Category: Scholarly Communication

New Book from EDUCAUSE: The Tower and the Cloud

EDUCAUSE has published a new book, The Tower and the Cloud, which is freely available in digital form (a print version is also available).

The book is a wide-ranging overview of major information technology trends and their impacts on higher education, with essays written by prominent authors such as Clifford A. Lynch ("A Matter of Mission: Information Technology and the Future of Higher Education"), Paul N. Courant ("Scholarship: The Wave of the Future in the Digital Age"), and John Unsworth ("University 2.0").

Version 73, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 73 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,350 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2007 Annual Edition (PDF file) is also available.

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards

An article about the bibliography ("Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography") has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

European Commission Launches Open Access Pilot Project

The European Commission has launched a pilot project to provide open access to EU-funded research results after a 6-12 month embargo period. Further information about the pilot project will be available on 9/1/08 at the Open Access Pilot in FP7 page.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Fast and reliable access to research results, especially via the Internet, can drive innovation, advance scientific discovery and support the development of a strong knowledge-based economy. The European Commission wants to ensure that the results of the research it funds under the EU's 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7) with more than € 50 billion from 2007-2013 are disseminated as widely and effectively as possible to guarantee maximum exploitation and impact in the world of researchers and beyond. The Commission today launched a pilot project that will give unrestricted online access to EU-funded research results, primarily research articles published in peer reviewed journals, after an embargo period of between 6 and 12 months. The pilot will cover around 20% of the FP7 programme budget in areas such as health, energy, environment, social sciences and information and communication technologies. . . .

The Commission's open access pilot, to run until the end of FP7, aims to ensure that the results from EU-funded research are progressively made available to all. Grant recipients will be required to deposit peer reviewed research articles or final manuscripts resulting from their FP7 projects in an online repository. They will have to make their best effort to ensure open access to these articles within either six or twelve months after publication, depending on the research area. This embargo period will allow scientific publishers to get a return on their investment.

Open access to research articles, previously accessible through journal subscriptions, can help to increase the impact of the EU's € 50 billion investment in research and development and avoid wasting time and valuable resources on duplicative research. With access to a wider selection of literature, researchers can build upon this knowledge to further their own work. Small and medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs can also benefit from improved access to the latest research developments to speed up commercialisation and innovation.

CLIR Report: No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century

The Council on Library and Information Resources has published No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century.

Here's an excerpt:

What are the critical functions of the research library in this changing landscape? How should we be rethinking the research library in a dynamic, swiftly changing landscape dominated by digital technology? To explore this question, CLIR convened a meeting of librarians, publishers, faculty members, and information technology specialists on February 27, 2008, in Washington, D.C. To prepare for the discussion, CLIR invited eight of the participants to share their perspectives on the future library in brief essays. The essays were circulated before the meeting and are presented in part II of this volume.

A Look at the Development and Future of Scholarly Communication in High Energy Physics

Robert Aymar, Director-General of CERN, has deposited a e-print of "Scholarly Communication in High-Energy Physics: Past, Present and Future Innovations" in the CERN Document Server.

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

Unprecedented technological advancements have radically changed the way we communicate and, at the same time, are effectively transforming science into e-Science. In turn, this transformation calls for an evolution in scholarly communication. This review describes several innovations, spanning the last decades of scholarly communication in High Energy Physics: the first repositories, their interaction with peer-reviewed journals, a proposed model for Open Access publishing and a next-generation repository for the field.

Of particular interest is his description of the INSPIRE Project, "a fully integrated HEP information platform for the future," that will have "text- and data-mining applications, citation analysis and other tools, and Web 2.0 features."

For further information about INSPIRE, see "Information Systems in HEP get INSPIREd" and the INSPIRE Wiki.

ARL Revamps Scholarly Communication Resources Web Site

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has revamped its FAIR (Freely Available Institute Resources) Web site.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has updated and reconfigured the FAIR (Freely Available Institute Resources) Web site, where faculty and alumni of the ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication share outreach and program development tools with the broader community.

FAIR is a component of the Institute on Scholarly Communication, a joint program of ARL and ACRL that promotes the development of library-led outreach on scholarly communication issues. Hundreds of institute alumni form a community that provides peer support and professional sharing of information relating to campus outreach. FAIR’s reconfiguration is part of a larger reorganization and expansion of ARL’s Web pages on scholarly communication.

FAIR currently offers four resource collections:

  • outreach to faculty;
  • program planning and development tools;
  • staff development tools; and
  • a collection of position descriptions with scholarly communication components.

With FAIR’s reconfiguration, the collection of sample position descriptions has been significantly expanded with recent contributions from a range of academic institutions. Position titles range from Copyright Librarian to Digital Repository Coordinator in addition to many titles explicitly including the phrase "scholarly communication."

Mellon Foundation's 2007 Scholarly Publishing Initiatives

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has released its 2007 annual report, and the "Scholarly Publishing Initiatives" section by Donald J. Waters and Joseph S. Meisel is of particular interest. The complete report is available as a PDF file.

Read more about it at "Mellon Foundation Assesses the State of Scholarly Publishing" (Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers only).

Bibliography of Open Access Released

The Open Access Directory has released the Bibliography of Open Access.

The Bibliography of Open Access is based on my Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, which was published in 2005 by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

With my permission and the agreement of ARL, most of the Open Access Bibliography has been converted to the MediaWiki format to form the basis of the Bibliography of Open Access. The new bibliography will be authored by registered Open Access Directory users, who can add or edit references. It is under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

The initial version of new bibliography has live links; however, they were last updated in August 2004, when the text of the Open Access Bibliography was frozen for print publication preparation. These links can now be updated by registered users.

The Open Access Bibliography, which contains textual sections not found in the Bibliography of Open Access, remains freely available in HTML and PDF formats at Digital Scholarship and as a printed book.

The Editor of the Open Access Directory is Robin Peek, the Associate Editor is David Goodman, and the Assistant Editor is Athanasia Pontika. The OAD editors, Peter Suber, and myself worked as a team on the initial version of the Bibliography of Open Access.

Institutional Repositories and Research Management Systems

Kate Price has posted a summary of the responses she received to an informal survey she did on JISC-REPOSITORIES about the use of institutional repositories and central publications databases. Responses are broken down into five models (e.g., "operates separate open access repository and central publications databases") and by system (e.g., EPrints).

In a related message, David Groenewegen points to the ARROW HERDC Working Group Interim Report May 2008.

Here's an excerpt from the report's "Introduction":

This report is an interim report on the activities of the Working Group. The interim report aims to stimulate discussion and invite feedback which will inform the final report.

As a first step the Working Group has identified and developed four potential broad models to represent the relationship between the university's research management system and the institutional repository.

The purpose of these models is to suggest possible workflows and processes, to stimulate discussion, and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each approach. It is assumed that local use of these models will necessitate variants as required by the environment of each institution.

Stanford University School of Education's Open Access Mandate—Harvard Medical School Next?

On June 26, Stevan Harnad and Leslie Carr broke the story that John Willinsky had announced an open access mandate for Stanford University's School of Education in a speech at ELPub 2008. Peter Suber then posted a link to the video of the speech.

Today, Willinsky posted the Stanford University School of Education Open Access Motion on the SPARC-OAForum, noting that it "was passed unanimously by the faculty of the School of Education, Stanford University on June 10, 2008, and was cleared by the Provost's Office and Stanford University's legal counsel on June 25th, 2008."

Here's the text of the motion:

In recognition of its responsibility to make its research and scholarship as widely and publicly available as possible, the faculty of the Stanford University School of Education is determined to take advantage of new technologies to increase access to its work among scholars worldwide, educators, policymakers, and the public. In support of greater openness in scholarly and educational endeavors, the faculty of the School of Education agree to the following policy:

Faculty members grant to the Stanford University permission to make publicly available their scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. They grant to Stanford University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to their scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are properly attributed to the authors not sold for a profit.

The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while a faculty member of the School of Education, beginning with articles for which the publisher's copyright agreement has yet to be signed. The Dean or the Dean's designate will waive application of the policy upon written request from faculty who wish to publish an article with a publisher who will not agree to the terms of this policy (which will be presented to the publishers in the form of an addendum to the copyright agreement).

No later than the date of publication, faculty members will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Dean of Education's Office, who will make the article available to the public in an open-access repository operated by Stanford University.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending policy changes to the School of Education from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented on the policy to the School of Education.

Willinsky also posted on the list "Questions and Answers on Harvard’s Open Access Motion," which is "a series of questions and responses that arose as part of a discussions of passing such a motion at the Stanford University School of Education (SUSE) by Claude Goldenberg, Roy Pea, Sean Reardon, and John Willinsky."

Peter Suber has commented on these Stanford documents in his "Details on the Stanford OA Mandate" posting.

In a Library Journal article ("At SPARC Forum, News of the University of California’s Open Access Near Miss") published today, a "representative of Harvard Medical School" is quoted as saying: "I think we’re going to be the next school to go for OA." (This article provides some brief additional information about the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences and Law School mandates and discusses as yet unsuccessful efforts at the University of California to pass a mandate.)

Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences Named as SPARC Innovators

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has recognized Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences as SPARC Innovators.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

A February 12 vote made the Harvard faculty the first in the U.S. to embrace an Open Access directive and the first to grant permission to the university to make their articles openly available. The policy, drafted by a 10-member provost’s committee, was ratified by unanimous vote of a quorum of faculty members.

The Harvard FAS vote and Open Access policy emerged at a time when there is growing concern among faculty that traditional publishing processes are not ensuring maximum access to their research.

"The FAS vote confirms that broadening access to their collective output is of fundamental importance to our faculty, and that they are willing to take strong and decisive action to ensure the accessibility of their works," adds Stuart M. Shieber, professor of computer science at Harvard, Chair of the provost’s committee, and recently named director of the university’s new Office of Scholarly Communication.

The new SPARC Innovator profile details the process that led to the faculty’s ultimate vote. It explores motivations behind the decision to take action, looks at how members of the faculty were informed and engaged, why the Open Access requirement and its opt-out provision emerged, and how Harvard has paved the way for other institutions to follow suit.

"People think Harvard can do this kind of thing because Harvard is so rich," said Shieber. "The irony is that the reason people here got involved was the financial unsustainability—even at Harvard—of the current scholarly publishing regime, which has led to a steady erosion of access as we and other institutions must cancel subscriptions. The goal of this and future policies we will develop is not to save money. The goal is to broaden access."

"Harvard’s leadership on this issue is an inspiration to academic institutions across the country," said Diane Graves, University Librarian at Trinity University in San Antonio. "Thanks to Harvard’s prestigious reputation and the unanimous vote by the Arts and Sciences faculty, colleges and universities throughout North America have the incentive to start—or strengthen—similar conversations between their libraries and the faculty. This landmark vote—and the votes that are sure to follow—signals the beginning of a new, sustainable model for scholarly communication."

"Harvard’s success was possible because of the determination of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to ensure the widest exposure of their research. We hope their forward-looking step will serve as invitation to other campuses and departments of all kinds to explore their own policies for research access," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "It is SPARC’s pleasure to highlight their achievement in as many ways as we can. . . ."

The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication propelled by an individual, institution, or group. Typically, these advances exemplify SPARC principles by challenging the status quo in scholarly communication for the benefit of researchers, libraries, universities, and the public.

CNI Spring 2008 Task Force Meeting Presentations

Presentations and project briefings from the CNI Spring 2008 Task Force Meeting are available. Podcast interviews with a few attendees are also available.

Here's a selection of project briefings:

2007 Impact Factors for PLoS Journals Released

The Public Library of Science has reported the 2007 impact factors for its journals as calculated by Thomson Reuters:

  • PLoS Biology: 13.5
  • PLoS Medicine: 12.6
  • PLoS Computational Biology: 6.2
  • PLoS Genetics: 8.7
  • PLoS Pathogens: 9.3

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

As we and others have frequently pointed out, impact factors should be interpreted with caution and only as one of a number of measures which provide insight into a journal’s, or rather its articles’, impact. Nevertheless, the 2007 figures for PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine are consistent with the many other indicators (e.g. submission volume, web statistics, reader and community feedback) that these journals are firmly established as top-flight open-access general interest journals in the life and health sciences respectively.

The increases in the impact factors for the discipline-based, community-run PLoS journals also tally with indicators that these journals are going from strength to strength. For example, submissions to PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens have almost doubled over the past year—each journal now routinely receives 80-120 submissions per month of which around 20-25 are published. . . .

Although Thomson is yet to index our two youngest journals, other indexing databases are. The subscription-only Scopus citation index (owned by Elsevier and, incidentally, including many more journals than Thomson’s offering) is already covering PLoS ONE (though so far, only as far back as June 2007). But authors don’t need to rely on subscription-only indexes such as those owned by Thomson and Elsevier, and can instead use the freely-available Google Scholar. Using Google Scholar, for example, one can find that the article by Neal Fahlgren and coauthors, about the cataloguing of an important class of RNA in plants and one of the most highly cited PLoS ONE articles so far has been cited 42 times—strong evidence that good research, even if published in a new journal, will rapidly find its place in the scientific record when it’s made freely available to all.

Citation Statistics Report Released

The International Mathematical Union in cooperation with the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics have released Citation Statistics.

Here's an excerpt from the Executive Summary:

This is a report about the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research. The idea that research assessment must be done using "simple and objective" methods is increasingly prevalent today. The "simple and objective" methods are broadly interpreted as bibliometrics, that is, citation data and the statistics derived from them. There is a belief that citation statistics are inherently more accurate because they substitute simple numbers for complex judgments, and hence overcome the possible subjectivity of peer review. But this belief is unfounded.

  • Relying on statistics is not more accurate when the statistics are improperly used. Indeed, statistics can mislead when they are misapplied or misunderstood. Much of modern bibliometrics seems to rely on experience and intuition about the interpretation and validity of citation statistics.
  • While numbers appear to be "objective", their objectivity can be illusory. The meaning of a citation can be even more subjective than peer review. Because this subjectivity is less obvious for citations, those who use citation data are less likely to understand their limitations.
  • The sole reliance on citation data provides at best an incomplete and often shallow understanding of research—an understanding that is valid only when reinforced by other judgments. Numbers are not inherently superior to sound judgments

Presentations from APSR Workshop about Author Identity Management in Scholarly Communication Systems

The Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories has released presentations from its Identifying Researchers workshop. Both PDF and MP3 files are available.

Here's an excerpt from the workshop's web page:

The issue of managing researcher and author identities is a significant one that has an impact on a range of situations including, but not limited to, scholarly communications. This is an issue not only for researchers who nowadays interact with multiple identity and security systems but also for scholarly communications where the need to accurately identify authors and describe their scholarly resources is increasing in importance.

Version 72, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

Version 72 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship. This selective bibliography presents over 3,250 articles, books, and other digital and printed sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.

This version adds hundreds of links to freely available journal articles from publishers as well as to e-prints of published articles housed in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories. All article references were checked for the availability of such free content.

These links have also been added to a revised version of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2007 Annual Edition. Annual editions of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography are PDF files designed for printing.

The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are in italics):

1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History
2.2 General Works
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals
3.4 General Works
3.5 Library Issues
3.6 Research
4 General Works
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights
5.2 License Agreements
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
6.2 Digital Libraries
6.3 General Works
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation
7 New Publishing Models
8 Publisher Issues
8.1 Digital Rights Management
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:

Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata
Digital Libraries
Electronic Books and Texts
Electronic Serials
General Electronic Publishing
Images
Legal
Preservation
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI
SGML and Related Standards

An article about the bibliography ("Evolution of an Electronic Book: The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography") has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog Update (6/4/08)

The latest update of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (SEPW) is now available, which provides information about new works related to scholarly electronic publishing, such as books, e-prints, journal articles, magazine articles, technical reports, and white papers.

Especially interesting are: "The American Chemical Society and Open Access"; "Evaluating the Impact of the Institutional Repository, or Positioning Innovation between a Rock and a Hard Place"; "Every Library's Nightmare? Digital Rights Management, Use Restrictions, and Licensed Scholarly Digital Resources"; "Institutional Repositories: Faculty Deposits, Marketing, and the Reform of Scholarly Communication"; "Library Budgets, Open Access, and the Future of Scholarly Communication"; "The Need to Formalize Trust Relationships in Digital Repositories"; "Open Access and the Self-Correction of Knowledge" and "PREMIS With a Fresh Coat of Paint: Highlights from the Revision of the PREMIS Data Dictionary for Preservation Metadata."

Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources: An Ithaka Report Released

The Strategic Content Alliance has released Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources: An Ithaka Report.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This paper was commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is the first step in a three-stage process aimed at gaining a more systematic understanding of the mechanisms for pursuing sustainability in not-for-profit projects. It focuses on what we call 'online academic resources' (OARs), which are projects whose primary aim is to make content and scholarly discourse available on the web for research, collaboration, and teaching. This includes scholarly journals and monographs as well as a vast array of new formats that are emerging to disseminate scholarship, such as preprint servers and wikis. It also includes digital collections of primary source materials, datasets, and audio-visual materials that universities, libraries, museums, archives and other cultural and educational institutions are putting online.

This work is being done as part of the planning work for the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA), so it emphasises the development and maintenance of digital content useful in the networked world. In this first stage, we have conducted an initial assessment of the relevant literature focused on not-for-profit sustainability, and have compared the processes pursued in the not-for-profit and education sectors with those pursued by commercial organisations, specifically in the newspaper industry. The primary goal of this initial report is to determine to what extent it would make sense to conduct a more in-depth study of the issues surrounding sustainability.