Scholarly Communication News@BC

Peter Suber Interviewed by Springer

2012-02-13T17:13:00.004-05:00

Peter Suber was interviewed by Springer as part of its Author Zone series. Among other topics, Suber discusses some of the benefits for authors when publishing open access; the obstacles funding bodies face; his views on where open access will be in five years time; his disagreement with Springer over its inimical attitude to immediate open access.

Full interview.

FRPAA 2012 Introduced

2012-02-09T17:18:00.002-05:00

Washington, DC – U.S. Representative Mike Doyle (D-PA) today introduced bipartisan legislation that directs federal agencies to encourage open public access to federally funded scientific research.

“Americans have the right to see the results of research funded with taxpayer dollars,” Congressman Doyle said in introducing the Federal Research Public Access Act. “Yet such research too often gets locked away behind a pay-wall, forcing those who want to learn from it to pay expensive subscription fees for access.”

“The Federal Research Public Access Act will encourage broader collaboration among scholars in the scientific community by permitting widespread dissemination of research findings. Promoting greater collaboration will inevitably lead to more innovative research outcomes and more effective solutions in the fields of biomedicine, energy, education, and health care.”

The Federal Research Public Access Act would require federal agencies with an extramural research budget of $100 million or more to make federally-funded research available for free online access by the general public, no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Scholars Boycott Elsevier

2012-02-06T15:24:00.007-05:00

Back in January, Fields medalist and mathematician at the University of Cambridge Timothy Gowers made public his longstanding boycott of the Elsevier publishing company.
After outlining the objectionable practices of Elsevier, Gowers stated:

So I am not only going to refuse to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on, but I am saying so publicly. I am by no means the first person to do this, but the more of us there are, the more socially acceptable it becomes, and that is my main reason for writing this post.

It occurs to me that it might help if there were a website somewhere, where mathematicians who have decided not to contribute in any way to Elsevier journals could sign their names electronically.

Within days the site was up and now has approximately 3000 scholars' signatures.

A few days ago, Michael Eisen published an analysis of the phenomenon:

Having spent a decade fighting the scientific publishing establishment, the last few weeks have been kind of fun. Elsevier, the Dutch publishing conglomerate that has long served as the poster child for all that is wrong with the industry, has come under withering criticism for pushing legislation that would prevent the US government from making the results of taxpayer funded research available to the public.

Scores of scientists (myself included) have slammed the hypocrisy of the bill. Prominent publishers, fearing a backlash against Elsevier’s overreach, have come out in favor of government public access policies.Even the editors of The Lancet, one of Elsevier’s prized possessions, called the bill a “damaging threat to science“.

But amidst all this richly deserved opprobrium, we must not forget that Elsevier are in a position to behave so poorly because we let them. Publishers control the paywalls that restrict access to the scientific literature. But individual researchers control the fate of their own papers. And the only reason a paywall ever stands between anyone and a paper they want to read is because its authors chose to put it there.

He points out a critical difference between the OA environment today and what existed when previous efforts were launched, and issues a call to action:

Thus, people joining in the new boycott have no excuses not to follow through. There are plenty of viable OA options and it is simply unacceptable for any scientist who decries Elsevier’s actions and believes that the subscription based model is no longer serving science to send a single additional paper to journals that do not provide full OA to every paper they publish. So, come on people! If we do this now, paywalls will crumble, and we all be better off. So, come on! Let’s do it!

SOPA's Killer Cousin You've Probably Never Heard About

2012-01-27T17:08:00.002-05:00

Abdulrahman El-Sayed has an excellent article in today's Huffington Post in which he strongly criticizes the proposed "Research Works Act" (H.R.3699). El-Sayed argues that this bill, if passed, will be detrimental to the dissemination of important biomedical research results. And the "heaviest burden . . . would fall on the poor and underserved."

Excerpts:

. . . . One of the greatest public goods our taxpayers fund is biomedical research.

Compared to all of the direct foreign aid our government disburses and all the flag-waving it does in an effort to improve our image on the global market, freely available NIH-funded research is among the best displays of goodwill we put forth. Consider, for example, a recent conversation I shared in an Alexandria hospital with Dr. Salah, an Egyptian surgeon. When he found out I was American he proclaimed "God bless America for Pubmed" -- the National Library of Medicine's online search engine for health research.

But that may soon come to an end. A recent bill, the "Research Works Act", proposed under pressure from the Association of American Publishers, threatens to strangle access to health research to protect the interests of a few greedy corporations -- it would keep crucial, life-saving information from doctors and scientists who use it to take care of people and contribute to knowledge. . . .

This bill would force taxpayers -- who pay for NIH-funded research in the first place -- to pay publishers for the right to access the science they've paid to have done.

What's worse, the heaviest burden of this insidious bill, if passed, would fall on the poor and underserved.

At home, it would keep crucial medical information from doctors who serve low-income patients and who can't afford the steep subscription costs. In low-income countries abroad, it would choke off doctors and scientists who rely on NIH-funded research to improve the lives and wellbeing of billions of people. . . .

Access to crucial scientific knowledge is at stake. Help kill this bill and save lives by contacting your representatives and expressing your indignation today.

Cracks Form in Anti-Open Access Push

2012-01-19T17:48:00.002-05:00

A brief article in The Scientist states that a number of academic publishers are disagreeing with their commercial counterparts over the latters' support of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) which is advocating on behalf of the proposed Research Works Act (H.R.3699). This Act aims to limit drastically public access to federally funded research findings. The academic publishers mentioned are: MIT, the Rockefeller University Press, the University of California Press, and the Pennsylvania State University Press.

Excerpts:

Academic publishers are publically disagreeing with their commercial counterparts over their association’s support of a bill being considered in the US Congress that would limit open access to research findings funded with tax payer dollars. . . .

The MIT Press was the first to contravene the association’s position on the legislation. “The AAP’s press release on the Research Works Act does not reflect the position of the MIT Press,” the press’s director Ellen Faran wrote in an email making the rounds in open-access circles last week. “We will not, however, withdraw from the AAP on this issue as we value the association’s work over all and the opportunity to participate as a member of the larger and diverse publishing community.” She added her suspicion that other academic presses felt the same way about the Research Works Act, and it turns out she was right.

The Rockefeller University Press, the University of California Press, and the Pennsylvania State University Press all followed the MIT Press’s lead, releasing their own statements rejecting the association’s stance. Throughout last week, open-access advocate Richard Poynder followed the splits on his blog Open and Shut. . . .

"Peers, Review your Actions": OA Advocacy

2012-01-11T08:39:00.003-05:00

One of the seven most widely read articles in The Times Higher Education in 2011 is "Peers, Review your Actions" by Michael P. Taylor, University of Bristol. Arguing strongly for universal open access to the results of research, Taylor urges scholars to stop providing their editorial and review work to publishers for free.

Excerpts:

. . . . It's a well-rehearsed truth that the government funds research; academics do the work, write the papers and give them to a publisher (often paying the publisher for the privilege); other researchers edit the papers, usually for no fee; other researchers provide peer review gratis; yet somehow the publisher ends up owning the result of the whole process - only to sell copies back to the researchers who did the work and the citizens who funded it.

Everyone knows this system is a historical hangover, but the cycle is hard to break. University libraries have to buy the journals so that their scholars can read them. And because only peer-reviewed articles are respected, scholars feel they have to place their work in the journals in order to advance their careers. . . .

But what's truly mind-boggling is that we also review and edit for these corporations. For free. It's the editorial and review process that gives the crucial stamp of approval to research. But publishers don't provide this: it's one more thing that we give them. We feel obliged to contribute our time, effort and expertise because reviewing is seen as a service to the community. But it's become a service to corporations. . . .

Research Works Act

2012-01-06T10:28:00.006-05:00

The Research Works Act is a new bill introduced in Congress on December 16. It attempts to repeal the requirement that NIH funded research be published in the open access PubMed Central -- and to block other agencies from being required to do the same.
Peter Suber has an informative post here -- and the follow-on comments provide even more information.
The American Association of Publishers has a press release supporting the bill.
This is particularly interesting in light of the recent White House request for information on Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research.
Boston College Libraries submitted a response to the RFI. Please contact Jane Morris, Scholarly Communication Librarian, if you would like a copy. jane[dot]morris[at]bc[dot]edu

MIT launches online learning initiative: MITx

2011-12-23T09:35:00.007-05:00

For years Massachusetts Institute of Technology has provided its OpenCourseWare program which offers over 2,000 free online courses. MIT has now announced a new online learning program, MITx, that will:

organize and present course material to enable students to learn at their own pace
feature interactivity, online laboratories and student-to-student communication
allow for the individual assessment of any student’s work and allow students who demonstrate their mastery of subjects to earn a certificate of completion awarded by MITx
operate on an open-source, scalable software infrastructure in order to make it continuously improving and readily available to other educational institutions.

Read the rest of the 19 Dec, 2011 press release.

Click here for an overview by Steve Kolowich of this MITx program in Inside Higher Education.

Europeana Adds its 20 Millionth Item

2011-12-19T15:13:00.002-05:00

Europeana recently added its 20 millionth item, Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath. Launched with 2,000,000 items in 2008 Europeana has now increased its content by a factor of ten.

"Google Books is at heart a catalogue of errors"

2011-12-15T16:17:00.002-05:00

Geoffrey Nunberg, University of California, Berkeley, is highly critical of what he believes are the widespread inaccuracies of Google Books according to an article in Times Higher Education:

Two years ago, Google Books was becoming the world's largest digital library and, with an effective monopoly, seemed "almost certain to be the last one".

The tragedy for scholars was that Google Books' metadata - which allow users to search the catalogue - were "a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess".

Such was the argument made in 2009 by Geoffrey Nunberg, adjunct full professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley.

He went on to have a good deal of fun with the many strange anomalies: 115 hits for Greta Garbo and 325 for Woody Allen in books said to date from before they were born; editions of Jane Eyre classified under history or antiques and collectibles; Sigmund Freud listed as an author of a guide to an internet interface.

There was even a case of an 1890 guidebook assigned to 1774 because it happened to open with an advertisement for a shirt manufacturer founded in that year.

All this made Google Books' search facility a very dangerous tool for serious researchers looking to track, for example, the way a particular word has changed its meaning over time.

In response to Professor Nunberg's critique, Google offered to correct any errors that were brought to its attention. But while this process has ironed out specific glitches in the intervening years, Professor Nunberg does not believe it has made a fundamental difference.

"The changes are a drop in a greatly enlarged ocean," he said, adding that the flaws in Google's metadata remain "a big systematic structural problem".

In the course of his research alone, he has continued to come across glaring errors similar to those he flagged up two years ago.

While working on a history of swearing, for example, Professor Nunberg did searches for the word "asshole". Google Books' search facility promptly provided much useful material.

But what is obviously a contemporary novel was listed as the complete works of the French composers Jean-Philippe Rameau and Camille Saint-Saëns. A novel by Arthur Hailey was catalogued as A Survey of American Chemistry, and a book about tattooing as Tudor Historical Thought.

A colleague of Professor Nunberg who was researching the history of alcohol searched for a kind of port known as a "30-year-old tawny" and was presented with a detailed discussion of the subject in a volume Google Books showed as bearing the title How to Play Better Soccer. There were also cases of Google technicians who had managed to scan in images of their fingers rather than the relevant pages of text. Among more general concerns, periodicals were often dated by their first issue.

Professor Nunberg said he could not understand why Google scans in copies of books from major research libraries, where the details tend to be recorded correctly, and then turns for its metadata to far less reliable sources.

To patch up the huge problems would now require substantial time and resources. These were unlikely to be forthcoming, Professor Nunberg said, because, "like most high-tech companies, Google puts a much higher premium on innovation than maintenance. They aren't good at the punctilious, anal-retentive sort of work librarians are used to."

UK takes steps to make publicly funded research open

2011-12-09T10:41:00.005-05:00

Results of publicly funded research will be open access – science minister

From The Guardian

New policy announced by David Willetts to make research freely available challenges business models of academic publishers

The government has signalled a revolution in scientific publishing by throwing its weight behind the idea that all publicly funded scientific research must be published in open-access journals.

The policy is in the government document Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth published on Monday, which also includes plans for a series of cash prizes for teams to solve specific scientific challenges and a new £75m fund for small businesses to develop their ideas into commercial products.

The commitment to making publicly funded research free to access is a direct challenge to the business models of the big academic publishing companies, which are the gatekeepers for the majority of high-quality scientific research. Previous attempts by open access publishers to break this stranglehold over the dissemination of scientific results have largely failed.

Positive Self-Archiving Stats

2011-12-07T09:22:00.003-05:00

Drawing from policies of 19,000 journals, Sherpa/RoMEO statistics show:

87% of journals allow some form of immediate self-archiving by authors

60% of journals allow immediate self-archiving of peer reviewed articles (the postprint, peer-reviewed version)

94% allow self-archiving after embargo periods have expired and restrictions met

Only 5% allow no self-archiving at all!

Open Access Journals from Society Publishers

2011-12-02T14:56:00.004-05:00

The latest issue of Peter Suber's Open Access Newsletter is now available. Particularly interesting is his feature on open access journals from society publishers. His list shows 530 societies publishing 616 full OA journals.

How many scholarly societies publish OA journals, and how many OA journals do they publish? Four years ago (November 2007), Caroline Sutton and I released the first edition of our inventory answering those questions, and today we release the second edition.

Cutting to the chase: Our 2007 list turned up 425 societies publishing 450 full or non-hybrid OA journals. Our 2011 list shows 530 societies publishing 616 full OA journals.

We're sure we overlooked some society OA journals in 2007 and we're sure we're still overlooking some today. If it weren't for that, we could say that the number of societies publishing OA journals grew by 25% in the last four years, and the number of their OA journals by 37%. Nevertheless it's hard to avoid the conclusion that both numbers are growing significantly.

The second edition of the list is a Google spreadsheet under a CC-BY license.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AgBYTDKmesh7dDZ6UnBfcnpOdVpnd3ptSnVpQ0xrenc#gid=0 (make sure to select "List" at bottom of spreadsheet).

. . . .

Quietly, Google Puts History Online

2011-11-29T13:11:00.003-05:00

There's an interesting article by Eric Pfanner in the New York Times discussing Google's initiatives in digitizing artifacts from museums, archives etc. and making them freely available globally to any one with internet access. Pfanner mentions a number of projects digitized by Google, all of which have seen great increases in the number of virtual visitors. He also considers the criticism that is often directed at nonprofit cultural institutions for working so closely with such a vast corporate company like Google.

Beginning of article:

PARIS — When the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, home to the Dead Sea Scrolls, reopened last year after an extensive renovation, it attracted a million visitors in the first 12 months. When the museum opened an enhanced Web site with newly digitized versions of the scrolls in September, it drew a million virtual visitors in three and a half days.

The scrolls, scanned with ultrahigh-resolution imaging technology, have been viewed on the Web from 210 countries — including some, like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Syria, that provide few real-world visitors to the Israel Museum.
“This is taking the material to an amazing range of audiences,” said James S. Snyder, the museum’s director. “There’s no way we would have had the technical capability to do this on our own.”
The digitization of the scrolls was done by Google under a new initiative aimed at demonstrating that the Internet giant’s understanding of culture extends beyond the corporate kind. The Google Cultural Institute plans to make artifacts like the scrolls — from museums, archives, universities and other collections around the world — accessible to any Internet user. . . .

Boston Library Consortium endorses the Berlin Declaration

2011-11-08T15:55:00.004-05:00

The Directors of the member libraries of the Boston Library Consortium (BLC) have unanimously agreed to endorse the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The BLC's name will be added to the list of organizations that have signed the Declaration.

More about the Berlin Declaration is available at

http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/

ARL Endorses the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities

2011-11-04T13:49:00.000-05:00

Press release from the Association of Research Libraries:

Washington, DC—On November 1, 2011, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) joined over 300 organizations and institutions to endorse the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

In a letter to Dr. Peter Gruss, President of the Max Planck Society, Winston Tabb, ARL President and Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and Museums at the Johns Hopkins University, wrote, “The Association of Research Libraries has been a longtime and consistent supporter of Open Access and has worked hard to advance its principles internationally. During the October 2011 meeting of the Board of Directors a decision was taken to become a signatory to the Berlin Declaration. I am pleased to extend our endorsement of the Declaration and join the growing number of signatories from North America.”

The Berlin Declaration was drafted by the Max Planck Society to, in part, “promote the Internet as a functional instrument for a global scientific knowledge base and human reflection and to specify measures which research policy makers, research institutions, funding agencies, libraries, archives, and museums need to consider.”

A National Digital Public Library Begins to Take Shape

2011-10-28T16:33:00.001-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a recent meeting about the proposed Digital Public Library of America:

"The Digital Public Library of America doesn't exist yet, but it's closer to becoming a reality.

At an energized meeting held here at the National Archives on Friday, representatives from top cultural institutions and public and research libraries expressed robust support for the proposed library, which would create a portal to allow the public to get easy online access to collections held at many different institutions.

Two foundations said they would together give $5-million in grant money to help get it up and running by April 2013. A major European digital library announced it will work with its planned American counterpart to make their technical structures compatible. And nine technology teams showcased online frameworks they built for a "beta sprint" contest to develop ideas for the technical framework the library will require. . . ."

The complete article

DPLA 's First Plenary

2011-10-22T08:50:00.007-05:00

The Digital Public Library of America's first plenary session kicked off with the announcement of $5 million in funding from the Sloan Foundation and the Arcadia Fund.
More on the plenary meeting.

Robert Darnton on Books, eBooks, Google Books, and the Digital Public Library of America

2011-10-21T09:17:00.004-05:00

In a very interesting video interview Robert Darnton, historian and director of the university library at Harvard, talks about books, ebooks, the Google Books settlement, the Digital Public Library of America, and the future of libraries.

http://librarylab.law.harvard.edu/blog/2011/10/17/robert-darnton-on-books-ebooks-google-books-and-the-dpla/

ACRL Signs Berlin Declaration on Open Access

2011-10-18T09:28:00.004-05:00

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) recently joined the growing ranks of signatories to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and the Humanities. ACRL encourages college and research libraries, as well as other campus groups, to follow suit.

The declaration builds on the significant progress of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, calling for Open Access to knowledge in the humanities as well as in the sciences. It also moves beyond the scope of primary literature, indicating, “Open access contributions include original scientific research results, raw data and metadata, source materials, digital representations of pictorial and graphical materials and scholarly multimedia material.”

Signatories commit to the principle of Open Access as well as to pursuing solutions that advance the Internet “as an emerging functional medium for distributing knowledge.”

Learn more about the Berlin Declaration.

Europe’s national librarians support opening up their data via CC0

2011-10-14T15:35:00.003-05:00

Following the exciting news of Europeana’s new data exchange agreement, which authorizes Europeana to release the metadata for millions of cultural works into the public domain using the CC0 public domain dedication, the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL) voted to support the agreement in a meeting last week at the Royal Library of Denmark. CENL represents Europe’s national libraries and “is responsible for the massive collection of publications that represent the accumulated knowledge of Europe.”

From the press release,

“It means that the datasets describing all the millions of books and texts ever published in Europe – the title, author, date, imprint, place of publication and so on, which exists in the vast library catalogues of Europe – will become increasingly accessible for anybody to re-use for whatever purpose they want. . . ."

Report: Authors and Users vis-à-vis Journals and Repositories

2011-10-07T13:56:00.002-05:00

The PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) Behavioural Research group from the Department of Information Science & LISU, Loughborough University, has completed its study: Authors and Users vis-à-vis Journals and Repositories.

The Executive Summary:
The Behavioural research project is one of three independent research projects commissioned and managed by PEER as part of the PEER Observatory. The aim of the Behavioural research project was to address the role of stage-two manuscript repositories in the scholarly and scientific communication system by exploring perceptions, motivations and behaviours of authors and readers. The research was carried out between April 2009 and August 2011 by the Department of Information Science and LISU at Loughborough University, UK.

Key conclusions:

Over the period of Phases 1 and 2 of the Behavioural research project the increase in the number of researchers who reported placing a version of their journal article(s) into an Open Access Repository was negligible.
Researchers who associated Open Access with ‘self-archiving’ were in the minority.
Open Access is more likely to be associated with ‘self-archiving’ (Green Road) by researchers in the Physical sciences & mathematics and the Social sciences, humanities & arts, than those in the Life sciences and the Medical sciences who are more likely to associate Open Access with Open Access Journals (Gold Road).
There is anecdotal evidence that some researchers consider making journal articles accessible via Open Access to be beyond their remit.
Authors tend to be favourable to Open Access and receptive to the benefits of self-archiving in terms of greater readership and wider dissemination of their research, with the caveat that self-archiving does not compromise the pivotal role of the published journal article.
Readers have concerns about the authority of article content and the extent to which it can be cited when the version they have accessed is not the published final version. These concerns are more prevalent where the purpose of reading is to produce a published journal article, and are perceived as less of an issue for other types of reading purpose.
Academic researchers have a conservative set of attitudes, perceptions and behaviours towards the scholarly communication system and do not desire fundamental changes in the way research is currently disseminated and published.
Open Access Repositories are perceived by researchers as complementary to, rather than replacing, current forums for disseminating and publishing research.

Streaming video decision

2011-10-05T10:15:00.004-05:00

From the Chronicle of Higher Education
Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Against UCLA Over Use of Streaming Video
October 4, 2011, 8:18 pm

By Marc Parry

A judge dismissed a lawsuit on Monday that had accused the University of California at Los Angeles of copyright infringement for streaming videos online. One copyright expert thinks the UCLA decision increases the chance that the HathiTrust digital-library consortium will prevail in its effort to fight off a separate copyright lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild over the digitization of books from university libraries.

The case was dismissed largely on the sovereign immunity issue (which does not apply to private universities), and the lack of standing by plaintiffs, who were not copyright holders. This may be a hopeful sign for those watching the HathiTrust orphan rights case.

See Kevin Smith's discussion of the limited applicability of this case.

Princeton Goes Open Access!

2011-09-30T11:20:00.003-05:00

Following in the footsteps of a number of other prestigious universities, e.g. Harvard and MIT, Princeton University has adopted an open access policy that requires its researchers not to hand over to publishers their copyright of scholarly articles. However, the policy does specify that a waiver may be granted in certain cases.

More information:

. . . . The new rule is part of an Open Access policy aimed at broadening the reach of their scholarly work and encouraging publishers to adjust standard contracts that commonly require exclusive copyright as a condition of publication.

Universities pay millions of dollars a year for academic journal subscriptions. People without subscriptions, which can cost up to $25,000 a year for some journals or hundreds of dollars for a single issue, are often prevented from reading taxpayer funded research. Individual articles are also commonly locked behind pay walls.

Researchers and peer reviewers are not paid for their work but academic publishers have said such a business model is required to maintain quality.

At a September 19 meeting, Princeton’s Faculty Advisory Committee on Policy adopted a new open access policy that gives the university the “nonexclusive right to make available copies of scholarly articles written by its faculty, unless a professor specifically requests a waiver for particular articles.”

“The University authorizes professors to post copies of their articles on their own web sites or on University web sites, or in other not-for-a-fee venues,” the policy said.

“The main effect of this new policy is to prevent them from giving away all their rights when they publish in a journal.” . . . .

Internet Ruffles Pricey Scholarly Journals

2011-09-23T07:06:00.000-05:00

D. D. Guttenplan, in an 18th September, 2011 article in The New York Times (Europe) considers the growth of open access journals and the various reactions to them.

The opening paragraphs:

LONDON — After decades of healthy profits, the scholarly publishing industry now finds itself in the throes of a revolt led by the most unlikely campus revolutionaries: the librarians.

Universities from Britain to California are refusing to renew their expensive subscriptions, turning instead to “open access” publishing, an arrangement whereby material is made available free on the Internet with few or no restrictions except for the obligation to cite it.

Paul Ayris, director of library services at University College London, describes the revolt’s goal as “the dream of every researcher — from the desktop and at the end of an Internet connection, to be able to have the world’s literature at your fingertips.”

For the moment, that dream is still a long way off. But with British universities already spending 65 percent of their library acquisition budgets on periodicals — up from 50 percent 10 years ago — and university funding cut back, the pressure for change is mounting. . . .

7000 Journals now in DOAJ

2011-09-23T06:58:00.003-05:00

There are now more than 7000 journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. 45% of the journals, more than 600,000, are searchable at the article level. See the press release.

Public Availability of Published Research Data in High-Impact Journals

2011-09-16T14:50:00.001-05:00

In a recent PLoSONE article, "Public Availability of Published Research Data in High-Impact Journals", the authors assess the current status of making research data available in highly-cited journals across the scientific literature. Their general conclusion is that much more needs to be done to make such data available.

Abstract:

Background
There is increasing interest to make primary data from published research publicly available. We aimed to assess the current status of making research data available in highly-cited journals across the scientific literature.

Methods and Results
We reviewed the first 10 original research papers of 2009 published in the 50 original research journals with the highest impact factor. For each journal we documented the policies related to public availability and sharing of data. Of the 50 journals, 44 (88%) had a statement in their instructions to authors related to public availability and sharing of data. However, there was wide variation in journal requirements, ranging from requiring the sharing of all primary data related to the research to just including a statement in the published manuscript that data can be available on request. Of the 500 assessed papers, 149 (30%) were not subject to any data availability policy. Of the remaining 351 papers that were covered by some data availability policy, 208 papers (59%) did not fully adhere to the data availability instructions of the journals they were published in, most commonly (73%) by not publicly depositing microarray data. The other 143 papers that adhered to the data availability instructions did so by publicly depositing only the specific data type as required, making a statement of willingness to share, or actually sharing all the primary data. Overall, only 47 papers (9%) deposited full primary raw data online. None of the 149 papers not subject to data availability policies made their full primary data publicly available.

Conclusion
A substantial proportion of original research papers published in high-impact journals are either not subject to any data availability policies, or do not adhere to the data availability instructions in their respective journals. This empiric evaluation highlights opportunities for improvement.

All About Orphans

2011-09-14T08:38:00.004-05:00

Those of you who follow Scholarly Communication issues closely know that the Author's Guild has filed suit against HathiTrust and others over the Orphan Works Project. Here is a selection items to read to better understand the issues:

From the New York Times: Lawsuit Seeks the Removal of a Digital Book Collection

From James Grimmelman in his blog, the Laboratorium: The Orphan Wars

From Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications @Duke: Why is adopting orphans controversial?
And his follow-up post today: Stop the internet, we want to get off!

And, finally: ARL's Resource Packet on the issues.

Early Journal Content on JSTOR, Free to Anyone in World

2011-09-09T08:34:00.003-05:00

JSTOR is making freely available to anyone throughout the world a vast amount of journal content. This content, almost 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals, consists of articles published prior to 1923 in the United States and prior to 1870 elsewhere. All this material, representing approximately 6% of the total content on JSTOR, may be downloaded.

A quick video tutorial about how to access this content is available.

See JSTOR's 7th September, 2011 Press Release.

Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions

2011-09-06T10:51:00.002-05:00

"The University of Kansas (KU), which in June 2009 became the first U.S. public university to adopt an open access (OA) policy regarding scholarly research in peer-reviewed journals, recently announced that it had spearheaded the formation of a 22-member Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI). The coalition includes Harvard University, Stanford University, Columbia University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
...

According to the announcement, COAPI will "collaborate and share [OA] implementation strategies," and advocate nationally for OA institutions. Advocacy will be aimed at bringing attention to OA and issues that could weaken OA policies, such as OA waivers required by some publishers...."

Academic Publishers Make Murdoch look like a Socialist

2011-09-02T12:48:00.003-05:00

George Monbiot has an excellent article in The Guardian: "Academic Publishers make Murdoch look like a Socialist".

In it Monbiot castigates the outrageous profits earned by certain academic publishers, arguing that exorbitant journal costs result in less and less accessibility to the results of research, much of which the public has paid for though taxes.

. . . . What we see here is pure rentier capitalism: monopolising a public resource then charging exorbitant fees to use it. Another term for it is economic parasitism. To obtain the knowledge for which we have already paid, we must surrender our feu to the lairds of learning. . . .

The knowledge monopoly is as unwarranted and anachronistic as the corn laws. Let's throw off these parasitic overlords and liberate the research that belongs to us. . . .

Though most librarians and many faculty are aware of the article's points, the great utility of the article is that it's published in an important newspaper with a broad readership. The message is being spread slowly but, one hopes, surely. [Thanks to Robert Stanton, English Dept., for alerting me to this piece]

The First Free Research-Sharing Site, arXiv, Turns 20 With an Uncertain Future

2011-08-26T15:39:00.003-05:00

The electronic disciplinary repository arXiv.org turns 20 years old this month. arXiv, one of the earliest and most successful efforts of the Open Access movement, is a pre-print repository serving the physical sciences, math, astronomy, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics. Boston College as a supporting institution provides financial help to arXiv.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a short piece celebrating arXiv's 20th birthday. Excerpts:

. . . . ArXiv, back in 1991 and still today, focuses on physics. “The original plan was for roughly 100 full-text article submissions each year,” writes Mr. Ginsparg, who works at Cornell University. Today the site gets about 75,000 of these “preprints” every year, and it serves up about one million full-text downloads to about 400,000 users every week. It holds roughly 700,000 texts. . . .

Hirtle on HathiTrust and orphan works

2011-08-05T08:34:00.005-05:00

In this interesting interview, Peter Hirtle, who wrote the book on Copyright and Cultural Institutions, talks about HathiTrust and the work involved in finding copyright holders of orphan works.

Available at http://youtu.be/5qp1qpw8Lus

Shieber on Guerrilla Open Access

2011-08-01T08:23:00.006-05:00

Stuart Shieber posted a very sensible comment on the Aaron Swartz JSTOR dowloading case.
His fear is that Swartz's actions will provide more ammunition to open access opponents:

Finally, and most importantly, this kind of action is ineffective. As Peter Suber predicted in a trenchant post that we can now see as prescient, it merely has the effect of tying the legitimate, sensible, economically rational, and academically preferable approach of open access to memes of copyright violation, illegality, and naiveté. There are already sufficient attempts to inappropriately perform this kind of tying; we needn’t provide further ammunition. Unfortunate but completely predictable statements like “It is disappointing to see advocates of OA treat this person as some kind of hero.” tar those who pursue open access with the immorality and illegality that self-proclaimed guerrillas exhibit. In so doing, guerrilla OA is not only ineffective, but counterproductive.

Note -- the Suber post begins with a guerrilla manifesto attributed to Swartz -- but Suber goes on to take issue with the illegal acts advocated.

I have three basic reasons: (1) OA is already lawful and doesn't require the reform or violation of copyright law, even if it could leap forward with the right reforms. (2) OA activists will never match the publishing industry's funds for litigation. (3) One of the most persistent and harmful misunderstandings of OA is that it violates copyright law. We've come a long way in educating policy-makers out of that misunderstanding. But the Orwellian Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (a.k.a. Conyers bill) is just one recent piece of evidence that we still have a lot of educating to do and that publishers can still make a lot of hay from the misunderstandings which remain. A campaign to give the publishing lobby its first valid evidence that OA violates copyright is the last thing we need.

OpenDOAR reaches its 2000th Repository

2011-07-29T09:14:00.003-05:00

Sherpa's OpenDOAR, a directory of academic open access repositories throughout the world, recently added its 2000th repository entry. The directory lists repositories and allows breakdown and selection by a variety of criteria - see the Find page - which can also be viewed as statistical charts.

Ad*Access -- Over 7,000 Digitized Ads, 1911-1955

2011-07-22T11:19:00.004-05:00

Duke University's site Ad*Access is a particularly interesting digitization project. It provides access to over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements dating from 1911 to 1955. Five product categories are included - Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda. Students very frequently look for ads that they can use in their research papers. While more contemporary ones are fairly readily available from a variety of sources, older ones are often more difficult to locate. However, Ad*Access should be of major help in identifying ads from the first half of the 20th century.

The ads are free to be used for research, teaching, and private study. "For these purposes under Fair Use, you may reproduce (print, make photocopies, or download) materials from this web site without prior permission, on the condition that you provide proper attribution of the source in all copies." More information about Ad*Access and copyright may be found at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess/about/

Visualising China: China 1850-1950, An Interactive Resource

2011-07-15T12:12:00.002-05:00

The recently launched Visualising China project has 8,000 rare photographs of China and Chinese life from the period 1850 to 1950. The site "allows access to many previously unseen albums, envelopes and private collections and also major collections such as Historical Photographs of China, the Sir Robert Hart Collection and Joseph Needham's Photographs of Wartime China. These have many sub-collections and albums."

For more about the Visualising China project see http://visualisingchina.net/#page=about

2011-07-08T08:14:00.002-05:00

The Royal Society has announced the launch of Open Biology, a new open access journal covering biology at the molecular and cellular level. "This selective, online Royal Society journal will publish original, high quality, peer-reviewed research in cell biology; developmental and structural biology; molecular biology; biochemistry; neuroscience; immunology; microbiology; and genetics. The criteria for acceptance will be scientific excellence, importance and originality."

Digital Public Library of America: Updates

2011-07-01T11:22:00.002-05:00

On 16 June Paula J. Hane provided in Information Today an update on the Digital Public Library of America. Yesterday John Palfrey, the vice dean for library and information resources at Harvard Law School, the co-director of the Berkman Center and Chair of the DPLA, provided a YouTube video update on the DPLA:

The British Library and Google to make 250,000 books available to all

2011-06-27T13:14:00.003-05:00

The British Library (BL) recently announced a collaboration with Google to digitize 250,000 books periodicals, and pamphlets from 1700 to 1870. The British Library will select the works while Google will do the actual digitization (as well as pay for the digitization). The digitized books will be freely available through both the BL's and Google's own websites.

From the press release:

. . . . It will include material in a variety of major European languages, and will focus on books that are not yet freely available in digital form online.

The first works to be digitised will range from feminist pamphlets about Queen Marie-Antoinette (1791), to the invention of the first combustion engine-driven submarine (1858), and an account of a stuffed Hippopotamus owned by the Prince of Orange (1775).

Once digitised, these unique items will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library’s website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive.

Researchers, students and other users of the Library will be able to view historical items from anywhere in the world as well as copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes. . . .

It is also planned to make the works available via Europeana (http://www.europeana.eu/), the European Digital Library.

Charles Darwin's Library

2011-06-23T15:18:00.005-05:00

Charles Darwin’s Library is a digital edition of the books comprising Darwin's personal library.

From the site's History & Scope section:

. . . . the library of Charles Darwin is more than the collection of the works he owned at his death. As Francis already appreciated in 1908, ‘The chief interest of the Darwin books lies in the pencil notes scribbled on their pages, or written on scraps of paper and pinned to the last page.’2 Darwin did read both systematically and with great intensity. He read to gather evidence, to explore and define the research possibilities of his evolutionary ideas, and to gauge reactions to his own publications. In fact, reading was a major tool in Darwin’s scientific practice. Thus what our digital reconstruction of the Darwin Library delivers is the ability to retrace and reduplicate Darwin’s reading of a wealth of materials.

The portion of the Darwin Library now published at the Biodiversity Heritage Library constitutes Phase 1 of a collaborative project to digitise the Darwin Library works and to provide transcriptions of Darwin’s marginalia side by side with the pages he marked. Phase 1 presents images and marginalia for 330 books, represents 22% of the total 1480 Darwin Library book titles. But, more significantly, these 330 titles represent 44% of the 743 Darwin books that bear his annotations or marks. The latter comprise 28951 annotated and marked book pages and 1624 attached note slips. Plans for further phases to complete digital publication of the remainder of the Darwin Library are now under consideration.

Also useful to the student of Darwin is another open access site: The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online.

Digital Public Library of America

2011-06-09T13:56:00.006-05:00

The Berkman Center has an informative wiki explaining and tracking the project they are spearheading to create a Digital Public Library of America.
This is a very exciting and ambitious project -- well worth following and participating in.

The Berkman Center will convene a large and diverse group of stakeholders to define the scope, architecture, costs, and administration for a proposed Digital Public Library of America. This initiative was launched in December 2010 with generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation....

In March, 2011, the Steering Committee drafted a Concept Note to describe the initiative, on which they seek comment.

Copyright Rebellion

2011-05-31T08:39:00.006-05:00

Today's Chronicle of Higher Education contains a series of four articles about scholars pushing back against copyright restrictions.
The article entitled The Million Book Lockup is a very good explanation of the Orphan Works problem. These issues are very familiar to those working on digitization projects.

Wiley Launches New OA Journal Program

2011-05-20T15:33:00.001-05:00

Wiley has just announced a new open access journal program, the launch of which will take place throughout 2011, with calls for submissions occurring soon.

Excerpts from the Press Release:

. . . . The first journals will launch shortly, publishing primary peer-reviewed research in a range of broad-based subject disciplines in the life and biomedical sciences, including neuroscience, microbiology, ecology and evolution.

Wiley Open Access will provide authors wishing to publish their research outcomes in an open access journal with a range of new high quality publications which meet the requirements of funding organizations and institutions where these apply. . . .

A publication fee will be payable by authors on acceptance of their articles. Wiley will introduce a range of new payment schemes to enable academic and research institutions, funders, societies, and corporations to actively support their researchers and members who wish to publish in Wiley Open Access journals. . . .

Orphan Works

2011-05-18T07:40:00.003-05:00

Two interesting developments regarding orphan works in the aftermath of the latest Google Books ruling:
The University of Michigan is undertaking a project to identify copyright owners of "orphan works".

What Michigan is doing is “detective work,” as Ms. Levine puts it. She has students probing in-copyright works from 1923 to 1963. They’re trying to determine ownership and, in the event that isn’t possible, documenting the dead ends that led them to conclude a work is orphaned.

In addition, the Library Copyright Alliance, issued a joint statement (ALA, ACRL, and ARL) indicating that a legislative solution to the orphan works issues may not be possible, and that recent rulings indicate that mass digitization projects may be better served by relying on fair use.

Digital Images of Yale’s Vast Cultural Collections Now Available for Free

2011-05-14T17:39:00.002-05:00

Yale University has announced a new open access policy whereby it will allow free access to online images of a very large number of objects from Yale's museums, archives, and libraries. Already more than 250,000 images are available through Yale's Cross Collection Discovery catalog. Click for a slide show of some digitized images from the collection.

Excerpt from the Yale Daily Bulletin (10 May, 2011):

The goal of the new policy is to make high quality digital images of Yale's vast cultural heritage collections in the public domain openly and freely available.

As works in these collections become digitized, the museums and libraries will make those images that are in the public domain freely accessible. In a departure from established convention, no license will be required for the transmission of the images and no limitations will be imposed on their use. The result is that scholars, artists, students, and citizens the world over will be able to use these collections for study, publication, teaching and inspiration.

"With this pioneering open access policy, Yale reminds us that with any great academic collection comes a great responsibility: to share our cultural heritage openly in order to advance scholarship not only on campus but around the world. Yale has set a new standard by which we should measure our colleges' and universities' commitment to scholarship," noted Max Marmor, president of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, which encourages teaching, learning and scholarship in the history of art.

Jewish News Archive Launches Online Archive with 250,000 Articles

2011-05-06T14:22:00.003-05:00

On 5 May the JTA Jewish News Archive announced the launching of a digital archive containing 250,000 articles dating from 1923. The archive is searchable and free for everyone to use.

Highlights of the archive include extensive reporting from Europe in the 1930s and 1940s —including perhaps the first article on what has become known as the Babi Yar massacre —JTA’s reportage on the founding of the State of Israel, close and sustained coverage of the Soviet Jewry movement, and decades of articles chronicling the changing roles and responsibilities of Jewish women.

“The JTA Jewish News Archive has the potential to spark an interest in the past that will transform the future,” said Jonathan Sarna, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University. . . .

“There was and still is a lot of conventional wisdom that Americans didn’t know about the Holocaust while it was happening, and couldn’t have known about the Holocaust while it was happening,” said Northeastern University journalism professor Laurel Leff. “One of the values of this archive is that people can actually look at the bulletins that JTA sent out during this period and see what information was, in fact, available.”

The archive was created with the help of Digital Divide Data, a nonprofit organization that provides jobs to disadvantaged youth in Southeast Asia. Young Cambodians digitized JTA’s files, thereby completing a circle — a vital journalistic record of the Holocaust is being preserved by the next generation in a country racked by its own genocide. . . .

MLA Establishes Office of Scholarly Communication

2011-05-01T08:25:00.003-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education has reported that the the Modern Language Association has established a new office of scholarly communication. It is likely that a primary concern of the office will be the promotion of digital scholarship among MLA members.

The Modern Language Association has created an office of scholarly communication and named a well-regarded digital-humanities scholar to lead it, the group announced on Friday. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of media studies at Pomona College and co-founder of MediaCommons, a digital scholarly network, will lead the new office. She will oversee the group’s book-publishing unit and “a range of activities intended to promote scholarship among our members and within the larger academic community,” the association said. Rosemary G. Feal, the association’s director, told The Chronicle in an interview on Thursday that the announcement was another sign that the MLA was “devoting more effort to thinking as an organization about the digital humanities” and about how to take advantage of Web-based publishing and networking opportunities.

Periodicals Price Survey 2011: Under Pressure, Times Are Changing

2011-04-24T07:41:00.002-05:00

Library Journal has just published its annual Periodicals Price Survey. The news is not good as the trend for prices is tending decisively upwards. Extracts:

There’s no way to sugarcoat the impact higher serials prices have on the information marketplace, or the dire state of funding for libraries. Libraries are no longer in a position of having to cut low-use journals in order to make room for high-use ones; instead, they are now being forced to cancel heavily used, even essential subscriptions, much to the dismay of their patrons. The economy still drives any discussion of serials pricing, and it remains a very ugly story.

In September 2010, the National Bureau of Economic Research reported that economic indicators showed that the recession hit its trough and began recovery in June 2009. But while this may be true technically based on economic data, the recovery’s effects remain very difficult for either libraries or their patrons to detect. Educational systems, especially higher education, are easy targets when funding gets tight and states’ budgets are far from flush. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report in 2010 that had some alarming news: “Counting both initial and mid-year shortfalls, 48 states have addressed or still face such shortfalls in their budgets for fiscal year 2010, totaling $193 billion or 28 percent of state budgets—the largest gaps on record.”

There is more bad news coming from the federal level, as 2012 budgets are hit hard without any federal stimulus funding to fill the gaps, as had been the case in previous years. . . . .

Evolve or die?
We are going to evolve. As has been well documented, the library world was already suffering from funding and technological pressure before the recession officially began in December 2007. In the five years since, the pressure and pace of disruptive change have only accelerated. In order to survive the next five years, the library community will have to focus on the much more difficult task of finding new opportunities. Libraries, publishers, and vendors will all shed some legacy processes; information purchasing patterns will change, leading inevitably to new pricing models. Technology will continue its march forward. The library landscape of 2016 will be very different from today’s.

Click Periodicals Price Survey 2011: Under Pressure, Times Are Changing for the full report.

It is also very likely that Open Access will play an ever increasing role in journal publication.

Open Access as Humanitarian Aid

2011-04-10T16:38:00.002-05:00

Peter Super's recent SPARC Open Access Newsletter is particularly interesting, and important, for his lengthy coverage of "open access as humanitarian aid" and his strong recommendation that publishers should consider engaging in more open access publishing.

DOAJ -- New Interface and Rapid Growth

2011-04-01T16:24:00.002-05:00

The Directory of Open Access Journals has an attractive new interface. It has also continued to grow rapidly – it now has over 6300 journals from more than 110 countries in more than 50 languages. Over 2500 journals are providing metadata at the article level which means that over 500.000 articles are searchable.

Robert Darnton: A Digital Library Better Than Google’s

2011-03-25T08:45:00.003-05:00

Robert Darnton, Director of Harvard University Libraries, comments in the New York Times on the rejection by a federal judge of the Google Book Settlement. Darnton though critical of aspects of Google's role in this project nevertheless argues for the need to build a digital public library where all digital copies are open access:

On Tuesday, Denny Chin, a federal judge in Manhattan, rejected the settlement between Google, which aims to digitize every book ever published, and a group of authors and publishers who had sued the company for copyright infringement. This decision is a victory for the public good, preventing one company from monopolizing access to our common cultural heritage.

Nonetheless, we should not abandon Google’s dream of making all the books in the world available to everyone. Instead, we should build a digital public library, which would provide these digital copies free of charge to readers. Yes, many problems — legal, financial, technological, political — stand in the way. All can be solved. . . .

All major research libraries have digitized parts of their collections. Large-scale enterprises like the Knowledge Commons and the Internet Archive have themselves digitized several million books.

A number of countries are also determined to out-Google Google by scanning the entire contents of their national libraries. France is spending 750 million euros to digitize its cultural treasures; the National Library of the Netherlands is trying to digitize every Dutch book and periodical published since 1470; Australia, Finland and Norway are undertaking their own efforts.

Perhaps Google itself could be enlisted to the cause of the digital public library. It has scanned about 15 million books; two million of that total are in the public domain and could be turned over to the library as the foundation of its collection. The company would lose nothing by this generosity, and might win admiration for its good deed.

Through technological wizardry and sheer audacity, Google has shown how we can transform the intellectual riches of our libraries, books lying inert and underused on shelves. But only a digital public library will provide readers with what they require to face the challenges of the 21st century — a vast collection of resources that can be tapped, free of charge, by anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Full article.

Libraries Respond to Google Decision

2011-03-24T08:22:00.004-05:00

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education

Tuesday, a federal judge tossed out the proposed settlement in the lawsuit over Google's vast book-digitization project. Still, research libraries with a stake in that work said they were undeterred. They emphasized that widespread digital access is key to scholars' work, and reiterated their commitment to making as much material available to as many people as possible, whether or not the settlement is revived in some form. And they said they hoped the ruling, by Judge Denny Chin, would galvanize efforts to solve the vexing problem of orphan works, which are under copyright but whose rights-holders are unknown or unfindable.

Some university librarians noted that the settlement's demise has scuttled, at least for the time being, the goal of low-cost library subscriptions to the enormous Google catalog. But they also raised hopes for a legislative solution that would sidestep the concerns about monopoly that the Google settlement raised.

More ...

Google goes back to the drawing board

2011-03-23T10:21:00.003-05:00

As reported in yesterday's New York Times, the NY Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has rejected the Google Books settlement.

[C]iting copyright, antitrust and other concerns, Judge Denny Chin said that the settlement went too far. He said it would have granted Google a “de facto monopoly” and the right to profit from books without the permission of copyright owners.

Judge Chin acknowledged that “the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many,” but said that the proposed agreement was “not fair, adequate and reasonable.” He left open the possibility that a substantially revised agreement could pass legal muster.

Another chapter begins.

Neil Gaiman on Copyright Piracy and the Web

2011-03-11T15:58:00.003-05:00

Here's an interesting video in which Neil Gaiman, best selling author of science fiction and fantasy books, discusses how pirated versions of his works on the internet have increased sales of his print books. And I suspect that his point may not matter much whether it's deliberately making books freely available on the web or having them available through piracy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI

Europeana, OA Gateway to European Culture

2011-03-03T16:15:00.001-05:00

Europeana is a European based initative for locating books, journals, films, maps, photos, music etc. from about 1500 contributing museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections. Currently there are more than 15 million items in Europeana. Launched in 2008, and based in the National Library of the Netherlands, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Europeana has the goal of making Europe's cultural and scientific heritage accessible to the public. Click on http://www.europeana.eu/portal/index.html to search.

Open Textbooks

2011-03-02T11:05:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I “attended” a SPARC briefing on open textbooks. The briefing was led by Eric Frank of FlatWorld Knowledge, a provider of open textbooks. This is a new publishing model attempting to alleviate the rising and sometimes crushing costs of textbooks for students. (He cited a Gates Foundation report that listed the cost of books as the #2 reason for students dropping out of community colleges.)

He stressed that within the FWK products there are several levels of choice – read free online, pay a small fee for print on demand, buy a black and white copy, buy a color copy, buy for e-reader, buy an audio file, and more. But all the products they carry are free online, licensed with Creative Commons licenses. They currently have approximately 150,000 student users, 44% using the free online version, 30% buying a paper copy and small percentages using audio books and e-reader versions.

There is also a licensing model for libraries – a license for a bundle of texts for eight core classes, for instance. Students would have access to all formats.

Frank stressed that the publishing end is old-fashioned in that they attempt to attract and compensate high- quality academic authors. Their list of titles is still small – it began with business/management titles and is deepest there, but they are now attempting to add titles for gen-ed required classes – Psychology, Sociology, Chemistry, etc.

Libraries are not usually the decision makers about texts for classes, so there was discussion of the library role in this new model. It was pointed out that libraries play an increasing role in curriculum support and that they are a trusted resource. Libraries are often the most active advocates for OA solutions and most familiar with licensing options.

Librarians in the group expressed some frustration with frequent offers to buy the product in various formats when using the free online versions. It is clear that this is a new model searching for sustainability.

Boston College CSOM faculty member John Gallaugher has published Information Systems: a manager’s guide to harnessing technology, through FWK.

To read more about open textbooks – see Stephen Bell’s recent post.

And, of course, lots of background info in the Wikipedia entry.

Open J-Gate: gateway to OA Journal Literature

2011-02-24T09:35:00.003-05:00

An important complement to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is Open J-Gate. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate indexes over 8,300 open access journals and provides links to the full-text at publisher sites. Currently 5567 of these OA journals are peer-reviewed. The site provides links to over one million open access articles with over 300000 new articles being added annually. Links to searching and more information are available at http://openjgate.com/Footer/About.aspx

Siva Vaidhyanathan on Googlization of Everything

2011-02-20T11:31:00.001-05:00

Siva Vaidhyanathan, cultural historian and media scholar, will present the lecture “The Googlization of Everything” — based on his forthcoming University of California Press book The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry) on Feb. 24 at 4:30 p.m. in Cushing 001.

On 16 February, 2011 Steve Kolowich published an article, "Google's Gadfly" on Siva Vaidhyanathan and his views on Google in Inside Higher Education.

Excerpts:

. . . .The Virginia professor, who is not afraid to confess his affection for the ease and usefulness of Google, nevertheless distrusts the company’s basic motivations as it vies for our intellectual inheritance. “Google has fostered a more seamless, democratized, global, cosmopolitan information ecosystem,” he writes. “Yet it has simultaneously contributed to the steady commercialization of higher education and the erosion of standards of information quality.”

Google does not reward our impulse to know, Vaidhyanathan argues; it exploits it by making it appear as though knowing is easy. “The ways that Google structures, judges, and delivers knowledge to us exacerbate our worst tendencies to jump to erroneous conclusions and act on them in ways that cause harm,” the professor writes. Meanwhile the company keeps collecting, on behalf of its advertisers, the wealth of personal information that we feed it in exchange for this flattery, then pats its own back all the way to the bank.

Vaidhyanathan’s point is not that Google has scammed us. He attributes the ascension of Google to a “public failure” — negligence by public stewards to preempt the privatization of knowledge and learning in the switch from analog to digital. In other words, we should have seen this coming. Did Google’s academic bloodlines lull higher education into passively supporting Page and Brin as they quietly absconded with the family jewels? Perhaps, but Vaidhyanathan is less concerned with how we got here than where we are and where we’re going. Accordingly, he proposes a sprawling effort by libraries and like-minded institutions that would essentially give Googlers a public option. “The future of knowledge — and thus the future of the species — depends on our getting this right,” he writes. . . .

Rankings in Economics

2011-02-16T16:11:00.004-05:00

(Thanks to Kit Baum, Economics Dept., for alerting me to this article)

Christian Seiler and Klaus Wohlrabe of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research, Munich, recently published a very interesting article in CESifo Forum: "RePEc – An Independent Platform for Measuring Output in Economics". They consider the much debated subject of academic rankings -- of authors, departments, universities -- and stress the importance that the Economics repository RePEc can have in determining the rankings (and potentially the evaluation) of authors, institutions and journals.

Excerpt:

The RePEc network (Research Papers in Economics, ) is a bibliographic service for economic research and its adjunct fields such as statistics. The goal of this network consists in constructing as complete a collection as possible of all research results that have been published in some form. Also, by using this information, various evaluations or rankings can be produced. An important difference from many other ranking methods is that RePEc is based on the ‘wiki’ principle and the relevant information is not compiled by an individual author or institution. This principle applies both to authors as well as publishers, which to some extent are dependent on each other. On the one hand, publishers must make available the meta-information of their publications (journal articles, books, book contributions, working papers) such as author names, titles, editions, number of pages or citations. On the other hand, scholars must register themselves at RePEc and classify their works. This enables a clear allocation to the authors. With the help of the information available in the network, rankings can be computed for authors and institutions. A potential disadvantage, however, is that some information (e.g. particular journals or citations) may not have been made available to the network or, because of the concentration on economic research, publications from other disciplines may not be included. For the research community there is thus a strong incentive to make as much information as possible available in order to fully exhaust the network effect.

Science Special Issue: Dealing with Data

2011-02-15T10:28:00.004-05:00

The February 11th (2011) issue of the journal, Science, has a special focus, Dealing with Data. Articles from this issue, augmented by others appearing in Science Signaling, Science Translational Medicine, and Science Careers, have been collected and made freely available. With scientific innovation increasingly recognized as central in dealing with such important societal issues as climate change and global public health, to name just two, greater accountability and transparency are required of the sciences, with better management and access to data recognized as central to achieving these goals. In addition to the need for improved access to data, articles over a range of scientific disciplines speak to the need for intelligent archiving decisions, given the deluge of data and the impossibility now of storing it all. There is a call for leadership on these issues from funders, societies, journals, educators, and individual scientists—and from society at large. The costs of losing data are tremendous, just as the opportunities in better management and availability are great.

UK Committee Announce New Inquiry into Peer Review

2011-02-14T11:36:00.002-05:00

The UK's House of Commons recently announced the creation of a Select Committee that will inquire into peer review:

The committee invites evidence on the operation and effectiveness of the peer review process used to examine and validate scientific results and papers prior to publication.

The Committee welcomes submissions on all aspect of the process and among the issues it is likely to examine are the following:

1. the strengths and weaknesses of peer review as a quality control mechanism for scientists, publishers and the public;
2. measures to strengthen peer review;
3. the value and use of peer reviewed science on advancing and testing scientific knowledge;
4. the value and use of peer reviewed science in informing public debate;
5. the extent to which peer review varies between scientific disciplines and between countries across the world;
6. the processes by which reviewers with the requisite skills and knowledge are identified, in particular as the volume of multi-disciplinary research increases;
7. the impact of IT and greater use of online resources on the peer review process; and
8. possible alternatives to peer review.

The Committee welcomes submissions from scientists whose material has been peer reviewed, those who commission peer reviews and those who carry out peer review.

More details.

American Physical Society Online Journals Available Free in U.S. High Schools

2011-02-11T16:33:00.001-05:00

Last summer the American Physical Society (APS) made its online journals freely available to public libraries, an initiative that was very well received. On 9 February, 2011 the Society announced that it will also make its journals freely available to high school students and teachers in the U.S. The journals are Physical Review Letters, Physical Review, and Reviews of Modern Physics, a collection constituting over 400,000 scientific research papers. This initiative is intended "as a contribution to public engagement with the ongoing development of scientific understanding."

The news release.

Scholar attitudes toward OA journals

2011-02-09T09:49:00.006-05:00

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education

Scholars Favor Open-Access Journals, but Some Say Quality and Fees Are Concerns

By Josh Fischman

A new survey of nearly 40,000 scholars across the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences shows that almost 90 percent of them believe open-access journals are good for the research community and the individual researcher. But charges for publishing and the perception that open-access journals are of lower quality than traditional publications deter scholars from the open-access route, according to the Study of Open Access Publishing report, by an international team of researchers.
more ...

One Million CIC Books Scanned

2011-02-08T14:22:00.002-05:00

The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) recently announced that Google has now digitized 1,000,000 books from member libraries of the CIC.

Each of these volumes has been scanned, translated from image to text with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology and added to the Google Books index. Once digitized, the books are shipped back to our originating libraries to resume their journeys from bookshelves to backpacks.

While Google preserves library books in digital form, and makes them more accessible to more people as a result, it also sends participating libraries (at no cost to us) digital copies for our own archives or other non-commercial use. Accordingly, the CIC libraries are making hundreds of thousands of the recently digitized public domain volumes accessible through their partnership with the HathiTrust Digital Library.

We became Google's 16th Library Project partner in June 2007. Google Books has now partnered with more than 40 libraries and scanned more than 15 million books worldwide. Books that have only been available for use within the walls of our libraries have found new readers now that they are open to the world.. . .

While we are pausing to celebrate this moment with Google today, we're not resting on our library laurels. We have a long way to go to digitize all of our books. In fact, CIC libraries have agreed to provide as many as 10 million volumes to this ambitious project, out of total collections approaching 85 million volumes. -- so this is just the beginning.

Nature's OA offering

2011-02-02T14:04:00.004-05:00

SPARC highlights a recent article about a new OA journal venture by the publishers of Nature, called Scientific Reports.

The article, published in Times Higher Education, begins:

The launch by Nature Publishing Group (NPG) of a high-volume open-access journal spanning the natural sciences is being tipped to accelerate the extinction of subscription fees in science publishing, and could also prompt the closure of many specialist journals.

Scientific Reports will launch this summer and will cover biology, chemistry, the earth sciences and physics.

Like the Public Library of Science's PLoS ONE journal, Scientific Reports will be entirely open access and will publish every submission deemed by a faster peer-review process to be technologically sound - including those reporting useful negative results.

RePEc Now Indexes Over One Million Works

2011-01-28T12:20:00.002-05:00

The RePEc Blog recently announced that this important Economics (and related subjects) repository now contains over 1,000,00 works:

"RePEc has reached over the last week-end a historic mark: one million works in Economics and neighboring sciences are now indexed, of which 87.5% are available for download. The bibliographic database is comprised by 59.2% of journal articles, 38.5% of working papers, 1.3% of book chapters, 0.8% of books, and 0.2% of software components. . . . As RePEc bears no costs, all the data is made available for free. . . ."

OA Courses for Independent Scholars at MIT

2011-01-16T11:36:00.002-05:00

According to MIT News, courses designed for independent learners are being introduced by MIT:

For the first time, MIT OpenCourseWare is introducing courses designed to serve the needs of independent learners, visitors to the site who have no affiliation with academic institutions. These "OCW Scholar" courses address a need the MIT faculty never envisioned in 2000 when the idea for OCW was first conceived. At that time, the expectation was that other educators would use the syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams from MIT courses to design their own courses. But in this first decade of MIT OpenCourseWare, independent learners have emerged as the primary users of these materials. . . .

While OCW Scholar courses represent a new approach to OCW publication, they complement the regular OCW publication but do not replace it. Because the OCW Scholar courses require faculty to create new content, they involve significantly more effort than the basic OCW approach. "We're still committed to publishing MIT's materials as we always have," says OCW Executive Director Cecilia d'Oliveira, "and our core publication continues to provide tremendous value to educators and students around the world. With OCW Scholar, we are enhancing our support for independent learners and building on what we've accomplished with the rest of the site."

The OCW team will continue to publish new and updated versions of materials drawn directly from MIT classrooms to support the broad international audience that already benefits from OCW. Last year alone, OCW received 17.5 million visits from 9.5 million individuals, and to date the site has been visited more than 75 million times by an estimated 45 million individuals. OCW content on affiliate and translation sites has been viewed by millions more. This dramatic success provides a solid foundation for innovations such as OCW Scholar. . . .

Click here for the full article.

2010-12-28T14:10:00.002-05:00

In the 10 December, 2010 Research Library Issue report (a bimonthly report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC) Prudence S. Adler, Associate Executive Director, Federal Relations and Information Policy, ARL, considers three critical attributes shared by the research, teaching, and learning enterprise and the Internet. They are a) providing access to research resources; b) promoting free speech; c) and fostering openness, innovation, and transparency.

The conclusion of the report (entitled Three Key Public Policies for Research Libraries: Net Neutrality, Fair Use, Open and Public Access) :

The ARL Strategic Plan calls for ARL to influence “laws, public policies, regulations, and judicial decisions governing the use of copyrighted materials so that they better meet the needs of the educational and research communities” and to contribute “to reducing economic, legal, and technical barriers to access and use of the research results from publicly funded research projects, enabling rapid and inexpensive worldwide dissemination of facts and ideas.” To succeed, research libraries are dependent upon a non-discriminatory, robust, open, technological infrastructure that will permit effective use of resources under copyright, in the public domain, and under other legal regimes. Such an infrastructure must encourage emerging scholarly communication models that realize the benefits of networked-based technologies and reflect the interests of the academy and the public.

The full report.

Fabian Society Online Archive

2010-12-10T17:15:00.005-05:00

A London School of Economics (LSE) website particularly useful to historians of British history is the open access Fabian Society Online Archive. The Fabian Society started publishing tracts in 1884, and included in this site are most tracts up to 1997. There are about 580 tracts. Among the authors are Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw, founders of the LSE. Other famous authors include Clement Attlee; Tony Benn; Tony Blair; Gordon Brown; G. D. H. Cole; Tony Crosland; R. H. S. Crossman; Denis Healey; Harold Laski; Kingsley Martin; Harold Wilson.

Topics treated in the tracts include:

* cultural matters
* economics
* electoral reform
* foreign policy (such as colonialism, the Cold War and relations with Europe)
* industrial relations
* the Labour Party
* local government
* politics (such as electoral and parliamentary reform)
* poverty
* social reform (such as education, health and pensions)
* socialism
* women's issues

December issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter

2010-12-03T11:55:00.002-05:00

Peter Suber's December issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter is now online. Particularly interesting is the section "The US elections and open access" where Suber considers at length the future of the FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act) bill which is presently before Congress. He believes that "because Congress is preoccupied with more urgent business, FRPAA has little chance as a stand-alone bill in the lame-duck session. If it expires without a vote at the end of this month, it or some variation of it will almost certainly be re-introduced in the new session. The new bill may be the same as the current FRPAA, which itself is the same as the version of FRPAA introduced in 2006, or may be revised to account for any executive action taken by President Obama in the meantime." Suber's prediction for the ultimate outcome of government mandated open access:

insofar as Republicans are inclined to work constructively for achievable progress, there will be some common ground with Democrats. That common ground will include creating jobs, stimulating the economy, opening government, showing fiscal responsibility with public funds, and mandating public access to publicly-funded research. That bodes well both for FRPAA and for an Obama executive order mandating OA from federal funding agencies. But insofar as Republicans are inclined to obstruct Democrats, reject their own party elders, or both, common ground will be a vanishing quantity. That plus Obama's tendency to seek compromise without reciprocation will mean defeat or dilution for OA policies.

Europeana Gives Open Access to Over 14 Million Examples of Europe's Cultural Heritage

2010-11-24T15:06:00.003-05:00

Launched in 2008 with two million objects, the European digital library, Europeana, now provides free online access to over 14 million digitized books, maps, photographs, paintings, film and music clips from cultural institutions across Europe. Thus, Europeana has already passed the initial target for 2010 of 10 million objects.

From the press release:

Digitised photographs, maps, paintings, museum objects and other images make up 64% of the Europeana collection. 34% of the collection is dedicated to digitised texts, including more than 1.2 million complete books that can be viewed online and/or downloaded. The texts cover thousands of rare manuscripts and the earliest printed books (incunabula) from before 1500. Video and sound material represents less than 2% of the collections. Much of the material accessible through Europeana is older, i.e. out of copyright, items, due mainly to the difficulties and cost of rights clearance to digitise and give access to in-copyright material (even for material that is no longer commercially distributed or out-of-print) or material whose potential right-holders are unknown (orphan works).

The World Bank Launches a New Digital Collection

2010-11-24T14:49:00.001-05:00

On 18 November, 2010 the World Bank announced the launching of the open access collection of all World Development Reports published since 1978. The Complete World Development Report Online may be accessed at http://wdronline.worldbank.org .

From the press release:

. . . . For over thirty years, the annual WDR has provided a window on development economics to a broad international readership. The report has served as one of the principal vehicles for encapsulating the World Bank’s knowledge of and policy recommendations on key global development trends. From agriculture and the environment to economic growth and international trade, the WDR has tracked theoretical and empirical findings as well as policies in the field of international development.

The robust search engine of The Complete World Development Report Online optimizes search both across and within all WDRs with the click of a button. In addition, the background papers upon which the most recent reports were drawn are also available.

A free optional individual user account allows users to take advantage of tools such as bookmarking and saving selected chapters or reports, saving searches, and taking notes. A custom eBook feature lets users select chapters from multiple reports for future reference, sharing with colleagues, or creating course packets. The custom eBooks may also be downloaded, printed, or easily shared through social networking sites. In addition, the site features quick links to World Bank open databases, RSS feeds, new content alerts, and COUNTER-compliant usage statistics for librarians . . . .

"Open Access at the Wellcome Trust: 5 Years On"

2010-11-15T10:46:00.001-05:00

In 2006, the UK's Wellcome Trust, a major funder of research, specified that all research that resulted from its funding be made open access, that is, be freely available. However, for the first couple of years compliance by funding recipients was low. At the recent Berlin 8 meeting in Beijing, Robert Kiley, Head Digital Services, Wellcome Trust, in a presentation "Open Access at the Wellcome Trust: 5 Years On" showed that there has been significant increase in compliance since 2006 -- it is now around 50%. Kiley, stating that there is still a long way to go, considers what other steps Wellcome Trust should take to improve compliance with its OA mandate.

Kiley also discusses the goal of transforming UK's PubMed Central into a Europe PMC, that is "a single, Europe-wide, repository where all European-funded, peer-reviewed, biomedical research papers can be accessed, data-mined and integrated into other related information sources".

The Conclusion of Open Access Week 2010

2010-10-29T13:03:00.001-05:00

A very encouraging letter from SPARC re the conclusion of Open Access Week 2010:

The largest, most successful International Open Access Week yet has just come to a close. With just under 900 participants in 94 countries, this year’s event was no less than three times larger than it was just a year ago. Hundreds of videos, photos, blog posts, and more were released to promote and highlight the benefits of Open Access to research and take the conversation even more deeply into the research community – and they absolutely did. . . .

Impressive Open Access Stats from MIT

2010-10-22T16:43:00.000-05:00

Interesting news from MIT about its ongoing success with its year-old campus wide open access policy. In the past year there have been added "1,900 scholarly articles to the MIT Open Access articles collection in DSpace@MIT". http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/open-access-1020.html

New BC Library Guide on Copyright

2010-10-15T13:38:00.006-05:00

BC Libraries has just released a new guide entitled Copyright and Scholarship. The primary purpose of the guide is to give guidance for resolving basic copyright questions. (There's a link to it on the right of this blog under heading: Related Library Pages). The guide includes information on:

Key Concepts

Processes

Types of Content

It is important to bear in mind that the guide is designed to provide basic, general information about copyright, and does not constitute legal advice.

October SPARC Open Access Newsletter

2010-10-04T17:17:00.003-05:00

Peter Suber has published the October issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. It is the 150th issue of the Newsletter. In it Suber "takes a close look at my own experience self-archiving, how I was an easier case than many other authors, how I was a harder case, and why I needed so long to move beyond a personal web site to an OA repository."

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

2010-09-28T15:14:00.001-05:00

Stanford University News recently published an update about its very heavily visited website: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The article's author, Cynthia Haven, stresses the authoritativeness of the Encyclopedia which was launched in 1995, years before both Google and Wikipedia. Visited over 700,000 times a week, the Encyclopedia has more than 1,200 entries authored by over 1,400 individuals. Contribtions are overseen by 120 leading philosophers from all over the world while Stanford's Dept. of Philosophy is the advisory board. Thus, "[N]o one can alter text without passing through several layers of approval."

Excerpts:

It's September, and as school resumes, so does the wrangling between students and teachers across the country over the reliability of Wikipedia and other Internet sources as fodder for footnotes in research papers.

The debate has been going on for years. When philosopher Larry Sanger left Wikipedia – the project he co-founded – he said its "anti-elitism" was the root of its shortcomings. He said that because pretty much anyone could write anything, expertise was mistrusted and those committed to mayhem or propaganda could too easily dominate the medium.

But he did recommend an online alternative: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . . .

The Latest Version of Open Access Bibliography Available

2010-09-17T13:25:00.004-05:00

Here is Charles Bailey's announcement about the online publication of his bibliography of material on open access and its effect on academic scholarship:

Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A
Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship:

http://digital-scholarship.org/tsp/transforming.htm

This bibliography presents over 1,100 selected
English-language scholarly works useful in understanding the
open access movement's efforts to provide free access to and
unfettered use of scholarly literature. The bibliography
primarily includes books and published journal articles. A
limited number of book chapters, conference papers,
dissertations and theses, magazine articles, technical
reports, and other scholarly works that are deemed to be of
exceptional interest are also included (see the "Preface"
for further details about selection criteria). The
bibliography includes links to freely available versions of
included works. Most sources have been published from
January 1, 1999 through August 1, 2010; however, a limited
number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also
included. The bibliography is available as a paperback and
an open access PDF file.

The following Digital Scholarship publications may also be
of interest:

(1) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, version 78

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html

(2) Digital Scholarship 2009 (paperback and open access PDF
file)

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/ds2009.htm

(3) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008
Annual Edition (paperback, Kindle e-book, and open access
PDF file)

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/sepb2008.htm

(4) Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography,
version 1

http://digital-scholarship.org/dcpb/dcpb.htm

Translate (oversatta, oversette, prelozit, traducir,
traduire, tradurre, traduzir, or ubersetzen):

http://digital-scholarship.org/announce/tsp.htm

The Open Access Imperative

2010-09-16T14:52:00.000-05:00

Katharine Dunn, Dean's Editorial Fellow, Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, provides a good overview of the history, the present state, and the importance of the Open Access movement. It's entitled "The Open Access Imperative".

Open Access Monograph Publishing

2010-09-10T15:48:00.001-05:00

Maria Bonn, associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan Library, has published "Free exchange of ideas: Experimenting with the open access monograph" in the latest issue of College & Research Libraries News. It's an interesting article that stresses the differences between OA journal and OA book publishing. Though a strong proponent of the latter, Bonn provides an excellent analysis of the challenges, as well as the opportunities, of applying open access models to monograph publishing.

SPARC Open Access Newsletter (Sept. issue)

2010-09-02T16:50:00.001-05:00

Peter Suber published today (September 2, 2010 ) the latest issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (issue #149).

Open Access Can be Successful

2010-08-30T08:56:00.002-05:00

Barbara Fister recently posted in Inside Higher Education an upbeat blog item about the potential of Open Access, "Open to Change: How Open Access Can Work". Excerpts:

Last week, when I challenged readers to think about how to make open access happen, Jason Baird Jackson had a ready answer: the Open Folklore project. This project is drawing a terrific map for societies unsure of how to proceed. Partnering with Indiana University libraries, the American Folklore Society is identifying where their literature is and how much of it is accessible, bringing attention to existing and potential open access journals, asking rights holders if material can be set free, digitizing gray literature so it will be preserved . . . these folks are sharp. And they're doing what scholarly societies should do: promoting the field and sharing its collective knowledge for the greater good.

I just visited their site again after reading a thoughtful article by Ted Striphas on the bizarre blind spot that cultural studies scholars have about the system that they depend on for conveying ideas and (perhaps even in their wildest dreams) making a difference in the world. He points out that cultural studies often unpacks the politics of media - except for those media that they participate in most frequently. He takes issue with the claim that I and others make repeatedly, that they system is broken. He says on the contrary, "the system is functioning only too well" - it rakes in terrific profits based largely on unpaid labor and a captive workforce. It just doesn't work very well for scholars, He does a great job of analyzing the issues and laying out steps that cultural studies scholars should take. It's a rousing call to action, and it's perfectly tailored to the concerns of his field. . . .

Sometimes I think about the tangle of cross-purposes and interests that seem so hard to disentangle and wonder if change can ever happen. But then I read something as sensible and smart and principled as Jason Baird Jackson's commentary or see what Open Folklore is up to and think ... you know, maybe we really can pull this off.

Web Alternative to Peer Review

2010-08-24T12:38:00.011-05:00

From today's New York Times, page one (by Patricia Cohen):

Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review

"For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.
Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience." More

APS Online Journals Available Free in U.S. Public Libraries

2010-07-30T10:26:00.001-05:00

In an interesting move the American Physical Society is making all issues of its journals freely available to readers in public libraries. From its 28 July announcement:

The American Physical Society (APS) announces a new public access initiative that will give readers and researchers in public libraries in the United States full use of all online APS journals, from the most recent articles back to the first issue in 1893, a collection including over 400,000 scientific research papers. APS will provide this access at no cost to participating public libraries, as a contribution to public engagement with the ongoing development of scientific understanding.

APS Publisher Joseph Serene observed that "public libraries have long played a central role in our country’s intellectual life, and we hope that through this initiative they will become an important avenue for the general public to reach our research journals, which until now have been available only through the subscriptions at research institutions that currently cover the significant costs of peer review and online publication."

Librarians can obtain access by accepting a simple online site license and providing valid IP addresses of public-use computers in their libraries. The license requires that public library users must be in the library when they read the APS journals or download articles. Initially the program will be offered to U.S. public libraries, but it may include additional countries in the future. . . .

Movie Clips and Copyright

2010-07-28T12:12:00.000-05:00

From Inside Higher Ed, July 28th:

If the words “sweeping new exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act” make you want whoop for joy and join a conga line, you just might be a fair use advocate — one who wants professors and students to be able to decrypt and excerpt copyrighted video content for lectures and class projects. Since Monday, a lot of advocates have been dancing.

“This is very exciting,” says Patricia Aufderheide, a communications professor and director of the Center for Social Media at American University. “We’re doing nothing but chat about this, we’re so excited.”

The thing that has made so many professors abuzz — and a-blog — is the latest round of rule changes, issued Monday by the U.S. Copyright Office, dealing with what is legal and what is not as far as decrypting and repurposing copyrighted content.

One change in particular is making waves in academe: an exemption that allows professors in all fields and “film and media studies students” to hack encrypted DVD content and clip “short portions” into documentary films and “non-commercial videos.”

Read the full article

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online Project

2010-07-25T09:06:00.000-05:00

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online is a vast and fascinating open access database that provides access to over two hundred years of full-text proceedings of British trials.

"The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts between 1676 and 1772. It allows access to over 197,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use.

In addition to the text, accessible through both keyword and structured searching, this website provides digital images of all 190,000 original pages of the Proceedings, 4,000 pages of Ordinary's Accounts, advice on methods of searching this resource, information on the historical and legal background to the Old Bailey court and its Proceedings, and descriptions of published and manuscript materials relating to the trials covered. Contemporary maps, and images have also been provided."

House Committee to Hold Hearing on OA to Federally Funded Research

2010-07-25T08:50:00.003-05:00

The Alliance for Tax Payer Access announced in a press release that a House Committee will hold a hearing on 29 July on open access to federally funded research:

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, the Census and National Archives announced it will hold a hearing on the issue of public access to federally funded research on Thursday, July 29. The hearing will provide an opportunity for the Committee to hear the perspectives of a broad range of stakeholders on the potential impact of opening up access to the results of the United States’ more than $60 billion annual investment in scientific research.

The Subcommittee’s interest stems from the growing number of visible expressions of interest in the issue of public access that have surfaced in recent months, in both the Legislative and Executive branches of government. Notably, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier this year hosted a Public Access Policy Forum on mechanisms that would leverage federal investments in scientific research and increase access to information.

Additionally, H.R. 5037, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which was introduced into the House on April 15 by Rep. Mike Doyle (R-PA) and is supported by a growing bi-partisan host of cosponsors, was referred to the Committee. The bill, and its identical Senate counterpart (introduced by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX)), proposes to require those eleven federal agencies with extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to implement policies that deliver timely, free, online public access to the published results of the research they fund. . . .

Digital Project of the Medieval Academy of America

2010-07-15T13:46:00.002-05:00

The Medieval Academy of America reports a retrospective digitization project of its publications:

The National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Research Programs, has awarded the Academy $120,000 to support “Retrospective Digital Editions of Print Editions Published by The Medieval Academy of America, 1925–2001.” The two-year grant will make it possible for the Academy to digitize thirty-eight editions published by Medieval Academy Books from the Academy’s foundation to 2001. In addition to editions of Medieval Latin, the project will digitize these major vernaculars: Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Welsh. Poetry and music are found in addition to prose works. By treating literary, philosophical, scientific, commercial, documentary, political, and religious texts, the project will provide multiple points of entry to the Middle Ages.

Half of the thirty-eight editions are out of print, and those titles in print and published before 1982 were printed on acidic paper and are therefore beginning to disintegrate. Digitization will obviate the problem of acidic paper and offer an extra dimension of accesssibility, for these texts will be findable through electronic search engines. Searchability will extend use of the material beyond the self-defined circle of medievalists, thus bringing the Academy’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship to a new level. The books will be accessible free of charge on the Academy’s website. . . .

Some beta versions of the Academy's digital editions.

Millions of Books get Digitized for the Disabled

2010-07-15T13:37:00.002-05:00

USA Today reports that the Internet Archive is embarking on a new campaign to double the number of digitized books available for print disabled people:

For those who are blind, dyslexic or have diseases like multiple sclerosis and have difficulty turning book pages, reading the latest best seller just got easier.

Brewster Kahle, a digital librarian and founder of a virtual library called the Internet Archive, has launched a worldwide campaign to double the number of books available for print-disabled people.

The Internet Archive began scanning books in 2004 and now has more than 1 million available in DAISY format, or Digital Accessible Information System, a means of creating "talking" books that can be downloaded to a handheld device. Unlike books on tape, the digital format makes it easier for print-disabled people to navigate books because they can speed up, slow down and skip around from chapter to chapter. . . .

Christopher Danielsen, spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind, says the Internet Archive will benefit the 1.3 million blind people in the USA because it will increase the variety of books available to the population. Danielsen says only about 5% of published books are transferred to a format the blind can use. . . .

Kahle says the Internet Archive is an invaluable resource for dyslexic, blind and print-disabled students who can use the digital book collection to download reference materials and write research papers. He encourages teachers to send in books that will be on reading lists for the next school year. If received now, the books can be scanned during the summer and available online when school resumes in the fall.

The Internet Archive will cover the expenses of scanning the first 10,000 books it receives but is asking people to donate to help continue scanning.

June's SPARC Open Access Newsletter

2010-07-02T13:41:00.001-05:00

The June, 2010 issue of Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter is now available.

Springer Introduces New Open Access Journals

2010-07-02T08:37:00.002-05:00

On 28 June Springer announced the establishment of a new open-access journal program entitled SpringerOpen. To start, SpringerOpen will publish 12 new, peer-reviewed, e-only journals covering science, technical, and medical disciplines.

From the press release:

Springer is expanding its open access offering to all disciplines. . . within the science, technology and medicine (STM) fields and will be offered in cooperation with BioMed Central. The entire content of SpringerOpen journals – including research articles, reviews, and editorials – are fully and immediately open access, and are accessible to anyone with an internet connection. No subscription is needed. . . .

SpringerOpen journals are e-only journals. Springer is committed to delivering high-quality articles and ensuring rapid publication as with its traditional journals, from online submission systems and in-depth peer review to an efficient, author-friendly production process. The final articles are not only published in a timely manner on Springer’s online information platform SpringerLink, but are also distributed to archives such as PubMed Central and to institutional repositories as requested.

SpringerOpen journals are published under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which facilitates the open distribution of copyrighted work. According to this license, Springer will not reserve any exclusive commercial rights. The journals ask the authors to pay an article-processing charge, in accordance with market standards. . . .

From Partition to Direct Rule: 50 Years of Northern Ireland Parliamentary Debates Online

2010-06-25T10:47:00.001-05:00

The Stormont Papers is a particularly useful site for historians of Britain and Ireland. Entitled "From Partition to Direct Rule: 50 Years of Northern Ireland Parliamentary Debates Online" the website offers access to the Parliamentary Debates of the devolved government of Northern Ireland from June 7 1921 to the dissolution of Parliament in March 28 1972. Consisting of about 92,000 printed pages (74 million words) the site is fully open access.

One may search either the full text using specific keywords, browse particular debates according to the combined subject index, or simply view the volumes.

Large Gift Will Speed Digitization at Oxford's Bodleian Libraries

2010-06-17T16:01:00.001-05:00

News item from Ian Wilhelm in yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education:

A British philanthropist has given $2.2-million to the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries to expand efforts to digitize their vast collection of books and manuscripts.

The gift, by the businessman Leonard S. Polonsky, will help pay for a new digital-imaging studio as part of a $115.6-million renovation of the New Bodleian Library, which will be known as the Weston Library upon reopening in a few years. The facility will be used to scan and make available online Oxford's most valuable and fragile documents and publications.

In addition, the donation will support the Bodleian's current efforts to digitize materials that promote interdisciplinary research and scholarship. For example, in 2010 and 2011 the library system plans to digitize Oxford theses and rare Islamic and Jewish manuscripts.

The money will help the Bodleian give humanities scholars and other academics greater access to its 11-million volume collection, only a "small fraction" of which has been digitized so far, said Sarah E. Thomas, the institution's librarian.

Mr. Polonsky, an alumnus of Oxford's Lincoln College, made a similar gift this month to the Cambridge University Library. The donor, who is executive chairman of Hansard Global, a financial-services company, said in a written statement that being part of a sea change in how a library operates was "exhilarating."

"Our inherited notions of 'library'—its architecture, scale, content, and services—will undergo quite extraordinary change over the coming years as digitization extends its impact," he said.

Open Access: Wittgenstein Archives

2010-06-15T15:11:00.001-05:00

The Wittgenstein Archives at The University of Bergen recently provided free access to a large body of Wittgenstein primary sources, including the Bergen Facsimile Edition (BFE) and the Bergen Text Edition (BTE) of 5000 pages of Wittgenstein's Nachlass. Access is

http://www.wittgensteinsource.org/

Portico Announces It Has Reached a Milestone

2010-06-15T13:46:00.004-05:00

In the past when print was the only form of publication, scholars would assume that the products of their work would live long lives on library shelves as books and journal articles. In today's publishing environment where electronic publications are proliferating, scholars may have serious doubts about the longevity of their work if they publish on the web. In an effort to address their concerns, several digital preservation projects have been developed in recent years. One of the most important is Portico. This means that the library's e-journals produced by publishers signed up with Portico will remain available to future researchers regardless of changes in technology. A recent announcement from Portico administrators provides some numbers that give an idea of how far Portico has progressed:

Portico is pleased to announce that 110 publishers, representing more than 2,000 professional and scholarly societies, are now participating in the Portico archive. Furthermore, nearly 15 million articles are now safely preserved in the Portico archive. "These are significant milestones for Portico and this substantial growth in a short period of time underscores the importance of digital preservation, and the commitment of the hundreds of Portico's participating libraries and publishers to ensuring long-term access to scholarly content," said Eileen Fenton, Portico's Managing Director.

Publishing in Open Access Education Journals: The Authors' Perspectives

2010-05-28T09:01:00.002-05:00

In the April, 2010 issue of Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian Bryna Coonin and Leigh M. Younce authored the article "Publishing in Open Access Education Journals: The Authors’ Perspectives". The Abstract:

Open access publishing is now an accepted method of scholarly communication. However, the greatest traction for open access publishing thus far has been in the sciences. Penetration of open access publishing has been much slower among the social sciences. This study surveys 309 authors from recent issues of open access journals in education to determine why they choose to publish in open access journals and to gain insight into the ways publishing practices within the discipline itself impact the willingness of authors to engage in open access publishing.

From the Conclusion:

Scholars work and teach in institutions, but the vitality of their scholarly lives is derived from the reception of their work by peers within their disciplines. The education researchers surveyed confirmed that peer review is of primary importance in their publishing activity. Among education researchers, though, the impetus to share the fruits of research with the practitioner community is historically strong. Open access publication enhances the options for accomplishing this.

There remains some confusion regarding the issue of electronic journal versus print publishing. For subject liaisons discussing open access publishing with faculty, it may be important to establish that the concept of open access is not the same as a format change from print to electronic. Another potential source of confusion is self-archiving. A major trend within the scholarly communication arena, self-archiving appears to respond to somewhat different stimuli than the impulse to engage in OA publishing. Liaison librarians working with faculty on these issues cannot assume that participation in one of these activities automatically implies interest in the other.

Increasingly, open access overall represents a leading edge in scholarly publishing rather than the “fringe.” However, an understanding (and acceptance) of open access journal publishing as a viable outlet for scholarly publishing is still quite dependent on the research and publishing cultures within the disciplines. It may be helpful for liaison librarians to keep in mind that issues concerning open access crystallize at different times for different individuals. For some, clarification develops as scholars become more aware of scholarly communication generally. Others may give the matter little or no thought until open access is discussed in a forum within their narrow discipline, among colleagues they hold in high regard.

. . . . Advocacy for open access is the ideal, but such a stance may not be possible for every subject liaison. Increasing awareness of open access among our academic faculty, however, remains an important and reasonable goal for librarians. Increasing one's own awareness and knowledge of the relevant trends, coupled with patience, is recommended.

The Hathi Trust

2010-05-21T15:41:00.002-05:00

The Hathi Trust, a shared digital repository, has about 6 million fully digitized volumes in its collection. This corresponds to well over 2,000,000,000 pages. A little under 1.2 million of the 6 million volumes are open access, i.e. in the public domain. Click FAQs to learn more about the Hathi Trust and its project to archive vast amounts of digital content.

To search the collection click here.

Nature Publishing Offering Open Access Options for More Journals

2010-05-20T09:37:00.009-05:00

Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has just announced the addition of seven more journals to its list of of titles offering an open access option, bringing the total to 25 for this publisher. Authors can choose to publish their articles as open access by payment of an article processing charge (APC). APC charges vary according to the selectivity of the journal; more information can be found on each journal page. The new titles include American Journal of Gastroenterology, Bone Marrow Transplantation, Gene Therapy, International Journal of Obesity, Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, Oncogene, and Leukemia. Authors are offered a choice of licenses (including one allowing for derivative works), as well as immediate and permanent public access to the final published version of their paper on nature.com and in PubMed Central and the rights to self-archive the final published version of their paper for public access immediately upon publication. Nature's self-archiving policy provides for authors publishing in any of the 43 Nature titles to comply with funder mandates.