Publishers Allowing the Deposition of their Published Version/PDF in Institutional Repositories

The Sherpa-Romeo website has recently been updated to highlight the growing number of publishers that allow authors to deposit the publishers' version or publishers' PDF of a journal article into the author's institutional repository. There are now 50 that do so, including such important publishers as Duke U. Press and California U. Press. As Jane Smith points out via the JISC-Repositories list: these 50 publishers "allow immediate, un-embargoed deposit into repositories -- even more allow use in restricted circumstances. This means that there is a large volume of work which can be deposited directly into repositories even if the author has not retained their own final draft. We hope that this information will help repository administrators in encouraging deposit into their repositories."

For a list of these publishers allowing authors to deposit the publisher version or PDF of their article in an Institutional Repository, without fee or an embargo see the following: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PDFandIR.html

European Commission Launches Online Pilot Project

The European Commission has launched a pilot project to provide open access to EU-funded research results after a 6-12 month embargo period. This improves access to scientific articles funded by the EU.

Max Planck Society and PLoS Agree Upon Central Funding of Publication Fees

The Max Planck Society (MPS) recently announced that it would pay from central MPS funds the publication fees of MPS scientists who publish in Public Library of Science (PLoS) journals. From the press release:

Like many Open Access journals, PLoS journals charge a fee for publication. For papers accepted in PLoS journals after July 1st, 2008, MPS will pay the publication fee directly to PLoS from central funds for all articles where the corresponding author is affiliated with a Max Planck Institute.

"PLoS is a top quality Open Access publisher. We are pleased to support a seminal publication model with this collaboration and thus facilitate publishing for our scientists in this interesting spectrum of titles", said Ralf Schimmer, head of the Department of Scientific Information Provision of the Max Planck Digital Library.

PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS applies the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to all published articles. Under the CCAL, authors retain ownership of the copyright for their article, but allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy articles in PLoS journals, so long as the original authors and source are cited. No permission is required from the authors or the publishers. Thus, the contents of the seven Open Access journals of PLoS are freely accessible for the reader worldwide via internet.

“The Max Planck Society is one of the world’s leading research organizations whose researchers have an international reputation for scientific excellence. We are delighted to be working with MPS so that more MPS researchers will be able to publish their work in PLoS journals, and for the broader promotion of Open Access to research literature", said Mark Patterson, Director of Publishing at PLoS.

Publisher-Author Agreements and the NIH Public Access Policy

The following excerpt is from a news release issued today (8/15/08) by the Association of Research Libraries:

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released "PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights: Agreements between 12 Publishers and the Authors Subject to the NIH Public Access Policy," by Ben Grillot, MLS (Maryland 2002), second-year student at the George Washington University Law School, and legal intern for ARL.

To help authors make informed choices about their rights, Grillot compares how the agreements of 12 publishers permit authors to meet the requirements of the recently revised National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy and share their works while they are under embargo. The NIH Public Access Policy requires authors of NIH-funded research to deposit their works in PubMed Central and make them publicly available within 12 months of publication. . . .

Grillot concludes that the significant variability in publisher agreements requires authors with NIH funding to closely examine publisher agreements and the rights granted and retained when deciding where to publish their research. His analysis of these 12 agreements will help authors determine what to look for in an agreement and what questions to ask before signing.

"PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights" is available for free download from the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/grillot-pubmed.pdf. It will also be included in a forthcoming issue of ARL: A Bimonthly Report.

Mellon Foundation Assesses E-Book Projects

According to an item in the Aug. 8, 2008 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the section on scholarly communication in the just-published 2007 report of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation states: "The transition to e-books has not been as smooth and as rapid as Mellon (and many others) thought it would be." In an effort to give a much needed boost to university presses but without any requirements that the presses produce books in digital format, the Mellon Foundation has awarded sizable grants to the presses for publishing books in one of two categories: the first a new series called the American Literature Initiative and the second a series on the civil rights movement. The absence of any expectation that the books be produced digitally was explained by two of the Mellon report authors Donald J. Waters and Joseph S. Meisel:

"Both projects [Gutenberg-e monographs and The Humanities E-Book project] have been extremely valuable in demonstrating the capabilities and requirements for publishing monographs authored specifically for electronic media," Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel write. "But neither of them succeeded in establishing the core hypothesis that such books would be cheaper to produce and distribute than those designed for print media."

All of which suggests we'll have to wait and see what the future role for e-books will be in the complex world of scholarly communication.

Publisher Facilitation of PMC Deposition Often Accompanied by Maximum Embargo Period

The August 7th issue of Library Journal Academic Newswire reports that National Institutes of Health (NIH) officials are recognizing that as many publishers are offering to facilitate deposition of journal content in the PubMed Central repository under the NIH Mandate, most are also requiring the maximum, 12-month embargo period before the article is released as open access.

ChemSpider -- Open Access Tool for Chemists

ChemSpider is a new structure-focused tool for search and retrieval of open access chemical information. You'll find here a single interface for access to structural and property data found in such open access repositories as PubChem (the National Library of Medicine compound database), ChemIDPlus, various NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) databases, Oxford University Chemical Safety Data and many others. Use the literature search module to link out to PubMed Central, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the International Union of Crystallography, and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, amongst others, to retrieve both freely-available and licensed resources.