Recent blog posts on institutional repositories

University Lectures By David(David) ... Research Showcase Dan Hood, Research Showcase Outreach Coordinator, will define "institutional repository" (IR), cover the history of IRs, and highlight notable advances in open access publishing relating to IRs. ... News from the "Real World" - http://cmuptm.blogspot.com/

A few thoughts on the heels of Berlin 6 By Cornelius Librarians tend to see themselves as guardians of physical objects (books) and of digital objects which can be treated like physical objects (papers, dissertations, stuff that can be put into an institutional repository). ... CorpBlawg - http://corpblawg.ynada.com/

Paper — Tune It Up: Creating and Maintaining the Institutional ... Tune It Up: Creating and Maintaining the Institutional Repository Revolution The explosion of recent open access repositories and the future desire for global open access to scholarly communication has prompted the need to have more ... ResourceShelf » Resources - http://www.resourceshelf.com/

Overview of the literature on IRs By admin Nicole Carpenter, Tune It Up: Creating and Maintaining the Institutional Repository Revolution, deposited November 11, 2008. Student paper for a class at the School of Library and Information Science, San Jose State University. ... Edu Blog - http://blog.lider.tc/

Repository interoperability By dempsey In interviews with depositors and after conducting a case study of an Institutional Repository, we find different perceptions of the role of the repository, some seeing it mainly as an administrative tool for collecting and collating ... Lorcan Dempsey's weblog - http://orweblog.oclc.org/

Author guide to open access published June 2008

The Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project of Australia has published an author guide to open access titled Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors.

Excerpt from summary:

This guide aims to provide practical guidance for academic authors interested in making their work more openly accessible to readers and other researchers. The guide provides authors with an overview of the concept of and rationale for open access to research outputs and how they may be involved in its implementation and with what effect. In doing so it considers the central role of copyright law and publishing agreements in structuring an open access framework as well as the increasing involvement of funders and academic institutions. The guide also explains different methods available to authors for making their outputs openly accessible, such as publishing in an open access journal or depositing work into an open access repository. Importantly, the guide addresses how open access goals can affect an author’s relationship with their commercial publisher and provides guidance on how to negotiate a proper allocation of copyright interests between an author and publisher. A Copyright Toolkit is provided to further assist authors in managing their copyright.

Academic Plagiarism - a detection tool for publishers

CrossRef, a non-profit membership association of publishers which includes open access publishers, has developed a search tool, CrossCheck, to check submissions against their members already published content. Launched June 19, 2008 CrossCheck is "already slated" to cover over 20 million journal articles and is in the process of enrolling CrossRef members to include their content in the CrossCheck database.

"CrossCheck powered by iThenticate" from CrossRef has been created to verify the
originality of submitted manuscripts. [A plagiarism dectection tool:] CrossCheck is two products, a database of scholarly publications and a web-based tool to check an authored work against that database. The web-based tool can be used in the editorial process to identify matching text but it can not, on its own, identify plagiarism. A human has to look at the matching text and use their best judgment to identify if plagiarism has occurred or not.

Harvard Law Faculty join their colleagues voting for "open access" to scholarly articles

As their Arts & Sciences colleagues did in February 2008 the faculty of Harvard Law School voted unanimously to mandate that their peer reviewed articles be deposited in a digital institutional repository and be open access.

From the May 7, 2008 announcement:

In a move that will disseminate faculty research and scholarship as broadly
as possible, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted last week to make
each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS
the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy.

"The Harvard Law School faculty produces some of the most exciting,
groundbreaking scholarship in the world," said Dean Elena Kagan '86. "Our
decision to embrace 'open access' means that people everywhere can benefit from
the ideas generated here at the Law School."

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members
available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and
available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally
distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere
can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not
used for profit. "

This exciting development is something in which the whole Harvard Law
School community can take great pride," said John Palfrey '01, executive
director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and newly appointed
vice dean of library and information resources. "The acceptance of open access
ensures that our faculty's world-class scholarship is accessible today and into
the future. I look forward to the work of implementing this commitment."The vote
came after an open access proposal was made by a university-wide committee aimed
at encouraging wider dissemination of scholarly work. Earlier this semester, the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to adopt a policy similar to the Law School’s
new initiative.

Periodicals Price Survey 2008: Embracing Openness

An article in Library Journal, 4/15/2008 by Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born reports:

Global initiatives and startling successes hint at the profound implications of open access on journal publishing.

Complete with 2004-2008 data and tracking the change this article discusses some of the effects and potential effects of the open access movement.

University College Dublin on the Institutional Repository project

UCD Today from the University College Dublin, includes publicity on the Institutional Repository project. See page 5.

NIH Requirements for Public Access to Journal Articles

The NIH open access requirement has been broadly advertised. Here is the NIH's FAQ on the topic and below is Springer's announcement of it. This is a description aimed at the authors/faculty and includes instructions for complying with the requirement.

Dear SpringerAlert Subscriber,

Do you receive research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH)? If so, as from April 2008 you will be required to deposit the final manuscript of your journal articles in PubMed Central and ensure free availability (open access) within 12 months of publication.

You will be pleased to hear that Springer journals are fully geared up for that requirement. All you have to do is opt for open access publication of your article through Springer's Open Choice - you will be given that option as soon as your article has been accepted for publication after peer review - and we will handle the administrative process.

Springer will take care of the immediate deposit in PubMed Central and what's more, not of the manuscript, but of the final, published article. And it will also be available with open access right away, and not just after 12 months.

The cost of Open Choice is - as stated on the NIH web site - a permissible cost in your grant so please take care to budget for it.

Publishing with open access in Springer journals completely takes away any worries you might have about complying with the new NIH rules for grantees when it comes to publishing your research results. We look forward to the submission of your next paper.

Best regards,
Your Springer Open Choice Team

U.S. Govt. Plans to Close Internet site Consolidating Economic Indicator Reports

U.S. Govt. Plans to Close Internet site Consolidating Economic Indicator Reports

The website was awarded a best of web by Forbes magazine.
The web site can, for now, can still be located at: http://www.economicIndicators.gov/

If you wish to continue to receive this data, you will need to acquire a temporary subscription to STAT-USA.

This is the Disclaimer from the http://www.economicIndicators.gov web site

Due to budgetary constraints, the Economic Indicators service (http://www.economicindicators.gov) will be discontinued effective March 1, 2008.

Economic Indicators.gov is brought to you by the Economics and Statistics Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce. Our mission is to provide timely access to the daily releases of key economic indicators from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the U.S. Census Bureau.

You may link to the most recent release by clicking on the report name in the table below. You may also subscribe to our *free Subscription Service to have these files emailed or faxed directly to you as soon as they are released.

comments on Harvard's OA / IR policy

A post by Noah Gray in the Nature Neuroscience blog on the Harvard policy critiques the all encompassing and vague nature of the policy. A comment from Steven Harnard of the American Scientist Open Access Forum on Gray's post proposes some alternate wording to optimize the effectiveness of the declaration.

Harvard Faculty Unanimously Agree To Establish Open Access Repository

An article in the February 13, 2008 Library Journal announces that

Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) yesterday unanimously approved a motion that would compel faculty to deposit their research in an open access (OA) repository managed by the library to be made freely available to anyone via the Internet.