ARL Awarded $1 Million Grant for Shared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE)

ARL has been awarded a $1 million grant for the Shared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has been awarded a joint $1 million grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop and launch the Shared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) Notification Service. SHARE is a collaborative initiative of ARL, the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) to ensure the preservation of, access to, and reuse of research findings and reports.

SHARE aims to make research assets more discoverable and more accessible, and to enable the research community to build upon these assets in creative ways. SHARE's first project, the Notification Service, will inform stakeholders when research results—including articles and data—are released.

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“The Demand for Out-of-Print Works and Their (Un)Availability in Alternative Markets”

Paul J. Heald has self-archived “The Demand for Out-of-Print Works and Their (Un)Availability in Alternative Markets.”

Here's an excerpt:

Prior studies demonstrate the shocking unavailability of most books published in the 20th Century, prompting The Atlantic Monthly headline: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish. The unavailability of new editions of older works would be less problematic, however, if little consumer demand existed for those works. In addition, the lack of new editions would be much less troubling if the works were easily available in alternative forms or markets. Newly collected data provides evidence of the demand for out-of-print books and then charts the availability of out-of-print works in digital form (eBooks and .mp3), in used book stores, and in public libraries. The situation with books remains dismal, although music publishers on iTunes seem to be doing a much better job of digitizing older works and making them available than do book publishers. Some theories for this discrepancy are offered.

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"Unwrapping the Bundle: An Examination of Research Libraries and the ‘Big Deal’"

Karla L. Strieb and Julia C. Blixrud have self-archived "Unwrapping the Bundle: An Examination of Research Libraries and the 'Big Deal'."

Here's an excerpt:

This study presents and analyzes the findings of a 2012 survey of member libraries belonging to the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) on publishers' large journal bundles and compares the results to earlier surveys. The data illuminate five research questions: market penetration, journal bundle construction, collection format shifts, pricing models, and license terms. The structure of the product is still immature, particularly in defining content and developing sustainable pricing models. The typical "bundle" is something less than the full publishers list. Neither market studies nor market forces have produced a sustainable new strategy for pricing and selling e-journals. Finally, a complex history of managing license terms is revealed in the data.

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Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges

The Wellcome Trust has released Developing an Effective Market for Open Access Article Processing Charges.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In their report, published in March 2014, Björk and Solomon set out a series of scenarios for how funders might develop their approaches for supporting APCs. These cover both full open access journals (which operate exclusively by this model) and so-called hybrid journals (which offer this service for individual articles, while continuing to operate via the subscription model). The authors appraised three combined scenarios, which they conclude to be the most promising for further consideration.

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MOOC Content Licensing Solution Launched

The Copyright Clearance Center has Launched the MOOC Content Licensing Solution.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The MOOC Content Licensing Solution uses the current per-page or per-article academic-based pricing rightsholders have established through CCC's Electronic Course Content pay-per-use service. CCC offers digital rights from over 5,000 rightsholders around the world to public, private not-for-profit, and private for-profit U.S.-based institutions of higher education that conduct academic MOOCs.

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PLOS Clarifies Open Data Policy

PLOS has clarified its open data policy.

Here's an excerpt:

In the previous post, and also on our site for PLOS ONE Academic Editors, an attempt to simplify our policy did not represent the policy correctly and we sincerely apologize for that and for the confusion it has caused. We are today correcting that post and hoping it provides the clarity many have been seeking. . . .

Two key things to summarize about the policy are:

  1. The policy does not aim to say anything new about what data types, forms and amounts should be shared.
  2. The policy does aim to make transparent where the data can be found, and says that it shouldn't be just on the authors' own hard drive.

Correction

We have struck out the paragraph in the original PLOS ONE blog post headed "What do we mean by data", as we think it led to much of the confusion. Instead we offer this guidance to authors planning to submit to a PLOS journal.

What data do I need to make available?

We ask you to make available the data underlying the findings in the paper, which would be needed by someone wishing to understand, validate or replicate the work. Our policy has not changed in this regard. What has changed is that we now ask you to say where the data can be found.

As the PLOS data policy applies to all fields in which we publish, we recognize that we'll need to work closely with authors in some subject areas to ensure adherence to the new policy. Some fields have very well established standards and practices around data, while others are still evolving, and we would like to work with any field that is developing data standards. We are aiming to ensure transparency about data availability.

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Getty Images Announces Free Noncommercial Use

Getty Images has announced that its images can be used freely on the web for noncommercial purposes.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Global digital media company Getty Images today announces, for the first time, the ability for people to easily embed and share its imagery—at no cost—or non-commercial use on websites, blogs and social media channels through a new embed tool. . . .

This is the latest in a series of moves by Getty Images to harness technology and social media to drive broader exposure and usage of its content. Recent initiatives include a unique partnership with Pinterest, the fastest growing content sharing channel*, announced in October 2013, whereby Pinterest pays Getty Images a fee in exchange for metadata. Getty Images then shares these fees with its contributors, who also receive attribution when their content is used.

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"Ethics and Access 1: The Sad Case of Jeffrey Beall"

Walt Crawford has published "Ethics and Access 1: The Sad Case of Jeffrey Beall" in Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.

Here's an excerpt:

This is the first of a trio of essays: two related to fairly specific situations, one covering a range of ethical discussions. Depending on how you define "ethics," I could also include sections on Elsevier and OA, embargoes, fallacious and misleading anti- OA arguments and the whole area of peer review. Or maybe not. In any case, we lead off with the sad case of Jeffrey Beall.

Since Beall's chief claim to fame is his ever-growing list of supposedly predatory OA journals, and since I'm showing the case for treating Beall as a questionable source, I have to say this: In case you're thinking "Walt's claiming there are no scam OA journals," I'm not—and toward the end of this essay, I'll quote some useful ways to avoid scam journals regardless of their business model.

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"Reed Elsevier 2013 Results"

Reed Elsevier has released "Reed Elsevier 2013 Results."

Here's an excerpt:

Commenting on the results, Anthony Habgood, Chairman, said:

"Reed Elsevier is continuing to deliver on its long term strategic and financial priorities. With underlying revenue growth across all major business areas, operating profit and earnings grew well in 2013. We made good progress on organic development and portfolio reshaping, and our strong cash flow enabled us to step up our share buyback programme whilst maintaining balance sheet strength. We are recommending a +7% increase in the full year dividend for Reed Elsevier PLC and +8% for Reed Elsevier NV, in line with growth in adjusted earnings per share at constant exchange rates."

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PLOS Mandates Immediate Open Access to Article-Related Data

PLOS has mandated that author's provide immediate open access to article-related data upon publication.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In an effort to increase access to this data, we are now revising our data-sharing policy for all PLOS journals: authors must make all data publicly available, without restriction, immediately upon publication of the article. Beginning March 3rd, 2014, all authors who submit to a PLOS journal will be asked to provide a Data Availability Statement, describing where and how others can access each dataset that underlies the findings. This Data Availability Statement will be published on the first page of each article.

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"E-Book Platforms for Academic Librarians"

Audrey Powers has self-archived "E-Book Platforms for Academic Librarians."

Here's an excerpt:

The goal of this issue is to provide a succinct overview of e-book platforms for academic librarians as well as insights into where e-book platforms are headed in the future. Most of the authors work in academic libraries and their job responsibilities include developing, procuring, promoting, and educating users about e-books. The topics covered include an overview of e-book platforms including technical aspects and business models, lending platforms, aggregator platforms, commercial publisher platforms, and university press platforms. It is our hope that when you read these articles it will add to your knowledge base about the current and future state of e-book platforms in academic libraries.

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The Benefits and Risks of the PDF/A-3 File Format for Archival Institutions

The NDSA has released The Benefits and Risks of the PDF/A-3 File Format for Archival Institutions.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The report takes a measured look at the costs and benefits of the widespread use of the PDF/A-3 format, especially as it effects content arriving in collecting institutions. It provides background on the technical development of the specification, identifies specific scenarios under which the format might be used and suggests policy prescriptions for collecting institutions to consider.

For example, the report suggests that for memory institutions, the acceptance of embedded files in PDF/A documents would depend on very specific protocols between depositors and archival repositories that clarify acceptable embedded formats and define workflows that guarantee that the relationship between the PDF document and any embedded files is fully understood by the archival institution.

Additionally, the report notes that the complexity of the PDF format and the wide variance in PDF rendering implementations and creating applications suggests that PDF/A-3 may be appropriate for use in controlled workflows, but may not be an appropriate choice as a general-purpose bundling format.

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"SCOAP3 Lifts Off: An Interview with Ann Okerson"

David Wojick has published "SCOAP3 Lifts Off: An Interview with Ann Okerson" in The Scholarly Kitchen.

Here's an excerpt:

Q: SCOAP3 seems pretty complicated to me. As I understand it they make deals with leading particle physics journals, so that when those libraries that participate in SCOAP3 pay the article publishing charges, everyone's subscription price is either lowered or eliminated, depending on whether some or all of the articles are paid for. Is that correct?

A: Roughly put, that's true. "They" are "we" in this case. Let me note here that without the interest and participation of the publishers, SCOAP3 would not have launched on January 1st, already with hundreds of 2014 articles in the SCOAP3 repository at CERN and now flowing in on a daily basis. The SCOAP3 Technical Working Group developed, in conjunction with the Steering Committee, a set of criteria that formed the basis for publisher participation. Publishers received the Invitation to Tender and responded by describing in detail the way in which they would participate and at what cost per article.

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Only 20.56 % of Jounals in DOAJ Use CC BY or CC BY-SA License

The post "CC-BY Dominates under the Creative Commons licensed Journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)" analyzes the use of Creative Commons licences by journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Here's an excerpt:

A total of 2,016 (or 20.56 %) of the guided journal in DOAJ therefore use a license (CC-BY or CC-BY-SA), which is compatible with the requirements of the Open Definition and allow a restriction-free use of the contents within the meaning of Open Access defined the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the RCUK Open Access policy and the Berlin Declaration.

If we consider the subset of journals that use any CC license that the claims of the Open Definition sufficient licenses dominate even slightly: About 54% of all journals that use a CC license , use either CC-BY ( 52.77 %) or CC-BY-SA (1.40 %). Surprisingly low is the proportion of journals which use the most restrictive CC license CC-BY-NC-ND : Only 737 journals (7.52 % of all journals and 19.80% under the CC-licensed journals). This license variant neither allows edits or allows to create derivative works (such as translations) nor a commercial use is possible. Surprisingly allow more than half (2,060, 55.35 %) of which is under a CC license Journals a commercial exploitation of the contents, only 44.65% (1662) prohibit this.

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E-print Copyright Debate Continues: "Its the Content, Not the Version!"

Kevin Smith has published "Its the Content, Not the Version!" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke.

Here's an excerpt:

Throughout this discussion, the proponents of the position that copyright is transferred only in a final version really do not make any legal arguments as such, just an assertion of what they wish were the situation (I wish it were too). But here is a legal point—the U.S. copyright law makes the difficulty with this position pretty clearly in section 202 when it states the obvious principle that copyright is distinct from any particular material object that embodies the copyrighted work. So it is simply not true to say that version A has a copyright and version B has a different copyright.

See also: "Where Copyrights Come from (Part I)—Copyediting Does–Not–Create a New Copyright" by Nancy Sims.

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"Guest Post: Charles Oppenheim on Who Owns the Rights to Scholarly Articles"

Charles Oppenheim has published "Guest Post: Charles Oppenheim on Who Owns the Rights to Scholarly Articles" in Open and Shut.

Here's an excerpt:

Posting D [draft article] on an OA repository is the so-called "Harnad-Oppenheim" solution, first proposed by Stevan Harnad and me more than 10 years ago.

When the solution was first enunciated, publishers dismissed it for two reasons: firstly, why would anyone want to read a draft when the final perfect version can be obtained via the publisher? And secondly, it would be difficult to track down a copy of D anyway. Their comments remain valid today, though the second one is not as strong because of services such as Google Scholar. But no publisher suggested that the solution was illegal because publishers owned the copyright to D, and they were right not to do so. The law is clear that I own the copyright in D. That is why I am so puzzled that some recent non-publisher commentators seem to think publishers own the copyright in D.

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"Troubleshooting Public Data Archiving: Suggestions to Increase Participation"

Dominique G. Roche et al. have published "Troubleshooting Public Data Archiving: Suggestions to Increase Participation" in PLOS Biology.

Here's an excerpt:

An increasing number of publishers and funding agencies require public data archiving (PDA) in open-access databases. PDA has obvious group benefits for the scientific community, but many researchers are reluctant to share their data publicly because of real or perceived individual costs. Improving participation in PDA will require lowering costs and/or increasing benefits for primary data collectors. Small, simple changes can enhance existing measures to ensure that more scientific data are properly archived and made publicly available: (1) facilitate more flexible embargoes on archived data, (2) encourage communication between data generators and re-users, (3) disclose data re-use ethics, and (4) encourage increased recognition of publicly archived data.

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Fixing the Broken Textbooks Market: How Students Respond to High Textbook Costs and Demand Alternatives

The U.S. PIRG Education Fund has released Fixing the Broken Textbooks Market: How Students Respond to High Textbook Costs and Demand Alternatives.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Today, a survey released by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund shows that 65% of student consumers have opted out of buying a college textbook due to its high price, and of those students, 94% they suffer academically.

Over the past decade, college textbook prices have increased by 82%, or at three times the rate of inflation. . . .

Open textbooks are faculty-written and peer-reviewed like traditional textbooks, but they are published under an open license, meaning they are free online, free to download, and affordable in print. 82% of survey respondents said they would do significantly better in a course if the textbook were free online and a hard copy was optional, which is exactly how open textbooks work.

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"Setting the Record Straight about Elsevier"

Kevin Smith has published "Setting the Record Straight about Elsevier" in Scholarly Communications @ Duke.

Here's an excerpt:

Each [article] version is a revision of the original, and the copyright is the same for all these derivatives. When copyright is transferred to a publisher, the rights in the entire set of versions, as derivatives of one another, are included in the transfer. Authors are not allowed to use their post-prints because the rights in that version are not covered in the transfer; they are allowed to use post-prints only because the right to do so, in specified situations, is licensed back to them as part of the publication agreement.

Once a copyright transfer has been signed, all of the rights that the author may still have are because of specific contractual terms, which are usually contained in the transfer document itself. In short, these agreements usually give all of the rights under copyright to the publisher and then license back very small, carefully defined slivers of those rights back to the author. One of those slivers is often, but not always, the right to use a submitted version, or post-print, in carefully limited ways.

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John Willinsky Gets SPARC Innovator Award

John Willinsky has received a SPARC Innovator Award.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In the late 1990s, Willinsky founded the Public Knowledge Project and developed Open Journal Systems (OJS), a free, open source platform that allows journals to be more easily and affordably published online. The results speak for themselves—today, more than 1.5 million articles are published in journals using the OJS platform. In 2012 alone, over 5,000 journals published at least 10 articles using the software Willinsky and his team pioneered.

Because Willinsky is both a visionary and pragmatist who brings effective business teams together, SPARC honors Willinsky with its January 2014 Innovator Award.

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"Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: The Elsevier Article of the Future Project"

The LIBER Quarterly has released a future article: "Bringing Digital Science Deep Inside the Scientific Article: The Elsevier Article of the Future Project."

Here's an excerpt:

In 2009, Elsevier introduced the"Article of the Future" project to define an optimal way for the dissemination of science in the digital age, and in this paper we discuss three of its key dimensions. First we discuss interlinking scientific articles and research data stored with domain-specific data repositories—such interlinking is essential to interpret both article and data efficiently and correctly. We then present easy-to-use 3D visualization tools embedded in online articles: a key example of how the digital article format adds value to scientific communication and helps readers to better understand research results. The last topic covered in this paper is automatic enrichment of journal articles through text-mining or other methods. Here we share insights from a recent survey on the question: how can we find a balance between creating valuable contextual links, without sacrificing the high-quality, peer-reviewed status of published articles?

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Open Access Publishing: A Literature Review

CREATe has released Open Access Publishing: A Literature Review.

Here's an excerpt:

Within the context of the Centre for Copyright and New Business Models in the Creative Economy (CREATe) research scope, this literature review investigates the current trends, advantages, disadvantages, problems and solutions, opportunities and barriers in Open Access Publishing (OAP), and in particular Open Access (OA) academic publishing. This study is intended to scope and evaluate current theory and practice concerning models for OAP and engage with intellectual, legal and economic perspectives on OAP. It is also aimed at mapping the field of academic publishing in the UK and abroad, drawing specifically upon the experiences of CREATe industry partners as well as other initiatives such as SSRN, open source software, and Creative Commons. As a final critical goal, this scoping study will identify any meaningful gaps in the relevant literature with a view to developing further research questions. The results of this scoping exercise will then be presented to relevant industry and academic partners at a workshop intended to assist in further developing the critical research questions pertinent to OAP.

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Université de Montréal Will Cancel about 75% of Wiley Online Library Periodicals

The Université de Montréal will cancel about 75% of its Wiley Online Library periodicals.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Out of 1510 periodicals in the Wiley Online Library, the Université de Montréal is cancelling subscriptions to 1142 titles at the end of January. As a result, and from this point on, the articles found in the cancelled titles will no longer be available on-line. However, access to earlier issues will be entirely maintained.

This action results from a process that started a long while ago. The financial cut-backs imposed by the Québec government only accelerated the decision process. The result of the analysis is simple: libraries have been driven to the wall because of the yearly rise of subscriptions to periodicals that hover between 3% and 6%. They cannot go on cutting back the acquisition of monographs to compensate for such price increases. As a result, this conclusion, as well as the adopted solution, would have been the same a few years down the line, independently of the financial context.

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"E-Book Monopolies and the Law"

Angela Daly has self-archived "E-Book Monopolies and the Law" in SSRN

Here's an excerpt:

This article will examine the legality of the digital rights management ("DRM") measures used by the major e-book publishers and device manufacturers in the United States, European Union and Australia not only to enforce their intellectual property rights but also to create monopolistic content silos, restrict interoperability and affect the ability for users to use the content they have bought in the way they wish. The analysis will then proceed to the recent competition investigations in the US and EU over price-fixing in e-book markets, and the current litigation against Amazon in the US for an alleged abuse of its dominant position. A final point will be made on possible responses in Australia to these issues taking into account the jurisprudence on DRM in other scenarios.

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"Do Altmetrics Correlate with Citations? Extensive Comparison of Altmetric Indicators with Citations from a Multidisciplinary Perspective"

Rodrigo Costas, Zohreh Zahedi, Paul Wouters have self-archived "Do Altmetrics Correlate with Citations? Extensive Comparison of Altmetric Indicators with Citations from a Multidisciplinary Perspective" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

An extensive analysis of the presence of different altmetric indicators provided by Altmetric.com across scientific fields is presented, particularly focusing on their relationship with citations. Our results confirm that the presence and density of social media altmetric counts are still very low and not very frequent among scientific publications, with 15%-24% of the publications presenting some altmetric activity and concentrating in the most recent publications, although their presence is increasing over time. Publications from the social sciences, humanities and the medical and life sciences show the highest presence of altmetrics, indicating their potential value and interest for these fields. The analysis of the relationships between altmetrics and citations confirms previous claims of positive correlations but relatively weak, thus supporting the idea that altmetrics do not reflect the same concept of impact as citations. Also, altmetric counts do not always present a better filtering of highly cited publications than journal citation scores. Altmetrics scores (particularly mentions in blogs) are able to identify highly cited publications with higher levels of precision than journal citation scores (JCS), but they have a lower level of recall. The value of altmetrics as a complementary tool of citation analysis is highlighted, although more research is suggested to disentangle the potential meaning and value of altmetric indicators for research evaluation.

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