Advisory on Retaining Copyright
The Canadian Association of University Teachers has issued an intellectual property advisory that directs faculty’s attention to the importance of retaining their copyright:
The purpose of this advisory is to assist academic staff in retaining copyright ownership in the articles they publish in journals. Without copyright ownership, academic staff can lose control of their own work and may no longer be entitled to email it to students and colleagues, post it on a personal or course web page, place it in an institutional repository, publish it in an open access journal or include it in a subsequent compilation.
…
Journals require only your permission to publish an article, not a wholesale transfer of the full copyright interest. To promote scholarly communication, autonomy, integrity and academic freedom, and education and research activities more generally, it is important for academic staff to retain copyright in their journal articles.
The end of the advisory is the Author Addendum created by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition).
Free Tools for Sharing Research Information
Microsoft has announced that they now provide free software tools to help scholars and researchers share information. From the press release:
Speaking to more than 400 faculty members from leading research institutions worldwide, Tony Hey, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s External Research Division, emphasized the role his group plays not only in supporting specific collaborative research projects, but also in improving the process of research and its role in the innovation ecosystem, including developing and supporting efforts in open access, open tools, open technology and interoperability. Toward that end, Hey announced a set of free software tools aimed at allowing researchers to seamlessly publish, preserve and share data throughout the entire scholarly communication life cycle. …
In the area of scholarly communication, Hey said, “Collecting and analyzing data, authoring, publishing, and preserving information are all essential components of the everyday work of researchers - with collaboration and search and discovery at the heart of the entire process. We’re supporting that scholarly communication life cycle with free software tools to improve interoperability with existing tools used commonly by academics and scholars to better meet their research needs.”
Overview of Scholarly Publishing Initiatives
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has published an essay in its 2007 Annual Report that provides an overview of current scholarly publishing initiatives in the United States:
In 2007, the Scholarly Communications and Research University and Humanistic Scholarship programs collaborated in launching two new initiatives in the area of scholarly publishing, one aimed at increasing the capacity of university presses to publish first books by junior scholars in fields where publication opportunities have become constrained, the other at strengthening the substantive relationship between university presses and their home institutions. These initiatives are described in greater detail in the President’s Report (on pages 16 and 22). This essay is intended to provide some background by focusing on the factors that prompted staff to direct Foundation resources in these particular ways. It begins with an overview of the conditions under which scholarly publishing is currently carried out in university presses. This summary is followed by a brief outline of historical concerns about the role and functions of university presses and a discussion of previous Foundation efforts to support scholarly publishing. Finally, this essay turns to the two new initiatives and considers their objectives in the broader context outlined in the previous two sections.
Recommendations for Open Science
Science Commons has made recommendations for open science, Open Access News reports. The recommendations cover four areas:
- Open access to literature from funded research
- Access to research tools from funded research
- Data from funded research in the public domain
- Invest in open cyberinfrastructure
Deposit Rate for PubMed Central
The number of articles deposited to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central (PMC) repository increased significantly in the past few months, according to a report in the Library Journal Academic Newswire:
According to NIH statistics, submissions to PMC began steadily rising in December 2007, soon after it became clear a mandatory policy would be adopted in 2008. By the first month following passage of the new policy, January 2008, monthly submissions to PMC hit an all-time high of 1255, and have continued to increase significantly every month so far this year. In April 2008, when the policy officially took effect, submissions spiked even more sharply, rising from 1852 total submissions in March, to 2,765 in April and 2,593 in May. The April/May 2008 figures represent well over double the number of submissions for the same months in 2007 (1,198 PMC submissions in April ‘07; 948 in May ‘07). Although official figures for June have not yet been posted, the NIH’s Dr. David Lipman told the LJ Academic Newswire the submission totals were higher than May.
The Newswire also discusses the compliance issue of the National Institutes of Health’s Public Access Policy:
But is compliance really so odious a task to archive a paper that publishers need to be involved? “No,” Open Access blogger Peter Suber told the LJ Academic Newswire. So why are many publishers taking on the burden of compliance? In a word, control. “The main reason why many publishers want to make deposits on behalf of authors is so that they can specify the embargo period,” Suber observed. NIH’s David Lipman acknowledged many publishers who permit authors to submit “author-final-manuscripts have indicated that they want minimum embargo of 12 months.”
…
Publisher involvement in facilitating NIH compliance, however, shouldn’t create confusion for authors, Suber maintained, especially not over their rights situation. “Authors sign funding contracts before they sign publishing contracts,” he explained. “When they eventually publish articles based on the funded research, they can only sign publishing contracts subject to the terms of their prior funding contracts.”
“Predictably Irrational” and Scholarly Publishing
The MIT Libraries have made available a podcast in which Professor Dan Ariely from Duke University discusses the relationship between “predictably irrational” and scholarly publishing, Open Access News reports. From the description page:
In the podcast, Professor Ariely speaks with us about how market and social norms intersect with authors’ decision-making in an evolving system of scholarly communication and publishing. He discusses reward systems, the importance of building an accessible community of knowledge, and the need to lower barriers for information sharing.
The MIT Libraries offer other podcasts about scholarly publishing and copyright.
WikiPathways to Foster Collaboartive Work in Biology
Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have developed a tool, WikiPathways, to manage and facilitate the long-term availability of biological data. From the press release:
The rapid accumulation of biological data today is a significant challenge for researchers. That challenge is prompting some scientists to focus on new ways to better manage that data and to make it readily available. The laboratory of Bruce Conklin in the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease has created a new collaboration tool, WikiPathways to focus on the use of biological pathways.
…
WikiPathways (http://www.wikipathways.org) is an open, collaborative platform for curating biological pathways. Building on the MediaWiki core that powers Wikipedia, they added a custom graphical pathway-editing tool and connections to major gene, protein and small molecule databases. This familiar web-based format makes it easy to participate. More importantly, it facilitates broad participation by the scientific community in peer review, editorial curation and maintenance of the pathway content.“The wiki model as exemplified by Wikipedia, was an obvious place to start,” said Alexander Pico, a postdoctoral fellow in the Conklin lab. “This strategy fits well with the current trend to information exchange through community-defined data formats, collaborative online environments, and the growing number of open access journals.”
There is an article in PLoS Biology (WikiPathways: Pathway editing for the people by Alexander R. Pico et al.) that describes WikiPathways.
Open Access Basics Wiki
The PALINET Leadership Network has created the Open Access Basics wiki. It provides a brief introduction to open access and its key terms. It also has pages that cover open access issues, open access myths, and open access controversies.
Citation Patterns of Monographs
An article published in College & Research Libraries (Citation characteristics and intellectual acceptance of scholarly monographs by Dr. Rong Tang) discusses the citation patterns of scholarly monographs. Here is the abstract:
The present study investigates citations to 750 randomly selected scholarly monographs in disciplines of religion, history, psychology, economics, mathematics, and physics. The objective of the study is to understand distributions of citations to scholarly monographs in various disciplines, to explore disciplinary difference in the citing of books, and to compare citations to monographs with previous results on citations to journal articles. The data revealed interesting citation patterns and aging effects that are in several aspects different from citation data based on the journal literature. While the distribution trend of monographic uncitedness is similar to that of journals across the disciplines, the noncitation ratios are much lower than what has been reported about journal citations. Half-life measures of scientific monographs are greater than those in the humanities and social sciences; this contradicts previous findings. Citation frequency and Price’s Index vary from discipline to discipline, and the most significant linear contract occurred between disciplines of religion, history, and economics as one group and psychology, mathematics, and physics as another. When using periods of intellectual acceptance as the unit of analysis, significant disciplinary differences emerged both in terms of citation frequency and the number of books cited. Significant differences also appeared between earlier periods of intellectual acceptance that are within the first 10 years following the original publication year and longer ages of survival that are beyond 10 years.
P.S.: The vendor database, Thomson Reuters, has made available a free white paper about using bibliometrics. From the announcement:
Until relatively recently, peer review was the main route by which science policymakers and research funders made policy decisions about science. However this is now being combined with bibliometrics to provide solid, objective information that impact resources, careers and future directions.
A library faced with collection decisions, a foundation making funding choices, or a government office weighing national research needs - all must rely on expert analysis of scientific research performance. Traditional peer review processes have now been enhanced by the application of bibliometrics.
Bibliography of Open Access
The Open Access Directory (OAD) now offers a Bibliography of Open Access:
- This bibliography is the work of OAD contributors. It’s based on Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 2005.
- The original bibliography is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 license. The OAD version (like the rest of OAD) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. The OAD version does not include the prefatory texts, which are still online. See the original Preface, Acknowledgements, and introductory essay, Key Open Access Concepts.
- …
