Factors in Journal Cancellation
The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) has commissioned a study to examine the factors contributing to libraries’ cancellations of journal subscriptions. Among the factors is the concern of whether authors’ self-archiving of preprints and/or postprints in institutional repositories and disciplinary archives will lead to a decrease in journal subscription. The study does not produce any definite conclusions, but it states: "There is no evidence in this study that core journals are under any threat from repositories. There are some hints, however, that very peripheral journals might find some pressure, and for that reason the threat might be felt more by aggregators than by journals, but only when there was very comprehensive coverage by repositories of the literature." The study’s report can be ordered from ALPSP, but the summary and conclusions as well as the survey data are available free.
The landscape of scholarly publishing is changing because of various factors such as new technologies, the open access movement, and higher education institutions’ scholarly communication initiatives. It will be interesting to note how scholarly publishing will evolve and how academics will react.
E-Journal Preservation Landscape
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) are collaborating to create a survey of the e-journal preservation landscape. Their goal is to help libraries better understand "the emerging strategies and options for ensuring long-term access to the born-digital scholarly literature," and to help libraries "determine their best course of action." While the survey is yet to be conducted, the two organizations have identified 10 e-journal archiving initiatives that will be studied. Refer to this article for details of the survey and the initiatives.
Open Access Bibliography Available in HTML Format
Charles Bailey’s Open Access Bibliography is now available in the HTML format. The table of contents in the home page of the bibliography has a complete set of links for all sections and subsections of the document. It makes the online reading of the bibliography much easier.
Capturing Analog Sound for Digital Preservation
Capturing Analog Sound for Digital Preservation, a report published by the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Library of Congress, "summarizes discussions and recommendations emerging from a meeting of leading audio preservation engineers held January 29–30, 2004, to assess the present state of standards and best practices for capturing sound from analog discs and tapes."
Scholarly Communications Symposium in April
The Drexel University Libraries in Philadelphia, PA will hold a Scholarly Communications Symposium on April 28, 2006. The speakers will discuss the impact and future trends of publishing in an electronic environment. The Symposium is free but requires registration.
Web Forum for E-Journal Editors
Scholarly Exchange, which offers a free open-source journal-publishing platform, has launched an open Web editors’ forum for interested parties to share experiences of starting, running, and archiving electronic journals. Participating in the forum requires free registration.
International Conference on Digital Libraries 2006
The International Conference on Digital Libraries 2006 will be held in New Delhi, India from Dec. 5th-8th. Its theme is "Digital Libraries: Information Management for Global Access." The conference "will focus on the creation, adoption, implementation, and utilization of digital libraries, e-learning, and knowledge societies." There is also a call for papers for the Conference.
Tales from Public Domain
Tales from the Public Domain: Bound by Law is a comic book that introduces the reader to concepts such as copyright and fair use. A project of Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, the book provides "a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture." It is free for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.
Open Access Journal to Enhance Communication of Economics
A new peer-reviewed journal, Theoretical Economics, adopts the open access publishing model to enhance the communication of research in economic theory. It allows article authors to retain unrestricted rights to use their articles for non-commercial purposes, including the right to make and distribute copies for teaching and research as well as the right to archive accepted papers on personal Web sites and in digital institutional repositories and disciplinary archives. Financially, the publisher (the Society for Economic Theory) "needs only to recover the modest costs of operating a web-based journal, and is legally entitled to do no more. These costs are covered by modest submission fees and voluntary memberships."
This new journal demonstrates how professional associations can work with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) to publish low-cost, high-quality peer-reviewed journals and to contribute to the flow of scholarly communication. Hopefully, other professional associations will follow suit and play an active role in the widest dissemination of their members’ scholarly outputs.
Open Access, Citation, and Article Download
This article reports that "articles deposited in the arXiv [an open access disciplinary archive for Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science] received 35% more citations on average than non-deposited articles (an advantage of about 1.1 citations per article), and that this difference was most pronounced for highly-cited articles." It investigates possible reasons for the difference and suggests that the disciplinary archive and publishers’ Web sites of journals may fulfill "distinct functional needs of the reader."
