No New Posts until March 25, 2008
Due to a technical upgrade, there will not be new posts on this blog from March 18th through March 24th. For the latest news and resources for scholarly communication, please read Open Access News.
P.S.: Due to unanticipated technical issues, there were no new posts on this blog from March 18th through March 31st.
Author’s Rights Video
A short video on author rights has been made available by the Association of College & Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). From the press release:
The two-minute video presentation, available at http://blip.tv/file/743274, explains in simple, graphic terms the potential for wider exposure of scholarly articles when authors retain key rights. Inspired by the SPARC Author Rights initiative, the presentation offers three steps to effective rights management:
1) Scrutinize the publication agreement
2) Negotiate with the publisher
3) Retain the rights you needAuthor addenda, such as the SPARC Author Addendum, are recommended as tools. …
A slide show of the video is also available. For more information about author rights, refer to SPARC’s resources for authors page.
Publishing in New Millennium
An article in New Scientists (Physicists slam publishers over Wikipedia ban) reports the copyright transfer issue in scholarly publishing:
Scientists who want to describe their work on Wikipedia should not be forced to give up the kudos of a respected journal. So says a group of physicists who are going head-to-head with a publisher because it will not allow them to post parts of their work to the online encyclopaedia, blogs and other forums.
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The authors of the rescinded papers and 38 other physicists are calling for the APS [American Physical Society] to change its policy. "It is unreasonable and completely at odds with the practice in the field. Scientists want as broad an audience for their papers as possible," says Bill Unruh at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who has been lobbying separately against strict copyright rules.
Issues involved in scholarly publishing have drawn more attention lately. For example, some Harvard University graduate students organized a forum (Publishing in the New Millennium) last November to discuss scientific publishing in biosciences. The proceedings of the forum are available online.
Switching to Open Access
An article (Taking the plunge: Open access at the Canadian Journal of Sociology by Dr. Kevin D. Haggerty), published in Information Research, discusses the issues involved in converting a subscription-based print journal to an open access journal:
Background The Canadian Journal of Sociology had established a strong position, internationally, among sociology journals. However, subscriptions were falling as readers increasingly accessed the resource through libraries and a transfer of editorship occasioned an opportunity for a radical re-assessment.
Rationale for open access Following something of a personal struggle on the part of the Editor, the rationale for open access, that is, increasing the visibility and use of the journal, was accepted. Support from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council becomes more central to economic viability
Conclusion Converting a scholarly print journal from toll-based to open access cannot be undertaken without serious consideration of all elements of the publishing and editing processes, but the benefits to scholarship are expected to be real.
Publishers interested in pursuing a similar route could refer to the Resources for Publishers page created by the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).
Three Symposia on Scholarly Communication
There are three upcoming symposia on scholarly communication: The Georgetown University Libraries are organizing the Sixth Scholarly Communication Symposium on March 26, 2008. Its theme is "Digital Scholarship in the University Tenure and Promotion Process":
Landmark digital multimedia scholarship projects have existed since at least the mid- 1990s–note the advent of George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media–and the web is ubiquitous in higher education. Yet well over a decade on, the connection between promotion, tenure, or salary increases and digital scholarship is uncertain. … Is there an understanding of what digital scholarship and its many facets entail? … Most digital scholarship projects are highly collaborative. Credit for digital scholarship has been defined by the criteria for traditional scholarship, but have criteria for an academic website been developed to the same degree that they have for an academic article?
Another symposium is Digital Discovery 2008, which will be held at The University of Texas School of Nursing at Houston on March 27th. It focuses on issues in scholarly publishing.
As previously announced, Drexel University Libraries will host the 2008 Scholarly Communication Symposium on April 16th. Its theme is Scholar 2 Scholar: How Web 2.0 is Changing Scholarly Communication. From the Symposium Wiki:
Web 2.0 technologies are more than just web-based games and social networks; these virtual environments are building communities of thought and practice which have very real implications for education and research in academia. How do educators, administrators, and librarians use or repurpose these tools to their advantage? What are the implications for teaching and research? Is the return on our investment of time and energy worth the engagement? …
Digital Scholarship in Music
Create Change has released an interview of Dr. Carolyn Kenny, a professor of human development and indigenous studies at Antioch University in Santa Barbara. She shares her view of the changing scholarly communication landscape:
What do you feel have been benefits of these new forms of digital scholarship-in general and to you personally?
First, there has been a radical shift in communication with the Internet and open access. It allows for much quicker communication and more communication internationally. Now there are networks in music therapy and ways of communicating across cultures and internationally that couldn’t exist previously.
Technology also helps to advance the arts because works can be more accurately represented. With the click of a button you can see the digital representation of a piece of art or hear the actual music for music therapy sessions, rather than describing it on paper. I am working with an arts student who just finished her electronic Ph.D. dissertation. She did an amazing job of using media-enhanced files within the dissertation. In her author introduction, she begins by with an audio recording of herself talking about what her dissertation will cover. Then she has music and video files embedded in the text.
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In your experience, what is holding back further change in how scholars communicate, share their work, and achieve recognition?
It’s generational. We are creatures of habit. But the rules are changing. There is a revolution because of open access in publishing of journals. More people have a voice. It’s a liberating feeling now. I do see open access as a revolution. It’s inevitable.
What recent changes are encouraging?
I see more journals like ours-free, online open-access journals. I think that’s really exciting. Even if you live in a remote area, you can get information now. We’re seeing things moving ahead very quickly.
What is the benefit of more open sharing of research?
It will give more people more of a voice and cut through the power structures-journal reviewers behind the scenes and the academic publishing business. Open Access is changing the way information is reviewed and produced and it will change the way people learn and do things. It’s a complete revolution and cuts through the hierarchy.
Open Access Publishing in High-Energy Physics
Recently, there have been discussions about SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) in the arena of scholarly communication. Here is a brief description of SCOAP3 from its About page:
The Open Access (OA) tenets of granting unrestricted access to the results of publicly-funded research are in contrast with current models of scientific publishing, where access is restricted to journal customers. At the same time, subscription costs increase and add considerable strain on libraries, forced to cancel an increasing number of journals subscriptions. This situation is particularly acute in fields like High-Energy Physics (HEP), where pre-prints describing scientific results are timely available online. There is a growing concern within the academic community that the future of high-quality journals, and the peer-review system they administer, is at risk.
To address this situation for HEP [High-Energy Physics] and, as an experiment, Science at large, a new model for OA publishing has emerged: SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics). In this model, HEP funding agencies and libraries, which today purchase journal subscriptions to implicitly support the peer-review service, federate to explicitly cover its cost, while publishers make the electronic versions of their journals free to read. Authors are not directly charged to publish their articles OA.
SCOAP3 held a U.S. Focal Meeting on February 29, 2008 in Berkeley, California. Among the presentations at the meeting are:
- A Call for Collective Action for a Collective Good by Rick Luce, Emory University
- Open Access Publishing in High-Energy Physics: The SCOAP3 Model by Salvatore Mele, CERN
- OA Synergies: Repositories for High Energy Physics by Travis Brooks, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing
The 12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing (ELPUB) will be held at the University of Toronto in Canada on June 25-27, 2008. Its theme will be "Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0":
Scholarly communications, in particular scholarly publications, are undergoing tremendous changes. Researchers, universities, funding bodies, research libraries and publishers are responding in different ways, from active experimentation, adaptation, to strong resistance. The ELPUB 2008 conference will focus on key issues on the future of scholarly communications resulting from the intersection of semantic web technologies, the development of cyberinfrastructure for humanities and the sciences , and new dissemination channels and business models.
Registration is now open.
Resources on Institutional Compliance with NIH Public Access Policy
If you missed the Webcast, Institutional Compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy: Ensuring Deposit Rights, it is now available online. It "explores the legal aspects of author rights management within the context of the new Public Access Policy adopted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)." It is free for viewing, but registration is required.
In addition to the Webcast, other relevant online resources include a guide, NIH Public Access Policy: Guide for Research Universities, and a white paper, Complying with the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy: Copyright Considerations and Options.
Reasons for Pursuing Open Access
Two recent articles have highlighted the significance of open access. The first is Open access to criminal justice scholarship: A matter of social justice by Allan Scherlen and Matthew Robinson, published by the Journal of Criminal Justice Education. From the abstract:
The paper argues that criminal justice scholarship disseminated through the traditional journal subscription model is not consistent with social justice. Adoption of "open access" principles in publishing benefits both authors and readers through broader and more egalitarian dissemination of criminal justice literature. Moreover, when viewed in light of social justice theory, open access is a more just method of scholarly communication. After providing a brief outline of the history and basic aspects of open access, the paper uses the framework of the social justice theories of John Rawls and David Miller to argue why open access is more just than traditional subscription models of publishing and why criminal justice scholars and their associations must consider the importance of supporting open access initiatives and promoting the dissemination of scholarship as widely as possible if they are concerned about attaining justice for criminal justice scholarly literature.
The second article, Information liberation by Daniel Akst, was published in The Wall Street. The author points out that hoarding information is bad for capitalism and the poor:
American institutions of higher education are knowledge machines of unprecedented fecundity, but much of the knowledge they produce is locked up in high-priced scholarly journals that most people can’t easily get. Citizens thus find themselves in the position of paying for research and then paying again to buy it back from academic journals whose prices have been spiraling upward. Library Journal says that U.S. journal prices rose 9% last year alone. The average chemistry-journal subscription, to cite a single egregious example, was $3,429 for one year.
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Other than in the realm of life-saving medicine, why should any of this matter to nonacademics? Well, for one thing, barriers to the spread of information are bad for capitalism. The dissemination of knowledge is almost as crucial as the production of it for the creation of wealth, and knowledge (like people) can’t reproduce in isolation. It’s easy to scoff at the rise of Madonna studies and other risible academic excrescences, but a flood of truly important research pours from campuses every day. The infrastructure that produces this work is surely one of America’s greatest competitive advantages.
In fact, open access might help to moderate some of the worst forms of academic hokum, if only by holding them up to the light of day — and perhaps by making taxpayers, parents and college donors more careful about where they send their money. Entering the realm of delirium for a moment, one can even imagine public exposure encouraging professors in the humanities and social sciences to write in plain English.
Keeping knowledge bottled up is also bad for the world’s poor; indeed, opening up the research produced on America’s campuses via the Internet is probably among the most cost-effective ways of helping underdeveloped countries rise from poverty. Closer to home, open access to scholarly work via the Internet would help counteract the plague of plagiarism that the Internet itself has abetted. Anyone suspecting a scholar of such chicanery could search for a phrase or two in Google and see if somebody else’s work turns up with the same unusual text string.
