5 Million Articles Online at HighWire, 2 Million of which are OA

HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, announced this week the posting of its five millionth article on its e-publishing platform. HighWire now hosts 1189 journals and 5,009,562 full text articles from over 140 scholarly publishers. Over 2,013,680 of these articles are open access, i.e. freely accessible to anyone with internet access.

SPARC Open Access Newsletter: December Issue

The December issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter is now available. Particularly interesting are Peter Suber's predictions for 2009.

Studying Institutional Repositories through a Sociological Lens

In the Fall 2008 issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Oya Y. Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies at Cornell University Library, argues that the development of institutional repositories (IRs) should be viewed from a sociological perspective, i.e., the perspective which explores how two groups - librarians and faculty - have approached the creation and use of IRs. According to Rieger,

IR development and deployment efforts to date have been predominantly driven by digital libraries. IRs provide a provocative case for examining the consequences of system development primarily based on perceptions, background, and expectations of a particular community of practitioners—in this case information and library scientists. It is an example of a technologically sound system that is facing challenges being embraced and adopted by intended end users. The problem is the misalignments between developers’ inscriptions of end users—their projection of users’ behavior in order to create the user interface—and the actual end use patterns.

Without more of a coordinated effort between the two groups, the IRs will be no more than "a set of empty shelves." The value of Rieger's article is her use of specific social theories to interpret how this particular area of library technology has evolved thus far. Her concluding remarks serve as an invitation to librarians to become more aware about who was involved in the construction of the IR and how it could be done differently.

Through analysis of sociocultural factors based on social theories, we can attain a better understanding of how information and communications technologies should be designed and implemented, and improve promotional activities to encourage their appropriation. . . . To design effective information and communication technologies, we need to better understand the associations among the information practices, institutions, and the social and material foundation of the scholarly communication processes.

NIH Public Access Policy Videos

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has made two videos available to assist in complying with the law requiring deposition of articles funded by NIH into PubMed Central. The first video shows how the author himself can deposit final peer-reviewed manuscript in PMC via the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS). The second video shows the submission process for final peer-reviewed manuscripts that the publisher has deposited in the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS).

Global Library of Women's Medicine Launched

Global Library of Women's Medicine, a new open access database, has recently been launched. It is intended to provide a definitive resource on the latest therapeutic options in women's medicine for doctors and women concerned about their health. Incorporating a vast range of detailed clinical information across the whole field of women's medicine, it consists of 442 main chapters and 53 supplementary chapters, supported by over 40,000 references. The chapters have been written by more than 650 specialists. This freely available Library is accessible at: www.glowm.com.

DOAJ Growing Impressively

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is going from strength to strength. DOAJ now lists 3756 journals. 1312 of these journals are searchable at article level, the number of articles included being 222745 as of today.

The goal of DOAJ “is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact.” It “aims to be comprehensive and cover all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content.” More information about DOAJ is available at http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=loadTempl&templ=about. There is also a page of FAQs.

European Commission launches EUROPEANA

Europeana, an online inventory of European digital resources, profiles its rich cultural heritage by drawing from collections in libraries, museums and archives. Although all EU countries are represented one observes that France dominates the site. View the Château de Versailles Podcast. Europeana complements The European Library site, of National Libraries of Europe website, formerly Gabriel.

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