Open J-Gate: Online Database of Open Access Journal Articles
Open J-Gate is a free online multidisciplinary database that indexes articles from more than 3,000 open access publications, with links to the full texts of the articles. About half of the indexed publications are peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Users can search by keywords, title, and author, and also browse the tables of contents of the indexed publications. At present, it seems that Open J-Gate works better with Internet Explorer.
Directory of DSapce Repositories
DSpaceInstances is a directory of online repositories/archives created with the DSpace software. The repositories/archives are scattered around the world and cover different disciplines.
Bottom Line on Open Access
This article in University Affairs discusses the open access movement and the perception of it in academia, with an emphasis on the Canadian context. It argues: "The epistemological benefits are difficult to dispute. Dr. Harnad refers to studies showing that citations can more than double for articles that are freely available on the web. Accessible online papers benefit academics in poor countries where universities have few resources. And research libraries see institutional electronic repositories as one way of ensuring the preservation of digitized online material that is highly vulnerable to the problem of disappearing URLs." The article is also available in French.
Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR)
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK has launched the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme to explore and evaluate different mechanisms for sharing digital content in higher education. There is now a JISC report that "shows how information systems can be implemented that enable institutions to manage and disseminate their research assets so that they bring the maximum benefit to the institution, to the research community and to a wider audience." It states that the major challenges encountered in setting up a digital repository/archive "relate to clarity of purpose, quality control, metadata and semantics, legal issues (intellectual property, institutional liability), to ethical issues (consent) and cultural issues, research cultures and variations between disciplines in terms of methodologies and practices, and so on." The report also lists the repositories and archives created as FAIR Projects.
Three Resources for Open Access Community
In his e-mail to the SPARC Institutional Repository Discussion List, Stevan Harnad alerts the open access community to three useful resources:
- Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR): It tracks the growth of registered institutional repositories
- Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies (ROARMAP): It records institutional self-archiving policies from different countries
- Journal Publisher Self-Archiving Policy Directory (ROMEO): It provides information on publishers’ policies regarding authors’ self-archiving
Copyright Issues in Open Access Research Journals
Published in the Feb. issue of D-Lib Magazine, this article presents the results of a survey conducted to explore authors’ attitudes in the UK and the Netherlands toward open access. Part of the article’s findings is: "The results from our web survey of authors can be interpreted as reflecting a strong desire on the part of authors to change the present situation whereby authors transfer the entire copyright for their works to the journal publishers. Given the choice between transferring the copyright and keeping it, most authors prefer to keep it. Even with regard to handling permission requests to reuse the article, most respondents do not see a role for the journal publisher." The article also suggests "an action programme" that higher education institutions and academic libraries can undertake to drive the change in handling copyright issues.
Also in the same issue of D-Lib Magazine are articles about facilitating scholarly communication in African Studies and the Federation of DSpace using CORDRA.
Texas Digital Library
The Texas Digital Library (TDL) is a new initiative that provides a digital repository for scholarly outputs from five participating institutions: Rice University, Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, The University of Houston, and The University of Texas. Its contents include open access journals, electronic theses and dissertations, faculty datasets, departmental databases, digital archives, course management and learning materials, digital media, and special collections. TDL will create new online content and develop services to help scholars publish, search for, and use information through the libraries of its member institutions.
Version 61, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography
From Charles Bailey’s DigitalKoans blog:
Version 61 of the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is now available. This selective bibliography presents over 2,610 articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.
The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals, by the same author, provides much more in-depth coverage of the open access movement and related topics (e.g., disciplinary archives, e-prints, institutional repositories, open access journals, and the Open Archives Initiative) than SEPB does.
The "Open Access Webliography" (with Ho) complements the OAB, providing access to a number of Websites related to open access topics.
Changes in This Version
The bibliography has the following sections (revised sections are marked with an asterisk):
Table of Contents
1 Economic Issues
2 Electronic Books and Texts
2.1 Case Studies and History*
2.2 General Works*
2.3 Library Issues
3 Electronic Serials
3.1 Case Studies and History*
3.2 Critiques
3.3 Electronic Distribution of Printed Journals*
3.4 General Works*
3.5 Library Issues*
3.6 Research*
4 General Works*
5 Legal Issues
5.1 Intellectual Property Rights*
5.2 License Agreements*
5.3 Other Legal Issues
6 Library Issues
6.1 Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
6.2 Digital Libraries*
6.3 General Works*
6.4 Information Integrity and Preservation*
7 New Publishing Models*
8 Publisher Issues*
8.1 Digital Rights Management*
9 Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
Appendix A. Related Bibliographies
Appendix B. About the Author*
Appendix C. SEPB Use Statistics*
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources includes the following sections:
Cataloging, Identifiers, Linking, and Metadata*
Digital Libraries*
Electronic Books and Texts*
Electronic Serials*
General Electronic Publishing*
Images*
Legal*
Preservation*
Publishers
Repositories, E-Prints, and OAI*
SGML and Related Standards*
Further Information about SEPB
The HTML version of SEPB is designed for interactive use. Each major section is a separate file. There are links to sources that are freely available on the Internet. It can be can be searched using Boolean operators.
The HTML document includes three sections not found in the Acrobat file:
- Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (biweekly list of new resources; also available by mailing list and RSS feed)
- Scholarly Electronic Publishing Resources (directory of over 270 related Web sites)
- Archive (prior versions of the bibliography)
The Acrobat file is designed for printing. The printed bibliography is over 215 pages long. The Acrobat file is over 570 KB.
Related Article
An article about the bibliography has been published in The Journal of Electronic Publishing.
“What Is Open Access?” Preprint Available
The preprint of Charles Bailey’s article, "What is open access?", is now available online in both HTML and PDF formats. From Bailey’s DigitalKoans blog:
This paper presents a more nuanced, contemporary view of open access than my "Key Open Access Concepts" excerpt from the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals; however, it had to be very compact to meet the publisher’s needs, and it omits some topics discussed in the earlier document.
Those wanting a more in-depth recent treatment might want to try the first half of my "Open Access and Libraries" preprint, which covers much of this material more fully as a preliminary to discussing the relationship between open access and library functions and operations. However, the "What Is Open Access?" paper reflects some changes in my thinking about OA not found in "Open Access and Libraries."
Perspectives on Negotiating Copyright
The PowerPoint presentations of the SPARC/ACRL Forum at the ALA Midwinter Meeting 2006 are now available online. The Forum focused on the different perspectives on negotiating licenses and copyright. John Ober from the California Digital Library discussed what the University of California system had done to educate their faculty about the copyright issues, and how they had tried to muster the faculty’s support for the system’s institutional repository. David Hoole from the Nature Publishing Group, on the other hand, talked about how the publishing company had adapted their business practices to the changing landscape of scholarly communication.
