Scholarly Communications News

From an ARL news release:

New approaches to scholarly communication are featured in the June 2008 issue of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) Bimonthly Report, no. 258.

In the lead article, Duke University Scholarly Communications Officer Kevin L. Smith offers pragmatic strategies that authors and their institutions can use to manage authors' copyrights to fulfill the requirements of the new National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. Karla L. Hahn, Director of ARL's Office of Scholarly Communication, discusses the results of her study of publishing services provided by ARL member libraries. Additionally, brief summaries are provided of the recently released SPARC-Science Commons guide to creating institutional open access policies and of ARL's new agenda for developing research library support for e-science.

Those interested in open access publishing can create and maintain simple factual lists about the open access movement in science and scholarship with the Open Access Directory (OAD) wiki, created by Peter Suber and Robin Peek. Suber is a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and Peek is an Associate Professor of Library and Information Science at Simmons College. They conceived the project in order to collect OA-related lists for one-stop reference and searching.

The wiki started operating with about half a dozen lists such as-- conferences devoted to open access, discussion forums devoted to open access, and journal "declarations of independence"-- and has now grown to include...
* Acronyms
* Blogs about OA
* Disciplinary repositories
* Discussion forums
* Events
* Free and open-source journal management software
* Free and open-source repository software
* Guides for OA journal publishers
* Institutions that support open access
* Jobs in open access
* Journal declarations of independence
* Lists maintained by others
* OA by the numbers
* OA speakers bureau
* Proposed lists.
* Research in progress
* Research questions
* Services to support repository managers
* Statements by learned societies and professional associations
* Wikis about OA