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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

NEW POLICY FOR PUBLIC ACCESS TO OUTPUTS OF CANADIAN RESEARCH

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

* 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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/

When the internet isn't free

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

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/

Social Science Statistics repository

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.

Cites on IRs from our emails

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

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

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

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

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?

June 2005 article by Marydee Ojala from EContent Journal

directory of open access repositories

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?

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

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

It's still available (Feb 2005).

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

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

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

SPARC just had a conference on Institutional Repositories

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

Latest in the scholarly publishing debate

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

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

More details are in STLQ and Open Access News.

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

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

Submitting comments by email
PublicAccess@nih.gov

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


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

Association of American Universities

Association of American Medical Colleges

Council of the National Academy of Sciences

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

Comments on the Creative Commons in the Chronicle

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

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

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

Education & Open Access - post ERIC changes

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

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

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

NEW ebooks online - GOOGLE beta test program

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

SELL statement on Elsevier's new pricing model

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

Scholars are adopting open-access practices & being rewarded

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

From the abstract:

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

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

Open Access in Anthropology

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

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

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

ACRL has joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access

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

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

IEEE Bioinformatics

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

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

Out of this world

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

SCIRUS - open access from Elsevier!

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