University Provosts Support Open Access
Inside Higher Ed’s article (Rallying behind Open Access) reports that the provosts of 25 universities have jointly issued an open letter to show their support for the Federal Public Research Access Act (FPRAA):
the provosts of 25 top universities are jointly releasing an open letter that strongly backs the bill and encourages higher education to prepare for a new way of disseminating research findings. “Widespread public dissemination levels the economic playing field for researchers outside of well-funded universities and research centers and creates more opportunities for innovation. Ease of access and discovery also encourages use by scholars outside traditional disciplinary communities, thus encouraging imaginative and productive scholarly convergence,” the provosts write.
Don’t you think that increased accessibility of scholarly works will benefit the advancement of scholarship as well as the dissemination of your scholarly achievements? For more information about how the conventional publishing model can hamper timely scholarly communication and collaboration, check out the Transforming Scholarly Communication Web site.
P.S.: The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has issued this press release about eight consumer groups’ support for FPRAA.
Open Access Conference in Portual
The University of Minho in Portugal will host the second conference on open access in November 2006. While the details of it are yet to be announced, the presentations of the 2005 conference are already available online.
Open Data Presentations
At the American Library Association Annual Conference held in New Orleans last month, there was a forum about open access to and preservation of research data. The presentations of that forum are now available online. Here is a description of the forum:
During the past several years, Open Data has become a field of urgent interest to researchers, scholars, and librarians. With the amount of scientific data doubling every year, issues surrounding the access, use, and curation of data sets are increasing in importance. The data-rich, researcher-driven environment that is evolving poses new challenges and provides new opportunities in the sharing, review, and publication of research results. Ensuring open access to the data behind the literature will play a key role in seeing that the scholarly communication system evolves in a way that supports the needs of scholars and the academic enterprise as a whole.
As Open Data moves to the forefront of scholarly communication, librarians, administrators, and researchers will be responsible for considering new access policies for data and data curation issues. This SPARC-ACRL forum introduced Open Data as an emerging focus, explored the challenges of managing the data deluge, and gave participants insights for crafting their own digital data preservation and curation policies.
Transforming Scholarly Communication Web Site Updated
Originally posted by Charles Bailey:
The UH Libraries’ Transforming Scholarly Communication Web site has been updated and expanded. Of particular interest is more coverage of what scholars can do about the scholarly communication crisis, what the UH Libraries are doing, and what governments and government agencies are doing, especially the NIH.
Have you wondered: How can I retain copyright to my articles so that I can use my own work and permit others to freely read and use it as well? We now provide detailed instructions on how to do so.
Institutional Repositories at Research Universities
Charles Bailey has compiled a list of operational institutional repositories maintained by some research universities in North America. These repositories not only enhance scholarly communication but also contribute to the branding of the universities.
Portal to Free Journals on Internet
LivRe!, a portal developed by the Brazilian National Nuclear Energy Commission, is a multilingual directory of free journals on the Internet. Here is a description of it:
The Portal covers scientific journals, magazines, bulletins and newsletters.
Free access journals are spreaded [sic] over several categories:
- free access to all the issues and articles. Great part of the titles are included in this category;
- free access requiring mandatory registration;
- free access only during a pre-established period from the publishing on;
- free access only after a period following publishing;
- partial free access, that means, only part of the articles are available for free.
The following data are available for each title: time coverage, language, secondary sources indexing the title, if it is a peeer [sic] reviewed journal, optional comments and contents description, as supplied by the publisher.
SPARC Innovator
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has recognized the University of California (UC) system as an innovator of scholarly communication. Part of what the UC system has achieved is to raise scholars’ awareness of the need to manage their author rights.
“Scholars’ management of their own copyright and an institutional policy and support infrastructure that includes copyright management is a big target in the scholarly communication landscape,” says [John] Ober. “Helping scholars to pro-actively manage their copyright is a precondition of long-term management and preservation of UC scholarship.” In fact, UC already makes available model copyright clauses complemented by in-depth information about the role of copyright in scholarly communication.
As scholars, what have you done to enhance and preserve the accessibility of your scholarly works?
Economics of Open Access Publishing
Dr. Jessica Litman, Professor of Law at the University of Michigan, discusses the benefits of open access to scholarly communication in her article (The economics of open access law publishing). She argues:
If we are examining the economics of open access publishing, we shouldn’t limit ourselves to the question whether open access journals have fielded a business model that would allow them to ape conventional journals in the information marketplace. We should be taking a broader look at who is paying what money (and comparable incentives) to whom, for what activity, and to what end. Are either conventional or open-access journals likely to deliver what they’re being paid for?
At the end, she concludes:
Instead of asking whether open access journals can act like conventional scholarly journals without relying on the subscription revenues made possible by access restrictions, it’s more useful to think about whether they can engender a less dysfunctional environment for scholarly publishing than the one we currently enjoy. This is true for legal scholarship and seems equally true for non-legal scholarship. In both cases, universities and other research centers expend massive amounts of money to generate and support research, scholarship and scholarly publications. Those expenditures vastly outweigh the modest operating budgets of even the most expensive scholarly journals. Thus, any analysis predicated on the economics of scholarly publishing should focus on the economics of the scholarly enterprise rather than the budgets of the journals that propagate its results. Where open access publishing can enhance the dissemination and impact of scholarly research, it seems like a good bargain for all concerned, for reasons that are primarily not financial.
Open Access Book Chapters
Two chapters from the book, Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects, are freely available on the Internet:
- What is open access?, by Charles Bailey
- Open access in the United States, by Peter Suber
Digital University Press
Rice University has revived its university press with a digital twist. From the press release:
Charles Henry, Rice University vice provost, university librarian and publisher of Rice University Press during the startup phase, said, "Our decision to revive Rice’s press as a digital enterprise is based on both economics and on new ways of thinking about scholarly publishing. On the one hand, university presses are losing money at unprecedented rates, and technology offers us ways to decrease production costs and provide nearly ubiquitous delivery system, the Internet. We avoid costs associated with backlogs, large inventories and unsold physical volumes, and we greatly speed the editorial process.
"We don’t have a precise figure for our startup costs yet, but it’s safe to say our startup costs and annual operating expenses will be at least 10 times less than what we’d expect to pay if we were using a traditional publishing model," Henry said.
Authors published by Rice University Press will retain the copyrights for their works, in accordance with Connexions’ licensing agreement with Creative Commons. Additionally, because Connexions is open-source, authors will be able to update or amend their work, easily creating a revised edition of their book. W. Joseph King, executive director of Connexions and co-director of the Rice University Press project, said, "Connexions’ mission is to support open education in all forms, including the publication of original scholarly works. We believe that Connexions has the ability to change the university press at Rice and in general."
There are also reports from Inside Higher Ed (New model for scholarly publishing) and from The Wall Street Journal (Rice University revives its press in digital model).
