CHORUS Progress Report, April 2015

CHORUS has released the CHORUS Progress Report, April 2015.

Here's an excerpt:

As of this month, CHORUS is providing access to and information about tens of thousands of articles reporting on federally funded research. CHORUS was also named by the US Department of Energy as part of its public-access solution. The significant progress we've made in the eight months since we moved into full production mode is a great foundation for CHORUS to build on for the benefit of the scholarly community. This report is a summary of our achievements during this pivotal period.

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Cogent OA Launches Experimental Freedom APCs Program Letting Authors Choose What to Pay

Cogent OA has launched an experimental Freedom APCs Program.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Through Cogent OA's Freedom APC model, authors are requested to explore all avenues for funding the publication of their article, such as their funding agency, institution or company and to select a fee from a range of options based on their circumstances and how much they can afford to pay. The final decision rests with the author.

Further information: Article Publishing Charges (APCs).

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"When Data Sharing Gets Close to 100%: What Human Paleogenetics Can Teach the Open Science Movement"

Paolo Anagnostou et al. have published "When Data Sharing Gets Close to 100%: What Human Paleogenetics Can Teach the Open Science Movement" in .

Here's an excerpt:

This study analyzes data sharing regarding mitochondrial, Y chromosomal and autosomal polymorphisms in a total of 162 papers on ancient human DNA published between 1988 and 2013. The estimated sharing rate was not far from totality (97.6% ± 2.1%) and substantially higher than observed in other fields of genetic research (evolutionary, medical and forensic genetics). Both a questionnaire-based survey and the examination of Journals' editorial policies suggest that this high sharing rate cannot be simply explained by the need to comply with stakeholders requests. Most data were made available through body text, but the use of primary databases increased in coincidence with the introduction of complete mitochondrial and next-generation sequencing methods. Our study highlights three important aspects. First, our results imply that researchers' awareness of the importance of openness and transparency for scientific progress may complement stakeholders' policies in achieving very high sharing rates. Second, widespread data sharing does not necessarily coincide with a prevalent use of practices which maximize data findability, accessibility, useability and preservation. A detailed look at the different ways in which data are released can be very useful to detect failures to adopt the best sharing modalities and understand how to correct them. Third and finally, the case of human paleogenetics tells us that a widespread awareness of the importance of Open Science may be important to build reliable scientific practices even in the presence of complex experimental challenges.

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Department of Defense Releases Draft Plan to Establish Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research

The Department of Defense has released a draft Plan to Establish Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research .

Here's an excerpt from the SPARC announcement:

It calls for all DoD-funded researchers to deposit final peer-reviewed manuscripts into the Department's "Defense Technical Information Center" (DTIC) repository. All articles will be made available to the public with no longer than a 12 embargo period. . . .

The DoD draft plan doesn't elaborate on reuse rights for articles in the DTIC database, other than to note that articles will be subject to copyright and related license terms. Articles authored by DoD employees, however, will carry a full government use license. . . .

One significant place where the DoD's draft plan differs from others released to date is in the area of compliance. The Department indicates that it plans to develop its own "compliance monitor," that will issue "certification tokens" to authors who submit articles and datasets to the DoD under the new policies. The current document doesn't provide any additional details, but the concept of tokens is an intriguing one.

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"What We Got Wrong about Books"

Joseph Esposito has published "What We Got Wrong about Books" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

This is where we have gotten into trouble. The apparent fixity of a book, the tendency to think of a book as something stuck inside an inflexible container, has led us to imagine that books are used the way they are written, or how we assume they are written—that is, from beginning to end. The prominence of the novel as a literary form over the past two centuries reinforces this. Who would want to break off in the middle of Tom Jones? The traditional novel is linear, which has created an expectation that all books are linear. That expectation is simply wrong, as Kobo and our own reading experience tell us.

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"Advancing Research Communication & Scholarship—An Interview with Robin Champieux and Jill Emery about This New Conference"

Alice Meadows has published "Advancing Research Communication & Scholarship—An Interview with Robin Champieux and Jill Emery about This New Conference" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

ARCS, Advancing Research Communication & Scholarship, is a new conference designed to provide a broad and collaborative forum for addressing and affecting scholarly and scientific communication. As organizers, we are working from the idea that supporting and improving knowledge communication in the digital age necessitates conversations and partnerships across communities, disciplines, and expertise. . . . Partnering with an organizing committee of librarians, technologists, humanists, scientists, and publishers we have built a conference program that addresses scholarly communication issues across the research cycle, through a diversity of stakeholder perspectives.

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"Beyond Beall’s List: Better Understanding Predatory Publishers"

Monica Berger and Jill Cirasella have published "Beyond Beall's List: Better Understanding Predatory Publishers" in College & Research Libraries News.

Here's an excerpt:

Although predatory publishers predate OA, their recent explosion was expedited by the emergence and success of fee-charging OA journals. No matter how strong our urge to support and defend OA, librarians cannot deny the profusion of predators in the OA arena; John Bohannon's recent "sting" made abundantly clear (despite methodological flaws) that there are many bad actors. Rather, we should seek to understand their methods, track their evolution, and communicate their characteristics to our patrons.

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"The OA Interviews: Alison Mudditt, Director, University of California Press"

Richard Poynder has published "The OA Interviews: Alison Mudditt, Director, University of California Press" in Open and Shut? in which Mudditt discusses the UC Press' Collabra and Luminos open access programs.

Here's an excerpt:

Collabra's model speaks to publishers, libraries, funders, and researchers who are seeking more cost transparency and greater recognition of the critical role that the academic and scientific community plays in journal publishing. In our model, the people who do the fundamental work of peer-review are recognized for this and are able to decide where to place that value.

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You Didn’t Think It Was Over, Did You? New Motion in GSU Copyright Case

According to "Publishers' Move Could Mean 'Whole New Trial' in GSU Copyright Case," the plaintiffs have filed a motion to "reopen the trial record, and have asked that new evidence be used to determine whether some of the university's online e-reserve course readings are infringing copyright."

The article also mentions a recent e-print by Brandon Butler, "Transformative Teaching and Educational Fair Use after Georgia State."

Here's an excerpt from the e-print:

The latest installment in the history of educational fair use, the 11th Circuit's opinion in the Georgia State e-reserves case, may be the last judicial word on the subject for years to come, and I argue that its import is primarily in its rejection of outdated guidelines and case law, rather than any affirmative vision of fair use (which the court studiously avoids). Because of the unique factual context of the case, it stops short of bridging the gap between educational fair use and modern transformative use jurisprudence. With help from recent scholarship on broad patterns in fair use caselaw, I pick up where the GSU court left off, describing a variety of common educational uses that are categorizable as transformative, and therefore entitled to broad deference under contemporary fair use doctrine. In the process, I show a way forward for vindicating fair use rights, and first amendment rights, by applying the transformative use concept at lower levels of abstraction to help practice communities make sense of the doctrine.

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UC Press and the CDL Given a $750,000 Mellon Grant to Develop OA Monograph Publication System

The University of California Press and the California Digital Library have been given a $750,000 grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation "to develop a web-based, open source content and workflow management system to support the publication of open access (OA) monographs in the humanities and social sciences."

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The proposed system will increase efficiency and achieve cost reduction by allowing users to manage content and associated workflows from initial authoring through manuscript submission, peer review, and production to final publication of files on the open web, whether via a publishing platform or an institutional repository. The system will streamline production so publishers can redirect resources back into the editorial process and disseminate important scholarship more widely.

During this two-year period, the system will be designed and built to support the new open access models being pursued by UC Press as well as CDL's current publishing programs. Throughout the two-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, UC Press and CDL will engage other university presses and library publishing units to ensure the system will meet the needs of a range of organizations. UC Press and CDL have built in a plan for long-term sustainability to ensure that this resource will continue to serve these communities and will realize its potential to re-invigorate the domain of monographic publishing within the humanities and social sciences.

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"Research Data Explored II: the Anatomy and Reception of figshare"

Peter Kraker et al. have self-archived "Research Data Explored II: the Anatomy and Reception of figshare."

Here's an excerpt:

In this paper, we present an analysis of figshare, one of the largest multidisciplinary repositories for research materials to date. We analysed the structure of items archived in figshare, their usage, and their reception in two altmetrics sources (PlumX and ImpactStory). We found that figshare acts as a platform for newly published research materials, and as an archive for PLOS. Depending on the function, we found different bibliometric characteristics. Items archived from PLOS tend to be coming from the natural sciences and are often unviewed and non-downloaded. Self-archived items, however, come from a variety of disciplines and exhibit some patterns of higher usage. In the altmetrics analysis, we found that Twitter was the social media service where research data gained most attention; generally, research data published in 2014 were most popular across social media services. PlumX detects considerably more items in social media and also finds higher altmetric scores than ImpactStory.

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"Flipping, not Flopping: Converting Subscription Journals to Open Access"

Alice Meadows has published "Flipping, not Flopping: Converting Subscription Journals to Open Access" in The Scholarly Kitchen .

Here's an excerpt:

The question of whether—and, if so, when and how—to 'flip' a traditional, subscription-based journal to open access (OA) is one that comes up time and again in meetings with our society partners. It's also something that funders sometimes like to suggest as a quick route to a more open world—"Why not just convert all your journals to OA?" they ask.

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"The Economics of Open Access"

Walt Crawford as published "The Economics of Open Access" in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

This essay is primarily about open access, but strays into journal publishing in general. As usual, it's a combination of resources (cites) and commentary (insights), divided into ten overlapping segments. I believe the mèlange will be informative and useful, although I'm certain it won't provide pat answers to most questions, because such answers don't exist.

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Altmetric Mentions and the Communication of Medical Research

Digital Science has released Altmetric Mentions and the Communication of Medical Research.

Here's an excerpt:

Social and mainstream media mentions of research publications appear much more rapidly than conventional academic citations and are generated by a wider range of users. They therefore offer the potential for early and complementary indicators of research impact. Such indicators could also identify new kinds of economic and social impact.

In this report we explore the relevance of such new indicators to research in medical and health sciences.

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"The Educational Value of Truly Interactive Science Publishing"

Michael J. Ackerman has published "The Educational Value of Truly Interactive Science Publishing" in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Here's an excerpt:

Interactive Scientific Publishing (ISP) has been developed by the Optical Society of America with support from the National Library of Medicine at NIH. It allows authors to electronically publish papers which are linked to the referenced 2D and 3D original image datasets. These image datasets can then be viewed and analyzed interactively by the reader. ISP provides the software for authors to assemble and link their source data to their publication. But more important is that it provides readers with image viewing and analysis tools. The goal of ISP is to improve learning and understanding of the presented information. This paper describes ISP and its effect on learning and understanding. ISP was shown to have enough educational value that readers were willing to invest in the required set-up and learning phases. The social aspects of data sharing and the enlarged review process may be the hardest obstacles to overcome.

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"AHRQ, NASA, USDA Release Plans for Public Access to Funded Research"

ARL has released AHRQ, NASA, USDA Release Plans for Public Access to Funded Research.

Here's an excerpt:

Three US Government agencies-the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA)-recently released their plans for increasing public access to federally funded research in response to the 2013 White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) directive. The OSTP memorandum directed federal agencies with R&D budgets of $100 million or more to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication.

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"The Case of the Disappearing E-book: Academic Libraries and Subscription Packages"

College & Research Libraries has released "The Case of the Disappearing E-Book: Academic Libraries and Subscription Packages" by Helen Georgas.

Here's an excerpt:

This study begins with a one-year analysis of "disappeared" titles from ebrary's Academic Complete™ collection at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY). Were certain subject areas particularly affected? Which publishers were removed? Were the removed titles mainly scholarly, or were they titles published by popular presses? Were the removed monographs older publications, or were recent titles deleted as well?

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"Open Access Article Processing Charges: DOAJ Survey May 2014"

Heather Morrison et al. have published "Open Access Article Processing Charges: DOAJ Survey May 2014" in Publications.

Here's an excerpt:

As of May 2014, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed close to ten thousand fully open access, peer reviewed, scholarly journals. Most of these journals do not charge article processing charges (APCs). This article reports the results of a survey of the 2567 journals, or 26% of journals listed in DOAJ, that do have APCs based on a sample of 1432 of these journals. Results indicate a volatile sector that would make future APCs difficult to predict for budgeting purposes. DOAJ and publisher title lists often did not closely match. A number of journals were found on examination not to have APCs. A wide range of publication costs was found for every publisher type. The average (mean) APC of $964 contrasts with a mode of $0. At least 61% of publishers using APCs are commercial in nature, while many publishers are of unknown types. The vast majority of journals charging APCs (80%) were found to offer one or more variations on pricing, such as discounts for authors from mid to low income countries, differential pricing based on article type, institutional or society membership, and/or optional charges for extras such as English language editing services or fast track of articles. The complexity and volatility of this publishing landscape is discussed.

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"Reflections on Library Licensing"

Ann Shumelda Okerson has published "Reflections on Library Licensing" in Information Standards Quarterly.

Here's an excerpt:

The way libraries acquire basic content for their readers has been completely upended in the last two decades. In this rapid electronic environment, content providers are pressed to enhance and update existing products or to produce competitive new products, with ever-increasing functionality and with great uncertainty about what users will pay for and how much they will pay. At the same time, numerous new producers are entering the electronic marketplace. We are living in an information Wild West, which can put libraries and publishers face to face on Main Street at high noon, often without the third-party subscription agents or book jobbers we used to depend on. This article discusses how we got to this place; whether one should prefer copyright or license; the differing view of rights by authors, publishers, libraries and their end users; different types of licenses; and current issues in licensing.

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Managing Open Access Publication: A System Specification

JISC Monitor has released Managing Open Access Publication: A System Specification.

Here's an excerpt:

The purpose of this document is to provide a specification for a system to help UK HE institutions manage administrative data in relation to the publication of open access Academic Outputs. The document is intended to:

  • Describe the scope of such a system and the workflows it should support
  • Describe an appropriate data model given the scope and workflows
  • Provide illustrative wireframes for a user interface (UI) to such a system

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"A Proposal for Regularly Updated Review/Survey Articles: ‘Living Reviews’"

David L. Mobley and Daniel M. Zuckerman have self-archived "A Proposal for Regularly Updated Review/Survey Articles: 'Living Reviews'."

Here's an excerpt:

We propose and encourage the publication of review/survey articles that will be updated regularly, both in traditional journals and novel venues. We call these "living reviews." This idea naturally builds on the dissemination and archival capabilities present in the modern internet, and indeed living reviews exist already in some forms. Living review articles allow authors to maintain over time the relevance of non-research scholarship that requires a significant investment of effort. We also envision living reviews leading to the creation of a new category of review—review papers published as living reviews in a purely electronic format without space constraints. This will also permit more pedagogical scholarship and clearer treatment of technical issues that remain obscure in a brief treatment.

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"One More Chunk of DOAJ"

Walt Crawford has published "One More Chunk of DOAJ" in Cites & Insights Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

Because there will be a published concise version of all this stuff—out this summer from ALA's Library Technology Reports, working title "Idealism and Opportunism: The State of Open Access Journals"—I went through 2,200-odd additional DOAJ journals with English as one of the language options (but not the first one), and was able to add 1,507 more entries to my DOAJ master spreadsheet, which now includes 6,490 journals qualifying for full analysis and 811 that don't. This essay offers some summary information on the 1,507 added journals and some overall notes on the full DOAJ set-including some new and replacement tables (there may be errors in tables 2.66 b and c and 2.67 b and c in earlier issues).

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"Adjunct No More: Promoting Scholarly Publishing as a Core Service of Academic Libraries"

Isaac Gilman has self-archived "Adjunct No More: Promoting Scholarly Publishing as a Core Service of Academic Libraries."

Here's an excerpt:

For small academic libraries, which are largely absent from ARL-dominated literature on library publishing (with some notable exceptions 14), the decision to pivot towards publishing services leads to several key questions: What skills and resources are needed in order to ensure quality and avoid Daniel Coit Gilman's disdained practice of "printing without publishing"?15) In what ways should the traditional work of the library change in order to accommodate this shift in focus? At the same time, in what ways can the work of publication be connected with traditional work and skills found within the library?

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JEP Publishes Books in Browsers V Proceedings

The Journal of Electronic Publishing has released its latest issue, which presents the Books in Browsers V proceedings. The articles are primarily in video format

Here's an excerpt from "Editor's Note [18.1]":

While there are a few changes, what remains is the mission of the conference and the consistently high quality of its programming. As Peter Brantley, the driving force behind Books in Browsers, notes, the conference intends to and does "explore how rapidly evolving open web standards can support advanced digital publishing, and in turn how the frontiers of digital publishing design, supporting highly customized authorial intentions, push on our understanding of the nature and corpus of web standards."

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"Who Should We Trust?"

Kevin Smith has published "Who Should We Trust?" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke.

Here's an excerpt:

It is not that we exactly trust commercial publishers, nor do we exactly distrust them. We may recognize that the values and goals of the commercial publishing business are different from, and even in conflict with, the best interests of scholarly authors and of scholarship itself. Perfectly nice people, working to advance their own interests as best they can, come in to conflict as the conditions for research and teaching change. And a real ambivalence is created because of how interwoven the parts of the academic enterprise are. More than just inertia is a work; important aspects of the academic enterprise remain interlocked with traditional forms of publication.

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