Open Access Checklist

Tilburg University has made available Alma Swan's Open Access Advocacy: A Checklist for Research Universities.

Op-Ed Piece on European Reaction to Google Book Settlement

Bill Echikson, an author of four books and senior manager of European communications in Google, recently published an op-ed piece in The Irish Times discussing the agreement made by Google with American authors and publishers that aims, if an American court approves, to allow US readers to search, preview and buy online access to potentially millions of out-of-print books that were scanned as part of Google Book Search. Echikson also ponders the European reaction, what he in fact calls "handwringing" and "concern", over this agreement.

Click here for the full-text of the article.

Benefits Worldwide of Nursing ETDs

In a recent article, "Electronic Theses and Dissertations: A Review of this Valuable Resource for Nurse Scholars Worldwide" in International Nursing Review L. M. Goodfellow makes a strong case that nurse scholars from both developing and developed countries could benefit from ETDs. In particular, "An international repository of ETDs benefits the community of nurse scholars in many ways. The ability to access recent graduate students' research electronically from anywhere in the world is advantageous. For scholars residing in developing countries, access to these ETDs may prove to be even more valuable."

Full text of article.

100+ Places for Free Books Online

Alan Cain has posted a very useful list of "100+ Places for Free Books Online".

Public Access Policies and ARL Libraries

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has published the results of a survey of ARL member libraries that provides information about how those libraries are helping their faculty meet open access mandates. An excerpt from the report's Executive Summary follows:

In many academic and research institutions, libraries
have taken the lead in developing resources
and services to support authors who are required to
comply with public access policies. This survey was
designed to explore the role libraries are playing in
supporting public access policies in their institutions.

The entire report is available.

Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing

Stuart M. Shieber, Director of the Office for Scholarly Communication at Harvard University, has authored a new article proposing changes to allow open-access journals to compete more effectively with traditional, subscription-based journals.

Shieber SM (2009) Equity for Open-Access Journal Publishing. PLoS Biol 7(8): e1000165.

Scholars write articles to be read—the more access to their articles the better—so one might think that the open-access approach to publishing, in which articles are freely available online to all without interposition of an access fee, would be an attractive competitor to traditional subscription-based journal publishing.

But open-access journal publishing is currently at a systematic disadvantage relative to the traditional model.

I propose a simple, cost-effective remedy to this inequity that would put open-access publishing on a path to become a sustainable, efficient system, allowing the two journal publishing systems to compete on a more level playing field. The issue is important, first, because academic institutions shouldn't perpetuate barriers to an open-access business model on principle and, second, because the subscription-fee business model has manifested systemic dysfunctionalities in practice. After describing the problem with the subscription-fee model, I turn to the proposal for providing equity for open-access journal publishing—the open-access compact.

Full article. (Thanks to Syed Khan for bringing this to our attention.)

Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) recently launched their Super-Enlightenment website. From Sarah Sussman's 13 April, 2009 overview of the site:

This collection assembles about three dozen rare works in French written between 1716 and 1835, covering mythology, alchemy, religion, free-masonry, science, and other topics. Rather than rejecting what we commonly think of as Enlightenment ideas and paradigms, these esoteric texts explore many of the same themes, representing what Dan Edelstein, assistant professor of Stanford's French and Italian department and faculty coordinator of this site, calls "the dark side of the Enlightenment" -- or "Super-Enlightenment." We hope that making these works available as a searchable corpus (after they have long been pushed to the margins) will open up new paths of research for scholars at Stanford and around the world. Historians, literary scholars, and art historians are some of the target audiences for this resource.

This text collection currently consists of 64 volumes, both held by SULAIR and gathered from other library collections, that are presented as searchable PDFs. Yet Super-E is not only a collection of primary sources, it also offers scholarly materials for the researcher and teacher. Nine bio-bibliographical essays by specialists in the field and Professor Edelstein's brief introduction offer historical and theoretical background to the project and to the works and authors that it showcases. Users can also sort the texts by author, date, and by the following thematic topics: Art and Architecture, Illuminism and Science, Masonry, Mythology, Orientalism, and Reform and Revolution