CARL and SPARC offer Canadian authors new tool to widen access to published articles

CARL and SPARC have teamed up to provide a Canadian version of the SPARC Author Addendum. Please spread the word! This message is an important example, and recognition, of Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement

Le texte français suit le texte anglais

For immediate release
August 15, 2007

For more information, contact:
Tim Mark, CARL
(613) 562-5385
carl@uottawa.ca

Jennifer McLennan, SPARC
(202) 296-2296 ext. 121
jennifer@arl.org

CARL AND SPARC OFFER CANADIAN AUTHORS NEW TOOL
TO WIDEN ACCESS TO PUBLISHED ARTICLES
Popular author copyright addendum adapted for use in Canada

Ottawa, ON and Washington, DC - August 15, 2007 - The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the release of the SPARC Canadian Author Addendum, a new tool for authors in Canada to retain key rights to the journal articles they publish.

Traditional publishing agreements often require that authors grant exclusive rights to the publisher. The new SPARC Canadian Author Addendum enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement by retaining select rights, such as the rights to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present the articles they publish for non-commercial purposes. It will help Canadian researchers to comply with granting council public access policies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Policy on Access to Research Outputs. The Canadian Addendum reflects Canadian copyright law and is an adaptation of the original U.S. version of the SPARC Author Addendum.

"The SPARC Canadian Author Addendum allows researchers to have maximum impact and visibility for their publications - with the comfort of knowing important rights still belong to them," stated Carolynne Presser, Chair of the CARL Scholarly Communication Committee and Director of Libraries at the University of Manitoba.

"The Canadian Addendum is an important contribution to the ongoing international movement to support authors in making research articles accessible to all who may benefit from their findings," said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. "Canada has been a leader in the move toward increased access to research and we're pleased to have played a role in collaborating with CARL on this important initiative."

An explanatory brochure complements the Addendum. Both the brochure and addendum are available in French and English on the CARL and SPARC Web sites and will be widely distributed. SPARC, in conjunction with ARL and ACRL, has also introduced a free Web cast on Understanding Author Rights. See http://www.arl.org/sparc/author for details.

For more information, please see the CARL Web site at http://www.carl-abrc.ca or the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

CARL
CARL is the leadership organization for the Canadian research library community. CARL's members represent Canada's 27 major academic research libraries, Library and Archives Canada, the Library of Parliament and the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI). For more information see www.carl-abrc.ca.

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.

Publication immédiate
Le 15 août 2007

Renseignements :
Tim Mark, ABRC
(613) 562 5385
carl@uottawa.ca

Jennifer McLennan, SPARC
(202) 296 2296, poste 121
jennifer@arl.org

L'ABRC ET SPARC OFFRENT AUX AUTEURS CANADIENS UN NOUVEL OUTIL POUR ÉLARGIR L'ACCÈS AUX ARTICLES PUBLIÉS
Un addenda populaire sur le droit d'auteur est adapté pour utilisation au Canada

Ottawa (Ontario) et Washington, DC - le 15 août 2007 - L'Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada (ABRC) et SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) ont annoncé aujourd'hui le lancement de l'Addenda de l'auteur canadien SPARC, un nouvel outil permettant aux auteurs du Canada de conserver d'importants droits sur les articles de revue qu'ils publient.

Selon les ententes traditionnelles de publication, les auteurs doivent souvent concéder des droits exclusifs à l'éditeur. Le nouvel Addenda de l'auteur canadien SPARC permet aux auteurs de conclure une entente plus juste du fait qu'ils conservent certains droits, comme les droits de reproduction, de réutilisation et de présentation publique des articles qu'ils publient à des fins autres que commerciales. Il permettra aux chercheurs canadiens de se conformer aux politiques d'accès public des conseils subventionnaires, comme la Politique sur l'accès aux résultats de la recherche des Instituts de recherche en santé du Canada. L'Addenda est conforme à la loi canadienne sur le droit d'auteur et il s'agit d'une adaptation de la version originale américaine du Author Addendum de SPARC.

« L'Addenda de l'auteur canadien SPARC permettra aux chercheurs d'avoir une influence et d'obtenir une visibilité maximales pour leurs publications, tout en sachant qu'ils en conservent certains droits importants, » a déclaré Carolynne Presser, présidente du Comité de la communication savante de l'ABRC et directrice des bibliothèques à l'Université du Manitoba.

« L'Addenda est une contribution importante au mouvement international actuel visant à aider les auteurs à rendre leurs articles savants accessibles à tous ceux qui pourraient tirer avantage de leurs découvertes, » a dit la directrice exécutive de SPARC, Heather Joseph. « Le Canada a été un chef de file dans le mouvement visant à élargir l'accès à la recherche et nous avons été heureux de jouer un rôle en collaborant avec l'ABRC à cette initiative importante. »

Une brochure explicative complète l'Addenda. La brochure et l'addenda sont disponibles en français et en anglais sur les sites Web de l'ABRC et de SPARC et ils seront largement diffusés. SPARC, en collaboration avec l'ARL et l'ACRL, a aussi lancé un webcast gratuit pour expliquer les droits d'auteur (Understanding Author Rights). Voir http://www.arl.org/sparc/author pour plus de renseignements.

Pour plus d'information, consultez le site Web de l'ABRC à http://www.carl-abrc.ca ou le site Web de SPARC à http://www.arl.org/sparc.

ABRC
L'ABRC est l'organisme chef de file pour l'ensemble des bibliothèques de recherche au Canada. Ses membres représentent les 27 grandes bibliothèques de recherche universitaire au Canada, Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, la Bibliothèque du Parlement et l'Institut canadien de l'information scientifique et technique (ICIST). Pour plus d'information, voir www.carl-abrc.ca.

SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), avec SPARC Europe et SPARC Japon, est une alliance internationale regroupant plus de 800 bibliothèques universitaires et de recherche qui s'efforcent d'établir un système plus ouvert pour la communication savante. Avec ses programmes de promotion, d'éducation et de partenariat, SPARC favorise une plus grande diffusion de la recherche. On peut trouver SPARC sur le Web à http://www.arl.org/sparc.

The Hybrids Continue: ALPSP Open Choice

I'm a little late on this and it has been blogged elsewhere but I thought I should at least mention the latest entry into the hybrid journal pool, "Open Choice" from the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). Beginning with the July 2007 issue, authors of articles in the ALPSP journal Learned Publishing will be able to make their accepted articles openly accessible with a submission fee $2500 US for members and $3000 for non-members.

Some notes:

*This is being run as a trial for 12 months, "to see if it provides a viable way of sustaining the costs of peer review, editing and other aspects of journal publication". They will also look at amending subscription costs after the year is up, a good thing, IMHO.

*The fees are at the high end of the hybrid spectrum. The $3000 non-member fee matches that of Springer's hybrid program, which is at or near the top. My gut feeling is that this might be too pricey for the average Learned Publishing author but I could be wrong.

*The ALPSP does permit all Learned Publishing articles to become freely accessible after a year so the addition of the OA option for the current year means that at least some of the journals will be OA regardless of date of publication.

Dean Giustini interviews John Willinsky

OA Librarian blog team member Dean Giustini interviews noted open access advocate John Willinsky on Google Scholar Blog. Topics include Willinsky's move to Stanford (while still maintaining a partial post at UBC), use of blogging within journals, and sustainability for open access journals, possibly through cooperatives.

Library Fund for Open Access Publishing at University of Wisconsin-Madison

Kudos to the library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for establishing a Fund for Open Access Publishing!.

Hat tip to Peter Suber on Open Access News for the tip.

Oxford adjusts open access pricing adjustments

I saw this first on the liblicense-l list on the afternoon of August 12 (it hadn't appeared in the liblicense-l archives as of writing - http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/ListArchives/). OUP announced that some of the 2008 prices for the journals with "Oxford Open" content have been amended; corporate rates were presented instead of academic ones. I gave the new list (http://www.oxfordjournals.org/oxfordopen/2008%20online-only%20price%20adjustments.doc) a once-over and I can't see too much difference between the revised rates and the previously-posted numbers though I may be missing something (others may be better able to pick out any notable variances; let me know if you see anything). Anyway, it's still a very good thing that the submission fees collected via the Oxford Open program are being taken into account in subscription pricing. OUP is certainly one of the earliest publishers to do this, if not the only one so far; I hope others will follow suit soon. Maybe we'll see more of this as 2008 subscription prices are released in the next few months?

DOAJ Review for The Charleston Advisor: Request for Comments

I am working on a review of The Directory of Open Access Journals for the October 2007 issue of The Charleston Advisor (TCA).

Comments from libraries, publishers, members, and sponsors of DOAJ would be most appreciated.

TCA is a peer-reviewed publication, with a primary focus on review of products of interest to libraries. Some articles in each TCA issue are open access, particularly those on open access initiatives (kudos to TCA for inviting reviews on OA products and initiatives).

TCA uses a 5-star rating system (with 5 stars representing the highest possible rating), based on 4 elements: Content, Searchability, Pricing, and Contract Options.

I have a particular interest in exploring economic models for sustainability of open access initiatives. Your comments on the DOAJ membership / sponsorship model would be most appreciated. Better yet - why not have your library or organization sign up as a member or sponsor now, and render the question moot?

Some preliminary thoughts on the elements:

1. Content: is DOAJ sufficiently comprehensive, and does the vetting process result in a list that we can trust for certain elements of quality, particularly peer review and open access status? How does DOAJ as a package of journals compare with subscription packages?

2. Searchability: can you find what you need on DOAJ? Is it easy or hard? Are there types of searches not currently supported that you would like to see?

3. Pricing: free access cannot be beat! However, here is where comments on the membership / sponsorship model would fit. One way to think of this: how does the cost of DOAJ membership compare with libraries paying for staffing to manage this kind of list on their own? Organizations in developing countries have expressed an interest in membership, but the initial suggestions do not fit their circumstances. Is there a way of defining a membership contribution that makes sense everywhere? How about a suggested membership fee based on X number of average days' salary? That is, DOAJ could calculate the initial suggestion based on number of day's salary, based on average salaries in Sweden. An organization in a developing country could then calculate the same amount of salary time based on salaries in their own country, and be confident that their contribution, while different in dollar amount, is fully equivalent to the contributions of others.

4. Contract options: this element may be more obvious with subscription resources, but is important with OA resources as well. Do we know everything we need to know about how we can use the resources in DOAJ? Journals and articles are free to read, of course - but what about inclusion in coursepacks or e-reserves, distribution in class?

Please post comments by August 12, or send to:
Heather Morrison
heatherm dot eln dot bc dot ca

Updated August 12, 2007

E-LIS: the Open Archive for Library and Information Science

reposted from The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics:

E-LIS: the Open Archive for Library and Information Science, by Heather Morrison, Imma Subirats Coll, Antonella de Robbio, and Norm Medeiros, has just been published in The Charleston Advisor (TCA), Volume 9, Number 1, July 2007 , pp. 56-61(6).

As noted in the article, we are E-LIS Editors and Administrators,although we have followed the format of the peer-reviewed TCA reviews and aimed for objectivity.

In brief, E-LIS is the largest of the open access archives for LIS, by far; as of July 31, 2007, E-LIS has more than 6,200 documents. Strengths of E-LIS include support for any language (currently there are 22 languages, however more will be added if needed), strong English and Spanish language content, and high quality of contents. More than half the documents in E-LIS are peer reviewed, and many of the remainder are scholarly in nature, e.g. theses, conference proceedings. As an LIS e-prints archive, it is perhaps only natural that E-LIS is exemplary in its organization and searchability, including extensive browsing capabilities, and the JITA classification team specially developed by the E-LIS team, for E-LIS.

From a personal perspective, what is most amazing to me is E-LIS as a global, almost entirely volunteer organization. Hardware and personnel support provided by CILEA in Italy is most appreciated. The Editorial Team consists of volunteers from over 40 countries. Participating as a member of the E-LIS team is highly recommended, as a way to work collaboratively with librarian colleagues from around the globe.

This global participation highlights one of the reasons why I recommend searching E-LIS first: the results of an E-LIS search have a much broader, more diverse perspective than many of the search tools we may be more familiar with. Even though many languages are supported, every article includes an English abstract - and sometimes, the abstract is enough. Enough, at least, to give us an idea of the commonalities and differences between our efforts, and those of our colleagues.

Recently, I am proud to say, the Canadian Library Association approved a policy which included investigating a partnership with E-LIS. [Disclosure: I am the Convenor of the CLA Task Force on Open Access].

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.

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.

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.


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

'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.

Journal Info

In my email this morning, posted to the American Scientist Open Access Forum, was a message about a just-released tool called Journal Info. Designed as a partner website to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, at http://www.doaj.org/), Journal Info presents information for about 18,000 journals. Some of the data is basic stuff (e.g. ISSN, publisher URL, etc.) but there is also a nifty section that lists fields dealing with "reader accessibility", most of which are OA-connected. Here's the "reader accessibility" information for the Haworth journal Serials Librarian:

Open Access: No
Allows self-archiving of reviewed manuscript: Yes
Hybrid: No
Alternative journals with Open Access:Journal of Medical Internet Research
Journal of the Medical Library Association
D-Lib Magazine
Information Research: an international electronic journal
more alternative journals ...

There's also a section called "quality" which lists the indexes a journal appears in and something called the Frida Score (Serials Librarian has a "low" Frida score). To be honest, I'm not sure what a Frida Score is; I'll have to do some digging...

Though Journal Info treads into territory held by Ulrich's and others, I think it could be a handy tool, especially the "reader accessibility" section.

The URL for Journal Info is http://jinfo.lub.lu.se/. I was created by the good folks at Lund University Libraries, with financial support from the National Library of Sweden.

Canadian Library Association Moves Open Access

From today's CLA Digest

CLA Moves Open Access

CLA Executive Council has approved some recommendations from the Open Access Task Force that move CLA towards providing virtually all of its intellectual property free of charge, in digital form, online and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. The revised policy has four parts:

CLA will provide for full and immediate open access for all CLA publications, with the exception of Feliciter and monographs The embargo period for Feliciter is one issue, and the embargo policy itself will be reviewed after one year. Monographs will be considered for open access publishing on a case-by-case basis.

CLA actively encourages its members to self-archive in institutional and/or disciplinary repositories and will investigate a partnership with E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies.

CLA will generally provide for the author's retention of copyright by employing Creative Commons licensing or publisher-author agreements that promote open access.
CLA will continue its long-standing policy of accessibility to virtually all CLA information except for narrowly defined confidential matters (e.g. certain personnel or legal matters).

The Task Force's Report is available by clicking here

Disclosure: I am the Convenor of the CLA Task Force on Open Access. Many thanks to Greg Linnell for preparing the report, and to the CLA Executive for moving on the recommendations!

Peter Jasco's Review of E-LIS

Peter Jasco's Review of E-LIS on Peter's Reference Shelf is available at: http://www.galegroup.com/reference/peter/200705/e-lis.htm

Peter compares E-LIS with other LIS Open Access Resources, such as the smaller DLIST repository and the larger EBSCO's LISTA. Both E-LIS and DLIST contain documents not available in LISTA.

Strengths of E-LIS include international and multilingual coverage, the JITA Classification scheme, and exceptional browsing functionality. More than half of the over 5,800 documents in E-LIS are peer-reviewed.

Thanks to Dirk Lewandowski, E-LIS Editor, Germany.


[Disclosure: I am on the E-LIS Administration Team, and an enthusiastic E-LIS contributor!]

OA Submission Waiver for the Journal of Experimental Botany and Package Deals

It's been reported well in a variety of places that the Journal of Experimental Botany, an Oxford University Press hybrid journal, will be waiving submission fees for authors who work at an insitution that has a current subscription to the journal. When this announcement first came out (June 19), I wondered if this applied to libraries that received the journal as part of a consortial or package deal; this may be particularly important in Canada (where I am), as many of the university libraries are part of a consortial deal for the OUP journals via the Canadian Research Knowledge Network arrangement. A follow-up message on June 20, posted to the LIS-E list (this was the only place I saw it; it may have appeared elsewhere), indicated that participants in deals of this nature are also entitled to the waiver. Good news, I think.

SPARC VIDEO CONTEST TO SHOWCASE STUDENT VIEWS

Competition invites students to apply new media to ongoing discussion; offers educators and librarians creative way to encourage campus engagement

Winner will receive $1,000, a public screening and a "Sparky Award"

Washington, DC - June 21, 2007 - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) today announced the first SPARC Discovery Awards, a contest that will recognize the best new short videos illustrating the importance of sharing information and ideas.

The contest, details for which are online at www.sparkyawards.org, encourages new voices to join the public discussion of information policy in the age of the Internet. Contestants are asked to submit videos of two minutes or less that imaginatively show the benefits of bringing down barriers to the free exchange of information. While designed for adoption as a college or high school class assignment, the SPARC Discovery Awards are open to anyone over the age of 13. Submissions will be accepted beginning in mid-July and must be received by December 2, 2007. Winners will be announced in January 2008.

The Winner will receive a cash prize of $1,000 along with a "Sparky Award." Two Runners Up will each receive $500 plus a personalized award certificate. At the discretion of the judges, additional Special Merit Awards may be designated. All the award-winning videos will be publicly screened during the January 2008 American Library Association Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia.

"The YouTube generation has a critical stake in how information can be used and shared on the Internet," said SPARC Executive Director Heather Joseph. "The SPARC Discovery Awards provide an outlet for their views and an opportunity for the rest of us to understand their perspectives. We hope these videos will help spark an expanded, informed, and energetic discussion."

SPARC expects to sponsor the Discovery Awards annually, as a means of supporting public discussion of critical information issues. The 2007 contest theme is "MindMashup." Mashup is an expression referring to a song, video, Web site or software application that combines content from more than one source.

The contest takes as its inspiration a quote from George Bernard Shaw: "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

For details, please see the contest Web site at http://www.sparkyawards.org.

SPARC

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and its affiliated organizations, SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, are an international alliance of academic and research libraries whose advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage a more open system of scholarly communication utilizing the Internet. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.

Nature Precedings - Digital assets for free

The speed of change in scientific and biomedical publishing is surprising sometimes (and the uptake of the use of Web 2.0 tools by the journal community).

Perhaps you know about PLoS One? Now, here's Nature Precedings:

"Nature Precedings is a place for researchers to share documents, including presentations, posters, white papers, technical papers, supplementary findings, and manuscripts. It provides a rapid way to disseminate emerging results and new theories, solicit opinions, and record the provenance of ideas. It also makes such material easy toarchive, share and cite. The whole service is free of charge."

And, even an editorial on this new project, intended to cover biomedicine, chemistry and the Earth sciences.

Will Google scholar crawl all of these knowledge objects? Where will all this fragmentation leave our searching? Boggles the mind. - Dean

Open access, medicine and academic freedom

Here, some of my Open Medicine colleagues discuss the circumstances that led to the launch of the Journal, and its existence as an example of open access's contribution to academic freedom.

Willinsky J., Murray S., Kendall C., Palepu A. Doing Medical Journals Differently: Open Medicine, Open Access, and Academic Freedom. - Working paper.

Notable, quotable quotes:

1. "Open Medicine was born of an editorial interference incident in the field of medical publishing, a field which is distinguished by its own professional and commercial influences." (You can say that again. DG)

2. "For all of the attention spent on finding the perfect economic model for increasing access to knowledge, it is important not to lose sight of scholarly communication’s other basic principles, beyond dissemination, namely editorial independence, intellectual integrity, and academic freedom." (What models will survive?)

3. "The ability to start a new journal that is able to establish its intellectual, as well as financial, independence from forces and traditions that might otherwise compromise that independence remains a critical factor in guaranteeing academic freedom within the global scholarly community."

4. ..."opening science to a larger world has always been a motivating force in scholarly publishing, [but] this openness is not just a matter of journals. Today, it includes initiatives focused on open data, open source biology, open encyclopedias, and a number of different “open science” projects." (Don't forget open search.)

5. "Open Medicine has raised the stakes for open access by demonstrating how this new approach can be used today to reassert editorial independence, intellectual integrity, and academic freedom." (And raised the stakes for librarians, I say.)

SPARC Innovators

Ted and Carl Bergstrom have been recognized as SPARC Innovators.

Excerpt from the SPARC announcement:

Father-son team named for pivotal work on journal pricing and assessing the value of scholarly information

Washington, DC - June 5, 2007 - SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has recognized Ted Bergstrom and Carl Bergstrom as the new SPARC Innovators. The father-son team advances the open sharing of scholarly information through original research and the creation of innovative tools that are used widely by the academic community to assess the value of research.

Ted and Carl are best known for their collaborations on Ted's journal pricing Web pages and, more recently, on the Eigenfactor.org Web site produced by Carl's research lab. Ted's journal pricing page, which offers data reporting price per article and price per citation for about 5,000 academic journals, has centralized pricing information so it can be explored and compared in ways that were previously impossible. The site has become a vital resource for researchers and librarians alike. Carl's Eigenfactor.org site offers a completely new and innovative approach to assessing the value of journals; it provides researchers, librarians and others a new mechanism to evaluate based on a diverse array of criteria.

Ted, an economist, holds the Aaron and Cherie Raznick Chair of Economics in the Economics Department at the University of California Santa Barbara. Carl, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington. To read in more detail about the Bergstroms' contributions to scholarly publishing, please see the SPARC Innovator Web page.

June SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the June 2007 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlights include a feature on author's rights and open access, 99 open access developments in May, and clarification of OA-related acronyms with more than more meaning.

IGLOO Library: open access to documents for innovation in international governance

The IGLOO Library of The Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) provides free access to documents in the area of International Governance. Topic areas include economics, environment, health, humanitarian issues, international institutions, international law, peace and security, science and technology, social and political development.

Thanks to Melissa Fraser.

SCOAP3 Progress Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics

The SCOAP3 Working Party, Towards Open Access Publishing in High Energy Physics Report of the SCOAP3 Working Party, CERN, April 19, 2007 (but released today)

CERN and its library, led by library director Jens Vigen, is helping to lead the effort to coordinate a move to full open access publishing in high energy physics (HEP), through a consortium of purchasers and publishers.

This initiative is noteworthy in many respects. For example, economic analysis has determined that the annual budget required for full OA publishing for HEP would be no more than a maximum of 10 million Euros per year; about what the 500 purchasing members of the consortium would pay in subscriptions for about 2 journals.

Peter Suber comments:


We're watching a massive transition to OA in process. This is not only the first project to convert all the TA journals in a field to OA; it's also succeeding. It's succeeding in pulling together the needed stakeholders and it's succeeding in raising the money. It's also succeeding in showing that the final result will cost the stakeholders less than the current system.

OA advocates have always argued that funding OA doesn't require new money, just a redirection of the money now spent on subscriptions....What's most significant about the CERN project is that it's a large-scale, discipline-wide, stakeholder-united redirection project.

Finally, CERN is on track to accomplish this feat with fusion, not fissionor with cooperation and comity all around rather than antagonism and division.

For more details, see Open Access News

Branding the library

A post on noted open access expert Alma Swan's new blog, Optimal Scholarship, on Branding the Library, may be of interest; particularly since Alma is not a librarian, but rather an academic researcher and consultant.

It seems that in the UK, libraries are seen as peripheral, which is unfortunate for scholarship. Where I come from, the library is seen as the heart of the campus, which makes sense given the importance of information for research and education throughout all academic disciplines.

Alma's blogpost is, as usual for her, based on a 6-month research study by Key Perspectives.

Be Open - Or, Be Irrelevant

I recently had a stimulating discussion with a medical faculty member about open access, and why being truly open may be important to the advancement of medicine. This is both an access issue, and a philosophical one. With all of the excitement and media coverage of Open Medicine, the faculty member was, in a sense, asking about intent and why researchers want to publish in open-access journals as opposed to one of the many pre-eminent, fee-based journals. It's important to be clear about how open access fits into our professional lives, and our emerging global society.

Excellent questions, ones we all should consider as open access advocates. First, I think it's important to conflate trends in information technology and society in general with the principles of open access. They enjoy symbiosis, I think. We live in an increasingly global world, where transnational communities and connections are now possible due to technology, and social software. Efficient, decentralized and inexpensive models of information dissemination were not available to us, even a few years ago.

Which brings me back to Open Medicine. I've been asked by colleagues to comment on our business model. At this point, we operate on very little money and are seeking philanthropic support, as well as reviewing other models of support. What propels us is a firm belief in openness, integrity in published research and transparency - ideals free from interference and conflicts. Is open access symbolic of changes in society? I believe it is. Those who try to ignore these changes, including the for-profit publishers, will increasingly risk irrelevancy. My new mantra: be open - or be irrelevant.

Elsevier charging more for hybrid journals?

William Walsh has put together a table of Subscription Costs for Elsevier Hybrid Journals. While Elsevier has promised to reduce subscription costs based on author payments, the average cost increase for Elsevier hybrid journals (6.39%) is higher than that for Elsevier journals overall (5.5%).

Thanks to William, and to Peter Suber on Open Access News for the alert and comments.

To me, this illustrates well why librarians should be involved in coordinating author processing fee charges (regardless of whether these are paid by funding agencies, departments, or the libraries). It is only when the two forms of payment (subscriptions and article processing fees) are brought together, that the payee is in a good position to understand what is happening, and effectively negotiate the best solution.

Any opinion expressed in this post is that of the author alone, and does not reflect the opinion or policy of BC Electronic Library Network or Simon Fraser University Library.

Why you’re crazy if you’re NOT submitting your LIS output to E-LIS

According to Laurie the Librarian, if you are not submitting your LIST output to E-LIS, you are crazy!

An Open Window Heralds Open Medicine

This is a good day for academic librarians who want to be equal partners in the academic enterprise. Those open access (OA) librarians who have been following the story will be pleased to learn that Open Medicine, a peer-reviewed, independent, international medical journal supporting academic freedom and open access, was launched today.

Open Medicine is open to all, doctors and the general public, and there are no strings attached - no political interference, no pharmaceutical patronage, no conflicts of interests and no exorbitant subscription costs or pay-per-article restrictions. Direct access to real content - openly-accessible.

The editorial team of consists of a group of academics and scientists, including co-editors Stephen Choi and Anita Palepu, associate editors Dean Giustini (OA librarian), John Hoey, Anne Marie Todkill, Claire Kendall and others, as well as our volunteer publisher John Willinsky ( author of The access principle: The case for open access to research and scholarship and founder of the Public Knowledge Project ). We are committed to “the equitable global dissemination of high-quality health research; to promote international dialogue and collaboration on health issues; to improve clinical practice; and to expand and deepen the understanding of health and health care”.

Web 2.0 and scholarly publishing in DC

The Allen Press' Emerging Trends in Scholarly Publishing seminar (held last week in Washington, D.C.) focussed on the practical uses and application of social software in scientific, medical and technological domains - but also the real and possible social impact of Web 2.0 tools. Prominent ideas for me? egalitarianism in publishing and peer review vs. reconciling the need for viable business models and maintaining efficiency and high standards in publishing. See my thoughts in progress about Web 2.0 and medicine.

Two of the speakers, Richard Akerman, the only other Canadian, and Konrad Förstner, are bloggers - check out their posts. A number of medical publishers were in attendance such as the New England Journal of Medicine, and several association publishers, who expressed interest in the launch of Open Medicine.

Researchers' Use of Academic Libraries and Their Services

This major study involving over 2,250 researchers and 300 librarians will be of interest to librarians everywhere for a number of reasons, including of course open access:

Researchers' use of academic libraries and their services, was commissioned by Research Information Network (RIN) and Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) and carried out by Sheridan Brown and Alma Swan of Key Perspectives.

This report shows that we have educational and promotional work to do! Findings include:

About 1 in 10 researchers fully understand open access

Researchers' awareness of institutional repositories is lagging; 52% of librarians said their institution had an IR, but only 15% of researchers.

Thanks to Peter Suber, who provides a useful extract and comments.

Open Libraries blog

Jay Datema, incoming technology editor for Library Journal, has a very cool Open Libraries blog.

Thanks to Peter Suber of Open Access News

Open Medicine (forthcoming OA journal)

Open Medicine is a forthcoming OA journal worth noting! Open Medicine has attracted an extremely prominent Editorial Board. It is currently comprised of 26 outstanding academics and scientists who are leaders in their respective fields.

The editorial team includes noted OA Librarian and Canadian Health Librarian of the year, Dean Giustini, as well as John Willinsky, principal investigator of the Public Knowledge Project.

From the web site:
The mission of Open Medicine is to facilitate the equitable global dissemination of high-quality health research; to promote international dialogue and collaboration on health issues; to improve clinical practice; and to expand and deepen the understanding of health and health care.

SSHRC Aid to Open Access Journals

It's been mentioned on other blogs (Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, Peter Suber, etc) but I thought a note about the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council's (SSHRC) recently-released Aid to Open Access Journals would be appropriate here (most of the bloggers on OA Librarian are Canadian and this is a Canadian program so...).

Anyway, as noted, SSHRC recently came out with a support program for Canadian OA journals in the social sciences and humanities. Details are at http://www.sshrc.ca/web/apply/program_descriptions/open_access_journals_e.asp#5.

Wearing my Serials Librarian hat, I have to say that this program may be very welcome; I certainly think it's a good idea. Some Canadian publishers of social sciences and humanities journals (societies, associations) have been a little freaked out about OA and how it can be supported so hopefully the Aid to OA Journals will alleviate some worries. Of course, the program is aimed at already-OA journals that have been around for at least two years; maybe a program to support conversion to OA is coming sometime in the not-too-distant future? It also remains to be seen if the amount of the grant ($850 CAN per article published plus up to $5,000 CAN to help defray distribution costs) will be adequate. Finally, the grant is only for one year and is not renewable; what affect will this have on journals? How many journals will get "hooked" on the grant and face "withdrawl" at the end of the 12 months?

OA Librarian's Dean Giustini Wins Award

Congratulations to Dean, selected as the 2007 recipient of the Canadian Hospital Librarian of the Year Award. About the CHLA award.

John Willinsky: Open Access: the Sea Change audio recording available

The University of Alberta Libraries is pleased to make available an audio recording of our March 20th forum with Dr. John Willinsky - Open Access: The Sea Change in Scholarly Publishing (mp3 format) - http://www.library.ualberta.ca/audio/openaccess.mp3


Dr. Willinsky’s award-winning Public Knowledge Project is the world’s leading open source software for journal publishing, and his recent book The Access Principle (MIT Press, 2006) has won this year’s Blackwell Award for Scholarship.

To learn more about support available from the University of Alberta Libraries, visit our Open Access Publishing Information Site - http://blogs.library.ualberta.ca/oa/

Thanks to Pam Ryan

Vectors: Journal of culture and techology in a dynamic vernacular.

I write Journal because I'm not sure what else to call it. They use the term but it is a journal that will not publish anything that could be published on paper.

It's at http://vectors.iml.annenberg.edu/index.php?page=6%7C1&pageLast=2%7C1

From their About:

Vectors maps the multiple contours of daily life in an unevenly digital era, crystallizing around themes that highlight the social, political, and cultural stakes of our increasingly technologically-mediated existence. As such, the journal speaks both implicitly and explicitly to key debates across varied disciplines, including issues of globalization, mobility, power, and access.

And farther down the same page:
Vectors features submissions and specially-commissioned works comprised of moving- and still-images; voice, music, and sound; computational and interactive structures; social software; and much more. Vectors doesn't seek to replace text; instead, we encourage a fusion of old and new media in order to foster ways of knowing and seeing that expand the rigid text-based paradigms of traditional scholarship. Simply put, we publish only works that need, for whatever reason, to exist in multimedia.

The things I looked at needed Flash 7, other Projects could require more but they all seem to use OS software in the creation.
This is high level work, most of it way over my head. I can just imagine helping a student who has a MLA citation question from a Vectors project.
Richard

CLA Open Access Pre-Conference: Transitioning to Open Access: Action and Advocacy

Transitioning to Open Access: Action and Advocacy
Wednesday, July 11, 2007, 9:00 - noon
Earl and Jennie Lohn Floor Policy Room
Simon Fraser University - Harbour Centre
515 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada

The Canadian Library Association's Task Force on Open Access warmly invites you to join us, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) for a presentation and discussion on transitioning to open access. This is a pre-conference to the PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2007 (http://ocs.sfu.ca/pkp2007/index.php)

Participants will learn about open access action and advocacy efforts underway, learn more about open access and/or develop confidence in their abilities to act as catalysts for open access, and develop a network of colleagues with whom to share ideas and issues in your own open access initiatives.

Presentation 9:00 - 10:30
Speakers:

Heather Joseph, SPARC
SPARC has been active in engaging in open access advocacy on the local institutional, federal and international policy levels. SPARC’s strategy is focused on reducing barriers to access, sharing and use of scholarly information, and its highest priority is advancing the understanding and implementation of open access to research results. Heather will provide an update on SPARC’s recent advocacy activities as well as a snapshot of the current open access policy climate.

Heather Morrison, CLA Task Force on Open Access
The Canadian Library Association adopted a Resolution on Open Access in 2005. The mandate of the CLA Task Force on Open Access is to draft recommendations on policy for CLA's own publications, draft a position statement on open access for Canadian libraries on behalf of CLA, and liaise with other library associations, such as CARL. Heather will report on activities to date, such as drafted a response to the CIHR Draft Policy on Access to Research Outputs, and planned.

Kathleen Shearer, CARL
Institutional repositories (IRs) are one of the major planks in the strategy for achieving open access. In 2002, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries launched an institutional repository project to support their members in implementing IRs. Kathleen Shearer will provide an overview of the project and discuss the opportunities and challenges for research libraries in supporting the open access movement.

Break 10:30 - 11:00

Discussion Groups: 11:00 - 12:00
The morning's speakers will briefly join each of the discussion groups, which will be led by members of the CLA's Open Task Force. Depending on interests of participants, discussion group questions may include:

• What policy and advocacy initiatives could my library undertake to promote open access to scholarly literature?
• What policy and advocacy initiatives could the CLA and/or CARL undertake to promote open access to scholarly literature?
• Share successful initiatives (and failures) that have been undertaken at your institution to promote open access/changes to the scholarly communications system.

Registration is required. Registration is online, at http://ocs.sfu.ca/pkp2007/registration.php

If you have already registered for the PKP conference, please register again for the CLA preconference. The two registrations can be combined into one single payment if desired.

CLA members: $40
non-members: $50

The website for Transitioning to Open Access: Action and Advocacy is http://ocs.sfu.ca/pkp2007/cla-pre-conference.php.

IDRC Library and Majorie Whalen: more library leadership in the open access movement

Canada's International Development Research Library plans to launch its Institutional Repository this April 24, with over 8,500 full text, open access documents, including IDRC documents and publications, as well as licensed research from IDRC research partners. Kudos to Marjorie Whalen and her team at IDRC library. For details, please see The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, and mark your calendar to view the IDRC website on April 24.

Partnership Journal now in DOAJ!

Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, has just been added as the 72th journal in library and information science in the Directory of Open Access Journals.

DOAJ carefully vets journals, for full open access status and peer review, before adding them to the list. For this reason, being added to DOAJ is an important milestone for a new open access journal. This vetting process adds value for the publisher, and for libraries; good reason for either to consider DOAJ membership.

Congratulations to all my colleagues at Partnership - the association, as well as the journal, and many thanks to all of our authors and reviewers. We are now hard at work on our second issue.

Disclosure: I am the Editor, Theory / Research, for Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research.

First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference: Registration Now Open

Registration is now open for the First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference, July 11 - 13, 2007.

Please Note: Registration is limited to 200 people and is filling up fast! If you are interested in attending the conference, please register and submit your payment as soon as possible to secure a place.

The conference will provide opportunities for those involved in the organization, promotion, and study of scholarly communication to share and discuss innovative work in scholarly publishing, with a focus on the contribution that open source publishing technologies (such as, but not restricted to, PKP’s OJS, OCS, and OA Harvester) can make to improving access to research and scholarship on a global and public scale.

Major keynote and plenary speakers have now been confirmed. John Willinsky, the founder of PKP and the creator of OJS software will provide the opening keynote address. Raym Crow from SPARC will speak on publishing cooperatives and the various forms they might take for nonprofit publishers, including societies, university presses, and universities themselves. We are also pleased to welcome Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar’s founding engineer. Finally, Michael Geist will close the conference with his thoughts on the changes and challenges that lie ahead in the fields of communications, knowledge creation, and intellectual property.

For more information and online registration:
http://ocs.sfu.ca/pkp2007/index.php

OA Librarian's Anita Coleman recognized in Library Journal

Anita Coleman has been recognized as a Global Thinker in Library Journal.

Congratulations - much deserved, Anita!

Thanks to Peter Suber of Open Access News for the link and additional comments.

Anita's efforts were recognized earlier on right here on OA Librarian.

More OA Hindawi journals

It's been noted elsewhere (lists, Peter Suber's blog, etc.) but I thought I would get my dibs in (after all, I am a Serials Librarian) and mention the 12 new OA journals that will be coming out soon from Hindawi Publishing (www.hindawi.com):

Research Letters in Biochemistry
Research Letters in Chemical Engineering
Research Letters in Communications
Research Letters in Ecology
Research Letters in Electronics
Research Letters in Inorganic Chemistry
Research Letters in Materials Science
Research Letters in Nanotechnology
Research Letters in Organic Chemistry
Research Letters in Physical Chemistry
Research Letters in Physics
Research Letters in Signal Processing

If my math is correct, this brings the Hindawi suite of fully OA journals to a total of 78. Not too shabby. The press release about the Research Letters titles indicates that others in this series will be announced in the near future.

The submission fees for the Research Letters journals will be 400 Euros (approx. $619 CAN or $535 US). This is at the cheaper end of the OA journal submission fee scale.

Flickr as source of OA material

When I saw the link to this in metafilter.org, it struck me that this is OA on the real cheap.

The link http://www.io.com/~iareth/codindx.html describes what the author calls the weirdest book in the world, the CODEX SERAPHINIANUS


http://www.flickr.com/photos/cottoncandyhammer/sets/72157594263968563/
is the link to the entire book in a flickr set.
I use my flickr account to document mountain biking rides, putting an entire book online for semi-free has never occurred to me....


I say semi-free because flickr only shows the medium size in the open display. When I login to my Pro account, I can view all sizes including the original at 2400 pixels largest dimension.

Is this kind of do it yourself digitization a trend?

The size of this and its uniqueness might make it a one-off. But consider other useful works that could be done by people who have the time and now thanks to flickr, the server space.
Richard

Chemists Without Borders Open Access Open Source Teleconference Series

** with apologies for cross-posting **

Any assistance in promoting this series of free events would be most appreciated. Please feel free to forward this message to any parties for whom it might be of interest.

Please join Chemists Without Borders for a special series of teleconference meetings on Open Access and Open Source. For more background, please see the link from the Chemists Without Borders website http://www.chemistswithoutborders.org/ to the Open Chemistry Position Statement.

Thursday, April 5 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time / Noon Eastern Time
Heather Joseph: Federal Research Public Access Act

Heather Joseph, Executive Director, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), will talk about the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). FRPAA is anticipated to be re-introduced this spring. The purpose of this bill is to require all U.S. Federal research granting agencies with portfolios of over $100 million (11 agencies altogether) to develop policies requiring open access to the results of the research they fund. FRPAA has been endorsed by many higher education leaders and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access. Chemists Without Borders is a member of the Alliance for Taxpayer Access; should we support FRPAA?
More information about FRPAA can be found on the SPARC website, at:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/frpaa/index.html

As the Executive Director of SPARC, Heather Joseph is very involved in advocacy for FRPAA. Before joining SPARC, Heather worked for many years in the publishing industry, and was formerly Executive Director of the BioOne publishing cooperative.

Thursday, June 7, 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time / Noon Eastern Time
Peter Suber: Open Access Questions & Answers
Peter Suber, Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge Project, author of Open Access News, at:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html
Peter Suber, one of the world's leading academics in the area of open access, will join Chemists Without Borders for a question and answer session on any aspect of open access.

Thursday, September 6 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time / Noon Eastern Time
Jean-Claude Bradley: Open Source Chemistry
Chemists Without Borders' own Jean-Claude Bradley, Coordinator for E-Learning at the College of Arts and Sciences at Drexel University, will talk about the Useful Chemistry approach to open source chemistry, founded by Bradley.
More information about Useful Chemistry is available at:
http://usefulchem.blogspot.com/

Chemists Without Borders: participation in this special series is the same as for regular teleconferences. Watch for a reminder. Not a member? No problem - contact us and let us know you would like to participate. There is no charge, other than regular long distance rates, to join the teleconference.

Heather Morrison
Member, Chemists Without Borders
http://www.chemistswithoutborders.org/
http://chemistswithoutborders.blogspot.com/

"Doing Good, Doing Well" John Willinsky

New course at UBC that might be of interest to OA Librarians:

LLED 565A - Section 951 - 3 credits
Developments in Scholarly Publishing: Doing Good and Doing Well
Instructor: John Willinsky> >Term 2 - July 3 to 16 http://www.lled.educ.ubc.ca/courses/summer2007/565A-951.htm

Topics
1. Origins of scholarly publishing (E Eisenstein, A Johns, JW)
2. Copyright, patents and ownership (Y Benkler)
3. Open science, open data, open source (PA David)
4. Journal publishing and scholarly societies (T Bergstrom)
5. Peer review, traditional and open (medical studies)
6. Archival projects and research sites (J McGann)
7. New roles and expectations for libraries (R Crow)
8. Indexes, searching, and citation (E Garfield)
9. Scholarly blogging, wikis, podcasts, and ebooks
10. PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference (3 sessions: 10 hours)
11. Postcolonial knowledge circulation (Altbach; JW)

Petition for Public Access to Publicly Funded Research in the United States

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has launched a Petition for Publicly Funded Research in the United States. Please sign!

Library Student Journal

The University of Buffalo Department of Library and Information Studies publishes a peer-reviewed open access journal, Library Student Journal.

The Library Student Journal site also features a blog, forum, and a new listserv for library students internationally.

Thanks to Eli Guinnee, Editor-in-Chief

SPARC web site redesigned

SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, has redesigned the SPARC Web Site to improve http://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifresource access for librarians, authors, and publishers

Please update your Web sites and scholarly communication pages with these key links:
SPARC resources on the Federal Research Public Access Act:
http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/frpaa
SPARC resources on the NIH Public Access Policy:
SPARC resources for authors: http://www.arl.org/sparc/author
SPARC resources for publishers: http://www.arl.org/sparc/publisher
Journal Pricing: http://www.arl.org/sparc/pricing
Open Access: http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess
Repositories: http://www.arl.org/sparc/repositories
The SPARC-ACRL Forum: http://www.arl.org/sparc/forum
Current SPARC Publisher Partners: http://www.arl.org/sparc/partner/partnerlist.html

Open Access Course

Fellow OA Librarian team member Heather Morrison will be teaching a course on OA this spring at the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS) at the University of British Columbia. The formal name for the course is LIBR 559K: Topics in Computer-Based Information Systems: Open Access. The goals of the course are:

To provide overview of the basic concepts of Open-access. The open access movement is one of the key trends in librarianship today, one that presents librarians and archivists with challenges, but also significant opportunities for leadership. This course will provide students with an overview of open access, key definitions, how and why libraries and archives are involved in open access, trends, policies, and implications for librarians and archivists.

I haven't really checked but I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this is the first university course devoted to OA in its entireity (though I'm sure that OA is an element in many other courses these days). Congratulations to Heather for developing and teaching this course!
I look forward to hearing more from her about it.

The full description for the course can be found at http://www.slais.ubc.ca/COURSES/coursdes/libr/libr559k.htm

Open Access (OA) and Web 2.0 - What's the connection?

Greetings fellow OA librarians,

On my sabbatical, I've had the distinct pleasure (and luxury) to contemplate some of the synergies created between open access and social software. But more than that, I've been able to determine for myself how some of these trends fit into a larger whole for our profession.

OA is not, despite its name, about access exclusively - although, it's our raison d'etre as librarians. OA is also about librarians being able to participate as equal partners in the academic enterprise. Some of the most rewarding work I have done in the past year is collaborate with physicians on the launch of our new OA journal called Open Medicine. Our launch is imminent.

Further, the core values that are brought out into the open through open access are linked to the notions of collaboration and socialization in web 2.0. Knowledge begins with conversations - one of the reasons we use blogs. Content-creation via wikis is important for exploration, and discovery. Using social tagging to organize websites is a simpler means of subject analysis and description. If librarians are good at getting their message out, web acolytes will see that we have expertise in description beyond simple taxonomies in the emerging 2.0 discourse.

For those of you interested in wikis, this article in Nature Medicine might be of interest. Dean

Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States

The new report:
Census of Institutional Repositories in the United States
MIRACLE Project Research Findings
is at:
http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub140abst.html

gives some background to where OA material is being stored.
The report is 167 pages but their summary gives a sense:

In this report, the authors describe results of a nationwide census of institutional repositories in U.S. academic institutions. The census is one of several activities of the MIRACLE Project, an IMLS-funded research program based at the University of Michigan.

A considerable portion of the scholarly record is born digital, and some scholarship is produced in digital formats that have no physical, in-the-hand counterparts. The proliferation of digital scholarship raises serious and pressing issues about how to organize, access, and preserve it in perpetuity. The response of academic institutions has been to build and deploy institutional repositories (IRs) to manage the digital scholarship their learning communities produce.

Richard Baer

OAIster: a union catalog of digital resources

OAIster, in addition to having passed the 10 million record landmark, has a new look and feel as well! For example, the OAIster web page now describers OAIster as a union catalog of digital resources. I like this - it seems easier to relate to this description than OAI-PMH metadata harvesting search tool. This could be because I'm a librarian, though!

If you know the name of a particular repository, you can do an OAIster search and enter the repository name as a search term, for an alternative way to search the other repository. For example, a search for "information literacy" and "E-LIS" yields all the documents in E-LIS on information literacy.

How do the results of an OAIster search of another repository compare with a direct search of another repository? Could this be an interesting question for a reference class?

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

Happy Birthday - and Valentine's Day - to BOAI!

Today is the 5th anniversary of what many of us see as the first major, international defining moment of the open access movement - the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

And, what a birthday it is! The European Union Petition for Guaranteed Public Access to Publicly-Funded Research Results now has more than 20,000 signatories, including more than 1,000 institutional signatories; a new study just released shows that 85% of European researchers support the EU open access mandate; in Brussells, Ministers & Rectors have signed the Berlin Declaration; and tomorrow, in the U.S., is a student-led National Day of Action on Open Access.

Thanks to Peter Suber for a very modest alert about BOAI (he was one of the drafters of the statement). For more details on recent events, see Open Access News.

Belgian Officials Endorse OA

Next week, 13 senior officials in Belgian research and education - Ministers, and Rectors - will sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge.

This is hugely significant; the signing will take place two days before the EC-hosted conference, Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area, in the context of the EU Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results

Details can be found on Open Access News.

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

Custom Search Engine for DOAJ

A couple of months ago, using Google co-op's Custom Search Engine (CSE) capability, Lukethelibrarian explains on his blog that he created a custom search engine that will perform a search across all the english language journals found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) collection.

Try out the DOAJ search engine for english journal content!

Lukethelibrarian is also looking for volunteers to help him refine his DOAJ CSE service. To volunteer, go to the main search page of his CSE and look for the "volunteer" link in the lower left part of the page. He is also looking forward to any suggestions or feedback.

Kudos!

Mandate Momentum in 2007!

The February 2007 SPARC Open Access Newsletter has been released. Peter's feature this month is the Mandate Momentum in 2007. As Peter says, "In the first month of 2007 we saw four adopted OA mandates, five pledges to adopt OA mandates, and five significant calls for OA mandates."

Time to set aside the furore over the PR pitbull episode, enjoy - and support - these historic initatives.


This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

New model for an online journal?

I was catching up with a great source of book reviews and everything else at
Political Theory Daily Review http://www.politicaltheory.info/
when I saw that The New Leader was back.
It had stopped publication as a print magazine in 2005 but was back at www.thenewleader.com


I would paste some of the announcement but cannot because the page announcing this is an image. They are calling it a bimonthy virtual magazine and publishing the issue as one large pdf.
It was indexed in Academic Search Premier and MAS Ultra article by article.

If they pick it up again, I wonder how they will handle the full text. You could index the titles from the bookmarks and the PDF does allow cutting and pasting so you can take it apart and print, email what you like.
But I have not noticed other magazines using quite this publishing model. I've furled this one and will see how they handle archiving and if Ebsco picks up the new version.
Richard

On the opposition to open access

The following message was posted to a number of listservs in Canada. OA Librarians in other countries might wish to alert local librarians about the issue of media slant. Please feel free to use portions of this message and customize for the local situation if you would like; e.g., you might want to replace the Canadian LIS OA journals with ones that your own colleagues will be familiar with.

An article in Nature on Wednesday, January 24, by Jim Giles, PR's "pit bull" takes on open access, reveals that the American Association of Publishers hired the "pit bull of public relations", Eric Dezenhall, as a consultant on strategies to oppose the open access movement.

According to Nature, "The consultant advised them to focus on simple messages, such as "Public access equals government censorship". He hinted that the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review...."

When assessing arguments against open access, it is important to consider where the messages are coming from. Dezenhall's previous clients include the former Enron chief and, according to Business Week, Exxonmobile (to criticize the environmental group Greenpeace).

Equating public access with government censorship is absurd. There are many open access publishers (including CACUL, with their Occasional Papers Series, and Evidence Based Librarianship, which members of CLA's own EBL Interest Group are very much involved in) who perform peer review. The Directory of Open Access Journals currently lists over 2,500 fully open access, peer-reviewed journals, and the numbers are growing rapidly.

In addition to fully open access journals, there are many journals which allow authors to retain copyright so that they can self-archive their works for open access, and also many which have hybrid open access models.

For those who do not have access to Nature, there is an excerpt on Open Access News, at:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_01_21_fosblogarchive.html#116966479599813483


Open Access News also details follow-up articles (in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Washington Post), as well as comments from bloggers.

My own comment, Stop fighting the inevitable - and free funds for OA!
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/01/stop-fighting-inevitable-and-free.html
focuses on the substantial funds spent by publishers to lobby against open access ($300,000 - $500,000 for this one consultation alone; Elsevier's lobbying budget in the U.S. alone is in the millions annually).

Heather Morrison

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

OAIster reaches 10 million records

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - OAIster Reaches 10 Million Records.
http://www.oaister.org/

We live in an information driven world, one in which access to good information defines success. OAIster's growth to 10 million records takes us one step closer to that goal.

Developed at the University of Michigan's Library, OAIster is a collection of digital scholarly resources. OAIster is also a service that continually gathers these digital resources to remain complete and fresh. As global digital repositories grow, so do OAIster's holdings.

Popular search engines don't have the holdings OAIster does. They crawl web pages and index the words on those pages. It's an outstanding technique for fast, broad information from public websites. But scholarly information, the kind researchers use to enrich their work, is generally hidden from these search engines.

OAIster retrieves these otherwise elusive resources by tapping directly into the collections of a variety of institutions using harvesting technology based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. These can be images, academic papers, movies and audio files, technical reports, books, as well as preprints (unpublished works that have not yet been peer reviewed). By aggregating these resources, OAIster makes it possible to search across all of them and return the results of a thorough investigation of complete, up-to-date resources.

Ann Devenish, Publication Services Project Manager at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, notes that Harvesting by OAIster is a primary selling point when we talk to scientists and researchers about the visibility, accessibility, and impact of their contributions in an institutional repository. From their own experiences they know that a search using one of the popular search engines can bring back thousands (if not, millions) of results which will require careful and time-consuming screening, with no guarantee that they will ever get to the content they seek. A search of OAIster, across hundreds of open and scholarly archives and millions of records, brings back results with the key metadata elements that allow for quick identification of, and easy navigation to, the content they seek.

OAIster is good news for the digital archives that contribute material to open-access repositories. [OAIster has demonstrated that] OAI interoperability can scale. This is good news for the technology, since the proliferation is bound to continue and even accelerate, says Peter Suber, author of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. As open-access repositories proliferate, they will be supported by a single, well-managed, comprehensive, and useful tool.

Scholars will find that searching in OAIster can provide better results than searching in web search engines. Roy Tennant, User Services Architect at the California Digital Library, offers an example: In OAIster I searched roma and 'world war,' then sorted by weighted relevance. The first hit nailed my topic, the persecution of the Roma in World War II. Trying 'roma world war' in Google fails miserably because Google apparently searches 'Rome' as well as 'Roma.' The ranking then makes anything about the Roma people drop significantly, and there is nothing in the first few screens of results that includes the word in the title, unlike the OAIster hit.

OAIster currently harvests 730 repositories from 49 countries on 6 continents. In three years, it has more than quadrupled in size and increased from 6.2 million to 10 million in the past year. OAIster is a project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Service.

For more information about University of Michigan's OAIster Project, visit
http://www.oaister.org/, or contact Kat Hagedorn at khage@umich.edu.

Congratulations & thanks to the University of Michigan's OAIster/ Metadata Harvesting Librarian Kat Hagedorn and OAIster.

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

World's biggest open access english language journals portal

Open J-Gate describes itself as the "World's largest open access english language journals portal". Unlike DOAJ, which is limited to peer-reviewed journals, Open J-Gate includes both peer-reviewed journals and professional and industry journals - a total of 3,933 journals, as of January 20, 2007.

In addition to this substantial content and frequent updating, About Open J-Gate reveals a number of search features that might appeal to librarians, such as:

Well designed journal classification
All journals are classified in a three-level hierarchical system to provide for better relevancy in search results.

Table of Content (TOC) Browsing
Users can browse the TOC of latest issue and the back issues.

Easy-to-Use search functionalities
Database allows various search options for the user�s convenience. The subscriber can search by Title, Author, Abstract, Author's Address/Institution, Keywords, etc.

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

New OA journal: International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies

From Juan Cole:

The URL is:
http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journalissues.php?issn=17512867&v=1&i=1

Registration needed but seems to be fully OA.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Details of first issue:

The first issue of the International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies is up on the Web and freely accessible. There are several good articles. The table of contents is:

The Islamist imaginary
Islam,Iraq,and the projections of empire
Authors: Raymond W. Baker

Media and lobbyist support for the US invasion of Iraq
Authors: Janice J. Terry

Beating the drum:Canadian print media and the build-up to the invasion of Iraq
Authors: Tareq Y. Ismael

The United States in Iraq:the consequences of occupation
Authors: Stephen Zunes

Toward regional war in the Middle East?
Authors: Richard Falk

Reconstructing the performance of the Iraqi economy 1950-2006: an essay with some hypotheses and many questions
Authors: Roger Owen

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

Petition for OA to publicly-funded research in Europe

Please sign the petition for OA to publicly-funded research in Europe - either individuals or organizations can sign, and it's easy & online. For details about the initiative, see Open Access News.

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

Release Your Research, Increase Your Impact

From the University of Alberta Libraries News page:

The University of Alberta Libraries is pleased to present Open Access: the Sea Change in Scholarly Publishing, a forum with Dr. John Willinsky on Tuesday, March 20, 1:30pm at the Myer Horowitz Theatre.

Dr. Willinsky proposes that current changes in scholarly publishing are poised to increase the global circulation of knowledge, while improving its scholarly and public quality. He will discuss ways in which the publishing choices that faculty and graduate students make can extend the contribution and reach of their work. He will also highlight the Open Journal Systems software, a system which can reduce the economic and energy demands of journal publishing, while adding to the rigor and coherence of the academic enterprise.

Dr. Willinsky’s award-winning Public Knowledge Project is the world’s leading open source software for journal publishing, and his recent book The Access Principle (MIT Press, 2006) has won this year’s Blackwell Award for Scholarship. He is Pacific Press Professor of Literacy and Technology at the University of British Columbia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Registration is free and open to all.

Thanks to Pam Ryan

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

New OA Journal: International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership

The International Journal of Education Policy and Leadership (IJEPL) is a joint publication of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, and the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University.

The mission of IJEPL: IJEPL seeks to build bridges between researchers, policymakers, and practitioners by enriching the policy and leadership knowledge base, and promoting exploration and analysis of policy alternatives.

IJEPL's Open Access Policy: By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non-commercial settings 90 days after initial publication. Copyright for articles published in IJEPL is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to the journal.

Articles are published individually as they complete the peer review process.

Thanks to Simon Fraser University Library's Percilla Groves, and Dan Laitsch of the SFU Education Department. IJEPL is published using the free, open source Open Journal Systems (OJS) software.

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

New OA Journal: Child Health and Education/ Santé et Éducation de l'Enfance

Child Health and Education/ Santé et Éducation de l'Enfance is a new open access journal, from Simon Fraser University.

Child Health and Education: An Interdisciplinary Journal provides an international forum for publishing empirical, theoretical, and methodological articles, papers, essays, and reviews that contribute to improving the lives of young children and their families.

Child Health and Education: An Interdisciplinary Journal was made possible through the support and guidance of:

* SFU Serial Publications Fund
* Public Knowledge Project at SFU
* Graphically Speaking Services Inc. (Website design services)

Authors publishing in Child Health and Education retain copyright. Child Health and Education is published using the free, open source Open Journals Systems (OJS) software.

Thanks to Percilla Groves.

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

Open Access Research (OAR): Call for Papers

Open Access Research (OAR) http://ojs.gsu.edu/oar, is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that will enable greater interaction and facilitate a deeper conversation about open access, including topics such as:

open access journals
institutional support for open access
open access publishing services and software
open access repositories (both institutional and subject-based)
electronic theses and dissertations
the impact of open access on scholarly research and communications.

If you are engaged in research relating to open access, or if you have an article in mind, please contact us. OAR's first issue will be in August, 2007 and will subsequently be published three times a year. Submissions received by March 31, 2007 will be considered for the August issue; subsequent submissions will be considered for future issues.

Send inquiries to:

William Walsh
Head – Acquisitions
Georgia State University Library
100 Decatur St. SE
Atlanta, GA 30303
wwalsh@gsu.edu

Editors-in-Chief: John Russell (University of Oregon), Dorothea Salo (George Mason University), William Walsh (Georgia State University), Elizabeth Winter (Georgia Institute of Technology). Please see our website for a full list of editors and editorial board members. Open Access Research is published by the Georgia State University Library using Open Journal Systems (http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs) software.

[Disclosure: I am on the Editorial Board].

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.

First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference Call for Papers: Deadlines

** with apologies for cross-posting **

The final deadline for the call for papers has been extended to Wednesday, February 7th. Preliminary review of abstracts will begin on January 15th. Those who are intended to take advantage of the extra time for developing a proposal may wish to submit a preliminary proposal by January 15th. The Open Conference Systems abstract submission process makes it very easy for the author to modify an initial proposal. If you are submitting a preliminary proposal, please include a note to this effect with the abstract.


First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference
Vancouver, July 11-13, 2007
WEBSITE: http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/493

The Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University is pleased to announce that the first international PKP conference will be held from July 11-13, 2007 in
Vancouver. The conference will provide opportunities for those involved in the organization, promotion, and study of scholarly communication to share and discuss innovative work in scholarly publishing, with a focus on the contribution that open source publishing technologies (such as Open Journal Systems) can make to improving access to research and scholarship on a global and public scale. The conference will appeal to all those with an interest in the future of scholarly publishing community: software developers and technical support specialists; journal publishers, editors, and staff; librarians; and researchers in scholarly publishing.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Abstract Deadline (required): January 15, 2007
Paper and PowerPoint Submission (desired but not required for public posting): July 1, 2007
This conference, which uses Open Conference Systems developed by the Public Knowledge Project, enables participants to submit abstracts online at http://ocs.sfu.ca/pkp2007/submit.php.

Presentations can include:
* Single papers (abstract max of 500 words)
* Multiple paper sessions (overview max of 500 words)

Call for Papers Announcement
The conference stream for those involved in the practices and study of journal publishing will focus on the following themes and topics:
* Scholarly publishing in developing countries;
* Open access and the academy: reforming and opening the peer review process, implications for academic freedom;
* New journals, new models: the how and why of starting a new journal, new economic models for old journals, encouraging open
data and related practices;
* Promotion and growth: building readership, authorship, and reviewership; open access is public access - challenges and benefits;
* Improving the features and design of publishing software

The conference stream for librarians and information specialists will focus on the following themes and topics:
* The role of libraries in supporting and developing emerging or alternate forms of scholarly communication, e.g., the library as publisher, implications for collections budgets and policies;
* Incorporating and supporting open access publications as part of current collections and related services;
* Using PKP software and related open source tools in libraries, e.g., "best practices" or case studies.

The conference stream for open source software developers and other technical experts working with PKP software will address the
following:
* Understanding and working with PKP software and its "plug-in" architecture;
* Building a PKP developers' community including software contributions and collaborative projects;
* PKP software development priorities and plans.

Emerald's turn at hybrid OA

I'll keep this short as the news is three days old and has already been caught by the ever-reliable Peter Suber on his blog (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_12_31_fosblogarchive.html#116801966650743317).
Anyway, Emerald has announced a trial hybrid OA program for their engineering journals, called Emerald Asset. The most interesting thing about Emerald Asset is that no fee is requested from accepted authors; in return for having their articles made openly accessible, authors "will be asked to submit a summary of their research findings highlighting their practical application. "

The announcement from Emerald can be found at http://engineering.emeraldinsight.com/pr/asset.htm?PHPSESSID=cc49ebb9293d698d6bedef2041768ab4.

Karger introduces "Author's Choice"

Joining the bandwagon, Karger has just announced its own hybrid journal trial program, entitled "Author's Choice". Under Author's Choice, articles in eight journals can be made OA for a cost of $2,500 US. The journals for which this applies are:

Cytogenetic and Genome Research
Dementia and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders
Dermatology
Developmental Neuroscience
European Neurology
Medical Principles and Practice
Neurodegenerative Diseases
Pathobiology

Author's Choice is described as a "trial model". This is likely why only eight of Karger's approximately 85 journals are included in the program.

No mention was made in the announcement of a corresponding reduction in subscription costs (maybe this will come later, after the "trial" period).

The $2,500 US payment is in addition to "any standard charges for supplementary pages, color images etc. which may apply".

More information about Author's Choice can be found on the Karger site at http://content.karger.com/services/choice.asp. Peter Suber has also blogged this at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2006_12_31_fosblogarchive.html#116791849595590997
(I blog in his shadow...)

Out of the cataloguing business..into Digital Strategies

McMaster University Library is Getting out of the Cataloguing Business...and into several interesting new areas. There will be several new librarian positions - the most interesting, from an OA Librarian perspective, is:

Digital Strategies Librarian: This position will be responsible for developing our digital library program; building our digital infrastructure; assisting with implementation of an institutional repository; and developing strategies to align us with programs at the provincial and national level such as Alouette.

Cataloguers will be moving into "tiered reference".

Thanks to McMaster University Librarian Jeffrey Trzeciak

This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.