Transforming Scholarly Communication

Budgeting for Libraries & Scholarly Communication

The Binghamton University Libraries will hold a symposium to explore the library funding and budgeting issues in the age of digital scholarship.  Below is the announcement of the symposium posted to the Electronic Resources in Libraries listserv:

 
The academic library community has undergone rapid change with the move to digital in the last two decades. The discussion of the management of this change is still very much in a self-defining mode. As libraries struggle to identify both challenges and strategies internally, an equally important issue is the interaction between faculty, students (especially graduate students), campus administration and the libraries in identifying and developing common goals for collection resource development and budgetary methods to reach those goals.
 
The Binghamton University Libraries will hold a symposium on March 20 & 21, 2006 bringing librarians, faculty and students together with invited outside presenters to explore the best ways to improve this dialogue on our campus. This symposium is open to other SUNY institutions as well as other interested participants. There is no fee.
 
The purpose of this symposium will be:

• To explore the challenges of information resource identification, prioritization and budgetary allocation in the digital age.
• To address the increasing interdisciplinary nature of teaching and research, and to involve the university community in an ongoing dialogue with the University Libraries in this process;
• To address the broad issues of the changing nature of scholarship in the digital age, both the production of scholarly information and the communication of scholarship within the academic community (e.g. the open-access initiative and its funding model implications for libraries and universities) and how these impact the challenges facing libraries in collection resource management and the strategies used to address these challenges;
• To take an important next step in the creation a flexible resource allocation process at Binghamton University to enable the Libraries to respond to changing research and curricular needs of faculty and students.

 
This symposium is being funded by a generous grant from the Binghamton University Provost’s Office, as well as additional support from the Binghamton University Libraries and Haworth Press.

Institute on Scholarly Communication

The Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College & Research Libraries are jointly sponsoring the Institute on Scholarly Communication, which will be held on July 12-14, 2006.  Below is an invitation for application posted to the ACRL Scholarly Communication listserv:

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) seeks applicants for the first Scholarly Communication Institute, co-sponsored with the Association for Research Libraries, to be held in Los Angeles, July 12-14, 2006. The deadline for application is March 1, 2006. Acceptance to the Scholarly Communication program is limited to 100 individuals.

Participants will:
·  Build expertise for their libraries and campuses
·  Design a collaborative program for their institutions
·  Explore strategies for creating systemic change
·  Discover new approaches for engaging faculty

This jointly sponsored institute offers tools and techniques to build a scholarly communication program or move an existing program to the next level. Participants will assess their campus environment before the institute, engage in two-and-one half intensive days of active learning, and develop customized outreach plans to implement at their home institutions.

The institute sponsors seek participants from a variety of institution types and sizes. They encourage large institutions to submit applications from small teams of no more than three reflecting various institutional roles, such as librarians, library administrators, faculty, and campus administrators. Applicants should articulate realistic goals for a campus plan and demonstrate institutional support for, or readiness to support, a plan. Selection is on a competitive basis.

Complete details about the program as well as the online application form and instructions can be found at www.ala.org/acrl/events (Click "ACRL/ARL Institute on Scholarly Communication").

Applicants can direct questions concerning the program or application process to Kara Malenfant at 312-280-2510; kmalenfant@ala.org.

ACRL is a division of the American Library Association (ALA), representing more than 13,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. ACRL is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians. Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments. 

Practices of Handling Open Access Journals

There was a Collection Development Librarians Discussion Group at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting held in San Antonio, Texas.  One of the discussion topics focused on academic libraries’ policies and practices of identifying, selecting, and promoting open access (OA) journals.  Here is a summary of the discussion:

Selection of OA Journals

•  Bibliographers are responsible for identifying and selecting OA journals
•  The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is usually used as the source for identifying OA journals.  All titles listed there are peer-reviewed and most of them are published in English.  However, DOAJ seems to be more science/technology-oriented. 
•  The selection criteria are the same as those for subscription-based journals.  Bibliographers would ask questions such as:
• How relevant and useful is this OA journal to the college/university curricula and the faculty’s research interests? 
• If the library had to pay for it, would we subscribe to it?
• Is it published in a language spoken by library users? 
•  It seems harder to evaluate Humanities and Social Sciences OA journals
•  Sometimes faculty members (e.g., mathematics faculty) suggest specific OA journals to the library
•  Selected OA journals are added to the library’s catalog and online journal A-Z list (if there is one)

Promotion of OA Journals

• Librarians can promote OA journals at departmental meetings.  OA journals are not portrayed as replacements for subscription-based journals. 

• There are problems with convincing faculty of OA journals’ values and trustworthiness.  Librarians have to point out that faculty members should evaluate OA journals by considering their contents instead of their mastheads. 

• Older science/technology faculty members are more open to OA journals because they no longer have to publish in well-known non-OA journals for attaining tenure

• OA journals are not visible to users because most of them are not indexed by abstracting and indexing (A&I) databases

Questions about OA Journals

•  Since most OA journals are not indexed by A&I databases, can users rely on Google Scholar to find OA journals and the articles therein? 

•  Does the usage statistics of OA journals matter? 

•  What are OA journals’ stability and longevity in general? 

OpenDOAR: Directory of Open Access Repositories

OpenDOAR, a joint collaboration between the University of Nottingham in the UK and Lund University in Sweden, is a new directory of open access repositories.  According to the press release, OpenDOAR "classifies archives holding research papers, conference papers, theses and other academic materials."  Moreover, "each of the OpenDOAR repositories have been visited by project staff to check the information that is gathered. This indepth approach gives a quality-controlled list of repository features."  The OpenDOAR directory is searchable and browsable.  Users can use the "Suggest a repository" function to alert the project staff to any unlisted repositories. 

Initiative to Preserve Published Scholarly Content

A group of publishers and academic libraries are working together to create an archive that will ensure access to published scholarly content in case any of the participating publishers is no longer able to provide the content.  According to the announcement, the initiative is named CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), and "is both fail-safe and has an acceptable process for providing continuing access for orphaned materials."  Additional information about the initiative is available from this article published in The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Ensuring Long-Term Preservation

The final papers, posters, and presentations of the 2005 Symposium of Ensuring Long-Term Preservation and Adding Value to Scientific and Technical Data (PV 2005) are available online. They discuss topics such as ensuring long-term data preservation, adding value to data, lessons learned, and future prospects.

Digital Rights Issues and Management

The American Library Association has released two documents related to digital rights management (DRM).  The first is a statement listing the issues and concerns about digital rights.  The second is a paper entitled "Digital Rights Management: A Guide for Librarians."  According to its author, Michael Godwin: "The primary purpose of this paper is to familiarize librarians, archivists, and others with DRM and how it works. Secondarily, this paper will outline certain legal and policy issues that are raised by DRM — issues that will continue to have an increasing impact on the ways in which librarians and libraries perform their functions." 

Directory of Open Access Journals Reaches Milestone

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was created to increase the visibility, accessibility, and usage of scholarly journals that are available free on the Web.  It has been instrumental in advancing the open access movement and in facilitating scholarly communication in the digital age.  It now carries 2,000 journals, which fall into different subject categories.  From the news about DOAJ: "We are very happy to see that the usage of the DOAJ is constantly increasing on all parameters. Every month visitors from more than 150 countries are using the service, hundreds of libraries all over the world have included the DOAJ titles in their catalogues and other services, and commercial aggregators are as well benefiting of the service. New titles are added frequently and to ensure that the holding information is correct."  

Place as Library?

In this EDUCAUSE Review article, Nancy Davenport, the President of the Council on Library and Information Resources, discusses two new roles of academic libraries in scholarly communication: 1. Collaborate with different constituencies in the creation and dissemination of knowledge; and 2. Collect, organize, and disseminate institutional research.  She argues that "collaboration among librarians, information technology experts, faculty members, and academic executives is needed to acquire and distribute new forms of digital scholarly communication, to develop user-driven services for groups whose preferred mode of access is electronic, and to maintain and exploit the rich heritage in paper-based collections."  The future roles of and directions for academic libraries in the age of digital scholarship are also addressed in two articles published in The Chronicle of Higher Education: James Neal’s Information Anarchy or Information Utopia?, and Deanna Marcum’s One Size Will Not Fit All. 

 

Impact of Electronic Publishing

In this Campus Technology article, John Savarese discusses the rise of open access as a result of electronic publishing and the Internet. Worth noting is a journal publishing milestone: "In a world where the top scientific journals can cost subscribers over $10,000 per year, an online science journal with a subscription price of $0 won a 13.9 impact-factor rating from the prestigious Thomson Scientific (formerly Thomson ISI) citation-counting service (Institute for Scientific Information), which acts as the Nielsen ratings of science publishing. That rating placed PLoS (Public Library of Science) Biology among the top journals in its category, although it was only two years old." The article also provides links to Internet resources related to electronic publishing, self-archiving, and open access.