Explore Revues' Electronic Journals

Revues covers more than 100 ejournal titles in the humanities and the social sciences published in France. Access e-Spania. Revue électronique d’études hispaniques médiévales or European Journal of American Studies.

"Scrittori d'Italia" makes available Italian literature, poetry and history texts

Intute reports “The website "Scrittori d'Italia" makes freely available online digital reproduction of texts representing the entire series published by Laterza publishing house, and bearing the same title. Under the editorial guidance of Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), the printed series ran to 179 texts which appeared - a few in several editions - between 1910 and 1987, year of the final publication. Benedetto Croce was responsible for the editorial selection and criteria of publication.” more

PubMed Central Submissions Jump Sharply Under New NIH Policy

Library Journal Academic Newswire reports that substantially more deposits of NIH funded research articles are now being made into PubMed Central as a result of the new mandatory NIH policy:

In the months since passage of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) mandatory public access policy in late December of 2007, the number of submissions to the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC) repository, where authors are now required to deposit their NIH-funded research papers, has risen significantly.

According to NIH statistics, submissions to PMC began steadily rising in December 2007, soon after it became clear a mandatory policy would be adopted in 2008. By the first month following passage of the new policy, January 2008, monthly submissions to PMC hit an all-time high of 1255, and have continued to increase significantly every month so far this year. In April 2008, when the policy officially took effect, submissions spiked even more sharply, rising from 1852 total submissions in March, to 2,765 in April and 2,593 in May. The April/May 2008 figures represent well over double the number of submissions for the same months in 2007 (1,198 PMC submissions in April ’07; 948 in May ’07). Although official figures for June have not yet been posted, the NIH’s Dr. David Lipman told the LJ Academic Newswire the submission totals were higher than May.

It’s still too early to compute compliance rates, Lipman noted, but the early returns suggest a stunning turnaround. “Looking at the increase in submissions and the dramatic increase in journals signing PMC Publisher Participation agreements,” Lipman suggested a “reasonable projection” would be a compliance rate “around 55-60 percent.” Adoption of the “mandatory” NIH policy was spurred by abysmal compliance rates under the NIH’s first public access policy, adopted in 2005, which, after considerable pushback from publishers opposed to a deposit mandate, was scaled back to a voluntary policy at the 11^th hour. In February, 2006, NIH reported to congress that compliance rates under the voluntary policy lagged around four percent.

SPARC executive director Heather Joseph told the LJ Academic Newswire she expected PMC deposits to remain strong, and said the spike in submissions validated the work done by NIH and the policy’s supporters, including libraries, to educate NIH investigators about the policy, including workshops, podcasts, and an array of web resources.

Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship

A recent report published in Science (Vol 321, p. 395), Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship, argues that even as the depth of online journal backfiles increases researchers are citing fewer journals and more recent articles. In addition, James Evans argues that the hyperlinking found in online articles may contribute to a hastening toward scientific consensus; print browsing and the use of less precise print indexing exposes the research to other, more diverse points of view. The study takes into account the currency of individual research areas (by weighting of title terms) and citation patterns within disciplinary subfields.

Lyon Municipal Library signs with Google Books

Google has announced a partnership with Lyon’s Municipal Library. This library, France’s second largest, has agreed to allow over 500,000 of its books to be digitized and made accessible as part of Google’s Book Search Library project. From the Bookseller (15 July, 2008):

Google and the municipal library of Lyon will make more than 500,000 books available online as part of Google's Book Search Library project.

The Lyon Municipal Library, which is France's second largest library after the national library in Paris, is the first French library to join the project. It will give internet users access to out-of-copyrights works, searchable through Google Book Search, with the chance to download the full texts from the historic and special collections.

It also includes works in Latin, Italian, English, German and Spanish, which will be added to Google's multilingual index.

Gérard Collomb, senator and mayor of Lyon, said: "[The decision] allows us to open our library doors to the rest of the world. Digitisation, combined with the increased usage of the internet now allows to preserve collections - with digital copies - while also opening up the possibility for users to access and consult books from a distance".

The Lyon Municipal Library is the 29th library to join the project, which also includes Oxford University, Harvard University, Stanford University and Princeton University.

APA policy re NIH deposit

Two days ago the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article stating that the APA had adopted a new policy with regard to its NIH funded authors, advising that they

"should NOT deposit” their own manuscripts, and instead should allow the group to do so. “The deposit fee of $2,500 per manuscript for 2008 will be billed to the author’s university,” the policy says. Because the NIH does not charge a fee, that money is apparently going to the psychological association.

Kevin Smith posted an interesting analysis of the policy on the blog Scholarly Communication @Duke http://library.duke.edu/blogs/scholcomm/. He states:

Now comes the news that the APA is announcing that authors publishing articles in its journals that are based on NIH-funded research “should NOT” deposit their own works in PubMed Central as is now required by law. Rather, they will be required to pay APA $2500 so that the articles can be deposited by the publisher. Since there is virtually no cost associated with the mechanics of deposit itself, and the NIH policy allows an embargo on public availability of articles of up to one year in order to protect the traditional subscription market, it is hard to see what this policy is intended to accomplish other than to force an additional income stream out of the faculty authors who already provide the APA with free content. And there is heavy irony in the APA’s assertion that they can do this “as the copyright holder.”

APA is trying to put its own authors between the proverbial rock and a hard place, and it is behaving as if theirs is a non-competitive market. This is not, in fact, the case – only two of the top ten psychology journals in 2007, based on impact factor, were published by the APA, and one non-APA journal editor expressed pleased surprise at the new policy because it was sure to benefit those other journals. But for years our faculties have behaved as if they were, indeed, captive to specific journals. As scholarly societies are driven, apparently by fear and anger more than a realistic business strategy, to treat the authors on whom they depend with such contempt, one can only hope that this misperception will begin to change.

In the meantime, the APA has removed the policy from their website and the page now states:

A new document deposit policy of the American Psychological Association (APA) requiring a publication fee to deposit manuscripts in PubMed Central based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently being re-examined and will not be implemented at this time. This policy had recently been announced on APA’s Web site. APA will soon be releasing more detailed information about the complex issues involved in the implementation of the new NIH Public Access Policy.

Canadian University Starts an Author's Fund

Observers of the open access movement are well aware of the cost issues involved in open access publishing. Open access journals operate on the principle that scholarly research should be freely available to all, but inevitably the publication of those journals requires funding. One of the models for raising funds has been for publishers to charge author's fees when an author wishes to provide open access to the published article. There have been a number of funding solutions to cover author's costs, and one has been financial support from the author's institution. Last month, the University of Calgary announced that it would create a special fund to cover this kind of expense for its faculty. The following text is from the university's announcement:

University of Calgary professors and graduate students will now have access to a $100,000 Open Access Authors Fund designed to increase the amount of publicly available research. The new fund, announced today by Thomas Hickerson, Vice-Provost, Libraries and Cultural Resources and University Librarian, is the first of its magnitude in Canada. “I am proud that the University of Calgary is taking leadership in this movement to increase the worldwide accessibility of cutting-edge research,” said Hickerson.