Issues in Scholarly Communication

Measuring scholarly impact

2011-01-26T07:44:00.004-07:00

An article, New Measures of Scholarly Impact, in the December 17, 2010 Inside Higher Ed describes MESUR, Eigenfactor and the role of real time online use figures in measuring the impact of a scholarly article.

Struggles of University presses

2010-11-23T08:45:00.002-07:00

A special issue, v. 13, no. 2, of the Journal of Electronic Publishing focuses on Reimagining the University Press. And commentaries from the Chronicle of Higher Education,
Hot Type: Despite Broader Audiences, University Presses May Have to Scramble for Support and Inside Higher Ed, New Models for University Presses, discuss the issues.

Textbook pricing and copyright

2010-11-23T07:31:00.004-07:00

An article from Inside Higher Ed, Challenge on Textbook Pricing, November 22, 2010 highlights the markets assault on the high cost of textbooks. And the earlier July 8, 2010 filing of an amici curia brief in the mentioned case, Costco Wholesale Corporation v. Omega, by the Library Copyright Alliance highlights the activity needed by library associations to continue to be able to provide the services that are traditional in the U.S.

Open Access Week

2010-10-06T13:30:00.002-06:00

Open Access Week (October 18 – 24, 2010) is an online coordination of activities that highlight the collaboration and collective action that have heightened the momentum behind Open Access. Lots of exciting things are happening.

The following is from the "Welcome" to the Open Access Week site:

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward.

ProQuest Drops Dissertation E-Submission Fees

2010-09-03T12:25:00.004-06:00

From Library Journal By Josh Hadro, Sep. 2, 2010

In a move with potentially broad implications for the world of Electronic Dissertations and Theses (ETD), ProQuest has dropped the fees for those using its ETD Administrator program and interface.

Copyright Symposium for Faculty

2010-08-03T16:42:00.004-06:00

How does copyright impact our research and teaching?

September 10, 2010 (Friday)
9 a.m. – 3 p.m. (lunch included)

Auraria Library Enhanced Learning Center

Speaker: Kevin Smith, J.D., Scholarly Communications Officer, Perkins Library, Duke University

Register for this lively symposium on copyright issues online or call 303-556-3526

Topics include:

Applications in teaching
Protecting your content
Copyright and media
Evolving landscape of copyright

Presented by:
Auraria Library
Teaching/Learning Center CCD
Center for Faculty Development UCD
Center for Faculty Development MSCD
Teaching with Primary Sources – Colorado
Health Sciences Library
CU Online

Video clips, teaching and rules changes issued Monday, 8/2/10, by the U.S. Copyright Office

2010-08-03T16:25:00.004-06:00

Video clips, teaching and rule changes issued Monday, 8/2/10, by the U.S. Copyright Office

"Champions of fair use say new copyright exemption is a victory for teaching and learning."
Inside Higher Ed

"Copyright Ruling + Online Video Platforms = Active Learning"
Inside Higher Ed

"Information on the New DMCA Exemptions"
Chronicle of Higher Education

Ireland's National Portal for Open Access to Research Goes Live

2010-06-10T09:51:00.002-06:00

Shortened version of an annoucement received on June 9, 2010 from Paul Sheehan, Director of Library Services, Dublin City University

RIAN - www.rian.ie - will act as a single point of access to national research output, and contains content harvested from the institutional repositories of the seven Irish Universities and Dublin Institute of Technology. RIAN will significantly increase the visibility and impact of Irish research and will expand to harvest content from other Irish Open Access providers as the service develops.

A national network of institutional repositories will increase the exposure of national research output, and allows services, such as enhanced searching, and statistics generation, to be developed using economies of scale. RIAN will demonstrate the impact of research to potential funders, who recognise the value of wider research dissemination.

The Irish Government has identified growth in research as critical to its future as a knowledge economy. Raising the research profile is a key strategy in the Universities’ strategic plans, and the ability to showcase research output and identify institutional research strengths is extremely important in attracting new funding and high quality staff.

The development of RIAN was managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians' Group and is supported by the Association. This three year project was equally funded by the Universities and the Irish Government’s Strategic Innovation Fund which is administered by the Higher Education Authority.

Benefits of RIAN to Irish authors:
* Broadens worldwide access to material
* Increases citations for research material
* Makes easier access to material via search engines such as Google, Google Scholar and Yahoo
* Raises profile of Irish researchers internationally

Benefits to Irish institutions include:
* Provides a showcase of the institution’s research output
* Raises the profile of the institution’s research internationally through broader access and citations
* Increases potential for collaboration and synthesis between Irish and international researchers

For more information contact:
Paul Sheehan, Director of Library Services, Dublin City University
Telephone: (+353 1) 7005211, Email: paul.sheehan@dcu.ie

Ning closing down free networks

2010-04-19T09:15:00.004-06:00

Some faculty use Ning in their teaching so it is with interest that I note a PC World article Friday, April 16, 2010 by Harry McCracken which reports that Ning is now asking customers to switch to a paid plan or leave the network.

There are more articles on the topic posted on Net-gold including a list of other "still free" options.

FRPAA

2010-04-16T12:42:00.013-06:00

The Federal Research Public Access Act - FRPAA - was introduced in the House of Representatives on April 15th.

"...the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2010 (FRPAA) has been introduced ... in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) and a bi-partisan host of co-sponsors. The proposed bill would build on the success of the first U.S. mandate for public access to the published results of publicly funded research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and require federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal" [press release from SPARC].

For more information see: "Call to action: Tell Congress you support the Federal Research Public Access Act," published Apr 16, 2010, Alliance for Taxpayer Access . http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/issues/frpaa/frpaa_action/10-0416.shtml .

Lilian Hoffecker

Institutional policies and researchers' views on open access

2010-03-30T08:11:00.004-06:00

A journal article Open access to research outputs--Institutional policies and researchers' views by Claire Creaser examines the results of two 2008 surveys investigating the effects and impact of open access on researchers. From the abstract:

... Researchers were largely unaware of their institutions' policies with regard to open access, or whether they had an institutional repository. ... The surveys found that any researchers maintained a suspicion of open access publications, both as authors and as users of scholarly material, together with a degree of ignorance about open access and the role of institutional repositories. ...

If you have dificulty accessing the article Auraria Library patrons may log in to read the fulltext.

Understanding of academic integrity effective against plagiarism

2010-01-26T14:56:00.002-07:00

A recent National Bureau of Econimic Research working paper titled Rational Ignorance in Education: A field experiment in student plagiarism by Thomas S Dee, Swarthmore College and Brian A. Jacob, University of Michigan found that required completion of an anti-plagiarism tutorial prior to a writing assignment substantially reduced the likelihood of plagiarism, particularly among students with lower SAT scores.

Amazon, e-books and publishers

2010-01-06T10:46:00.002-07:00

An article from Business Week on Amazon, Kindle and publishers:

www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_02/b4162050103172.htm

What about the academic press?

Developing scholarly encyclopedias

2009-12-14T07:53:00.004-07:00

Open Access Encyclopedias is the title of an article by Steve Kolowich in Inside Higher Ed about efforts to create free online scholarly alternatives to Wikipedia.

He discusses the realities of creating such sites and refers to resources such as Scholarpedia, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Encyclopedia Virginia, the Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture, the New Georgia Encyclopedia, and Citizendium.

Google Books Settlement amended

2009-11-16T12:35:00.008-07:00

The following resources are from the Center for Intellectual Property's Digital Copyright Listerv; subscriptions available at http://www.umuc.edu/distance/odell/cip/listserv.shtml#digital.

On Friday, November 13, 2009, the parties to the Google Books Settlement filed an amended agreement with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Following are a variety of resources about the latest developments on the topic: Press Coverage; Legal; Overviews.

PRESS COVERAGE

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Google relents with revised digital books settlement.
Washington Post, November 15, 2009.

"In a move to allay its critics and the Justice Department, Google filed in federal court a revised legal settlement that would allow it to distribute millions of digital books online."

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Google backtracks on putting world's books online.
Sunday Times Online, November 15, 2009.

"Google has slashed in half its controversial plans to become the world's biggest online library in a legal move to appease critics, including China, the US Justice Department, authors and publishers."

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Google makes concessions on digital book deal.
Associated Press, November 14, 2009.

"Internet search leader Google will ease its control over millions of copyright-protected books earmarked for its digital library if a court approves a revised lawsuit settlement that addresses objections of antitrust regulators."

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Google, Authors try to answer book deal concerns.
Reuters, November 14, 2009.

"Google and the Authors Guild filed a new version of a deal to create a massive online library on Friday in hopes of answering antitrust and copyright concerns in the United States and overseas."

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Google narrows scope of book-scanning project.
Telegraph, November 14, 2009.

"Google and a group of publishers and authors have agreed to scale back the scope of their proposed digital books library, which could resolve a legal dispute and clear the way for millions of books to be sold online."

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Google submits revised digital book settlement.
Agence France Press, November 14, 2009.

"Google and US authors and publishers submitted a revised settlement to a US judge Friday seeking approval of an agreement that would clear the way for millions of books to be sold online."

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Terms of Digital Book Deal With Google Revised.
New York Times, November 13, 2009.

"Google and groups representing book publishers and authors filed a modified version of their controversial books settlement with a federal court on Friday. The changes would pave the way for other companies to license Google's vast digital collection of copyrighted out-of-print books, and might resolve its conflicts with European governments."

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Revised Google Settlement Offers Minor Changes on Antitrust Issue, No Response on Library Pricing.
Library Journal, November 14, 2009.

"Shortly before midnight last night, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers released a revised version of the Google Book Search Settlement, with some clear concessions to foreign rightsholders (as noted by Publishers Weekly), a vague-and, to critics, fatally inadequate-concession on orphan works. There was also no response to library concerns about pricing of the potentially monopolistic institutional database-an issue that Google representatives say can't be addressed in the settlement."

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Google Books settlement sets geographic, business limits.
CNET News, November 13, 2009.

"A revised settlement filed late Friday over Google's right to scan digital books places additional limits on the company. The settlement allows out-of-print books from only English-speaking countries to be scanned, restricts the ways that Google can make money from scanning and digitizing out-of-print books, and requires a registry to seek out copyright holders who do not come forward."

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Google Settlement Filed.
Publishers Weekly, November 13, 2009.

"After two delays, attorneys for the AAP, Authors Guild and Google filed an amended settlement agreement late Friday night with Judge Denny Chin in an effort to end litigation brought by the publishers and authors against Google over its library scanning program. As expected by many, the biggest change in the agreement deals with international works. The agreement is now limited to books that were either registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia or Canada. The parties said that after feedback from foreign rightsholders they decided to narrow the class to include only countries "which share a common legal heritage and similar book industry practices" with the U.S."

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Blog: Google, Content Groups Sign New Google Books Deal.
PC Magazine, November 13, 2009.

"Google and a number of agencies representing book publishers agreed to a revised settlement covering Google Books on Friday, limiting the international scope of the agreement and providing a sort of trust fund for "orphaned" works."

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Google, Authors Limit Reach of Online Book Settlement.
Bloomberg, November 14, 2009.

"Google Inc. and groups of authors and publishers agreed to scale back the international reach of a settlement designed to create a digital book library."

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Google, Plaintiffs Submit Revised Book Search Settlement.
PC World, November 14, 2009.

"Right up against a deadline to submit a revised settlement agreement to a judge overseeing a lawsuit filed against Google by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, the parties filed their second take near midnight on Friday."

LEGAL:

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Blog: Google Book Search Settlement Revised: No Reader Privacy Added.
Posted by Cindy Cohn on DeepLinks (Electronic Frontier Foundation), November 14, 2009.

"Late Friday night the parties to the Google Book Search class action submitted a revised settlement agreement to the federal court in New York that is hearing the case. Unfortunately, the parties did not add any reader privacy protections. The only nominal change was that they formally confirmed a position they had long taken privately that information will not be freely shared between Google and the Registry."

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Blog: Amended Google Book Settlement: Doesn't Deal with Privacy Problems.
ACLU of Northern California, November 14, 2009.

"The Amended Google Book Search Settlement, filed with the Court on Friday, November 13, does not resolve the privacy concerns. The ACLU, along with EFF and the Samuelson Clinic, have been working to ensure that Google Book Search does not become a one-stop shop for government surveillance into the reading habits of millions of Americans and pushing for robust privacy and free speech safeguards to be included in the Settlement provisions."

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Blog: Is the Google Books Settlement Worth the Wait?
Open Book Alliance, November 13, 2009.

"Today, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers released their revised book settlement proposal in an attempt to fix the deeply flawed legal agreement. Open Book Alliance co-chair Peter Brantley said, 'Our initial review of the new proposal tells us that Google and its partners are performing a sleight of hand; fundamentally, this settlement remains a set-piece designed to serve the private commercial interests of Google and its partners. None of the proposed changes appear to address the fundamental flaws illuminated by the Department of Justice and other critics that impact public interest.
By performing surgical nip and tuck, Google, the AAP, and the AG are attempting to distract people from their continued efforts to establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress's role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process.'"

(Members of the OBA include: Amazon; American Society of Journalists and Authors; Council of Literary Magazines and Presses; Internet Archive; Microsoft; National Writers Union; New York Library Association; Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America; Small Press Distribution; Special Libraries Association; and Yahoo)

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Blog: Revised Google Book Settlement Filed & Live Blogging The Press Call.
Posted by Danny Sullivan on Search Engine Land, November 14, 2009.

"As expected, a revised Google Book Settlement has been filed today - about as late as possible. The agreement narrows the scope to the US, UK, Canada and Australia. It alters how revenue generated by "unclaimed works" will be handled. It formally grants retailers who license out-of-print books covered by the settlement - including Google competitors - a 37% share of sales. It also clarifies how the book pricing algorithm will work."

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Blog: GBS: Midnight Madness.
Posted by James Grimmelmann on the Laboratorium, November 14, 2009.

"The amended settlement dropped in the eleventh hour. Here's a redline version and here's the related memorandum with the procedural details.
The best news coverage is the New York Times story; the best blog coverage is Danny Sullivan's. I've just completed a first pass through the amended settlement, tweeting all the way."

OVERVIEWS:

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Overview of the Revised Google Books Settlement Agreement. Association of American Publishers (AAP).

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FAQ Revised Google Books Settlement Agreement. Association of American Publishers (AAP).

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Amended Settlement Filed in Authors Guild v. Google. Authors Guild.

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Modifications to the Google Books Settlement.
Google Public Policy Blog, November 13, 2009.

"Last year, we joined with a broad class of authors and publishers to announce a settlement agreement that would make millions of out-of-print books available to students and readers in every part of the U.S., while forging new opportunities for rightsholders to sell access to their books. Tonight we submitted an amended version of the Google Books settlement agreement to the court."

Utah State University Press to become open access

2009-11-04T08:18:00.003-07:00

A statement from Utah State University Press and Merrill-Cazier Library on Monday November 2, 2009 announced that USU will join Rice University and the University of Michigan where their university press has merged with the library and developed an online, open access model of publication.

From the announcement:

USU Press will adopt a new publication model, with open access as a central component and will move toward increased digital delivery of books. The library’s position will be enhanced as well, as academic libraries nationally take on a stronger role in the evolution of scholarly publishing.

“This move directly serves the needs of the university,” Clement said. “Open access allows us to go back to where university presses began — to publish work by all faculty in every discipline.”

At the same time, USU Press remains a refereed scholarly press, with the standards of rigorous peer review appropriate to a university publisher.

In an article by Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Education today he notes that:

For the last nine months, the survival of the Utah State University Press has been in doubt, with fears that deep cuts being made to public higher education in Utah would end up killing off the publishing outlet.
This week comes news that the press will survive -- in part by embracing a new model of organization (becoming part of the university library) and a new business model (embracing open access, in which most publications would be available online and free).

Computers and Composition Digital Press is a USU Press imprint.

Open Access Week, October 19 - 23, 2009

2009-10-12T15:39:00.002-06:00

October 19-23, 2009 is the first international Open Access Week.

Open Access Week is intended to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access to research within the international higher education community and the general public.

Last years Open Access Day organizers SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition), the PLoS (The Public Library of Science), and Students for FreeCulture are joined for 2009 by OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook); Open Access Directory (OAD); and eIFL.net (Electronic Information for Libraries).

Activities around the world are listed at Open Access Week.
Check out the week of talks at the University of Puerto Rico, the pre-week activities in Ireland, the PLoS competition for the best medical paper and the spirit of open access haiku contest from SHERPA.

Income models for supporting open access

2009-10-08T16:43:00.005-06:00

A new guide "Income Models for Supporting Open Access" has been published by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc for publishers who want to support open access. From the guide:

Developing a sound business model is a critical concern of publishers considering open-access distribution. Selecting the model appropriate to a particular journal will depend not only on the expense hurdle that must be cleared, but also on the publisher’s mission objectives, size, business management resources, risk tolerance, tax status, and institutional or corporate affiliation.

This Web site and accompanying guide provide an overview of income models currently being used to support the open-access distribution of peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals. These resources will be a useful tool both for publishers exploring new potential sources of income and for libraries weighing where to direct meager library funds.

Defining noncommercial use study

2009-09-25T08:44:00.001-06:00

The report and raw data from a year long study, Defining Noncommercial, on how people view noncommercial use was released Monday, September 14, 2009 by Creative Commons. The study was conducted by Netpop Research.

An excerpt from the press release.

Creative Commons noncommercial licenses preclude use of a work “in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.” The majority of respondents (87% of creators, 85% of users) replied that the definition was “essentially the same as” (43% of creators, 42% of users) or “different from but still compatible with” (44% of creators, 43% of users) theirs. Only 7% of creators and 11% of users replied that the term was “different from and incompatible with” their definition.

Study noted by the 'In the News' email newsletter on digital copyright from the Center For Intellectual Property at the University of Maryland University College.

Study was discussed in Plagiarism Today blog from Johnathan Bailey.

Compact for open access publishing equity

2009-09-15T08:33:00.005-06:00

Scott Jaschik reports in the September 15, 2009 edition of Inside Higher Ed that five major research universities, MIT, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, pledge to set up system of payments for work their professors publish in free, online journals -- aiming to shift economic model of scholarly communication, the "Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity".

Specifically, the universities have each committed to "the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in open access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds."

Here's the same story from the Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus blog posted by Ben Terris on September 14, 2009.

Speak Now, or Forever Hold Your Copyrights!

2009-09-04T08:08:00.003-06:00

Speak Now, or Forever Hold Your Copyrights! is an article by Steve Kolowich on the next deadline of the Google book settlement from Inside Higher Ed, September 4, 2009.

[Judge Denny] Chin, the federal judge who is presiding over Author’s Guild et al. v. Google, Inc., has been inundated with letters and amicus briefs in advance of the September 7 deadline for participants in the class action to opt out of a settlement over the company's controversial Google Books project that has received preliminary approval from the court. A handful of the documents have come from professors, university libraries, and advocacy groups.

Auraria Library students and faculty search Lexis Nexis Federal and State case law or Lexis Nexis Law reviews using these links.

"Google's Book Search: a disaster for scholars"

2009-09-02T11:37:00.000-06:00

This review from the Chronicle Review on August 31, 2009 by Geoffrey Nunberg brings to light some of the problems of re-publishing works without metadata, or to be exact, sloppy and incorrect metadata. It also points out the problem with depending solely on automated processes.

While many web users focus on the idea more than on when an idea was published or it's author, scholars need to know the truth. There is a useful comment on this review by John Wilkin, Executive Director of the Hathi Trust.

The review is at http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/. Auraria Library users who are off campus will need the information at this link to see the article.

JSTOR & Univ. of California Press Collaboration

2009-08-13T08:43:00.005-06:00

This is something to watch for those working within the scholarly communication arena. It is the beginnings of a new economic model. Here is a blog post from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired Campus.

From a press release dated August 13, 2009:

A new collaboration emerges to improve access to scholarship for faculty, students, and librarians. University of California Press and JSTOR today announced a new effort to invest in a shared online platform and outreach services that promise to create a more seamless, rich online work environment for faculty and students, ease the burden on librarians of negotiating separate license agreements with a multitude of publishers and independent titles, and promote a more cost-effective publishing environment.

University of California Press, the not-for-profit publishing arm of the University of California, and JSTOR, the preservation archive and research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, will work in partnership —and encourage others to join them—to make current and historical scholarly content available on a single, integrated platform, to provide a single point of purchase and access for librarians and end users around the world, and to ensure its long-term preservation.

Beginning in 2011, current content from all University of California Press published journals, including those from scholarly societies, will be hosted on a re-designed JSTOR platform. Faculty and students around the world will be able to access all licensed content on JSTOR – current issues, back issues, and a growing set of primary source materials from libraries – easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the Press’s current journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction. The journals will also continue to be preserved in Portico, the digital preservation service that is also part of ITHAKA.

...

For more information about the Current Scholarship Program, as this program will be known, see http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/programs/currentScholarship.jsp.

Open Humanities Press creates five new open-access monograph series

2009-08-11T07:14:00.004-06:00

New Open-Access Monograph Series Is Announced

By Jennifer Howard
Wired Campus, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 07, 2009

Open Humanities Press (OHP) is joining the University of Michigan Library's Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO) to create five new open-access monograph series with a focus on critical and cultural theory. "All of the books will be freely available in full-text, digital editions and as reasonably priced paperbacks," according to a statement released today, and they will be subject to "the highest standards of editorial vetting and peer review." .. more

Scholarly Communication Program Speaker Series Videos

2009-05-19T15:08:00.002-06:00

Scholarly Communication Program Speaker Series Videos Now Available Online

Columbia University Libraries Scholarly Communication Program, Research without borders, held a speaker series on scholarly communication issues in 2008-09 and recently released all the videos from those events. See http://tinyurl.com/c4jrdc

Scholarly Communication video

2009-04-22T11:02:00.003-06:00

From a talented group of librarians at UT Arlington here is a short video on scholarly communication. Their recommendation to speak with a subject librarian for further information applies to Auraria Library faculty and researchers as well. Make an appointment with a subject specialist for in depth assistance.

Study on rank of authors publishing in open access journals

2009-04-07T07:24:00.004-06:00

Academic Rank of Authors Publishing in Open Access Journals by Elaine Nowick
Published in Agricultural Information Worldwide (2008) v. 1, no. 2, pp. 45-51.

Abstract: When deciding where to publish their research results, faculty take into consideration factors such as the prestige and readership of journals. The weight a journal article will carry is particularly a concern for pre-tenured faculty members. Previous research has indicated that some faculty members may have some concerns about publishing in Open Access journals because of a perceived lack of rigor and reputation of Open Access titles. In this study, the academic rank of authors publishing in Open Access and commercial scholarly journals was compared. Most authors in both Open Access and For-fee journals were full professors. There was no indication that pre-tenured faculty avoided Open Access titles. In fact, there was a slight but significant trend for pre-tenured faculty to publish in Open Access journals.

Note: Article available in the Digital Commons. See link on authors page [http://www.unl.edu/libr/liaison/facultysites/nowickElaine/]

Google, digitization & books

2009-01-29T08:33:00.003-07:00

Of interest on Google, digitization & books

From the New York Review of Books:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22281

Other resources:

"Impact of the Google Book Settlement on Libraries" by OCLC
http://www.oclc.org/programs/publications/reports/2009-01.pdf

A set of links "Google Book Settlement Link Dump Awesomeness"
http://tinyurl.com/9zph4v

A blog Google Book Search Settlement: Reviewing the Notice of Settlement
http://dltj.org/article/gbs-settlement-2/

The full text of the settlement
www.googlebooksettlement.com/agreement.html

Recent blog posts on institutional repositories

2008-11-18T08:00:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-07T07:26:00.005-06:00

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

2008-06-27T07:21:00.003-06:00

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

2008-05-12T15:13:00.003-06:00

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

2008-04-15T10:24:00.003-06:00

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

2008-03-10T09:01:00.001-06:00

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

2008-02-20T09:39:00.005-07:00

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

2008-02-18T10:20:00.002-07:00

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

2008-02-18T08:21:00.003-07:00

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

2008-02-13T12:07:00.003-07:00

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.

Univ College Dublin Library & Enovation Solutions team up

2007-12-11T07:45:00.000-07:00

Emmet Ryan of ENN reports that the UCD Library and Enovation Solutions have completed the development of an open access digital repository to collect, preserve and disseminate the full-text research outputs of researchers at University College Dublin for launch later in 2008.

Open Access Forum from the UCDHSC Libraries & Colorado Health Informatics Collaboration

2007-10-18T16:27:00.000-06:00

Open Access Forum

Examine key issues surrounding Open Access, including its impact on faculty scholarship and publishing.

Learn more about:

Legislative issues and current debates surrounding access to federally funded research;
How researchers can retain their intellectual property and authorship rights;
Various publishing models for distributing science research and data;
Issues surrounding access to scientific discovery among the globally poor.

Schedule:

Presentation by
Larry Peiperl, MD, Senior Editor, PLoS Medicine titled
Open Access: Three Kinds of Impact
(Impact Factor, Societal Impact, Clinical Impact)

Reactor Panel

Robert Dellavalle, MD, PhD, MSPH - Associate Professor, Department of Dermatology, UCDHSC School of Medicine
Lawrence Hunter, PhD - Associate Professor, Department of Pharmacology, UCDHSC School of Medicine
Lisa Schilling, MD - Associate Professor, Department of Medicine, UCDHSC School of Medicine

Q&A Session follows

Join us on
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
11:30AM – 1:30 PM
RC1 West Auditorium
Anschutz Medical Campus

Registration is not required
Pizza and sodas provided (First come, first served)

Sponsors:
UCDHSC Libraries - Health Science Library and Auraria Library
Colorado Health Informatics Collaboration

Questions? Contact Kevin.Cullen@uchsc.edu or Catherine.Reiter@uchsc.edu

Open Access resources are available

2007-09-24T08:51:00.000-06:00

Open-access literature is digital literature, both peer-reviewed and popular, that is available on the web, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Committing to open access requires dispensing with the financial, technical and legal barriers that are designed to limit access to scientific research articles to paying customers.

The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for
copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the
integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and
cited. - from the Pakistan National Digital Library

Here are some resources for educators and researchers made possible by open access principles.

National Science Digital Library
Library of Congress National Digital Library Program

More websites or directories listing open access journals
Auraria Library Open Access info
BioMed Central
Library Publishing Media
Directory of Open Access Journals
Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek Universitaet Regensburg
FFT: Free Full Text
PhysNet
Public Library of Science
PubMed Central

First Close Look at Colleges' Digital Pirates

2007-09-11T07:53:00.000-06:00

The First Close Look at Colleges' Digital Pirates by BROCK READ, Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 September 2007 http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i02/02a00102.htm (Aurarians use this link to find the password you'll need)

"Ms. Elzy and Mr. Arbogast wanted financial support from the industry, and they got it. The Digital Citizen Project, as Illinois State calls it, has benefited from considerable entertainment-industry financing, including an influx of several hundred thousand dollars that came shortly after the meeting. . Later, Illinois State secured promises that the information the university collects will not be used to prosecute students."

SPARC letter to members on the PRISM anti-open access effort

2007-09-11T07:51:00.000-06:00

Press Release: SPARC letter to members on the PRISM anti-open access effort
Date: September 6, 2007
To: SPARC Members
From: Heather Joseph, SPARC Executive Director
Re: PRISM anti-open access effort
http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/07-0907prism.html

"I'm writing to bring to your attention the recent launch of an anti-open access lobbying effort. The initiative, called "PRISM - the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine" ( http://www.prismcoalition.org), was launched with development support from the Association of American Publishers and specifically targets efforts to expand public access to federally funded research results - including the National Institute of Health's Public Access Policy."

Publisher author agreements

2007-08-08T15:16:00.000-06:00

Open access: An examination (as noted on the blog DigitalKoans) of the publisher author agreements statistics shows 72% permit some form of self-archiving.

According to today's SHERPA/RoMEO statistics, 36% of the 308 included publishers are green ("can archive pre-print and post-print"), 24% are blue ("can archive post-print (i.e. final draft post-refereeing)"), 11% are yellow ("can archive pre-print (i.e. pre-refereeing)"), and 28% are white ("archiving not formally supported").
...
Much progress has been made in the area of author agreements, but authors must still pay careful attention to the details of agreements, which vary considerably by publisher. The SHERPA/RoMEO—Publisher Copyright Policies & Self-Archiving database is a very useful and important tool and users should actively participate in refining this database; however, authors are well advised not to stop at the summary information presented there and to go to the agreement itself (if available). It would be very helpful if a set of standard author agreements that covered the major variations could be developed and put into use by the publishing industry.

Bill requiring open access for NIH-funded research moving through Congress

2007-08-02T11:28:00.000-06:00

From the August issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter: This issue takes a close look at a bill moving through Congress that would require open access for NIH-funded research. The round-up section briefly notes 79 OA developments from July.
Posted by Peter Suber at 8/02/2007 10:17:00 AM. (from Open Access News)

Momentum for open access

2007-07-24T12:45:00.000-06:00

Article by David Solomon from Inside Higher Ed, July 24, 2007

Last year, a proposal in Congress to require all federally supported research to be placed online, freely available, attracted considerable attention and debate — and ultimately stalled.
This year, a measure that is narrower — it would apply only to research supported by the National Institutes of Health — appears within reach of passage. The proposal is part of the appropriations bill for the Education Department and the NIH, and passed the House of Representative without debate last week. The Senate Appropriations Committee has already approved the measure, which has attracted bipartisan support.

Impact of BioOne journals

2007-07-17T16:16:00.000-06:00

BioOne (www.bioone.org) announced the cumulative increase of journal impact in its BioOne.1, BioOne.2, and Open Access Collections, according to the Thomas Scientific Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) 2006 Journal Citation Report (JCR), published last week.

An innovative full-text aggregator of essential bioscience research journals published by independent not-for-profit societies and institutions, BioOne now boasts 86 ISI ranked titles—a robust 68% of its total collection of 126 journals. This includes five titles that have gained an Impact Factor in the 2006 JCR including:

· Castanea, published by the Southern Appalachian Botanical Society

· URSUS, published by the International Association for Bear Research and Management

· Rangeland Ecology and Management, published by the Society for Range Management

· Haseltonia, published by the Cactus and Succulent Society of America

· Journal of Insect Science, published by the University of Wisconsin

Several other BioOne publications saw marked increases in their Impact Factor from the 2005 to 2006 Journal Citation Reports. BioScience, the journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, became BioOne’s most highly ranked participating publication with an Impact Factor of 5.424, up from 4.708 in the 2005 index. BioScience now is ranked 6^th of 64 titles in biology.

BioOne also increased its title presence in a number of ISI subject categories, including Ornithology. The Auk, published by the American Ornithologists’ Union, ranks 2^nd of 19 titles in Ornithology, with an Impact Factor of 2.056 (up from 1.838 in the 2005 index.) The Condor, published by the Cooper Ornithological Society, ranks 3^rd in Ornithology, with an Impact Factor of 1.604 (up from 1.337 in the 2005 index.)

Mindful that the ISI Impact Factor is most useful when combined with other metrics for assessing journal quality, we applaud the BioOne participating titles that have made such impressive strides in the 2006 ISI Journal Citation Report.

Encouraging faculty to use an author addendum (allows for deposit in institutional repositories)

2007-07-11T07:47:00.000-06:00

Yesterday the U of Illinois Provost, Linda Katehi, sent this email letter to U of Illinois faculty:
New opportunities created by electronic publishing and archiving are changing the business of scholarly publication. Because traditional publication agreements transfer copyrights to publishers and restrict electronic distribution by the author and their institution, publishers appear to have captured much of the benefit of these changes.
In November 2006, faculty governance leaders from CIC universities discussed these issues that affect scholarly communication and called for a concrete strategy that would help faculty retain more control over their published intellectual property. Subsequently, the CIC provosts issued a Statement on Publishing Agreements and an Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors. The Addendum is intended to be used by faculty entering into publication agreements with journal publishers or presses. It supports authors rights to use their own published work in teaching and research, to post a publication on a personal website, or to deposit it in a repository maintained by their institution or a professional association. IDEALS is the University of Illinois institutional repository.
Late this Spring [April 30, 2007], the U of I Senate endorsed the principles expressed in the CIC Provosts Statement and Addendum; encouraged faculty to consider using it as well as other publication agreement addenda that increase their rights in reproducing, distributing, and archiving their own work; and asked the CIC Provosts to provide leadership in negotiating with publishers to develop new publication agreements that provide CIC authors and institutions greater rights for use, distribution and archiving their published scholarly works.
It is our responsibility as scholars to ensure that our work is available as widely as possible to maximize its scholarly impact, accessibility, and educational use. I encourage you to use the Addendum and to deposit your research and scholarship in IDEALS, which provides reliable and persistent access to its holdings.
(Thanks to Katie Newman on the U of I Scholarly Communication blog.)
Comment. The U of I is right to encourage faculty to use the CIC author addendum. But in the June SOAN, I hoped that CIC institutions would go further:
...[I]t's not clear what form the encouragement will take. Will it be limited to the abstract encouragement of passing a resolution in the Faculty Senate? Or will there also be some case-by-case encouragement? ...In a standoff between a publisher and faculty member, what will universities do to support their faculty member?
Here's the bigger question: What else will these universities do to encourage OA archiving? If they take the step of adopting an author addendum, they should also adopt a policy to require OA archiving. If permission is not a problem (because publishers already give it or because an addendum worked), what will these institutions do to insure that faculty postprints are actually archived? ...
The permission problem is worth solving, but we have to remember that solving it is only a means to the end of OA. Universities adopting an author addendum are moving in the right direction, but they must keep moving. Permission for OA isn't yet OA itself....
What's important is not how often U of I faculty use the author addendum, but how often they self-archive. I hope Provost Katehi's office monitors the self-archiving rate and is ready to adopt an effective policy to move it toward 100%.
From Open Access News

2007-07-10T08:31:00.000-06:00

HHMI becomes first major US funder to require open access
In a significant development for the open access movement, the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes (HHMI) this week became the first large research funder in the USA to require its investigators to make their published results openly accessible. The policy on Public Access to Publications, announced this week, requires HHMI Investigators to ensure that all biomedical articles on which they are a major author are made freely accessible within at most 6 months of publication, and are deposited in PubMed Central .
The policy also proposes a clear mechanism for enforcement, indicating that, in future, only articles published in compliance with the policy will be eligible for consideration when investigators' HHMI appointments are reviewed.
HHMI's President, Tom Cech, discussed the background to the Insitute's open access policy in the May issue of the HHMI Bulletin.
A notable aspect of HHMI's intitiative on open access is that the Insitute has agreed to pay some traditional publishers up to $1500 (on top of subscription revenue) in order to ensure that HHMI retains the right to post a copy of the author's manuscript version (not the final published version) on to PubMed Central after a 6 month embargo period. This emphasizes the importance attached to open access by HHMI, but also makes clear the value for money offered by BioMed Central's article processing charge (APC).
BioMed Central's typical APC, after institutional discount, is less than $1500 and this cost is instead of subscription revenue, not in addition to it. In return for this payment, BioMed Central makes the official final version of published articles freely available on PubMed Central immediately on publication, and also makes the articles freely available for reuse and redistribution.
Many HHMI Investigators have already published in BioMed Central's open access journals. We hope that the Institute's new policy on open access will encourage further HHMI researchers to give our journals a try.
For details of other funders policies on open access, see BioMed Central's funder policy page.

Losing access to research

2007-06-30T09:01:00.000-06:00

Article by pHd student Danney Kingsley on a system built to increase access to government funded research in Australia that is going awry. Losing Access to Research, ScienceAlert, Australia and New Zealand, June 29, 2007.

Making your OA publications easier to find

2007-04-23T13:12:00.000-06:00

PublicationsList is a new tool from Textensor that lets authors make an online linked list of their OA publications. From today's announcement:
PublicationsList.org launched to improve access to self-archived and open-access academic publications
Now there is nothing stopping every researcher having a professional and up-to-date list of their publications on the web.
[PublicationsList is] a new easy-to-use, on-line service designed to let researchers maintain a comprehensive public record of their research output with links to full text versions of papers.
With growing interest in open access journals and institutional repositories, an author's home page still remains the obvious starting point to access their work. But all too often personal web pages are out of date or do not link to full text versions of papers even when they are available.
Textensor's new service...is designed to make the process of maintaining a comprehensive publications list on the web as quick and straightforward as possible. For most researchers this is the single most important aspect of their web presence.
Authors who already have their publications organised in reference management systems can simply upload the file to have them all imported in one go. For biomedical researchers, the system will also accept identifiers from PubMed, the central repository of bioscience papers, then fetch all the required data automatically.
Links can be included to full text versions of each paper and, where the publishers allow it, PDF files can be uploaded directly. This means the service can be used for individual self-archiving although Textensor anticipates that most users will prefer to link out to the various journal websites or institutional repositories where their work is already archived. The system will also host abstracts, keywords, and the author's own notes about their publications. These can be particularly useful, for example to indicate where a more recent publication supersedes an earlier one, or to add links to related work.
The key feature of PublicationsList.org is that it focuses on the requirements of the individual and remains a fixed point as they move between institutions in the course of their career and publish in a range of journals. To this end, it also allows the user to include their contact details and bibliography, and their papers are listed at a straightforward and memorable URL such as "publicationslist.org/albert.einstein". Hosting publications on publicationslist.org is free for research students and there is a low cost subscription for academic staff....
From a post in Open Access News, by Peter Suber.

BBC to Put one Million Hours of its Past Online Corporation wants its entire archive to be available for free

2007-04-18T08:03:00.000-06:00

James Robinson, media correspondent
Sunday April 15, 2007
The Observer Guardian Unlimited

Thousands of hours of broadcasting history are to be made available to the public online as part of a plan to open up the BBC's entire archive to licence-fee payers free of charge.

The radio and TV material, some of which has never been repeated, includes an interview with Martin Luther King filmed shortly before he was assassinated, and another with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in which the former Beatle talks candidly about the impact their relationship had on the band.

Other programmes include a 1956 episode of the nature series Zoo Quest in which a young David Attenborough captures the komodo dragon on film for the first time. The episode has never been repeated but could soon be available online as part of the ambitious project, headed by the BBC's director of future media and technology, Ashley Highfield.

The BBC wants to put nearly one million hours of material on the internet for viewers to watch, listen to and download and has already begun the long process of retrieving and transferring programmes. A trial involving 20,000 users will begin next month, and the service could be available nationally in a year's time. Highfield will announce details of the scheme in a speech this week.

CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication will be broadcast on the web

2007-04-18T07:57:00.000-06:00

The main proceedings of the CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI5) will be broadcast on the web as video file attachments in the programme:

http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceOtherViews.py?view=standard&confId=5710

A file for each session in the main auditorium should appear approximately 10 minutes after the end of the presentation. The first such session takes place on Wednesday afternoon in Geneva, CH, and then on Thursday during most of the day and Friday morning.

We hope that many of you will join us virtually to watch. Messages to participants can be sent to oaiworkshop-organisation@cern.ch.

Copyright Utopia

2007-04-12T09:06:00.000-06:00

Copyright Utopia: Alternative Visions, Methods & Policies
May 21-23, 2007
UMUC Inn & Conference Center, Adelphi, Maryland http://www.umuc.edu/cip/symposium/

Ordinary people around the world are revolutionizing the way media is produced and distributed. Sites like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, BitTorrent, Wikipedia and Google are completely altering how the masses interact with video, pictures, art, music, and literature. Colleges and universities desire to harness the power of these incredible tools for distributing scholarship and creative works. But does U.S. copyright law accommodate many of these uses?

Please join the Center for Intellectual Property as we discuss these issues with scholars and practitioners about how students, faculty and the general public can continue to innovate within the U.S. Copyright regime. Each panel and speaker will address some aspect of how or whether copyright law can be adapted or developed to accommodate the massive changes that technological innovation brings.

YOU need to be at the table.

Confirmed speakers include:
-- William Fisher, Berkman Center to Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
-- Fred von Lohmann, Electronic Frontier Foundation
-- William Brit Kirwan, Chancellor, University System of Maryland; Co-Chair, Joint Committee of the Higher Education and Entertainment Communities Technology Task Force
-- Donna Ferullo, Purdue University
-- Kenneth Crews, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Confirmed panelists include:
-- Alec French, NBC Universal
-- Robert Samors, National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges
-- Patricia Aufderheide, Center for Social Media
-- Heather Joseph, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
-- Tracy Mitrano, Cornell University
-- Ann Bartow, University of South Carolina Law School
-- Paul Jaeger, University of Maryland, College Park
-- Gigi Sohn, Public Knowledge
-- Matt Skelton, Office of Policy and International Affairs, U.S Copyright Office
-- Miriam Nisbet, American Library Association
-- Denise Troll Covey, Carnegie Mellon University
-- Reed Stager, Digimarc Corporation
-- Mike Carroll, Villanova University School of Law
-- Brian Crawford, American Chemical Society Publications
-- Elizabeth Winston, Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law
-- Karen Coyle, Digital Libraries Consultant
-- Steven M. Marks, Recording Industry Association of America
And many more...

Registration includes a detailed notebook, meals and opportunity for in depth interaction with colleagues and speakers. Early registration deadline has been extended to April 20th! Please check the website for all other discounts.

Co-sponsored by the Copyright Clearance Center
--
Olga Francois, Assistant Director
Center for Intellectual Property
University of Maryland University College
3501 University Blvd. East, PGM3-780
Adelphi, MD 20783
Phone: 240-582-2803
Fax: 240-582-2961
http://www.umuc.edu/cip/

Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in the United States

2007-04-10T07:31:00.000-06:00

This petition builds on the 24,000+ signatures collected from around the world in support of free and open access to European research and for the recommendations proposed in the EU's 'Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe' as well as the 132 higher education leaders who have written of their explicit support for public access to publicly funded research.

from SPARC <http://www.arl.org/sparc>, ACRL <http://www.acrl.org/>, PLoS <http://www.plos.org/> and more.

American Scientist Open Access Forum

2007-03-27T07:41:00.000-06:00

A recent post by Steven Harnad on the American Scientist Open Access Forum is a comprehensive critique of:

Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University's Installation of DSpace. PM Davis & MJL Connolly. D-Lib Magazine 13(3/4) March/April 2007 http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html

Nature: Agencies join forces to share data

2007-03-22T12:35:00.000-06:00

From the March 22 issue of Nature.

Excerpt:
The US government is considering a massive plan to store almost all scientific data generated by federal agencies in publicly accessible digital repositories. The aim is for the kind of data access and sharing currently enjoyed by genome researchers via GenBank, or astronomers via the National Virtual Observatory, but for the whole of US science.

Scientists would then be able to access data from any federal agency and integrate it into their studies. For example, a researcher browsing an online journal article on the spread of a disease could not only pull up the underlying data, but mesh them with information from databases on agricultural land use, weather and genetic sequences.

How national OA policies will affect libraries

2007-03-16T07:55:00.000-06:00

The presentations from the SPARC-ACRL forum at the ALA midwinter meeting, Public Access: Federal Research Access Policies and How They'll Change Your Library (Seattle, January 20, 2007), are now online. (Thanks to Adrian Ho.)
From a post in Open Access News, by Peter Suber.

Comments on the Brussels Declaration

2007-03-15T08:29:00.000-06:00

A post today on DigitalKoans by Chs W. Bailey discussing the publishers response to scholars' interest in open access.

The recent "Brussels Declaration on STM Publishing" by major scholarly publishers, such as Elsevier and Wiley, can be boiled down to: the scholarly publishing system ain’t broke, so don’t try to fix it. It provides an interesting contrast to the 2004 "Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science" by not-for-profit publishers, which outlined a variety of strategies for making content freely available.

It might also be interesting to read about an ongoing study of new scholars' attitudes and concerns led by Cathy Trower of Harvard. She recently spoke at Auraria and here is some text from the promo.

Trower leads Harvard’s Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE). The COACHE survey of 4,500 tenure-track faculty at 51 colleges and universities has revealed that, overall, climate, culture, and collegiality are more important to the success and satisfaction of early career faculty than compensation, tenure clarity, workload, and policy effectiveness.

COACHE discovered that the some of the key climate variables for junior faculty include: interest senior faculty take in their work, fairness with which they are evaluated, opportunities to collaborate with senior faculty, how well they seem to fit in their departments, sufficient professional and personal interaction with colleagues, and a sense of community in the department.

Support for open access publishing, a suggestion from BioMed Central

2007-03-13T14:59:00.000-06:00

Some ideas from BioMed Central. Auraria Library is a member of BioMed Central and thus supports Auraria faculty publishing.

BioMed Central, which publishes over 170 peer-reviewed journals in biology, medicine and chemistry, has been a pioneer of the open access publishing model for academic research. Under the open access model, published articles are made universally available online with the cost being covered not by subscriptions but by article processing charges, payable on publication. Open access publishing has proven very popular with authors, and has grown dramatically since BioMed Central's launch in 2000. In order for that growth to continue, however, it is vital that sufficient funds are available to cover the cost of open access publication in a sustainable way.

There has been much discussion within the academic community about how best to pay the costs of open access publication, given that library budgets are already stretched. The Wellcome Trust examined this issue, and concluded that open access publication costs are best seen as part of the cost of doing research. Research institutions and funders recognize that research involves not only direct costs, but also indirect costs (for necessary infrastructure such as buildings/ laboratories/ maintenance/ library services etc.). We feel that it is very important that open access publishing costs should be recognized as such an infrastructure cost and budgeted for appropriately.

We would like to encourage all research institutions around the world to define an open access publishing budget for their institution, just as they currently have a library budget. A central 'open access publishing fund' could receive contributions from each of the funding organization that supports research at the institution. For example the National Institutes of Health and California Institute for Regulative Medicine both have open access policies, which enable researchers to apply for publication costs funding. For further information on all the funding agencies who have policies, please visit our website.

Having such a central fund for authors at your institution would reduce the barriers for those authors wishing to publish in an open access journal, and would thus deliver a more level playing field for open access journals to compete with traditional journals, which already receive extensive institutional support through library subscriptions.

If you would like help or ideas on how to set up a central fund or would like to discuss this further, please contact us at: institutions@biomedcentral.com.

We shall also be holding an open access consultation at the forthcoming Medical Library Association conference, on Monday, May 21st, 2007 from 7.00 - 9.00am, where we shall be discussing the issues of payment for open access publications, please do let us know if you would like to attend the event.

OAIster reaches 10 million records

2007-01-26T12:52:00.000-07:00

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - OAIster Reaches 10 Million Records.
http://www.oaister.org/
We live in an information-driven world-- one in which access to good information defines success. OAIster's growth to 10 million records takes us one step closer to that goal.
Developed at the University of Michigan's Library, OAIster is a collection of digital scholarly resources. OAIster is also a service that continually gathers these digital resources to remain complete and fresh.
As global digital repositories grow, so do OAIster's holdings.
Popular search engines don't have the holdings OAIster does. They crawl web pages and index the words on those pages. It's an outstanding technique for fast, broad information from public websites. But scholarly information, the kind researchers use to enrich their work, is generally hidden from these search engines.
OAIster retrieves these otherwise elusive resources by tapping directly into the collections of a variety of institutions using harvesting technology based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. These can be images, academic papers, movies and audio files, technical reports, books, as well as preprints (unpublished works that have not yet been peer reviewed). By aggregating these resources, OAIster makes it possible to search across all of them and return the results of a thorough investigation of complete, up-to-date resources.
Ann Devenish, Publication Services Project Manager at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, notes that "Harvesting by OAIster is a primary 'selling point' when we talk to scientists and researchers about the visibility, accessibility, and impact of their contributions in an institutional repository. From their own experiences they know that a search using one of the popular search engines can bring back thousands (if not, millions) of results which will require careful and time-consuming screening, with no guarantee that they will ever get to the content they seek. A search of OAIster, across hundreds of open and scholarly archives and millions of records, brings back results with the key metadata elements that allow for quick identification of, and easy navigation to, the content they seek."
OAIster is good news for the digital archives that contribute material to open-access repositories. "[OAIster has demonstrated that]...OAI interoperability can scale. This is good news for the technology, since the proliferation is bound to continue and even accelerate," says Peter Suber, author of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. As open-access repositories proliferate, they will be supported by a single, well-managed, comprehensive, and useful tool.
Scholars will find that searching in OAIster can provide better results than searching in web search engines. Roy Tennant, User Services Architect at the California Digital Library, offers an example: "In OAIster I searched 'roma' and 'world war,' then sorted by weighted relevance. The first hit nailed my topic-- the persecution of the Roma in World War II. Trying 'roma world war' in Google fails miserably because Google apparently searches 'Rome' as well as 'Roma.' The ranking then makes anything about the Roma people drop significantly, and there is nothing in the first few screens of results that includes the word in the title, unlike the OAIster hit."
OAIster currently harvests 730 repositories from 49 countries on 6 continents. In three years, it has more than quadrupled in size and increased from 6.2 million to 10 million in the past year. OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service.
For more information about University of Michigan's OAIster Project, visit http://www.oaister.org/, or contact Kat Hagedorn at khage@umich.edu.

Plans for an OA portal of world science

2007-01-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

The US Department of Energy (DOE) and the British Library have agreed to build an OA portal of world science. From yesterday's announcement:
...Called ‘Science.world,’ the planned resource would be available for use by scientists in all nations and by anyone interested in science. The approach will capitalise on existing technology to search vast collections of science information distributed across the globe, enabling much-needed access to smaller, less well-known sources of highly valuable science. Following the model of Science.gov, the U.S. interagency science portal that relies on content published by each participating agency, ‘Science.world’ will rely on scientific resources published by each participating nation. Other countries have been invited to participate in this international effort.
Recognising the impact of international research efforts, [Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Under Secretary for Science for DOE] stated, “It is time to make the science offerings of all nations searchable in one global gateway. Our goal is to speed up the sharing of knowledge on a global scale. As a result, we believe that science itself will speed up.” ...
Objectives of the “Science.world” initiative are to:
Search dispersed, electronic collections in various science disciplines;
Provide direct, seamless and free searching of open-source collections and portals;
Build upon existing and already successful national models for searching;
Complement existing information collections and systems; and
Raise the visibility and usage of individual sources of quality science information....
Posted by Peter Suber at 1/26/2007 09:35:12 AM.

Demonstrate support for open access

2007-01-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

Following from the report from the "EU Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe" (summary at http://www.ec-petition.eu/) a consortium of organisations (see below for list) working in the scholarly communication arena is sponsoring a petition to the European Commission to demonstrate support for Open Access and for the recommendations in the report.

Signatures may be added on behalf of individuals or institutions.

Please register your support for Open Access. To sign the petition, go to

http://www.ec-petition.eu/

This note is forwarded at the request of Dr Alma Swan who is working on behalf of the organisations listed below.

------------------------------------------------------------
The sponsoring organisations are JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag-og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark).

DRM TECHNOLOGIES & Higher Education: an online workshop

2006-12-12T07:51:00.000-07:00

DRM TECHNOLOGIES & Higher Education: an online workshop

Are you interested in learning more about digital rights management (DRM) technologies? Would you like to learn more about the current state-of-the-art in DRM and its applicability to your campus? Do you have concerns and questions about personal media, your students and your liability? What is the future of DRM? What about open standards? Do they offer a future for the marketplace? These and other questions will be reviewed, discussed and considered in the upcoming workshop:
DIGITIAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (DRM) TECHNOLOGIES
January 22 - February 2, 2007
http://www.umuc.edu/cip/ipa/
Moderators:
Bill Rosenblatt, M.S., Founder, GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies
Kimberly Kelley, M.L.S, Ph.D., Vice Provost and Dean, Academic Resources and Services, University of Maryland University College;
This workshop is part II of the first DRM workshop held in February, 2006. At the same time, this workshop is standalone; the previous workshop is not a pre-requisite. Join the Center for Intellectual Property as we continue the discussion of DRM technologies and how they impact higher education.

Workshop participants will:

• Review DRM technologies. – definitions, how it works, and the technology components
• Examine the use of specific DRM technologies by institutions as well as by the owners, publishers, and providers of digital content—and some of the current technologies deployed (e.g., Apple FairPlay; Microsoft Windows Media DRM);
• Examine DRM and copyright law including the special case of libraries (Section 108 of the Copyright Act);
• Gain clarity on fact versus fiction in the realm of personal media and campus life, including P2P file sharing and the TEACH Act for distance learning;
• Examine the future of DRM including law, policy, open standards and cross-industry collaboration
• Share experiences with DRM!
Please see the web site for detailed course objectives:
http://www.umuc.edu/cip/ipa/workshops.html#copyright_education
SIGN UP TODAY!
Early Bird Rates $125 !!!Early Registration Ends January 6, 2007!!!
Regular Rate: $150
https://nighthawk.umuc.edu/CIPReg.nsf/Application?OpenForm
--------------
Marvin Stewart
Event Specialist
Center for Intellectual Property
University of Maryland University College
3501 University Boulevard East
Adelphi, MD 20783
T: 240.582.2966
F: 240.582.2961
mdstewart@umuc.edu

NEW POLICY FOR PUBLIC ACCESS TO OUTPUTS OF CANADIAN RESEARCH

2006-11-30T14:13:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON, DC and OTTAWA, NOVEMBER 28, 2006 - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and CARL (the Canadian Association of Research Libraries)--together representing over 200 academic and research libraries across North America--commend the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for the strength and timeliness of its Draft Policy on Access to Research Outputs.

The CIHR's Draft Policy on Access to Research Outputs is the result of consultations, and a survey of the health research community, focusing on topics related to access. The process was conducted through the CIHR Web site beginning in April 2006.

CARL is the leadership organization for the Canadian research library community. CARL's members represent Canada's 27 major academic research libraries , Library and Archives Canada, the Library of Parliament and the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI).

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and SPARC Europe are an international alliance of more than 300 academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. SPARC's advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research.

Cost Benefits Analysis of OA: a study

2006-09-29T16:00:00.000-06:00

Australia's Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) has published an important report by John Houghton, Colin Steele & Peter Sheehan: Research Communication Costs In Australia: Emerging Opportunities And Benefits, September 2006 (also available in RTF).

Some findings:
benefit / cost ratios ranging from 4 to over 51 for Australia's proposed open access via mandated self-archiving policy. That is, from various perspectives, the benefits of this approach exceed the cost by at least 4 times to over 51 times ($51 dollars of benefits for every dollar of cost).

Expressing these impacts as a benefit/cost ratio we find that, over 20 years, a full system of institutional repositories in Australia costing AUD 10 million a year and achieving a 100% self-archiving compliance would show:

* A benefit/cost ratio of 51 for the modelled impacts of open access to public sector research (i.e. the benefits are 51 times greater than the costs);
* A benefit/cost ratio of 30 for the modelled impacts of open access to higher education research; and
* A benefit/cost ratio of 4.1 for the modelled impacts of open access to ARC competitive grants funded research....

From: Peter Suber's Open Access News - more details

Taylor & Francis offers open access option to authors

2006-09-28T15:09:00.000-06:00

Taylor & Francis is the latest publishing company to start offering its authors an open access (OA) option. iOpenAccess, as the new service is dubbed, certainly has a name that will attract the iPod generation, but at present remains a pilot.
iOpenAccess is across 175 Taylor & Francis journals in its chemistry, mathematics and physics portfolios, as well as a behavioural science journal from the Psychological Press. Medical and bioscience journals from the Informa Healthcare brand are also included in the scheme.
<-more from IRW->

Empirical study of university-level OA mandates

2006-08-23T07:28:00.000-06:00

Arthur Sale, The acquisition of open access research articles, a preprint, self-archived August 23, 2006.

Abstract: The behavior of researchers when self-archiving in an institutional repository has not been previously analyzed. This paper uses available information for three repositories analyzing when researchers (as authors) deposit their research articles. The three repositories have variants of a mandatory deposit policy.
It is shown that it takes several years for a mandatory policy to be institutionalized and routinized, but that once it has been the deposit of articles takes place in a remarkably short time after publication, or in some cases even before. Authors overwhelmingly deposit well before six months after publication date. The OA mantra of 'deposit now, set open access when feasible' is shown to be not only reasonable, but fitting what researchers actually do.

From the body of the paper:
Conclusions:
Repository managers should invest in promotion and follow-up for 2-3 years after a mandatory policy is promulgated, after which the behavior becomes routinized.
No especial activities need to be undertaken to convince researchers to deposit research articles soon after publication – this seems to happen naturally under mandatory policies.
Six month embargos by publishers are likely to be unpopular with researchers, since in the absence of constraints they deposit earlier than this.
The recommendation widely adopted by the open access movement and summarized as ‘deposit immediately, and make open access as soon as legally possible’ is shown to be excellent advice for any university or funding agency considering adopting a mandatory policy.

Comment. This is an important set of results. Sale's research shows that OA mandates work without coercion and supports the case for university-level mandates, the case for the dual deposit/release strategy, and the case against self-archiving embargoes.

From Open Access News, August 23, 2006
Posted by Peter Suber at 8/23/2006 08:52:00 AM.

Institutional repositories do not always mean open access

2006-08-01T12:09:00.000-06:00

Many institutions and authors develop repositories and not all are completely open access. Most, if not all of the actively growing repositories use software that allows the author complete control over who sees her/his work. The flexibility allows authors the choice of making their works, as a body or as individual arcticles, available or not and allows them to retain complete control. Also citation counting capability is becoming standard for these comprehensive software packages.

The effects of this control are discussed in a recent article in Citebase.

How many IRs are there in the US?

2006-07-11T07:54:00.000-06:00

An article in the D-Lib Magazine (http://dlib.org/dlib/september05/lynch/09lynch.html) gives a snapshot answer to this as of early 2005.
At that time the number was small with as many being planned as existed at that time.

Also from the conclusions:

"Research libraries have taken on a leadership role in both policy formulation (including the framing of the necessary campus-wide conversations) and operational deployment roles for institutional repositories at our research universities. (We did not explore funding questions, which will be crucial going forward.) Clearly, while an institutional repository is recognized as an institutional service, library leadership is generally unquestioned; what varies from university to university is the extent of active collaboration by other campus units. Institutional repositories represent a critically important new policy and operational role for research libraries, and one that renews their connection with the core academic processes of the university."

More on the OA news from Oxford and PLoS

2006-06-27T07:27:00.000-06:00

John Timmer, The state of public access publishing, Ars Technica, June 26, 2006. Excerpt:
A few stories came out regarding public access scientific articles over the past week that provide a decent summary of where things stand. The first comes out of the Oxford Journals, a large collection that includes some scientific journals and is managed by the Oxford University Press....In keeping with the spirit of things, they've made the presentations and reports from the conference freely available. Various journals were subjected to analyses based on the access and citation rates before and after open access, and the results were generally mixed. One presentation, however, stood out from the rest for some interesting and definitive conclusions. As a result of opening up Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), search robots visits to the site rapidly peaked. By a year later, access to the site following a link from search engines had passed the PubMed database as the primary means of reaching an NAR article. In less than two years, journal access was up about 145 percent. In the words of the analysis, open access has, "opened the gates to the Google generation."
We've already mentioned how the sophisticated evaluations performed by commercial search engines can often provide better results than some dedicated academic search sites and how at least one commercial publisher is interested in making subscription based content accessible to search engines. Presumably, clear cut results such as these will hasten such efforts in the future. There were a few other interesting tidbits in the report. For example, it seems that most of the additional views appear to be of older articles, suggesting that search engines are more adept at pointing users to content they might otherwise overlook. A lot of the new readers appear to be from central Europe, where funding for paid access to journals can be expected to be limited.
Meanwhile, one of the commercial publishing houses (Nature) takes a look at one of their open access rivals, the Public Library of Science....The article notes that, based on impact factor, the top PLoS journals are doing very well for newcomers in the publishing field. But the financing hasn't followed; income is increasing, but it's still lagging far behind spending, resulting in a net deficit of US$1 million last year. So far, PLoS has made up the difference via grants from foundations, but the fees charged for publishing a paper there are set to rise to make up some of the difference. Currently at $1500, those fees could rise to nearly $2500. For context, many other publishers charge fees, some of which vary by the number of color images in an article. It’s entirely possible to rack up even higher charges for publishing in a commercial journal. Still, it’s a far cry from the hopes that accompanied the formation of PLoS. It seems like the open access movement is still experiencing some growing pains.
From: Open Access News, June 27, 2006

E-prints "request a copy" button

2006-06-20T12:11:00.000-06:00

In April 2006 GNU Eprints (free IR software) added a request button for copies of the eprints seen in the IR. The functionality of the button allows authors to gage the level of interest in their creations. Many hope the level of interest shown will encourage authors to open the access.

"Where a record of a stored eprint tells the user that an open access copy is not available, a form box appears inviting the user to paste in their email address and send a request to the author for a copy of the paper. This request is emailed automatically to the author, offering three choices in return: to email the requested eprint, to reject the request, or to make the eprint open access in the repository." - from the press release

2006-06-16T15:27:00.000-06:00

Wellcome digitizes a million pages for OA

Kim Thomas, Wellcome Trust digitisation hits million page mark, Information World Review, June 16, 2006. Excerpt:
The Wellcome Trust has completed the first million pages of its project to digitise nearly 200 years’ worth of medical journals. The project, which started in 2004, is creating a digital archive that will offer free access to medical journals via PubMed Central, the online medical service from the US National Institutes of Health. The earliest archived journal dates from 1809, but the archive will also encompass current and future journals.
“It’s a living archive,” said Robert Kiley, head of systems strategy at medical research funding charity Wellcome Trust. He added that participating publishers have agreed to make all future content freely available online within 12 months of publication. “Once we’ve digitised a journal, if the publisher wants a copy itself for its own website, it can do that,” he said.
As well as digitising the content, the project, funded jointly by the Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), is creating a PDF file for every article in the archive. All the text is also being put through an optical character recognition process, making it possible to carry out free-text searches.
Kiley said that the project had been “subject to heavy and sustained use”. The Biochemical Journal has had more than one million articles downloaded in an eight month period, he said. The next journal to be digitised will be the British Medical Journal, a source of several ground breaking studies.

From Open Access News at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html

warning about two-tiered internet

2006-06-08T09:09:00.000-06:00

* Web inventor warns of 'dark' net *

The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, has warned of the dangers of introducing a two-tier internet.
See article in BBC News:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/-/2/hi/technology/5009250.stm

OpenDOAR

2006-06-08T08:38:00.000-06:00

From the DOAR site:

"The OpenDOAR service is being developed to support the rapidly emerging movement towards Open Access to research information. This will categorise and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown up around the world."

"The project is a joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham in the UK and the Lund University in Sweden. Both institutions are active in supporting Open Access development. Lund operates the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which is known throughout the world."

http://opendoar.org

Using Fedora for institutional repositories

2006-06-06T13:26:00.000-06:00

This article is a summary and review of a series of articles written by Peter Murray at Ohiolink and posted to the Disruptive Library Technology Jester blog over the past couple of months .../2006/05/02/the-jesters-case-for-fedora

Fedora is used at OhioLink's Digital Resource Commons.

Interviews on Open Access in Research Information Magazine

2006-06-01T16:27:00.000-06:00

Research Information has just published a series of interviews by editor Sian Harris on Open Access: http://www.researchinformation.info/rijunjul06openaccess.html

* 'Open access is much wider than just readers not paying' - Martin Richardson, Oxford Journals

* 'Academics have access anyway' - Michael Mabe, formerly of Elsevier

* 'Text mining of subject archives will enable new facts to be discovered' - Robert Terry, The Wellcome Trust

* 'Self-archiving should be mandatory' - Steven Harnad, U Quebec/Montreal & U Southampton (corrections by author in red at: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/shcorrex.html)

* 'The environmental community will embrace open-access' - Tim Smith, Institute of Physics Publishing

* 'Many areas of research are funded by taxpayers but they do not see the results' - Matthew Cockerill, BioMed Central

* 'The first priority should be awareness-raising' - Alma Swan, Key Perspectives

* 'Our community is used to immediate release of preprints' - Jens Vigen, CERN

* 'Get research authors to change their behaviour' - Leslie Carr, University of Southampton

- post adapted from list input by S. Harnad

Open data

2006-05-22T10:36:00.000-06:00

SPARC-ACRL FORUM TO EXPLORE OPEN DATA

Washington, DC and Chicago, IL - May 11, 2006 - The upcoming SPARC-ACRL forum on emerging issues in scholarly communication, to be held during the American Library Association's annual meeting in New Orleans, will explore questions related to the field of Open Data. The forum will feature experts who are familiar with the issues associated with Open Data and known for their analysis of the evolving scholarly communication scene.

During the past several years, Open Data has become a field of urgent interest to researchers, scholars, and librarians. With the amount of scientific data doubling every year, issues surrounding the access, use, and curation of data sets are increasing in importance. The data-rich, researcher-driven environment that is evolving poses new challenges and provides new opportunities in the sharing, review, and publication of research results. Ensuring open access to the data behind the literature will play a key role in seeing that the scholarly communication system evolves in a way that supports the needs of scholars and the academic enterprise as a whole.

As Open Data moves to the forefront of scholarly communication, librarians, administrators, and researchers will be responsible for considering new access policies for data and data curation issues. This SPARC-ACRL forum will introduce Open Data as an emerging focus, explore the challenges of managing the data deluge, and aid participants in crafting their own digital data preservation and curation policies.

Speakers will include:

* Christopher Greer, Cyberinfrastructure Advisor, Office of the Assistant Director for Biological Sciences, National Science Foundation
* Robert Hanisch, Project Manager, Space Telescope Science Institute
* Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information

The SPARC-ACRL forum will be held on Saturday, June 24th from 4:00 - 5:30PM in the Morial Convention Center, Room 356 - 357. Reservations are not required.

The forum is followed by the ACRL Scholarly Communication Discussion Group, an opportunity to exchange views with speakers from the forum and take the discussion to a deeper level. The Discussion Group convenes on Sunday, June 25th, from 4:00 - 5:30PM in Evangeline Suite of the Royal Sonesta Hotel.

For more information, visit the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/ and the SPARC Open Data email discussion list at http://www.arl.org/sparc/opendata/.

SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and SPARC Europe are an international alliance of more than 300 academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. SPARC's advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is located on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc; SPARC Europe is at http://www.sparceurope.org.

ACRL
ACRL is a division of the American Library Association (ALA), representing more than 13,000 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 libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments.

Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006

2006-05-10T08:54:00.000-06:00

The Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 by Robin Peek, InfoToday, May 8, 2006 http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb060508-2.shtml

"One of the greatest events in the history of Open Access may have just happened. On May 2, Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, introduced the bipartisan Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA) (S.2695). The legislation is co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn. If passed, the policy would require that agencies with research budgets of more than $100 million enact policy to ensure that articles generated through research funded by that agency are made available online within 6 months of publication.

Aurarians can track this bill thru Legislative Histories, Bills & Laws (Lexis Nexis). Click on Bill Tracking and then do a search on S 2695 limited to the current session 109 (2005-2006).

Related story

Scholarly journals resist offering online versions By Sara Ivry, The New York Times, May 8, 2006 http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6069510.html

"Scholarly publishing has never been a big business. But it could take a financial hit if a proposed federal law is enacted, opening taxpayer-financed research to the public, according to some critics in academic institutions."

Meta universities and open access

2006-05-09T16:15:00.000-06:00

Dr. Charles M. Vest discusses how the Internet, educational technology, and the open access movement will contribute to the globalization of higher education and the possible emergence of a global meta-university in Open content and the emerging global meta-university, May/June of EDUCAUSE Review. He writes:

My view is that in the open-access movement, we are seeing the early emergence of a meta-university—a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. The Internet and the Web will provide the communication infrastructure, and the open-access movement and its derivatives will provide much of the knowledge and information infrastructure.

Big changes that can have unintended consequences.

Google Scholar at Auraria Library

2006-05-01T09:50:00.000-06:00

Auraria Library is back in the list of library links from Google Scholar so you may again choose it as a resource. On campus, the linking to full text resources via Auraria Full Text Resources in Google Scholar works just fine without going through the Library proxy, since campus computers are in the valid ip address ranges for Auraria Library electronic resources.

You may also choose Google Scholar from the Library's list of databases, login with your student id and nine-digit password, and you will automatically be searching Google Scholar with Auraria Library and Open WorldCat chosen as your defaults. Each record that you have access to has a link to Auraria Library Resources.

The link to this resource is available from on and off campus because you log in. The direct link to it, which you can bookmark/make a favorite, is
http://0-scholar.google.com.skyline.cudenver.edu/advanced_scholar_search.

FYI: As with all the online databases we buy or send you to, the number of resources Google Scholar can show you is large, very large, but is not the universe of scholarly resources available to you. As a matter of economics, each individual publishers' entire set of resources is not opened to Google to search. Many, but not a majority, of academic authors are turning to referreed open access journals as a place to publish their work (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html, http://www.doaj.org/) which are often available to anyone via the internet and thus to Google (and other search engines http://www.freefulltext.com/, http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/). So Google Scholar is well populated and extremely useful to serious researchers.

gathering storm

2006-03-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

Three Gathering Storms that could cause collateral damage to OA and academia in general, is an article by Peter Suber in the March 2006 Open Access Newsletter, at:

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-06.htm#collateral

Rationale for institutional repositories

2006-03-13T08:50:00.000-07:00

Here is an article by Steven Harnad discussing the need for self-archiving by scholars, and consequentially institutional repositories. The data is presented that supports the university wide development of ir's.

http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12078/

Institutional Repositories & Open Access at Auraria

2006-03-02T07:49:00.000-07:00

Institutional Repositories & Open Access at Auraria

The search feature of the Directory of Open Access
Repositories is finally available. The searching is by keyword only; there is a
browse function also. The metadata used to create the browse displays is not
very granular. Hopefully this resource will improve over time. --Jeffrey

http://www.opendoar.org/doar?func=search

Home Search Browse Suggest a repository About FAQ News Feedback

Find repositories

© University of Nottingham, UK and Lund University Libraries, Sweden

When the internet isn't free

2006-02-20T13:54:00.000-07:00

How is this going to affect higher ed?

When the Net Goes From Free to Fee
The fear is that big broadband providers will split the Net into first class and steerage.
By Steven Levy Newsweek Feb. 27, 2006 issue
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11433420/site/newsweek

Report on orphan works to Senate Judiciary Committee

2006-02-01T09:23:00.000-07:00

FYI: The U.S. Copyright Office submitted its "Report on Orphan Works" to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, January 31, 2006:

http://www.copyright.gov/orphan/

IRs & Open Access from ALA

2006-01-25T14:25:00.000-07:00

1. Check out this group: Code4lib. It's an organization for people interested in programming for libraries. They are having a conference in Oregon soon. http://www.code4lib.org/

2. Here's an interesting sort-of library-oriented blog from one of the speakers I heard: http://www.maisonbisson.com/blog/

3. Several sessions mentioned COUNTER: http://www.projectcounter.org/
About COUNTER
The use of online information resources is growing rapidly. It is widely agreed by producers and purchasers of information that the use of these resources should be measured in a more consistent way. Librarians want to understand better how the information they buy from a variety of sources is being used; publishers want to know how the information products they disseminate are being accessed. An essential requirement to meet these objectives is an agreed international set of standards and protocols governing the recording and exchange of online usage data. The COUNTER Codes of Practice provide these standards and protocols and are published in full on this website.
4. Somebody mentioned a new concept: "Search fatigue."
5. Another IR software we should look at is ContentDM: http://contentdm.com/
6. http://www.library.cornell.edu/cts/elicensestudy/ermi2/sushi/ This is SUSHI, the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI).
7. One IR person recommended finding out the number of academic journals published on this campus, or scholarly journals whose editor is a professor on this campus.
8. The SHERPA (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/) web site compiles author rights statements. In their words: SHERPA is investigating issues in the future of scholarly communication and publishing. In particular, it is developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities. These eprint repositories or archives facilitate the worldwide rapid and efficient dissemination of research findings.
9. A woman who runs an IR at Oregon said their IR really took off when they started using it to archive the various newsletters that were produced across campus. She also said that faculty who assigned students to write papers for the IR found that the students wrote much better quality papers when they knew it would be mounted there.

Social Science Statistics repository

2006-01-24T11:02:00.000-07:00

Another oa-discipline based repository established in 1962(!) at Univ of Mich.

Membership is needed to get at ALL the datasets. Member list at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/membership/ors.html.

Libraries cannot be members, only institutions. Info at http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-FAQ/0051.xml and this about the complete online access to datasets (http://webapp.icpsr.umich.edu/cocoon/ICPSR-FAQ/0104.xml).

It's in the adi, under criminal justice and criminology, statistics and sociology.

ICPSR (University of Michigan Institute for Social Research) The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) maintains and provides access to an archive of social science data for research and instruction, and offers training in quantitative methods to facilitate effective data use. Some datasets are available to the public.

Digital Rights Management: A Guide for Librarians

2006-01-20T15:52:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure I'll get through this, but this is a decent reference for Digital Rights Management.

http://www.ala.org/ala/washoff/WOissues/copyrightb/digitalrights/DRMfinal.pdf

LISTA database Free to all Interested in Libraries and Librarianship

2005-12-20T14:53:00.000-07:00

LISTA database Free to all Interested in Libraries and Librarianship

EBSCO Publishing is proud to provide the Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) database as a free resource to anyone interested in libraries and information management. This world-class bibliographic database provides coverage on subjects such as librarianship, classification, cataloging, bibliometrics, online information retrieval, information management and more. Delivered via the EBSCOhost platform, LISTA indexes more than 600 periodicals plus books, research reports, and proceedings. With coverage dating back to the mid-1960s, it is the oldest continuously produced database covering the field of information science.

Note: Be sure to set a bookmark for http://www.libraryresearch.com. This link takes you directly to the LISTA database. Make it a "favorite" so this free resource is available whenever you need it!

Cites on IRs from our emails

2005-12-16T15:23:00.000-07:00

from Ellen G:

As promised, here's a list of citations (in no particular order) that have been shared so far:

The PowerPoint slides and resource list from the "Policies and Practices of Institutional Repositories" program at Annual 2005 are available on the Emerging Tech. Interest Group site: See: http://www.lita.org/ala/lita/litamembership/litaigs/emergingtechnol/programs.htm

Interesting article/Fedora http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october05/johnston/10johnston.html

Celestial (software that harvests metadata from OAI-compliant repositories and re-exposes that metadata to other services - in effect an OAI cache) http://celestial.eprints.org/

ProQuest's Digital Commons http://umi.com/features/feature-15/default.shtml

Stanford iTunes http://itunes.stanford.edu/

...

And lastly,

Here's a list to join:
AMERICAN SCIENTIST OPEN ACCESS FORUM:
> A complete Hypermail archive of the ongoing discussion of providing
> open access to the peer-reviewed research literature online
> (1998-2005) is available at:
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/
> To join or leave the Forum or change your subscription
> address:
> http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html
> Post discussion to:
> american-scientist-open-access-forum@amsci.org

And another list of interest: ERIL-L@LISTSERV.BINGHAMTON.EDU

Ellen

E-prints

2005-12-16T11:02:00.000-07:00

from Jeffrey:

1. Here is E-LIS, E-prints in library and information science:

http://eprints.rclis.org/

Perhaps you want to have a look at the article I deposited there.

2. Here is a link to the open-source company that makes the software for this:

http://www.eprints.org/

3. Here is a link to a library's site using that software: (Queensland University of Technology)

http://eprints.qut.edu.au/

Recruitment of content

2005-12-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

From Elaine:

Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories NF Foster, S Gibbons - D-Lib Magazine, 11 (1), 2005 - dspace.lib.rochester.edu http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html

Wikis - Chron of Higher Ed article

2005-07-15T08:34:00.000-06:00

Disaster Reporting via Wikis
from The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog Education-technology news from around the Web from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Basically reports on a blog entry demonstrating how a wiki works using the London bombings entry on the Wikipedia as a example.

New international study demonstrates worldwide readiness for Open Access mandate

2005-07-07T17:06:00.000-06:00

A wide-ranging new international study across all disciplines has found that over 80 per cent of academic researchers the world over would willingly comply with a mandate to deposit copies of their articles in an institutional repository.

The findings of the study, carried out by Key Perspectives Ltd, for the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, have been greeted by Southampton’s Professor Stevan Harnad as ‘a historic turning point in the worldwide research community’s progress towards 100 per cent Open Access’.

quoted from Innovations Report June 23, 2005

Open Access: Open Sesame or Opening Pandora’s Box?

2005-06-17T17:14:00.000-06:00

June 2005 article by Marydee Ojala from EContent Journal

directory of open access repositories

2005-03-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

Something is beginning that could be useful:

A new service is starting development to support the rapidly emerging movement towards Open Access to research information. The new service, called DOAR - the Directory of Open Access Repositories - will categorise and list the wide variety of Open Access research archives that have grown up around the world. Such repositories have mushroomed over the last 2 years in response to calls by scholars and researchers worldwide to provide open access to research information. More about it.

Wonder though, why not find a way to catalog these databases into, say OCLC?

How much time would you have to spend to keep your work readily available?

2005-03-17T11:12:00.000-07:00

Stevan Harnad and Leslie Carr, Univ. of Southhampton, have posted a paper titled Keystroke Economy: A Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving
(http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/)
from the abstract:

A common objection to self-archiving is that it is an extra task that puts an unnecessary burden on each researcher. In particular, the need to enter the extra bibliographic metadata demanded by repositories for accurate searching and identification is presumed to be a particularly onerous task. This paper describes a preliminary study on two months of submissions for a mature repository and concludes that the amount of time spent entering metadata would be as little as 40 minutes per year for a highly active researcher.

Syllabus Magazine on Campus Technology

2005-02-01T12:19:00.000-07:00

Electronic Publishing >> Book 'Em by Matt Villano has some interesting info on both institutional repositories and open access. It also refers to the Proquest technology we've just been discussing.

"Digitizing selected, pre-existing printed content is only one approach to electronic publishing; in some cases, efforts are underway to publish original content in the digital medium right away, eliminating the printed page all together. On the publishing side, Oxford is leading the way here, publishing some of its newest journals only in digital form online. On the academic side, thanks to technology from the content-digitizing vendor ProQuest Information and Learning (www.il.proquest.com/umi), a leader in this effort is Boston College, where efforts to pilot an institutional repository of intellectual property have dovetailed with the publication of Web-only journals and have gained astounding momentum in recent months."

BBC Radio 4: Publish or be damned

2004-12-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

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.