BBC Radio 4: Publish or be damned

It's still available (Feb 2005).

An important overview/commentary on open access - open achives - self-archiving - institutional repositories was on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, Dec. 21. It's about 40 minutes long and explains the modern academic's choices related to access to new forms of "publishing".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/progs/listenagain.shtml

The programme reportedly will be repeated on Boxing Day (Sunday 26th at 5:00 pm GMT), but it is also available on the web for a week at the above URL - look under P for Publish or be damned.

SPARC just had a conference on Institutional Repositories

http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ir04/ir04.html

Latest in the scholarly publishing debate

The Science & Technology Committee of Parliament (House of Commons, UK) took testimony and issued a major report with detailed recommendations in July, Scientific Publications: Free for All?. The committee basically recommended that the UK legislate to support open access and this raised questions and counter-arguments, particularly from major scientific publishers.

The committee's 14th report dated Nov. 1, 2004 includes the administration's response Appendix 1 along with responses from several other important players.

More details are in STLQ and Open Access News.

Deadline to comment on the NIH public/open access proposal is TOMORROW

November 16 is the deadline for submitting comments on the NIH public/open access proposal.

Submitting comments by email
PublicAccess@nih.gov

Submitting comments by web form
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/public_access/add.htm


Here are some links to helpful analytic material from George Porter at the California Institute of Technology.

Association of American Universities

Association of American Medical Colleges

Council of the National Academy of Sciences

Joint letter from AAP/PSP, American Medical Publishers Association and the DC Principles Coalition

Comments on the Creative Commons in the Chronicle

Alternative License for the Arts Fails to Catch On in Academe
By ANDREA L. FOSTER, Chronicle.com, October 1, 2004
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i06/06a03401.htm
(Registration Required)
Aurarians only - get the name & password through Auraria Library

"Creative commons, an effort to get artists and scholars to give up some
control of their works so that they can be more freely distributed, is
struggling to gain a foothold in academe."

"Academic programs that use Creative Commons licenses include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseWare and Rice University's Connexions, online repositories of college-course material, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, and the Berklee College of Music's Berklee Shares, which offers free music lessons. The Public Library of Science, which publishes free journals online, also licenses material under Creative Commons."

Education & Open Access - post ERIC changes

The effect of the recent changes in ERIC is discussed by the AERA Communication of Research SIG, which maintains a list of open access journals in education. DOAJ also includes journals in other disciplines as well as education.

Will an independent "disciplinary repository" develop in education (as is Cogprints for psychology, or MERLOT for learning objects)?

Will education faculty become regular contributors to institutional repositories that may be searched by OAI harvesters? See the University of Kansas ScholarWorks which was built on open-source software (DSpace) created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

NEW ebooks online - GOOGLE beta test program

Oct 5. Google launched Google Print (beta) and on this page offers an invitation to publishers to let people find their books by searching the full text on the internet. Once found a surfer can browse the book but not print/download and there are convenient links to buy the book. An online Tattered Cover. There are not many books there yet (40,000+ listed, but only a very few actually link to anything yet). To look at the list in (of course) no particular order do a google search on: isbn site:print.google.com.

SELL statement on Elsevier's new pricing model

Will business practices such as these ultimately be self defeating?
Read the statement (posted in September2004) from the Southern European Libraries Link page at http://www.heal-link.gr/sell/statement.htm.

Scholars are adopting open-access practices & being rewarded

Antelman, K. (2004) . Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact? Author eprint, E-LIS, 29 September 2004, abstract available at College and Research Libraries, 65(5):372-382, September 2004.

From the abstract:

This study looks at articles in four disciplines at varying stages of adoption of open access—philosophy, political science, electrical and electronic engineering and mathematics—to see whether they have a greater impact as measured by citations in the ISI Web of Science database when their authors make them freely available on the Internet. The finding is that, across all four disciplines, freely available articles do have a greater research impact.

Paper added 29 September 2004 to the OpCit Projects' bibliography of studies on the effect of open access and downloads on citation impact.

Open Access in Anthropology

"The Anthropology Review Database (ARD) is intended to improve the level of access of anthropologists to anthropological literature by making them more aware of what is being published and helping them to evaluate its relevance to their own interests. Unlike the more traditional print journals, ARD is not constrained by production deadlines and has few running costs. We can keep abreast of the production of new materials, and do so in a much more timely fashion than the traditional media. Envision an almost continous flow of information from publisher to reader, by way of this database."

In March, 2004, ARD signed on to the Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science, an initiative with a "commitment to providing free access and wide dissemination of published research findings".

Look at the list of books to review, and sign up for those you would like to review. ARD retains copyright to all submitted reviews (disclaimer).

ACRL has joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access

Association of College and Research Libraries has joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/), an informal coalition of libraries, patient and health policy advocates, and other stakeholders who support reforms that will make publicly funded biomedical research accessible to the public. ACRL also encourages libraries and institutions to join the Alliance.

Today the vast majority of research funded with public dollars is available only through increasingly costly journal subscriptions (often costing thousands of dollars annually for a single journal), institutional licenses (more than a million dollars annually for many universities), or per article purchases (as much as $30 per article). Alliance supporters believe the current system of subscription-based access to scientific research is economically unsustainable and effectively impedes the dissemination and use of research that has been paid for with public dollars. Libraries and institutions wishing to join the Alliance for Taxpayer Access will find membership information and a list of current members on it's website.

IEEE Bioinformatics

The joint bioinformatics journal from IEEE and ACM is now available from
both societies major digital journal repositories.

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (TCBB)
Fulltext v1+ (2004+)
http://portal.acm.org/browse_dl.cfm?idx=J954
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/servlets/opac?punumber=8857
ISSN: 1545-5963
From: George S. Porter
Sherman Fairchild Library of Engineering & Applied Science
California Institute of Technology
http://library.caltech.edu

Out of this world

The Lunar and Planetary Information Bulletin is free online from 1994. Has some absolutely beautiful photos and interesting links such as the Digital Lunar Orbiter Photographic Atlas of the Moon.

SCIRUS - open access from Elsevier!

SCIRUS is an open access scientic database from Elsevier. It searches across several well known open access (such as BioMed Central, NASA, the US Patent Office) and proprietary databases that Auraria Library subscribes to (including Science Direct) and some that we don't (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics).

NIH (=federally) funded research must be open access

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) strongly supports reforms that will make federally funded biomedical research openly accessible and available on line and at no extra cost to the American public.

ACRL has sent letters to Dr. Elias A. Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and to members of Congress encouraging them to ensure that peer-reviewed articles on taxpayer-funded research at NIH become fully accessible.

In addition, ACRL has joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, an informal coalition of libraries, patient and health policy advocates, and other stakeholders who support reforms that will make publicly funded biomedical research accessible to the public. ACRL also encourages libraries and institutions to join the Alliance.

Today the vast majority of research funded with public dollars is available only through increasingly costly journal subscriptions (often costing thousands of dollars annually for a single journal), institutional licenses (more than a million dollars annually for many universities), or per
article purchases (as much as $30 per article). Alliance supporters
believe the current system of subscription-based access to scientific research is economically unsustainable and effectively impedes the dissemination and use of research that has been paid for with public dollars.

ACRL is a division of the American Library Association, representing 12,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. ACRL is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians. Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic and research libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments.

Project Euclid online peer-reviewed journals for mathematicians

"Project Euclid is a user-centered initiative to create an environment for the effective and affordable distribution of serial literature in mathematics and statistics." from the site
Reviewed by Gerry McKiernan in the Charleston Advisor (self-archived at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~gerrymck/ProjectEuclid.pdf.

Open access accelerates research

The following is a quote from the Open Access brochure from Create Change

Steve Lawrence, a scientist at NEC Research Institute, analyzed nearly 120,000 computer science articles cited in a standard disciplinary bibliography. When he looked at articles with successively higher levels of impact or citations, he found successively higher percentages of open-access articles, and vice versa. He found the strength of this correlation steadily increased over a decade.
source: Steve Lawrence, “Online or Invisible?” Nature, Vol. 411,No. 6837, p. 521, 2001.
http://www.neci.nec.com/~lawrence/papers/online-nature01/