Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: September 30, 2009

The September 30, 2009 Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available.

Abstract

This issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access features a few key quotable numbers to illustrate the growth and current extent of open access: more than 4,000 fully open access, peer reviewed journals in DOAJ, growing by 2 titles per day; close to 1,500 open access repositories listed in OpenDOAR, adding a new repository every business day; over 30 million free publications through Scientific Commons, growing by more than 20 thousands items per day; more than 20% of the world's medical literature is freely available 2 years after publication, and close to 10% is freely available immediately on publication; 1 more journal decides to submit all or most content to PMC every business day, and growth of open access journals in PMC is one new journal every other business day. The number of open access mandate policies is well over a hundred, and growing rapidly - but also likely understated. If you have a policy, please be sure to register with ROARMAP. This quarter saw some minor setbacks. Most notable (but still small) is a decrease in free content through Highwire Press.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity: a key step in transitioning to open access

My comments on the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) are available on the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. In brief, I recommend that every library and university join. No immediate financial commitment is required, rather a commitment to develop models that provide equity for open access journals. Commitment entails recognition of the key role that libraries provide in supporting scholarly journals.

For links to COPE, see Andrew's post.

Monday, September 14, 2009

Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE)

Five major US universities (Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Berkeley) have announced that they have joined together in a compact for Open Access publication. Each university commits "to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication fees for open-access journal articles written by its faculty for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds". Other universities are being asked to sign on to the compact.

More details can be found here:

The announcement/press release: http://hul.harvard.edu/news/2009_0914_compact.html

The website for the compact: http://www.oacompact.org/

Thursday, September 10, 2009

PLoS One wins ALPSP award for publishing innovation!

PLoS One is the winner of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) award for publishing innovation! Congrats, PLoS One! (Thanks to Peter Binfield on twitter).

Free webcast of OASPA conference

Free webcast of the first Open Access Scholarly Publishing Conference which begins September 16! Announcement from OASPA follows:

Dear All, I am pleased to announce that the 1st Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing will be broadcast live online at: http://www.river-valley.tv/ in order to broaden the reach of the conference beyond those participants who will be able to physically join us next week. Assuming that there are no technical hiccups, the webcast will begin on Monday September 14th at 12.30 pm Swedish time (11.30 am London/6.30 am in New York), and will continue according to the conference schedule, which can be found at: http://oaspa.org/coasp/sessions.php. If you check the website and find that the webcast is not working, I would encourage you to check back after a while to see if the conference has come back online. The parallel breakout sessions on the second day of the conference, as well as the social events in the evening, will not be broadcast. In addition to the live webcast, we will be recording both the video and audio of all of the conference presentations, which should be made available online within 1-2 weeks after the conference has ended. The recordings of the individual presentations will be posted as soon as they are ready at: http://www.river-valley.tv, and once all of
the presentations have been uploaded we will send out a final announcement. If you will be joining us in Lund, I look forward to seeing you next week. Otherwise, I hope you take the opportunity to check out the conference online.

Best Regards,
Paul Peters,
Chair 1st Conference on Open Access Scholarly Publishing

Caroline Sutton, PhD
Publisher Co-Action Publishing

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Workshops on creating open access journals

David Solomon and Caroline Sutton are looking for co-organizers to host their Workshop on Creating Open Access Journals. I attended the workshop held at the 2nd International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference. Highly recommended. This is very useful for the librarian interested in scholarly communication, or consider hosting a workshop for your faculty members.

Saturday, September 05, 2009

Please join me for ALCTS Webinar September 23rd

Please join me (Heather Morrison) on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2:00 - 3:00 p.m. EDT for the ALCTS webinar, Open Access: Key Trends

Description

While content recruitment at the local IR may seem slow and painful, from a global / historical perspective, the growth of open access in all its flavors is nothing short of phenomenal. The benefits of the IR for authors and for institutions will become more and more apparent in the near future. The chicken will emerge from the egg, and the IR will be seen as a great career choice. This session will provide an overview of the latest key trends in open access: why we need green as well as gold, both institutional and disciplinary repositories, and open access policies to fill the repositories. Institutional open access policies will be highlighted, introducing different types of policies, what makes for good policy, and approaches to open access policy development at the university.

For details and registration for this and other programs , see the ALCTS Webinar Series.

Kudos to Harvard and for FRPAA support letter and DASH!

Kudos to Harvard University for a Letter supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), to many thanks to the letter's signatories, Harvard Provost Steven E. Hyman, Robert Darnton, and Stuart Shieber.

Congrats also to Harvard on launch of DASH, Harvard's institutional repository.

What an impressive and inspiring start to the semester!

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

September 2009 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the September 2009 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this: BMJ's successful business model, supporting OA full-text through paid abridgements.

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Copyright Hall of Janus? : Harvard University’s Two-Faced Approach to Copyrigh

This post by Raizel Leibler of The Learned Fangirl, contrasting Harvard as excellent role model (with their leading-edge, faculty-led OA policies) and horrible role model (Harvard Business Review's IP is for me approach), may be of interest to librarians.