"The Open Access Availability of Library and Information Science Literature"

College & Research Libraries has released a preprint of "The Open Access Availability of Library and Information Science Literature" by Doug Way.

Here's an excerpt:

To examine the open access availability of Library and Information Science (LIS) research, a study was conducted using Google Scholar to search for articles from 20 top LIS journals. The study examined whether Google Scholar was able to find any links to full text, if open access versions of the articles were available and where these articles were being hosted. The results showed the archiving of articles is not a regular practice in the field, articles are not being deposited in institutional or subject repositories at a high rate and the overall the percentage of available open access articles in LIS was similar to the findings in previous studies. In addition, the study found that Google Scholar is an effective tool for finding known LIS articles.

University of Tampere Adopts Open Access Policy

The University of Tampere has adopted an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt:

According to the proposal of the work group the Rector would

  • request researchers working at the University as of 1 January 2011 to deposit copies of their research articles accepted for publication in scientific journals in the institutional repository provided by the University of Tampere and
  • encourage researchers to deposit copies of their publications in the University's repository before the decision comes into force.

Research articles refers in this Decision to single articles to be published in scientific refereed journals, in the University's own publication series, in conference publications or other compilations. The final publisher's version of the article should be deposited in the repository or then the author's last version of the article revised in response to referees' comments (according to the publisher's policy).

The University of Tampere hereby undertakes to provide researchers with the support services required for parallel depositing. The University of Tampere will endeavour to improve publication information systems and to design the process of depositing in a researcher-centred manner.

In addition to the research articles referred to in the Decision, other kinds of publications which may be stored in the open depository provided by the University of Tampere include popular articles, other published written texts, serial publications of University departments, teaching material and, if the publication agreements allow, also monographs.

Copenhagen Business School Adopts Open Access Policy

The Copenhagen Business School has adopted an open access policy.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

If articles are published in publication channels that are not readily accessible to the general public or that require a subscription, copies of the article must be made available through OpenArchive@CBS. If an embargo is required by the publishing house an embargo period of up to one year may be respected.

In cases where the publisher refuses to allow open access depositing and / or further use of the scholarly work and where the publication in this specific channel is deemed necessary the Research Dean and the CBS Library will handle the demands for opting-out. The individual author must send a written notification to the library which proposes to the dean whether he should grant the opt-out possibility. The articles not archived for this reason must be registered in OpenArchive@CBS with bibliographical information, a short résumé and information about publication channel.

In the first 3 year period of implementing this policy the questions of opting-out will be dealt with very carefully. The intention of the open access policy is to promote and disseminate as widely as possible the research form CBS not to prevent publishing.

The Executive Management Team, Heads of Departments and Directors of Centers are expected to actively support and encourage faculty in living up to the principles in this policy.

Peter Sefton on ThesICE (ICE for Theses)

In "ICE for Theses (ThesICE), Where We Are We Up To?," Peter Sefton, Manage of Software Research and Development Laboratory at the Australian Digital Futures Institute, discusses ThesICE (ICE for Theses).

Here's an excerpt:

Assuming that you have the resources to support ICE, which I’ll cover below there are a few reasons why an institution might want to use it for theses specifically.

  • It provides a well tested general purpose way to design templates, with a standard set of style names, so even if none of the other features appeal ICE templates might. . . .

  • You can present theses in HTML as well as PDF. . . .

    It is possible to deposit from ICE into a repository via SWORD APP; we have plugins for ePrints and Fedora only at the moment, not for Dspace which is what they use at ANU.

  • It provides annotation services . . . If you are running ICE either from a desktop or the server version then you can collaborate via paragraph-level annotations, but at the moment we don’t have a way to do the workflow that would be required to allow examiners to do this. . . .

  • You can integrate data into a document via links, making it Linked Data at least, we have proved the concept on the ICE-TheOREM project, but this would need to be worked out discipline by discipline.

PLoS Currents = E-Biomed 2.0?

In "E-Biomed 2.0?," Richard Poynder discusses PLoS Currents in the historical content of the National Institutes of Health's ill fated 1999 E-Biomed proposal.

Here's an excerpt:

Looking back one is bound to ask: Was the E-Biomed proposal really so radical and, as some at the time argued, dangerous? As Varmus explained in his proposal, papers posted on E-Biomed would get there by one of two routes: "(i) Many reports would be submitted to editorial boards. These boards could be identical to those that represent current print journals or they might be composed of members of scientific societies or other groups approved by the E-biomed Governing Board. (ii) Other reports would be posted immediately in the E-biomed repository, prior to any conventional peer review, after passing a simple screen for appropriateness."

Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research's Open Access Policy

The Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, which is funded by the Government of British Columbia, adopted an "Open Access to Research Outputs Policy" on July 6, 2009. (Thanks to Be Openly Accessible or Be Obscure.)

Here's an excerpt:

All MSFHR Award Recipients who receive an award or an award renewal after July 7, 2009 must ensure that all final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from research supported by that award (in whole or in part) are made freely accessible through either the Publisher's website or an online repository within six months of publication.

The Policy applies to any manuscript that is supported from funding in whole or in part from a MSFHR Award. The manuscript must be peer-reviewed and is accepted for publication in a journal on or after July 7, 2009. This includes all graphics and supplemental materials that are associated with the article. The Policy does not apply to non-peer-reviewed materials such as book chapters, reports, monographs, conference proceedings and editorials.

Additionally, Award Recipients are now required to deposit bioinformatics, atomic, and molecular coordinate data, as already required by most journals, into the appropriate public database immediately upon publication of research results.

Authors are encouraged, but are not required, to submit final peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted before July 7, 2009, if they have appropriate copyright permission. MSFHR Award Recipients are responsible for ensuring that any publishing agreements concerning submitted manuscripts fully comply with this Policy.

National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Adopted Open Access Mandate in February

The National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences adopted an open access mandate this February.

Here's an excerpt from the library's home page that describes it:

NSLC functions as the key library nationally for collecting information resources and providing information services in natural sciences, inter-disciplinary fields, and high tech fields, for the researchers and students of CAS and for the researchers around the country. It also conducts services such as information analysis, digital library system development, scientific publication (with its 14 journals), and promotion of sciences. It also operates the Archives of CAS.

NSLC has a staff over 470, building areas more than 80,000m2 [square meters], and a collection about 11.5 million items

Read more about it at "Open Access Mandate in the National Science Library (NSL), Chinese Academy of Science (CAS)" and "Open Access Practice in National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Science."

"Positional Effects on Citation and Readership in arXiv"

Asif-ul Haque and Paul Ginsparg have self-archived "Positional Effects on Citation and Readership in arXiv" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

arXiv.org mediates contact with the literature for entire scholarly communities, both through provision of archival access and through daily email and web announcements of new materials, potentially many screenlengths long. We confirm and extend a surprising correlation between article position in these initial announcements, ordered by submission time, and later citation impact, due primarily to intentional "self-promotion" on the part of authors. A pure "visibility" effect was also present: the subset of articles accidentally in early positions fared measurably better in the long-term citation record than those lower down. Astrophysics articles announced in position 1, for example, overall received a median number of citations 83% higher, while those there accidentally had a 44% visibility boost. For two large subcommunities of theoretical high energy physics, hep-th and hep-ph articles announced in position 1 had median numbers of citations 50% and 100% larger than for positions 5-15, and the subsets there accidentally had visibility boosts of 38% and 71%.

We also consider the positional effects on early readership. The median numbers of early full text downloads for astro-ph, hep-th, and hep-ph articles announced in position 1 were 82%, 61%, and 58% higher than for lower positions, respectively, and those there accidentally had medians visibility-boosted by 53%, 44%, and 46%. Finally, we correlate a variety of readership features with long-term citations, using machine learning methods, thereby extending previous results on the predictive power of early readership in a broader context. We conclude with some observations on impact metrics and dangers of recommender mechanisms.

“Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories”

Anne Gentil-Beccot, Salvatore Mele, and Travis Brooks have self-archived "Citing and Reading Behaviours in High-Energy Physics. How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories" in arXiv.org.

Here's an excerpt:

Contemporary scholarly discourse follows many alternative routes in addition to the three-century old tradition of publication in peer-reviewed journals. The field of High- Energy Physics (HEP) has explored alternative communication strategies for decades, initially via the mass mailing of paper copies of preliminary manuscripts, then via the inception of the first online repositories and digital libraries.

This field is uniquely placed to answer recurrent questions raised by the current trends in scholarly communication: is there an advantage for scientists to make their work available through repositories, often in preliminary form? Is there an advantage to publishing in Open Access journals? Do scientists still read journals or do they use digital repositories?

The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead.

“Open Access Policy for University Of Kansas Scholarship”

The "Open Access Policy for University Of Kansas Scholarship" is now available.

Here's an excerpt :

Each faculty member grants to KU permission to make scholarly articles to which he or she made substantial intellectual contributions publicly available in the KU open access institutional repository, and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. This license in no way interferes with the rights of the KU faculty author as the copyright holder of the work. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while a faculty member of KU. Faculty will be afforded an opt out opportunity. Faculty governance in consultation with the Provost's office will develop the details of the policy which will be submitted for approval by the Faculty Senate.

In "More on the U. Kansas OA Policy,"Gavin Bakerr comments:

A Web version of the text of the University of Kansas' new OA policy confirms what I'd suspected in my last post: that the policy as passed doesn't contain an OA mandate. It commits the university to OA, gives the university permission to provide OA to its faculty's research via the IR, and establishes a task force to work out the details—including the details of how the manuscripts will get into the IR.

University of Kansas Becomes First U.S. Public University to Pass University-Wide Open Access Policy

The University of Kansas has become the first U.S. public university to pass a university-wide open access policy. (Thanks to Open Access News.)

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Under the new faculty-initiated policy approved by Chancellor Robert Hemenway, digital copies of all articles produced by the university’s professors will be housed in KU ScholarWorks, an existing digital repository for scholarly work created by KU faculty and staff in 2005. KU ScholarWorks houses more than 4,400 articles submitted in digital formats that assure their long-term preservation.

Professors will be allowed to seek a waiver but otherwise will be asked to provide electronic forms of all articles to the repository. KU’s Faculty Senate overwhelmingly endorsed the policy at a meeting earlier this year, but additional policy details, including the waiver process, will be developed by a senate task force in the coming academic year, said Faculty Senate President Lisa Wolf-Wendel, professor of education leadership and policy studies. The task force will be led by Ada Emmett, associate librarian for scholarly communications.

"Academic publishing has become increasingly commercial and unavailable to other scholars, or to the general public, in recent years," said A. Townsend Peterson, distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and curator at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at KU. " This new policy offers a voluntary means of opening doors to much of KU's journal-based scholarship. This policy represents a first step towards a new means of scholarly communication, in which the entire global academic community has access to the totality of scholarship. We all can participate in the scholarly exchange that leads to new knowledge creation."

Peterson said open access policies such as KU's will bring greater visibility to the authors' work and will showcase the breadth and depth of the faculty's contributions to academic research and to the university's mission.

"Granting the university the right to deposit a copy of scholarly journal articles in an open digital repository extends the reach of the scholarship, providing the widest possible audience and increasing its possible impact," said Lorraine J. Haricombe, dean of libraries.

Harvard Graduate School of Education Faculty Adopt Open Access Policy

The Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty have adopted an open access policy. (Thanks to Open Access News.)

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) voted overwhelmingly at its last faculty meeting to allow the university to make all faculty members' scholarly articles publicly available online. The resolution makes HGSE the fourth of Harvard's 10 schools to endorse open access to faculty research publications. The Faculties of Arts and Sciences, the Harvard Law School, and the Harvard Kennedy School all passed similar policies in recent months. . . .

As a result of the resolution, HGSE faculty will now provide their scholarly articles to the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication for deposit in an open access digital repository that is currently under development. When the repository launches later this year, the contents will be freely available to the public, unless an author chooses to embargo or block access. The policy makes rights sharing with publishers and self-archiving the default, while allowing faculty to waive Harvard's license on a case-by-case basis, at the author's discretion.

RoMEO Application Programmers’ Interface Version 2.4 Released

SHERPA has released version 2.4 of the RoMEO Application Programmers' Interface (API).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The new version uses a totally new algorithm and is faster than earlier 1.x versions. It also supplies data for the fields that were missing in earlier versions—paid open access, and compliance with research funders' mandates. . . .

If you are using an older version of the prototype, we strongly recommend that you upgrade your application to use V.2.4 as soon as possible, because we will be discontinuing the old versions at the end of 2009. Version 2.4 is largely compatible with earlier versions. The main things that may require attention are: the new URL, handling the extra fields, and handling changes to the parameter and copyright fields.

Japanese Institutional Repositories: IRDB Contents Analysis System Enhanced

The NII Institutional Repositories DataBase Contents Analysis has been enhanced with new features.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

We have made the following improvements:

  1. The default in "Content growth" has been changed to "Full text". . .
  2. "Breakdown of content by resource type (ratio)" has been added. . .
  3. The details of data have been hidden. . .
  4. The analysis of content has been added. . .

“Achieving the Full Potential of Repository Deposit Policies”

Karla Hahn has published "Achieving the Full Potential of Repository Deposit Policies" in the latest issue of Research Library Issues.

Here's an excerpt:

Editor's note: A small group of individuals with expertise on author-rights policies, the campus policy environment, National Institutes of Health (NIH) deposit processes, and digital repository services met in Washington DC on January 9, 2009, under the auspices of ARL's Public Policy and Scholarly Communication programs. The group explored opportunities, desired outcomes, and policy issues involved in developing capabilities for institutionally mediated deposit processes and content transfer between institution-based and funder-based repositories, particularly PubMed Central. Based on that discussion, the group also identified potential strategies that would lead toward creating the needed rights-management environment and repository services. This essay reflects the January 9 discussions.

Also of interest in this issue are: "Author-Rights Language in Library Content Licenses," "Digital Scholarly Communication: A Snapshot of Current Trends," and "Strategies for Supporting New Genres of Scholarship."

University of Washington Faculty Senate Passes Resolution Concerning Scholarly Publishing Alternatives and Authors’ Rights

The University of Washington Faculty Senate has passed a "Resolution Concerning Scholarly Publishing Alternatives and Authors' Rights." (Thanks to Open Access News.)

Here's an excerpt:

BE IT RESOLVED, that

1. the University of Washington prepare for a future in which academic publications are increasingly available through open sources by encouraging faculty members to:

  • assess the pricing practices and authors' rights policies of journals with which they collaborate (as authors, reviewers, and editors) and advocate for improvements therein; and
  • adopt and use an Addendum to Publication Agreement such as that provided by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) in order to retain their rights to use their work in the classroom and in future publications and to archive final accepted manuscripts; and
  • publish scholarly works in moderately priced journals, in journals published by professional societies and associations, or in peer-reviewed "open access" journals; and
  • archive their work in the UW's ResearchWorks or other repositories supported by research institutions, professional societies, or government agencies in order to provide the widest and most affordable access to their scholarship; and

2. UW Libraries is encouraged to

  • provide relevant, current information regarding journal publishers, pricing, and authors' rights to departments and individual faculty members; and
  • maintain and further develop ResearchWorks and related services; and
  • allocate personnel to facilitate the deposit of faculty publications in ResearchWorks, and to obtain publishers' permission to deposit previously published works when possible; and

3. the University of Washington administration is encouraged to:

  • provide resources to the Libraries and to academic units to foster these efforts; and
  • work with departments and colleges to assure that the review process for promotion, tenure and merit takes into consideration these new trends and realities in academic publication.

SWORD Named Most Innovative Project at JISC Repositories and Preservation Conference

UKOLN's SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) Project was named most innovative project at the JISC Repositories and Preservation conference.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

SWORD, whose partners include developers of the DSpace, EPrints, Fedora and IntraLibrary repository software platforms, plus the University of York and CASIS at the University of Wales, has created a mechanism for repositories to deposit and receive deposits via a standard protocol, thus making it possible for different repositories and other applications to move content around more easily. SWORD has received much interest, and a growing community of active developers is building, including Microsoft whose SWORD plug-in can support deposits direct to a repository from within Microsoft Word. FeedForward, a close second for the award, is also SWORD-compliant. Work on SWORD continues within the UKOLN suite of activities.

University of Calgary Academic Council of Library and Cultural Resources Adopts Open Access Mandate

The University of Calgary's Academic Council of Libraries and Cultural Resources has adopted an open access mandate. (Thanks to Open Access News.)

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The Academic Council of Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary has adopted a mandate to deposit their scholarly output in Dspace, the University’s open access scholarly repository. The repository has been in place since March 2003 and currently provides access to a broad range of scholarly output, including a growing collection of full text university theses.

Members of the Council, comprised of archivists, curators, and librarians, have long supported open access through promotions on campus such as Open Access Day, membership in SPARC and Canadian Association of Research Libraries, support for online open access journals published through the University of Calgary Press, and an active program of introducing the repository to faculty and graduate students. Libraries and Cultural Resources also funds the $100,000 Open Access Authors Fund to assist researchers to publish in open access journals.

The text of the mandate is:

"As an active member of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary endorses the Budapest Open Access Initiative, the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing and the Berlin Declaration.

LCR academic staff members believe that the output of our scholarly activities should be as widely disseminated and openly available as possible. Our scholarly output includes but is not limited to journal articles, books and book chapters, presentations if substantial, conference papers and proceedings, and datasets.

Effective April 17, 2009, LCR academic staff commit to

  • Deposit their scholarly output in the University of Calgary’s open access scholarly repository
  • Promote Open Access on campus and assist scholars in making their research openly available
  • Where possible, publish their research in an open-access journal"

Stevan Harnad: “Waking OA’s ‘Slumbering Giant’: The University’s Mandate To Mandate Open Access”

Stevan Harnad has self-archived "Waking OA's 'Slumbering Giant': The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access" in the ECS EPrints Repository.

Here's an excerpt:

Open Access (OA) will not come until universities, the universal research-providers, make it part of their mandate not only to publish their research findings, as now, but also to see to it that the few extra keystrokes it takes to make those published findings OA—by self-archiving them in their institutional repositories, free for all online—are done too. Students and junior faculty—the next generation of researchers and users—are in a position to help convince their universities to go ahead and mandate OA self-archiving, at long last.

Draft Report on the Provision of Usage Data and Manuscript Procedures for Publishers and Repository Managers

The PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) project has released Draft Report on the Provision of Usage Data and Manuscript Procedures for Publishers and Repository Managers.

Here's an excerpt:

This draft report sets out specifications for deposit procedures for both publishers and authors, and the reporting in log files of subsequent usage. Since this report is presented in draft format, it is anticipated that such specification will be adjusted as a result of actual implementation experience. Until the ultimate formulation of specifications and guidelines is achieved, a support mechanism is envisaged to assist both publisher and repository communities to share the experience gained. . .

This report is designed to be preliminary investigation of the issues addressed herein. As such, it forms the basis for a common understanding of the expected outcomes of the PEER project, and it highlights the issues of concern that need to be monitored and evaluated in the final report. Significantly, it indicates workflows, procedures and best practices that will be explored towards the establishment of best practice shared by publisher and library communities to ensure the future of scholarly communication.

Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and the American Physical Society Agree on Open Access Arrangements

The Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication and the American Physical Society have come to an agreement about how to implement Harvard's open access policies for articles published by Harvard authors.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

As a result of the new agreement, APS recognizes Harvard's open access license and will not require copyright agreement addenda or waivers, in exchange for Harvard's clarification of its intended use of the license. In general terms, in exercising its license under the open access policies, Harvard will not use a facsimile of the published version without permission of the publisher, will not charge for the display or distribution of those articles, and will provide an online link to the publisher's definitive version of the articles where possible. The agreement does not restrict fair use of the articles in any way.

According to Professor Bertrand I. Halperin, Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy in the Harvard Physics Department and Chair of the 2008 Publications Oversight Committee of the American Physical Society, "Harvard’s open access legislation was always consistent in spirit with the aims of the APS publication policies, but there were differences in detail that would have required faculty members to request a waiver for every article published in an APS journal. It is a credit both to Harvard and to APS that these differences have been worked out. Since APS journals include, arguably, the most important journals in the field of physics, the fact that faculty will now be able to continue publishing in APS journals without seeking a waiver from Harvard’s policies will strengthen both Harvard and the goal of promoting open access to scholarly publications worldwide."