Sunday, January 25, 2009

Sebastian Boell creates Master List of LIS journals, finds that 16% are open access

Sebastian Boell has self-archived a thesis in E-LIS, producing a Master List of LIS journals and his finding that 16% are open access.

Thanks to Gavin Baker on Open Access News.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

STM on institutional repositories

The Society of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers has openly released a document for publishing executives on institutional repositories. While this document clearly shows continuing resistance to public access through institutional repositories, and a fair bit of confusion, there are some positives here as well. One example is STM's open recognition of the value of the IR for public access, the feature of the first paragraph. To me, this is a bit of a milestone, not unlike when publishers first began to acknowledge the value of OA as a philosophical ideal. The open posting of the document, too, is a step forward. Let's hope that this is an initial sign that we're moving past some of the debate, towards a most welcome discussion of the issues.

My detailed comments are on IJPE. See also comments by Peter Suber and Stevan Harnad.

Friday, January 16, 2009

OA Librarian is hot!

I picked this up from my colleague Paul Pival's blog The Distant Librarian. Thanks, Paul.

According to the HotStuff 2.0 blog, OA Librarian is presently ranked #9 out of 442 active library-related blogs, a rise of 21 places from #30. I'd say that's a pretty good spot to be in! (The Distant Librarian is in the neighborhood as well, at a definitely not-too-shabby 45).

Here's the background to HotStuff 2.o and the rankings:

"RSS feeds from over 800 library related blogs are collated on a daily basis and analysed in an attempt to discover new and/or interesting topics. Not all of the blogs have posted something new since HotStuff was launched, so the number of active blogs is lower."

"Just for fun, every day the last 3 blog posts from each blog are analysed to give a “Hot or Not” score. Points are gained for using words that haven’t been used frequently in the past, but lost for using words that are declining in popularity. You can see the current scores on the Hot or Not page!"


Thursday, January 15, 2009

ELPUB 2009 - Final Call for Papers - NEW DEADLINE January 29, 2009

ELPUB 2009 - Final Call for Papers - NEW DEADLINE January 29, 2009

*** apologies for cross-posting ***

Due to numerous requests for a postponement, and compatible with the review process and the publication time, the deadline for abstracts submission has been extended to January 29: NEW DATE!

ELPUB 2009 - Final Call for Papers - NEW DEADLINE January 29, 2009 (abstract submission)
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
elpub2009@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 a diversity of environments. The ELPUB 2009 conference will focus on key issues in e-communications, exploring dissemination channels, business models, technologies, methods and concepts.

See website for detailed author instructions: http://www.elpub.net. 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 and indexed by the major indexing agents.

Join the "ELPUB Electronic Publishing Conference" group on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=3D36376184362

ELPUB 2009 and OAI 6 are just 3 days in time and 400 km in space (4 hours by train, 50 minutes by plane) away from each other: take this unique chance to participate in both, enjoying two exciting scientific events in electronic publishing and scholarly communication and visiting Italy and Switzerland.
--
ELPUB 2009, www.elpub.net
General Chair: Susanna Mornati, CILEA, Italy
Programme Chair: Turid Hedlund, Hanken School of Economics, Finland
mailto: elpub2009@elpub.net

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit updated

NEWS

For Immediate Release

January 13, 2009

New look, updated content for ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit

CHICAGO – The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has released an updated version of its popular Scholarly Communication Toolkit in a new format and with updated content. The toolkit continues to provide context and background by summarizing key issues to offer quick, basic information on scholarly communication topics. It also links to examples of specific tools, including handouts, presentations and videos for libraries to adapt and use on their own campuses. The ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit is freely available at http://www.acrl.ala.org/scholcomm/.


“Library services involve education of the next generation, infrastructure for long term knowledge access and advocacy for rights and practices that lead to a sustainable system of scholarly peer-review, its distribution and preservation," explains Kim Douglas, university librarian at California Institute of Technology and co-chair of ACRL’s Scholarly Communication Committee. “The ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit supports library staff seeking to align their programs with an essential byproduct of their parent institutions – the creation, protection, dissemination and archiving of new knowledge.”


“Given the current economic climate, it's natural to ask if scholarly communication activities are a luxury or a distraction,” said Richard Fyffe, librarian of the college for Grinnell College and co-chair of ACRL’s Scholarly Communication Committee. “We define scholarly communications issues as central to the mission of virtually every kind of academic library because they are central to the mission of our institutions. We feel libraries need to maintain a commitment to awareness, understanding, ownership and activism.”

The updated toolkit serves as a resource for scholarly communication discussions inside the library, outreach programs to faculty and administrators and library school students seeking to incorporate these issues into their course work. The ACRL Scholarly Communication Committee, as part of its efforts to keep the toolkit current, encourages librarians to contribute tools and case studies on their local scholarly communication campaigns. Simply post a comment describing your tool and provide a link in the appropriate tab.

The ACRL Scholarly Communication Toolkit is available online at http://www.acrl.ala.org/scholcomm/.

Thanks to Adrian Ho.

Second International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference: Deadline for Call for Papers Extended

The final deadline for the call for papers for the 2nd International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference (Vancouver, July 8 - 10, 2009) has been extended to February 9, 2009.

Quick links:

PKP 2009 Conference website:
http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/pkp2009

Call for papers:
http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/pkp2009/schedConf/cfp

About the conference:

The Public Knowledge Project is pleased to announce that the second international PKP conference will be held from July 8 - 10, 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The first PKP conference was an overwhelming success with presentations and participants from around the world. A selected set of conference papers was subsequently published in the October 2007 issue of First Monday.

The conference will appeal not just to members of the PKP community, but to anyone interested in trends and developments for scholarly publishing and communication. There will be a wide range of topical sessions on new reading and publishing technologies; open access initiatives; alternative publishing and funding models; national and international collaborative projects; new roles and partnerships for libraries, scholarly publishers and others; and sustainability for open access publishing and open source software. Prospective and first time users of OJS and other PKP software will be able to learn more about the systems and establish contacts with the PKP community. Experienced implementers, developers, and system administrators will have an opportunity to participate in technical sessions and exchange information.

The conference will commence with an opening keynote session on the evening of July 8 convened by John Willinsky, the founder of the Public Knowledge Project. There will be several pre-conference workshops on July 8, and the main conference program will present a combination of concurrent and single track sessions during on July 9 and 10. The conference will conclude with three special symposia on community and network building intended for each of the core PKP constituents: journal editors and publishers; librarians; and software developers.

The conference will be hosted at Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus and will be adjacent to a wide range of accommodations, restaurants, and other popular tourist destinations. Please mark the July 8 - 10 dates on your 2009 calendars. The PKP partners look forward to welcoming you to the second PKP conference.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Vote for the OA Proposal to the Obama Transition Team's Citizen's Briefing Book

The U.S. Open Access Working Group has posted an OA proposal to the Obama transition team's Citizen's Briefing Book. Please vote for the proposal! Details and links are available on Open Access News.

Saturday, January 10, 2009

ELPUB 2009 - Final Call for Papers

ELPUB 2009 - Final 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 maxximum 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.
Authors of accepted papers will be asked to register to the Conference and
present their work.

Key Dates:
November 15th 2008: Opening date for 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 and indexed by the major
indexing agents.

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=3D36376184362

ELPUB 2009 and OAI 6 are just 3 days in time and 400 km in space (4 hours
by train, 50 minutes by plane) away from each other: take this unique
chance to participate in both, enjoying two exciting scientific events in
electronic publishing and scholarly communication and visiting Italy and
Switzerland.

Friday, January 02, 2009

A substantial start to 2009! Peter Suber's January SPARC OA Newsletter

What a way to start 2009! Peter Suber just released the January 2009 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. The feature this month is highlights of the very substantive progress in implementing open access in 2008 - far more than just the numbers, this piece succinctly captures the major events of 2008 - the widely heralded such as the strong NIH mandate, the Harvard mandate, and the Springer acquisition of BioMedCentral - to the more important but perhaps less noticed events - such as the fact that BMC achieved profitability before being bought by Springer. Highly recommended as a review for those who keep up, or an overview for those who don't always have the time.