Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Jasco reviews DLIST

Reference guru Dr. Péter Jacso reviews DLIST in his Digital Reference Shelf for June 2007.

Thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News for a very helpful excerpt and comments.

Friday, July 20, 2007

Engineering Open Choice

Another hybrid OA journal program was announced yesterday. This one is from Professional Engineering Publishing in the UK and is called Engineering Open Choice. It's the usual sort of thing; a submission fee is paid in order for an accepted article to become openly accessible. There are a few aspects of this program worth mentioning, both good and bad:

*The fee for Engineering Open Choice is 1700 pounds, which, as of this morning, works out to $3643 CAN or $3494 CAN. Don't hold this to me but I think this is the most expensive hybrid OA submission fee, more than Springer Open Choice, which is $3000 US. On top of this hefty fee, there are also colour charges (but no other fees).

*Engineering Open Choice applies to all of the Professional Engineering Publishing journals, including the well-known Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

*Interestlingly, the publisher will guarantee that Engineering Open Choice articles will be freely available online via their website for a period of 10 years from the date of publication minimum. Unless I've missed something, this is the first time I've actually seen a specific guarantee of availability in years given by a publisher. I would hope that it would be much longer than 10 years in practice but it's good to see some sort of promise of accessibility.

*Authors who take part in Engineering Open Choice will be able to use a Creative Commons license and deposit the published version in repositories. This is good.

*Not so good is the lack of any mention of subscription price decreases in response to the take-up of Engineering Open Choice, as other publishers have indicated. Perhaps that will come later.

On that note, Oxford University Press has announced that, in response to the take up of their OA option, will apparently be reducing the subscription costs of some journals for 2008. Details are forthcoming. I'll post these to OA librarian as soon as I can after they are released.

More information about Engineering Open Choice from Professional Engineering Publishing can be found at http://www.pepublishing.com/pep/guidelines/Engineering_Open_Choice.PDF.

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Naina Pandita and Open Access in India

Librarian Naina Pandita and Suhkdev Singh of the Government of India's National Informatics Centre recently spoke at the First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference about the "free access" services of the Indian Medlars Centre, and the key role of the centre in leading the transition to open access.

The small group of 4 staff at the centre manage a union database of holdings of health libraries throughout the country to facilitate resource sharing, the freely available INDMed bibliographic database of Indian biomedical journals, the first phase in the transition to open access, as well as fulltext to 38 of these journals, through the medIND service. MetaMED provides a means to cross-search INDmed along with PubMedCentral.

Congratulations to Naina and her team for an outstanding example of combining the very best of traditional library services with leadership in the transition to open access.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Monday, July 02, 2007

'Free' is Not Necessarily Open Access

The Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) has just published:

Stanbrook et al. Congratulations to our colleagues at Open Medicine [commentary]. CMAJ • July 3, 2007; 177 (1).


We, at Open Medicine, appreciated the endorsement but felt the need to clarify some confusion introduced by the commentary which you can read about at the Open Medicine blog.

It's important for librarians of all stripes to articulate the differences between free access and open access.

Dean Giustini
OM blogger
OA blogger

July SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the July 2007 issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. The feature this month is called Problems and Opportunities - Blizzards and Beauty.