Two major physics labs to pay author charges for their researchers

PhysMath Central, the BioMedCentral open access publisher for physics, mathematics and computer science, announced this week a new agreement with two major particle physics research organizations. CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and DESY (the German Electron Synchrotron) will now provide central funding of author charges for their researchers publishing in the new PhysMath Central peer-reviewed journal, PMC Physics A. PMC Physics A, edited by Ken Peach of the University of Oxford and Royal Holloway, launched in October 2007. The December 13^th press release describes this as an intermediate step towards the SCOAP³ model of publishing.

SCOAP³ Promotes a New Model for Open Access Journals

The field of High Energy Physics (HEP), already a leader in wide and open distribution and discussion of scholarly content through its use of the ArXiv.org eprint server, is proposing a new model in open access publishing. SCOAP³, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, is a consortium made up of High-Energy Physics funding agencies, High-Energy Physics laboratories, and leading national and international libraries and library consortia. This group has designed a system whereby the major stakes-holder institutions support the widespread and open availability of the major HEP journals. Here are the basics of the idea:

• Funding bodies and libraries pay money to the Consortium. The Consortium, in turn, pays the scholarly publishers to provide peer review and publish high-quality content, to be made available to everyone. The publishers are provided with the revenue stream required for their efforts, and users, regardless of affiliation, are provided with the content they need. Authors are no longer required to pay as the prevailing open access model now requires.
• SCOAP³ partners will finance their contributions by canceling journal subscriptions. Each partner will be expected to pay in accordance with its country’s share of HEP publishing.
• The initial scope of the project involves just 5 core journals and one discipline-wide title:
• Physical Review D
• Journal of High Energy Physics
• Physics Letters B
• Nuclear Physics B
• European Physical Journal C
• Physical Review Letters
• At this time, HEP funding agencies, laboratories and libraries are signing Expressions of Interest for the financial backing of the consortium. As this process gains momentum and long-term commitments, affected publishers will be asked to tender proposals and enter negotiations. Conversion of these titles is estimated at a cost of 10 Million Euros per year, considerably less than the collective payments made by libraries for access for their institutional users.

Ethics of Open Access to Biomedical Research

On 7 December, 2007 Stevan Harnad published the article “Ethics of open Access to biomedical research: Just a special case of ethics of open access to research” in Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine. His abstract (provisional):

The ethical case for Open Access (OA) (free online access) to research findings is especially salient when it is public health that is being compromised by needless access restrictions. But the ethical imperative for OA is far more general: It applies to all scientific and scholarly research findings published in peer-reviewed journals. And peer-to-peer access is far more important than direct public access. Most research is funded so as to be conducted and published, by researchers, in order to be taken up, used, and built upon in further research and applications, again by researchers (pure and applied, including practitioners), for the benefit of the public that funded it -- not in order to generate revenue for the peer-reviewed journal publishing industry (nor even because there is a burning public desire to read much of it). Hence OA needs to be mandated, by researchers' institutions and funders, for all research.

The complete article is available as a provisional PDF. The fully formatted PDF and HTML versions are in production.

First Fifty Volumes of Medieval Archaeology Freely Available Online

In celebration of the Society for Medieval Archaeology's 50^th anniversary the first fifty volumes of Medieval Archaeology have been made available in digital form.

• Medieval Archaeology - vols. 1 - 50
• Medieval Archaeology - Indexes

For more information click here.

ARL Report on Journals’ Transition from Print to Electronic Formats

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published “The E-only Tipping Point for Journals: What’s Ahead in the Print-to-Electronic Transition Zone,” by Richard K. Johnson and Judy Luther. The report examines the issues associated with the migration from dual-format publishing toward electronic-only publication of journals.

Publishers and libraries today find themselves in an extended transition zone between print-only and e-only journals. Both parties are struggling with the demands of dual-format publishing as well as the opportunity costs of keeping electronic journals operating within the bounds of the print publishing process, which are increasingly taxing the status quo for publishers, libraries, authors, and readers. There are suggestions that this transitional phase is especially challenging to small publishers of high-quality titles and places them at a disadvantage in relation to large, resource-rich publishers as they compete for subscribers, authors, and readers. The question of when dual-format journals will complete the transition to single-format (electronic) publishing is taking on increasing urgency.

The persistence of dual-format journals suggests that substantial obstacles need to be surmounted if the transformation to e-only publication is to be complete. This study seeks to create a better understanding of the dynamics of the transition process, both for librarians and for publishers. Neither publishers nor librarians independently control the process and the need to coordinate their activities greatly increases the complexity of the transition.

The report provides a synthetic analysis of librarian and publisher perspectives on the current state of format migration, considering the drivers toward electronic-only publishing and barriers that are slowing change. The authors provide an assessment of likely change in the near term and recommend strategic areas of focus for further work to enable change.

The work is based in large part on interviews conducted between June and August 2007 with two dozen academic librarians and journal publishers. Publishers and librarians were consulted equally in recognition that these changes pose significant issues of coordination. Interviews were conducted with collection officers and others at ARL member libraries and publishing staff of societies and university presses, publishing platform hosts, and publishing production consultants.

The report is available for free download from the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/Electronic_Transition.pdf.

SPARC Open Access Newsletter, issue #116

The latest issue of Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter is now online. Particularly interesting are Suber's ten predictions for 2008.

Open Access Resources from Alexander Street Press

Explore or become part of a scholarly community today and collaborate with a publisher in the electronic environment.

The "Second Wave" and Beyond, a free resource provided by Alexander Street Press, “is an innovative form of electronic communication and research that brings together feminist thinkers, scholars and activists, to analyze compelling questions about feminist activism and theories, define new directions for historical research on this period, and provide a new venue for publishing traditional articles but also for writing and recording this history in ways made possible by the medium of online publication.” The “Second Wave” and Beyond complements the database Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (subscribed to by BC Libraries). However, participants in the former need not be affiliated with institutions that subscribe to Women and Social Movements. For more information see http://alexanderstreet.com/products/wasm_scol.htm.

Another open access resource made available by Alexander Street Press is In the First Person. This is “a free, high quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world. It lets you keyword search more than 700,000 pages of full-text by more than 18,000 individuals from all walks of life. It also contains pointers to some 4,300 audio and video files and 30,000 bibliographic records. The index contains approximately 20,500 months of diary entries, 63,000 letter entries, and 17,000 oral history entries.”

Though Alexander Street Press is a for-profit publisher, the open access nature of these two resources is very welcome. Alexander St. Press is to be applauded.