Friday, October 31, 2008

Happy Birthday, Open Access Directory!

The Open Access Directory is now 6 months old - Happy Birthday, OAD!

As noted on the OAD website, We have grown from six lists to thirty-four, which shows the strength and passion of the OA community.

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

INTERACTIVE MARKETING SESSION TO BE FEATURED AT SPARC DIGITAL REPOSITORIES MEETING

For immediate release
October 28, 2008

For more information, contact:
Jennifer McLennan
(202) 296-2296 ext 121
jennifer@arl.org

INTERACTIVE MARKETING SESSION TO BE FEATURED
AT SPARC DIGITAL REPOSITORIES MEETING

Last Chance to Register and Book Hotel at Reduced Rates

Washington, DC – Oct. 28, 2008 – At the upcoming SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting, branding strategist Nicole Colovos will lead a module dedicated to addressing one of the most compelling questions of digital repository management: How do we grow our content? The SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 will be held November 17-18 at the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel in Baltimore, USA.

This “Marketing Practicum” will introduce key marketing principles and strategies for the academic context. Participants will have a hands-on opportunity to apply these in an exercise aimed at engaging campus constituencies and demonstrating the importance of digital repositories. They will examine the research and publishing process from a variety of perspectives and be challenged to introduce repositories in ways that clearly communicate their benefits and opportunities to wide-ranging constituencies.

Colovos is the Vice President of Strategic Development for Bremmer & Goris Communications, the Alexandria-based marketing and design firm whose clients have included Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University at Buffalo, and the Council on Library and Information Resources. The firm has been instrumental in developing recent SPARC educational campaigns, including “The Right to Research: The student guide to opening access to research” and the Sparky video awards.

The Marketing Practicum will be on Tuesday, Nov. 18, following the luncheon keynote address by Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck-Combs Communications, who will offer his unique insights on targeted message development. One-day registration rates are available.

Advance registration fees for the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting 2008 expire Oct. 31, after which higher on-site rates apply. Hotel reservations must be made by Nov. 1 to obtain the discounted conference rate. To register and for more details, visit the meeting Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc/ir08.

The SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting is supported by major contributions from Microsoft (Conference Sponsor); Berkeley Electronic Press, BioMed Central, DC Lab, and EPrints, (breakfast and luncheon Sponsors); and by additional contributions from seventeen coffee break and supporting sponsors.

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SPARC

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC’s advocacy, educational and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

The SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting program has been developed by the members of the 2008 Program Committee: Jun Adachi (SPARC Japan), Raym Crow (SPARC), Richard Fyffe (Grinnell College), Susan Gibbons (University of Rochester), Melissa Hagemann (Open Society Institute), Karla Hahn (Association of Research Libraries), Bill Hubbard (SHERPA), Rick Johnson (SPARC), Michelle Kimpton (DSpace Foundation), Norbert Lossau (Goettingen State and University Library and DRIVER), Joyce Ogburn (University of Utah), Terry Owen (University of Maryland, College Park), Kathleen Shearer (Canadian Association of Research Libraries), Alma Swan (Key Perspectives Ltd.), Sean Thomas (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Susan Veldsman (eIFL), and Charles Watkinson (The American School of Classical Studies at Athens).



Jennifer McLennan
Director of Communications
SPARC
(The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition)
http://www.arl.org/sparc

ELPUB 2009 - First Call for Papers

ELPUB 2009 - First Call for Papers
Rethinking Electronic Publishing : Innovation in Communication Paradigms and Technologies
13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

10 - 12 June 2009, Milan, Italy
http://www.elpub.net

Electronic publishing via the Internet is continuously changing its shapes and models, challenging traditional players to adapt to new contexts. Innovative technologies enable individuals, scholars, communities and networks to establish contacts, exchange data, produce information, share knowledge. Open access sources and commercial players make contents available for a heterogeneous audience in diversity of environments, from business to private life, from educational and cultural activities to leisure time, and in a large variety of devices, from personal computers to mobile media.

New opportunities and new needs challenge us to rethink electronic publishing, to innovate communication paradigms and technologies, to make information not just a flat equivalent of a paper but a truly digital format, to allow machine processing and new services, to face the future of mobile life. The ELPUB 2009 conference will focus on key issues in e-communications, exploring dissemination channels, business models, technologies, methods and concepts.

We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of the communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of electronic publishing and scholarly communications. Topics include but are not restricted to:

- New publishing models, tools, services and roles
- New scholarly constructs and discourse methods
- Innovative business models for scholarly publishing
- Mobile distribution of e-contents, e-books
- M2M publishing services
- Multilingual and multimodal interfaces
- Services and technology for specific user communities, media, and content
- Content search, analysis and retrieval
- Interoperability, scalability and middleware infrastructure to facilitate awareness and discovery
- Personalization technologies (e.g. social tagging, folksonomies, RSS)
- Semantic web, metadata, information granularity, digital objects
- Data mining, text harvesting, dynamic formatting
- Knowledge linking, discovery, presentation
- User generated contents
- Usage and citation impact
- Security, privacy and copyright issues
- Digital preservation, content authentication
- Recommendations, guidelines, interoperability standards

Author Guidelines

Contributions are invited for the following categories:
– Single paper (abstract minimum of 1,000 and maximum of 1,500 words)
– Tutorial (abstract min. of 500 and max. of 1,000 words)
– Workshop (abstract min. of 500 and max. of 1,000 words)
– Poster (abstract max of 500 words)
– Demonstration (abstract max of 500 words)

See website for detailed author instructions: http://www.elpub.net.

Key Dates:
November 15th 2008: Opening of submission of abstracts.
January 15th 2009: Deadline for submission of abstracts (in all categories).
February 23rd, 2009: Notification of acceptance of submitted proposals.
April 6th, 2009: Deadline for submission of final papers.

All submissions are subject to peer review (double-blind) and accepted by the international ELPUB Programme Committee. Accepted full papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Printed proceedings are distributed during the conference. Electronic versions of the contributions will be archived at: http://elpub.scix.net

ABOUT ELPUB
The ELPUB 2009 conference will keep the tradition of the previous international conferences on electronic publishing, held in the United Kingdom (in 1997 and 2001), Hungary (1998), Sweden (1999), Russia (2000), the Czech Republic (2002), Portugal (2003), Brazil (2004), Belgium (2005), Bulgaria (2006), Austria (2007) and Canada (2008), which is to bring together researchers, lecturers, librarians, developers, business executives, entrepreneurs, managers, users and all those interested in issues regarding electronic publishing in a wide variety of contexts. These include the human, cultural, economic, social, technological, legal, commercial, and other relevant aspects that such an exciting theme encompasses.
Three distinguishing features of this conference are: broad scope of topics which creates a unique atmosphere of active exchange and learning about various aspects of scholarly communications and electronic publishing; combination of general and technical issues; and a condensed procedure of submission, revision and publication of proceedings which guarantees presentations of most recent work.
ELPUB 2009 will offer a variety of activities, such as workshops, tutorials, panel debates, poster presentations and demonstrations. Social events and sight-seeing tours will also be available to participants (at additional costs). Please see the conference web site for details.

Conference Location: Milan, Italy. Milan is the largest metropolitan area in Italy, one of the largest in Europe: 7,4 million population. It is the Italian capital of industry and business and well renowned as one of the world capitals of fashion and design. Milan is one of the oldest artistic centres in Northern Italy and its surroundings include the beautiful Alps and the famous Garda, Maggiore and Como lakes. All this makes Milan a perfect place for sight-seeing, cultural visits and exciting shopping, not to mention enjoying Italian food and wines.

Conference Host: The State University of Milan is the third largest university in Italy after Rome and Naples. The venue is the main building, in the centre of Milan, 3 minutes on foot from the Cathedral. It was made in 1450 under Duke Francesco Sforza, who also built the famous Castle. ELPUB 2009 is organized by CILEA, a consortium of Italian Universities founded in 1974 to promote the use of advanced ICT in academic and research environments, to support technological transfer and to manage ICT services, facilities and infrastructures. Within CILEA, the AePIC team deals with innovative e-publishing technologies and models, promoting Open Access to knowledge through sustainable online publishing.

General Chair: Susanna Mornati, CILEA – Inter-Academic Consortium for ICT, Segrate, Italy - mornati@cilea.it

Programme Chair: Turid Hedlund, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland - turid.hedlund@hanken.fi

Conference information: elpub2009@elpub.net

Conference web site: http://www.elpub.net

Join the "ELPUB Electronic Publishing Conference" group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=36376184362

Heather Morrison
ELPUB Programme Committee

Monday, October 27, 2008

Charles Bailey: Authors' Rights Tout de Suite

Many thanks to Charles Bailey for yet another useful tool!

Charles Bailey's announcement:

Author's Rights, Tout de Suite, the latest Digital Scholarship publication, is designed to give journal article authors a quick introduction to key aspects of author's rights and to foster further exploration of this topic through liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent Web sites.


http://www.digital-scholarship.org/ts/authorrights.pdf


It is under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose, including derivative works, in
accordance with the license.


http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/


The prior publication in the Tout de Suite series, Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite, is also available.


http://www.digital-scholarship.org/ts/irtoutsuite.pdf

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association Launches

ANNOUNCING THE LAUNCH OF THE OPEN ACCESS SCHOLARLY PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION, OASPA

14 October 2008, London. The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA, announces its official launch today in conjunction with an OA Day celebration hosted by the Wellcome Trust in London. The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines through an exchange of information, setting of industry standards, advancing business and publishing models, advocating for gold OA journals publishing, education and the promotion of innovation.

From having first emerged as a new publishing model over a decade ago, OA publishing has become an embedded feature of the scholarly publishing landscape: The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists over 3500 peer-reviewed journals; a growing number of professional organizations offer OA publications; university libraries increasingly support OA publishing services; funding organizations support and encourage OA publishing; and a long tail of independent editorial teams and societies now publish their titles OA. Professional OA publishers such as BioMed Central and the Public Library of Science (PLoS) have been in business for over five years, while some scientist/scholar publishers (editorial teams operating independently of a professional publisher) have published their OA journals for a decade or more. Moreover, a number of traditional publishing houses are now engaging in Open Access activities, the recent acquisition of BioMed Central by Springer and the SAGE-Hindawi partnership being two cases in point. By bringing together those who share an interest in developing appropriate business models, tools and standards to support OA journals publishing, it is hoped that success in these areas can be achieved more quickly to the benefit of not only OASPA members, but more importantly, for the scholarly community that OA publishers serve.

Membership in OASPA is open to both scholar publishers and professional publishing organizations, including university presses and for profit and non-profit organizations. Members are expected to demonstrate a genuine interest in OA journals publishing by having signed either the Berlin or Budapest Declarations and must publish at least one full OA journal. Other individuals and organizations who support OA journals publishing or who are interested in exploring opportunities are also welcome. Membership criteria and an application form can be found on the OASPA website, www.oaspa.org.

The founding members of OASPA represent a broad spectrum of OA publishers and include: BioMed Central, Co-Action Publishing, Copernicus, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, Journal of Medical Internet Research (Gunther Eysenbach), Medical Education Online (David Solomon), the Public Library of Science (PLoS), SAGE, SPARC Europe and Utrecht University Library (Igitur). Representatives from each of these publishers will form an interim board until a first General Meeting is held during 2009.

###

Open Access Scholarly Publishers’ Association, OASPA, is launched today 14 October 2008 in response to long-time informal discussions among Open Access publishers, and aims to represent the interests of OA journals publishers globally. For more information about the organization, visit the OASPA website at: www.oaspa.org.

The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity in the UK. It funds innovative biomedical research, in the UK and internationally, spending over £600 million each year to support the brightest scientists with the best ideas. The Wellcome Trust supports public debate about biomedical research and its impact on health and wellbeing.

Open Access (OA) scholarly publication refers to the dissemination of peer-reviewed manuscripts containing original research or scholarship immediately upon publication, at no charge to user groups, without requiring registration or other restrictions to access. OA publications also allow users to "copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship...."

(From the SPARC Open Access Forum

Happy Open Access Day!

Follow the events on the Open Access Day website!

Sunday, October 12, 2008

In the Library with a Lead Pipe

Check it out! A new open access, peer-reviewed blog by librarians, called In the Library with a Lead Pipe.

Thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

October 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the October 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlighted this month: an attempt to overturn the NIH policy with a bill that makes the ludicrous claim that copyright in published results of publicly funded research belongs to the publishers.

If publishers make a little money from publishing the results of publicly funded research, that's fine - as long as this does not interfere with the purpose of funding the research. In medicine, the purpose is advancing our understanding so that we can prevent, cure, and treat illnesses.

This is a topic I've written about in more depth in my open letter to the American Association of Cancer Research, In lieu of flowers.