Open Access Policy @ Georgia Tech

On November 27, 2012 the faculty of Georgia Tech approved a new open access policy which will take effect January 1, 2013.

Excerpts:

The Faculty of Georgia Tech is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In addition to the public benefit of such dissemination, this policy is intended to serve faculty interests by promoting greater reach and impact for articles, simplifying author retention of distribution rights, and aiding in electronic preservation. In keeping with these commitments, the Faculty adopts the following policy: 

Each Faculty member grants to Georgia Tech Research Corporation (hereinafter "GTRC") nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to GTRC a nonexclusive, irrevocable, royalty-­‐free, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, provided the articles are not sold or licensed for a profit by GTRC or any GTRC-­‐granted licensee. 

This policy applies to all published scholarly articles that any person authors or co-­‐authors while appointed as a member of the Faculty, except for any such articles authored or co-­‐authored before the adoption of this policy, or subject to a conflicting agreement formed before the adoption of this policy, or conducted under a classified research agreement. Upon notification by the author, the Provost or Provost's designate will waive application of this license for a particular article. At author request, access will be delayed for up to one year. 

To assist in distributing the scholarly articles, each Faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the Provost’s Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Provost’s Office, no later than the date of publication. The Provost’s Office or designate will make the scholarly article available to the public in an open-­‐access institutional repository. . . .

Berlin 10 Open Access Conference

Abby Clobridge in Information Today provides a recap of the proceedings of The Berlin 10 Open Access Conference that took place at Stellenbosch University, South Africa (6–10 November 2012). The theme of the conference was "Networked Scholarship in a Networked World: Participation in Open Access." One may also download a number of conference papers and the keynote address (given by Ms Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, European Commission, Belgium), listen to a selection of podcasts, and view Powerpoint presentations from the official Conference site.

Open Access Mandated by Durham University

Durham University has agreed to mandate open access to the research publications of its community. The principle stipulations are:

1. Where copyright agreements permit, all research outputs published in peer reviewed journals since 1 January 2008 must be made freely available in Durham Research Online (DRO), the University’s institutional repository. This should be the final peer-reviewed, pre-publication version of the paper where copyright restricts the use of the published version.

2. Authors are also strongly encouraged to deposit other types of research outputs (including book chapters, reports and grey literature) in DRO and make them freely available for consultation.

3. Where the deposit of final research outputs is a requirement of the funding conditions, it is the responsibility of the individual author to ensure that these conditions are met.

4. Where appropriate, researchers are strongly encouraged to take advantage of opportunities to publish their research in other Open Access forms. . . . 

See the full open access mandate statement.

Why Decouple the Journal?

 "Today's journals are still the best scholarly communication system possible using 17th century technology."

Jason Priem, altmetrics innovator and creator of such tools as ImpactStory, gives persuasive reasons to "decouple" the journal.

He notes that we have not allowed the web to revolutionize scholarly communication and that "online journals are essentially paper journals delivered by faster horses."

In addition to using altmetrics as a broader and more meaningful measure of impact, journals could be decoupled. Instead of all journals providing all services separately and redundantly, authors could pick and choose providers of the four major journal functions: dissemination, certification, archiving and registration from various (decoupled) providers. For instance -- scholarly societies might provide peer review services and institutional or subject based repositories might provide archiving and registration, while the author might choose to do his own marketing through tweets, blogs and scholarly contacts.

Jason's own description of this new publishing model is more eloquent. His in depth article has been published in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience.
Kevin Smith has a recent blog post about his ideas that is helpful as well.

Open Access Explained

The video below includes excellent talking points for open access advocates -- concise, easy to understand and fun!
Nick Shockey and Jonathan Eisen take us through the world of open access publishing and explain just what it's all about.  From phdcomics.com