of Windsor Senate Adopts Open Access Policy

The University of Windsor Senate has adopted an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In recognition of the importance of providing open access to Windsor research, and building on the momentum of the Tri-Council Open Access Policy (CIHR, NSERC, SSHRC), University Senate passed the University of Windsor's own open access policy (OA), Friday May 8. . . .

In Canada, the recent release of the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications requires grant recipients, as of May 2015, to take steps to ensure that peer-reviewed journal publications arising from supported research are made freely accessible within 12 months of publication.

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University of Colorado Boulder Adopts Open Access Policy

The University of Colorado Boulder has adopted an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

"We are delighted that the Chancellor's Executive Committee has approved an Open Access policy for the campus that was endorsed by the Boulder Faculty Assembly, the Council of Deans, and the Office of the Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor," said University of Colorado Boulder Chancellor Philip P. DiStefano. "CU-Boulder proudly joins the ranks of other campuses in higher education that have created such policies in the interest of openly sharing their published intellectual assets."

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"Weighing Up Anonymity and Openness in Publication Peer Review"

Hilda Bastian has published "Weighing Up Anonymity and Openness in Publication Peer Review" in Absolutely Maybe.

Here's an excerpt:

There are some consequences that flow inevitably from the choice of anonymity or naming, like workload for journals, or the ability for peer reviewer conflicts of interests unknown to editors to be revealed. I'll come back to that later. But first, what evidence do we have that masking the identities of authors and peer reviewers achieves what it is meant to? . . .

So I've taken a deep dive into this literature. I found 17 relevant comparative studies, 12 of which are controlled trials. The quality of these studies varies greatly, especially the ability to control for variables. Some are in hypothetical situations. But there are some very good, decent-sized trials.

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"The Open Access Interviews: John Willinsky"

Richard Poynder has published "The Open Access Interviews: John Willinsky" in Open and Shut?.

Here's an excerpt:

I was fortunate enough to draw together a wonderful team, led by the Associate University Librarian Brian Owen and technical wonder Alec Smecher at Simon Fraser University Library, who, through the research and development funds we were able to raise, created open source systems for scholarly workflow management and publishing. Together, we created Open Journal Systems (OJS) beginning in 2002, to answer the question of what will it cost to put a journal online. . . .

Over the course of the next decade, the use of OJS has spread across the globe to the point where—with 8,000 journals actively using it in 2013—we now feel a considerable responsibility at PKP for ensuring that this system provides a high-quality editorial workflow and publishing environment, and all the more so with roughly half of those journals in the Global South.

So in terms of your question on what PKP has developed into, I would say that it has become primarily but not entirely an open source software development and community support project in a global scale.

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University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Faculty Council Unanimously Adopts Open Access Policy

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Faculty Council has unanimously adopted an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Resolution 2015-9: On Endorsing a University Open Access Policy represented more than a year of work by a 35-member faculty Open Access Task Force. Chairs Todd Vision and Julie Kimbrough told the University Gazette that they worked diligently to craft a policy recommendation that could be applied differently according to the needs of various disciplines.

UNC-CH is the 51st university or university unit to have adopted an open access policies by a unanimous faculty vote.

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"When Is an Article Actually Published? An Analysis of Online Availability, Publication, and Indexation Dates"

Stefanie Haustein et al. have self-archived "When Is an Article Actually Published? An Analysis of Online Availability, Publication, and Indexation Dates."

Here's an excerpt:

With the acceleration of scholarly communication in the digital era, the publication year is no longer a sufficient level of time aggregation for bibliometric and social media indicators. Papers are increasingly cited before they have been officially published in a journal issue and mentioned on Twitter within days of online availability. In order to find a suitable proxy for the day of online publication allowing for the computation of more accurate benchmarks and fine-grained citation and social media event windows, various dates are compared for a set of 58,896 papers published by Nature Publishing Group, PLOS, Springer and Wiley-Blackwell in 2012. Dates include the online date provided by the publishers, the month of the journal issue, the Web of Science indexing date, the date of the first tweet mentioning the paper as well as the Altmetric.com publication and first-seen dates. Comparing these dates, the analysis reveals that large differences exist between publishers, leading to the conclusion that more transparency and standardization is needed in the reporting of publication dates. The date on which the fixed journal article (Version of Record) is first made available on the publisher's website is proposed as a consistent definition of the online date.

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"Who Needs Open Access, Anyway?"

Walt Crawford has published "Who Needs Open Access, Anyway?" in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

That title is not my own opinion or question—but it feels like the appropriate title for this odd roundup, covering several dozen items I've tagged over the last two years (or so) as " oa-anti. " The tag doesn't necessarily mean the item was a flat-out attack on open access (even with the typical "some of my best friends are OA, but… " nonsense that's usually now phrased as "I am/this publisher is/a big proponent of OA, however… "). It means that, in skimming the item initially, it seemed to register as something that either seemed to undermine OA or could be used as an attack on OA—or, in some cases, it's discussing somebody else attempting to undermine OA. At the end of this mostly-unsorted set of items, I note a handful of " oa-pro " items for a little balance.

You can help support Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large and Crawford's open access research by donating as little as $2 per month via PayPal.

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"Thumbs Down for the Freemium Model? Researchers Reject Nature’s Fast Track Peer Review Experiment"

David Crotty has published "Thumbs Down for the Freemium Model? Researchers Reject Nature's Fast Track Peer Review Experiment" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

NPG launched a four-week trial in their megajournal Scientific Reports. The journal features a Gold open access (OA) business model, where accepted authors pay a $1,495 article processing charge (APC). In the trial, authors willing to pay an additional $750 upfront would get their decision in three weeks. NPG would be able to offer this additional speed by outsourcing the peer review process to Rubriq, a service offered by the private company Research Square.

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"Stepping Back from Sharing"

Kevin Smith has published "Stepping Back from Sharing" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke.

Here's an excerpt:

Two major features of this retreat from openness need to be highlighted. First, it imposes an embargo of at least one year on all self-archiving of final authors' manuscripts, and those embargoes can be as long as four years. Second, when the time finally does roll around when an author can make her own work available through an institutional repository, Elsevier now dictates how that access is to be controlled, mandating the most restrictive form of Creative Commons license, the CC-BY-NC-ND license for all green open access.

See also: "Elsevier Updates Its Article-Sharing Policies, Perspectives and Services" and "GET IT IN WRITING: On Elsevier's Revised Sharing/Hosting Policies."

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Elsevier: "Unleashing the Power of Academic Sharing"

Elsevier has released "Unleashing the Power of Academic Sharing."

Here's an excerpt:

Elsevier's updated sharing and hosting policies explain how articles published with Elsevier may be shared and made available. These provide a more clear and consistent framework that is aligned with the rest of the publishing industry, and which is based on feedback from our authors and institutional partners. While we know the policy changes will not go as far as some would like, we believe they strike an appropriate balance between the rights and responsibilities of sharing.

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"Fast and Made to Last: Academic Blogs Look to Ensure Long-Term Accessibility and Stability of Content"

Christof Schöch has published "Fast and Made to Last: Academic Blogs Look to Ensure Long-Term Accessibility and Stability of Content" in Impact of Social Sciences.

Here's an excerpt:

The advantage of blogs compared with such talks is that here, discussions can happen across geographical and temporal borders, and that they stay visible online in comments or companion posts. But aren't blog posts, ultimately, almost as fleeting as a talk at a workshop? Who makes sure the content stays online not just today and tomorrow, but in the long term? Who guarantees that the link to the post remains the same? Who ensures that the text will not be modified later on? These are issues that need to be resolved if blogs are to be reliable, trusted, citeable resources and receive academic recognition even in the absence of traditional pre-publication peer-review. . . . The research blogging platform hypotheses.org has understood this early on. This fact is undoubtedly a factor in the success of the platform, which is run by the French initiative OpenEdition and currently hosts 1006 (and counting) research blogs in French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and English coming from the Humanities and Social Sciences.

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"Four Facets of Privacy and Intellectual Freedom in Licensing Contracts for Electronic Journals"

Alan Rubel and Mei Zhang have published "Four Facets of Privacy and Intellectual Freedom in Licensing Contracts for Electronic Journals" in College & Research Libraries.

Here's an excerpt:

This is a study of the treatment of library patron privacy in licenses for electronic journals in academic libraries. We begin by distinguishing four facets of privacy and intellectual freedom based on the LIS and philosophical literature. Next, we perform a content analysis of 42 license agreements for electronic journals, focusing on terms for enforcing authorized use and collection and sharing of user data. We compare our findings to model licenses, to recommendations proposed in a recent treatise on licenses, and to our account of the four facets of intellectual freedom. We find important conflicts with each.

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Disrupting the Subscription Journals’ Business Model for the Necessary Large-Scale Transformation to Open Access

The Max Planck Digital Library has released Disrupting the Subscription Journals' Business Model for the Necessary Large-Scale Transformation to Open Access .

Here's an excerpt:

This paper makes the strong, fact-based case for a large-scale transformation of the current corpus of scientific subscription journals to an open access business model. The existing journals, with their well-tested functionalities, should be retained and developed to meet the demands of 21st century research, while the underlying payment streams undergo a major restructuring. There is sufficient momentum for this decisive push towards open access publishing. The diverse existing initiatives must be coordinated so as to converge on this clear goal. The international nature of research implies that this transformation will be achieved on a truly global scale only through a consensus of the world's most eminent research organizations. All the indications are that the money already invested in the research publishing system is sufficient to enable a transformation that will be sustainable for the future. There needs to be a shared understanding that the money currently locked in the journal subscription system must be withdrawn and re-purposed for open access publishing services. The current library acquisition budgets are the ultimate reservoir for enabling the transformation without financial or other risks. The goal is to preserve the established service levels provided by publishers that are still requested b y researchers, while redefining and reorganizing the necessary payment streams. By disrupting the underlying business model, the viability of journal publishing can be preserved and put on a solid footing for the scholarly developments of the future.

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"Steps toward a New GSU Ruling"

Kevin Smith has published "Steps toward a New GSU Ruling" in Scholarly Communication @ Duke University.

Here's an excerpt:

It appears that once again the publishers have failed in an effort to broaden the scope of the case beyond the item-by-item fair use analysis that has already been done and to possibly reintroduce some of the broad principles that they really want, which have so far been rejected at every stage. Now Judge Evans has explicitly told them, in her scheduling order, that what is required is "consideration and reevaluation of each of the individual claims" in order to redetermine "in each instance… whether defendants' use was a fair use under 17 U.S.C. section 107." Her schedule for the briefs is tight, with an end of the briefing now scheduled just two and a half months from now. Presumably we would still have a long wait while Judge Evans applies revised reasoning about fair use to each of the individual excerpts, but it looks a bit more like that is what is going to happen.

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"A Network Approach to Scholarly Communication Infrastructure"

Rebecca Kennison and Lisa Norberg have published "A Network Approach to Scholarly Communication Infrastructure" in EDUCAUSE Review.

Here's an excerpt:

The open-access movement, fueled by the digital revolution, is transforming the business of scholarly communication, affecting the entire value chain. Rapidly emerging technologies have been crucial enablers of this transformation, blurring traditional roles and attracting new participants. The infrastructure and the economic framework established to support a centuries-old model of scholarly publishing are no longer adequate to the task. We believe that a radically different approach is required-one that is open, flexible, collaborative, and networked.

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"Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On | Periodicals Price Survey 2015"

Stephen Bosch and Kittie Henderson have published "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On | Periodicals Price Survey 2015" in Library Journal.

Here's an excerpt:

Open access (OA) continues to develop, but some financial analysts, such as Sami Kassab, executive director at investment firm Exane BNP Paribas, now believe that OA may no longer be a pressure point on commercial publishing. OA has not been the disruptive force on commercial publishing for which many had hoped.

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University of Minnesota Press and GC Digital Scholarship Lab Get $732,000 Mellon Grant for Manifold Scholarship

The University of Minnesota Press and GC Digital Scholarship Lab of Graduate Center of the City University of New York have received a $732,000 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant for Manifold Scholarship.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Moving beyond the digitization of scholarly books, based primarily in siloed, read-only analogues to print such as Adobe Acrobat PDF and Epub, Manifold will define and create the next phase of scholarly publishing: monographs that open the boundaries of separate formats like "print" and "e-book." Foreseeing an emerging hybrid environment for scholarship, Manifold will develop, alongside the print edition of a book, an alternate form of publication that is networked and iterative, served on an interactive, open-source platform. . . .

In Manifold, a digital scholarly work would not be a static replication of the print book. From the beginning it is dynamic, revised, and expanded to reflect the evolution of academic thought and research, incorporating access to primary research documents and data, links to related archives, rich media, social media, and reading tools. Manifold seeks to encompass the growth and refinement of academic work as it is discussed, reviewed, and analyzed.

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50 Universities or University Units Have Now Adopted Open Access Policies by Unanimous Faculty Votes

With recent votes by Boston University and University of Delaware faculty, 50 universities or university units, such as schools, have now adopted open access policies by unanimous faculty votes.

Here's a list from Unanimous Faculty Votes. See the original document for omitted details, and see the recently revised (and praised) Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies (ROARMAP) for a complete list of over 670 open access policies.

  1. February 12, 2008. Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
  2. April 27, 2008. Macquarie University
  3. May 7, 2008, Harvard University, School of Law
  4. June 10, 2008, Stanford University, School of Education
  5. October 2008, University College London (UCL)
  6. February 11, 2009. Boston University
  7. March 6, 2009, Oregon State University, Library Faculty
  8. March 18, 2009, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
  9. May 2009. University of Calgary, division of Library and Cultural Resources
  10. May 2009. University of Pretoria
  11. May 7, 2009, University of Oregon, Library Faculty
  12. May 14, 2009, University of Oregon, Department of Romance Languages
  13. May 14, 2009, Gustavus Adolphus College, Library Faculty
  14. October 1, 2009, York University, librarians and archivists
  15. October, 2009. Universidad de Oriente (Venezuela)
  16. November 18, 2009, Oberlin College
  17. December 2, 2009, University of Northern Colorado, Library Faculty
  18. February 1, 2010, Wake Forest University, Library faculty
  19. February 9, 2010, California Polytechnic State University
  20. February 12, 2010, Oregon State University College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences (COAS)
  21. February 24, 2010, University of Virginia
  22. February 25, 2010, Rollins College Faculty of Arts and Sciences
  23. March 18, 2010, Duke University
  24. March 24, 2010, University of Puerto Rico School of Law
  25. April 19, 2010, San Jose State University
  26. September 27, 2010, University of Northern Colorado
  27. October 2010, Trinity College Dublin
  28. December 22, 2010, Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
  29. March 15, 2011, Emory University
  30. May 11, 2011, University of Pennsylvania
  31. September 2011, Princeton University
  32. October 19, 2011, Florida State University
  33. December 8, 2011, Pacific University
  34. January 27, 2012, Bifröst University
  35. February 15, 2012, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto
  36. April 2012, Utah State University
  37. May 21, 2012, University of California, San Francisco
  38. February 6, 2013, Wellesley College
  39. March 4, 2013, College of Wooster
  40. March 5, 2013, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Library faculty
  41. March 21, 2013, University of Rhode Island
  42. April 2013, Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University
  43. June 13, 2013, Oregon State University
  44. December 2013, Télé-université (TELUQ), Université du Québec
  45. December 2, 2013, Columbia University, School of Social Work
  46. June 18, 2014, Harvard Medical School
  47. October 7, 2014, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
  48. October 9, 2014, Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
  49. February 11, 2015, Boston University
  50. April 6, 2015, University of Delaware

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"Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness"

A. Swan et al. have self-archived "Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness".

Here's an excerpt:

The PASTEUR4OA project analyses what makes an Open Access (OA) policy effective. The total number of institutional or funder OA policies worldwide is now 663 (March 2015), over half of them mandatory. ROARMAP, the policy registry, has been rebuilt to record more policy detail and provide more extensive search functionality. Deposit rates were measured for articles in institutions' repositories and compared to the total number of WoS-indexed articles published from those institutions. Average deposit rate was over four times as high for institutions with a mandatory policy. Six positive correlations were found between deposit rates and (1) Must-Deposit; (2) Cannot-Waive-Deposit; (3) Deposit-Linked-to-Research-Evaluation; (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention; (5) Must-Make-Deposit-OA (after allowable embargo) and (6) Can-Waive-OA. For deposit latency, there is a positive correlation between earlier deposit and (7) Must-Deposit-Immediately as well as with (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention and with mandate age. There are not yet enough OA policies to test whether still further policy conditions would contribute to mandate effectiveness but the present findings already suggest that it would be useful for current and future OA policies to adopt the seven positive conditions so as to accelerate and maximise the growth of OA.

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Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available

The Authors Alliance has released Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This guide is the product of extensive outreach to the publishing industry. In the process, we interviewed authors, publishers, and literary agents, ranging from a CEO of a major publishing house to contracts and rights managers of trade and academic presses, editorial assistants, novelists, and academic authors.

We were happily surprised by the consistency of publishers' responses: across the board, publishers told us that they want to work together with their authors and that they are often willing to give authors their rights back if its in the books' best interests.

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"Next Up for Agency Public Access Plans: NOAA"

SPARC has released "Next Up for Agency Public Access Plans: NOAA" by Heather Joseph.

Here's an excerpt:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has released its plan to create policies ensuring public access to articles and data resulting from its funded research, as required by the February 2013 White House directive. . . .

The NOAA plan calls for all agency-funded intramural and extramural researchers to deposit final, accepted manuscripts into the agency's repository upon acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal. Unlike many of the other agencies that have released plans to date, NOAA will also require its investigators to submit technical reports, data reports, and technical memoranda into the repository as well—significantly increasing the scope of the materials covered by the agency's policy.

NOAA will use the OSTP-suggested 12-month embargo period as its baseline. Like other agencies, it will provide stakeholders with a mechanism for petitioning the agency to change the embargo period. The plan indicates that requests must include evidence that outweighs the public benefit of having the embargo remain at one year. . . .

Currently, funded researchers are required to make data "visible and accessible" within two years. The new plan calls for this time frame to be shortened to just one year. It also indicates that data underlying the conclusions of peer-reviewed articles will most likely be required to be made available at the time of the article's publication, in appropriate repositories (presumably to be designated by NOAA).

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"Dramatic Growth of Open Access 2015 First Quarter"

Heather Morrison has published "Dramatic Growth of Open Access 2015 First Quarter" in The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics.

Here's an excerpt:

OpenDOAR added 129 repositories for a total of 2,857. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine added close to 3 million documents for a total of over 71 million documents. Another 7,690 authors joined the Social Sciences Research Network for a total of over 275,000 authors.

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"NIST Releases Public Access Plan: Agency will Partner with NIH to use PMC Platform"

SPARC has released "NIST Releases Public Access Plan: Agency will Partner with NIH to use PMC Platform" by Heather Joseph.

Here's an excerpt:

NIST's plan calls for the agency to partner with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to use PubMed Central (PMC) as the repository for articles. The plan indicated that NIST selected this option in order to "leverage the well-established search, archival, and dissemination features of PMC."

All NIST-funded researchers will be required to deposit their final peer-reviewed manuscripts into PMC upon acceptance in a peer-reviewed journal and make them available to the public with no longer than a 12-month embargo period. NIST will also accept final published articles where allowed and will follow the NIH's current format requirements. As with the other agencies, NIST will provide stakeholders with a mechanism for petitioning the agency to "shorten or extend the allowable embargo period." NIST envisions that this process would take place through a public petition process run through the Federal Register. . . .

NIST's plan for providing public access to data consists of three components: requiring data management plans (DMPs), creating an Enterprise Data Inventory (EDI), and establishing a Common Access Platform providing a public access infrastructure.

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"5 Million Public Domain Ebooks in HathiTrust: What Does This Mean?"

Rick Anderson has published "5 Million Public Domain Ebooks in HathiTrust: What Does This Mean?" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

A week or so ago, a monumental thing happened: the number of public-domain books in the HathiTrust digital repository topped 5 million. And since no one (including HathiTrust, so far) seems to be making a very big deal about this, it seems like a good moment both to recap the achievements of HathiTrust and to consider a few of its implications for the future of reading and scholarship.

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"Should I Stay or Should I Go? Alternative Infrastructures in Scholarly Publishing"

Carl Lagoze, et al. have published "Should I Stay or Should I Go? Alternative Infrastructures in Scholarly Publishing" in the International Journal of Communication.

Here's an excerpt:

For more than three-and-a-half centuries, the scholarly infrastructure—composed of commercial publishers, learned societies, libraries, and the scholars themselves—has provided the foundation functions of certification, registration, access, preservation, and reward. However, over the last two decades, the stability of this infrastructure has been disrupted by profound changes in the technological, economic, cultural, and political climate. We examine the actions of scholars in response to this infrastructure instability through the lens of Hirschman's "exit, voice, and loyalty" framework. We describe the motivations and actions by scholars, especially those with tenure, who have chosen exit from the mainstream scholarly communication infrastructure to a proliferation of newly available alternative infrastructures. However, this option is not practical for all scholars due to the "enforced loyalty" imposed by reward systems based on metrics that are intricately tied to the traditional infrastructure. We examine the alternative of voice exercised by these scholars, combined with the threat of exit that has changed policies that are the source of dissatisfaction with the system.

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