Podcast: Librarians say Google can Support International Education and Research

The UK's JISC's (Joint Information Systems Committee) recently released a podcast in which two librarians Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and Mike Keller at Stanford University – who are both working with Google to digitize large parts of their collections -- talk to Philip Pothen about the opportunities and the challenges of working with the private sector to digitize important scholarly resources.

European e-Theses: A Demonstrator Portal Project

SOURCE: SURFfoundation Site

(Project funded by JISC, the National Library of Sweden, and the SURFfoundation. The SURFfoundation ran the project.)

Doctoral theses contain some of the most current and valuable research produced within universities, but they are underused as research resources. Nowadays, theses and dissertations no longer have to gather dust in attics or on the shelves of university libraries. By making them available on the Internet, both the author andthe university can showcase their research, benefiting not only fellow scientists, but a broad public as well. And when they are publicly available, they are used many times more often than printed theses available only at libraries or by inter-library loan.

Current developments in Europe with respect to digital repositories encourage the visibility and retrievability of doctoral e-theses. Academic material that is “published” in an institutional repository will be picked up by worldwide search engines as well as by services that focus especially on e-theses.

JISC (UK), the National Library of Sweden and the Dutch SURFfoundation have tested the interoperability of repositories for e-theses and set up a freely accessible European e-Theses portal providing access to over 10,000 doctoral theses. For the first time ever, various repositories containing doctoral e-theses have been harvested on an international scale. Five countries were involved in the project: Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The ETD demonstrator project proved that within this repository infrastructure, interoperability of doctoral theses is possible on a European or even larger scale....

For more see Full Report.

LA Times Editorial: Accessing NIH research

On 27 July the LA Times published the following editorial on the NIH and open access. Click here for the web site.

Accessing NIH research. Congress should grant taxpayers free access to the medical studies they fund.

Taxpayers pony up $28 billion annually for the National Institutes of Health, the world's largest source of funding for medical research. The payoff, in addition to the occasional spectacular breakthrough, is more than 60,000 published studies each year.

The first beneficiaries of that knowledge aren't doctors or patients. They are the publishers of the journals that review, print and sell the results to subscribers. Your tax dollars may have financed the clinical trial of a new treatment regime for the rare disease you've contracted, but you'll probably still have to pay to see the results.

Now, some lawmakers are trying to increase the public's access to this research. In a new funding bill for the NIH, the House of Representatives required that the results of the studies the government funds must be made freely available online within 12 months of their publication. The requirement builds on a 2-year-old NIH initiative to gather research in a free website called PubMed Central. That initiative was voluntary. But so few researchers complied -- less than 5% in the first year -- that proponents of "open access" to scientific research have lobbied to make it mandatory.

The main opposition has come from publishers, who argue that making research available free could ruin the smaller journals that serve some medical specialties. Libraries may stop subscribing to costly niche journals if they know the material will be available for free within a year. And if those journals die off, researchers will lose the valuable services they supply, such as rounding up experts to review studies before they're published.

While publishers have an important role to play, particularly in judging a study's credibility, that doesn't mean they're entitled to squeeze cash from that study in perpetuity. An open access requirement could force changes in some journals' business models, but a growing number have found ways to succeed while making research available for free -- for example, by charging researchers fees for publication. And the 12-month period of exclusivity enables publishers to continue selling journals to those with the most immediate need to see them.

At the same time, opening up access to NIH-funded studies will increase their impact on researchers around the world. That's very much in the public interest. The more information that's available, the more chance someone will leverage it into another medical breakthrough.

University Publishing in a Digital Age

Ithaka.org has released a new report, University Publishing in a Digital Age, that "argues that a renewed commitment to publishing in its broadest sense can enable universities to more fully realize the potential global impact of their academic programs, enhance the reputations of their institutions, maintain a strong voice in determining what constitutes important scholarship, and in some cases reduce costs." The summary of recommendations are as follows:

• Recognize that publishing is an integral part of the core mission and activities of universities, and take ownership of it.
• Take inventory of the landscape of publishing activities currently taking place within your university.
• Develop a strategic approach to publishing on your campus, including what publication services should be provided to your constituents, how they should be provided and funded, how publishing should relate to tenure decisions, and a position on intellectual assets.
• Create the organizational structure necessary to implement this strategy and leverage the resources of the university.
• Consider the importance of publishing towards an institution’s reputation, especially when associated with core academic strengths.
• Develop online publishing capabilities for backlist and frontlist content and for new emerging formats.
• Develop a shared electronic publishing infrastructure across universities to save costs, create scale, leverage expertise, innovate, extend the brand of U.S. higher education, create an interlinked environment of information, and provide a robust alternative to commercial competitors.
• Commit resources to deliver an agreed strategic plan for scholarly communication.

The downloadable pdf is on this page.

Momentum for Open Access

The following article, Momentum for Open Access, appeared today in Inside Higher Education. It concerns the proposal that is part of the appropriations bill for the Education Dept. and the NIH:

Last year, a proposal in Congress to require all federally supported research to be placed online, freely available, attracted considerable attention and debate — and ultimately stalled.

This year, a measure that is narrower — it would apply only to research supported by the National Institutes of Health — appears within reach of passage. The proposal is part of the appropriations bill for the Education Department and the NIH, and passed the House of Representative without debate last week. The Senate Appropriations Committee has already approved the measure, which has attracted bipartisan support.

While supporters of the “open access” movement continue to want a similar provision to apply to all federally supported research, they view the prospect of a win on NIH-supported research as a significant breakthrough. “The long term vision is that public access to federally supported research is the place to be,” said Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, one of the groups pushing for open access. Passing the NIH bill would show that this is “sound and prudent public policy” and that “the sky won’t fall.” . . . . MORE

Great strides for Intute - one year on

The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), composed of senior managers, academics and technology experts working in UK further and higher education, recently released a press release celebrating the first anniversary of Intute, a free online service providing access to the "very best Web resources for education and research." Intute is funded by JISC. (Thanks to Charles Bailey's Digital Koans)

Intute, the free national online service funded by JISC, celebrates its first birthday today by renewing its commitment to enable lecturers, researchers and students to discover and access high quality Internet resources.

Over the last year, Intute has seen a rapid rise in usage and the launch of new features and services. It now looks forward to a future of continuing to take innovative approaches to delivering the best of the web for education and research within this ever changing Internet environment.

Intute offers a range of tools and services, responding to the need for quality assured Internet information and Internet research "Intute offers what search engines don’t - a commitment to quality - by using subject specialists in universities and colleges to hand-pick Web resources that will support education and research.” skills for the academic community. "Intute offers what search engines don’t”, says Stephen Hoare in The Guardian; “commitment to quality – by using subject specialists in universities and colleges to hand-pick Web resources that will support education and research.”

What this means in practice is a searchable database, across all subject areas, of over 115,000 Internet resources and websites, complemented by over 60 revised and updated Virtual Training Suite tutorials, Blogs, MyIntute, and much more.

“I’m delighted with the success of the service so far and the opportunities we have had to engage with the community and take on other exciting developments, for example the Intute Repository Search project” says Caroline Williams, Executive Director of Intute. “We have established a unique collective expertise through our partner institutions and contributors which I believe will enable us to go from strength to strength.”

The success of Intute over the last year has been unquestionable, with over a quarter of a million hits on the website every day and over 3,000 registered users of the MyIntute personalisation service. In addition, since the successful launch of the new Informs, the interactive tool for creating online tutorials, the number of subscribers has doubled. In response, JISC has made a commitment to funding Intute for a further five years.

As Intute looks to the future, the needs of its users are at the forefront of its drive to be a service developed for the community by the community. As Stephen Downes of the Canadian National Research Council observes, "What Intute represents is a turning point in the sharing of academic resources.”

Intute is freely available at: The best of the web.

BMC's New Open Access Portal for the Developing World

BioMed Central www.biomedcentral.com issued the following press release introducing a new portal from BMC highlighting the importance of open access to scientific and medical literature for the developing world:

London, July 18, 2007 - BioMed Central, the world's largest publisher of open access scientific research, today announced a new information portal calling attention to the developing world's need for open access to the scientific and medical literature. The Open Access and the Developing World portal highlights the most relevant peer-reviewed research from BioMed Central's open access journals and brings together the latest news and resources relating to open access and the developing world.

As part of the launch of the portal, BioMed Central is inviting researchers and others working in developing countries to share their stories about how open access to the online research literature is changing their work.. . .

"Open access to the scientific and medical literature is a key way in which the developed world can help developing countries," said Matthew Cockerill, Publisher of BioMed Central. "In recent years, the funding for research on global health issues such as AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis has increased significantly thanks to support from philanthropic foundations. Open access is vital to ensure that the full use is made of the results of this research."

The research articles that will feature on the new portal includes publications from Malaria Journal, a leading BioMed Central journal which was recently ranked by Thomson Scientific as number one in the field of Tropical Medicine. Other BioMed Central journals which publish research highly relevant to developing countries include AIDS Research & Therapy, BMC Infectious Diseases, BMC Public Health and the International Journal for Equity in Health.

The portal also offers profiles of BioMed Central authors who work in developing countries, newsfeeds and a blog which will provide a regular round-up of news and resources relating to open access and the developing world.

"Working in a developing country I feel like I need to be one of those to take a lead in publishing much of my work in open-access journals," said Dr. Philip Hill, Clinical Epidemiologist at MRC Laboratories in Banjul, The Gambia. "I am very pleased that BioMed Central has provided this resource, which will be of particular benefit to researchers in developing countries."

Share Your Story
BioMed Central is inviting researchers and practitioners working in developing countries to send in a photograph or video relating to their work, along with a story explaining why open access to the scientific literature is important to them. The senders of the first 10 stories selected by BioMed Central to appear on the Share Your Story page will receive one of BioMed Central's "Open Access - Global Access" T-shirts. The sender of the best story received by 30 September 2007 will receive a contribution of $1000 towards computer equipment for the lab or project of their choice.

For further information please contact Charlotte Webber at BioMed Central on +44 (0)20 7631 9980 or press@biomedcentral.com

For more information about the Open Access and the Developing Worl portal please visit http://www.biomedcentral.com/developingcountries/

Or for the related link, Share Your Story, please visit http://www.biomedcentral.com/developingcountries/stories/