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!