Scholarly Communications News

Jan Veltrop, publishing director of BioMed Central is joining Springer as the new director of open access.

A report on alternative business models for scholarly publishing has been released by the ALPSP.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) has announced plans for its sixth, peer-reviewed, open access journal -- PLoS Clinical Trials.

An editorial by T. Scott Plutchak describes his investigation into the impact of having the Medical Library Association's journal available on PubMed Central.

Google has changed the name of Google Print to Google Book Search

The group of publishers that have signed on to the "DC Principles" have presented a proposal to NIH as an alternative to the agency's manuscript submission system.

Streamed video and other materials are now online from the recent UCLA Symposium on "Managing Intellectual Property: What Faculty Need to Know to Publish and Teach in the Digital Age."

A new booklet on copyright issues for colleges and universities is now available at no charge -- Campus Copyright Rights and Responsibilities: A Basic Guide to Policy Considerations (PDF format).

"Submissions are up, reviewers are overtaxed, and authors are lodging complaint after complaint about the process at top-tier journals. What's wrong with peer review?" Read the complete article by Alison McCook published in February's issue of The Scientist.

Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) introduced legislation in early May that would require many federal agencies to ensure that articles resulting from funded research are made freely available online within 6 months of publication. The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) would apply to agencies with extramural research budgets of more than $100 million and would include the National Science Foundation and the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, and Transportation, among others.

You can read the full text of the Act at Senator Cornyn’s web site. For more information and links, see the special web page on FRPAA created by The Alliance for Taxpayer Access. The Association of American Publishers is one of the publishing groups who has voiced opposition to the Act.

The prestigious science journal Nature has announced a 3-month trial for a new form of peer review. Authors will have the choice of posting their article submissions on a preprint server for open comments by others in the field. The trial will not affect the traditional closed review process and it will not influence the likelihood of publication. At the same time, the journal has set up a forum for readers to discuss and debate issues on the topic of peer review.

One of the changes brought about by computer technology is the (sometimes) overwhelming generation of scientific data. An article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education talks about some of the issues and management possibilities. You can participate in an online discussion of this topic on Thursday, June 22 at 2 p.m. on the Chronicle's Colloquy site. A transcript will be made available at the site following the discussion.

Details of the recent contract between Google and the University of California reveal that as many as 3,000 books per day may be provided for scanning. The story was reported in the Aug. 25 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Officials from higher education institutions in the U.S. are showing their support – and opposition – to the proposed Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), S.2695. More than 100 university presidents and provosts, including VCU Provost and VP of Academic Affairs Stephen Gottfredson, have gone on record in support of the legislation. FRPAA would require researchers who receive funding from federal agencies to make their research articles available freely online within 6 months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. However, support is not unanimous among the higher education community and senior officers from at least 10 academic institutions have registered concerns in a letter of their own. The letter expresses the view that mandating free access to publications could have negative consequences for scientific publishers and ultimately undermine the peer review process and the integrity of the scientific record.

For more information on FRPAA, check the following sites:
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access
SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access and several leading American associations are sponsoring an online petition to call for strong support of open access. The petition builds on a similar European initiative and "is written to support public access to research funded by the U.S. government as well as the reintroduction and passage of the Federal Research Public Access Act," according to Heather Joseph, Director of SPARC.

"An online database that enables people to search copyright-renewal records for books published in the United States between 1923 and 1963 has been launched by Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR)."

Complete press release - http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/april4/copy-040407.html

Copyright Renewal Database - http://collections.stanford.edu/determinator/

From the Press Release dated May 17, 2007.......

Science Commons and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have announced the release of a new online tool to help authors exercise choice in retaining critical rights in their scholarly articles, including the rights to reuse their scholarly articles and to post them in online repositories.

The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine is an online tool created by Science Commons to simplify the process of choosing and implementing an addendum to retain scholarly rights. By selecting from among four addenda offered, any author can fill in a form to generate and print a completed amendment that can be attached to a publisher's copyright assignment agreement to retain critical rights to reuse and offer their works online.

From the Press Release dated June 5, 2007 .....

SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has recognized Ted Bergstrom and Carl Bergstrom as the new SPARC Innovators. The father-son team advances the open sharing of scholarly information through original research and the creation of innovative tools that are used widely by the academic community to assess the value of research.

Ted and Carl are best known for their collaborations on Ted's journal pricing Web pages and, more recently, on the Eigenfactor.org Web site produced by Carl's research lab. Ted's journal pricing page, which offers data reporting price per article and price per citation for about 5,000 academic journals, has centralized pricing information so it can be explored and compared in ways that were previously impossible. The site has become a vital resource for researchers and librarians alike. Carl's Eigenfactor.org site offers a completely new and innovative approach to assessing the value of journals; it provides researchers, librarians and others a new mechanism to evaluate based on a diverse array of criteria.

The SPARC Innovator program recognizes advances in scholarly communication realized by an individual, institution, or group. For further information or a list of previous SPARC Innovators, please see the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill that will require free online access to publications of research supported by NIH. The provision is part of the appropriations bill for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services and Education, and it mandates that NIH provide public access to research findings within 12 months of publication. Similar language appears in the appropriations bill to be considered by the Senate later this summer.

In a press release from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, advocates characterize this action as a "major advance for scientific communication." However, the move is not without its critics, including the Association of American Publishers who opposed the legislation.

A related article on the legislation appears in the July 24 edition of Inside Higher Ed.

How much open access is there already? Answer: lots!!

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) lists over 2,800 titles, and is growing at a rate of more than one title per calendar day.
http://www.doaj.org

An OAIster search encompasses more than 12 million records in over 800 repositories.
http://www.oaister.org/

Scientific Commons includes more than 16 million publications from over 6 million authors in over 800 repositories.
http://www.scientificcommons.org/

The world's largest open access archive is PubMed Central, which exceeded the one million mark in June 2007.
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov

Re-posted with permission from
Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com
Originally posted on Aug. 18, 2007

An open access article on dietary supplements published in BioMed Central's Nutrition Journal has been downloaded more than 16,000 times since it was published on the journal's website on Oct. 24, 2007. Matthew Cockerill, publisher of BioMed Central, comments on the significance of this fact in his blog post. For examples of other BioMed Central articles that have received a wide readership, see the publisher's Most Viewed page.

With the signing of the omnibus appropriations bill, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is directed to make mandatory its policy for funded investigators to submit final versions of their manuscripts to PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine's digital archive. Previously, researchers were encouraged to make submissions to the publicly accessible database but the new provision will require all NIH grantees to deposit their research papers within 12 months after publication. The legislation comes after many years of lobbying by advocacy groups for such open access language and just as many years of opposition by publishers.

The NIH maintains a website with information and tutorials on the Manuscript Submission System and the Public Access Policy at http://www.nihms.nih.gov/

For additional information, see the news release from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, Dec. 26, 2007

The Chronicle of Higher Education's Wired Campus e-newsletter reports that the University of California's eScholarship Repository has recently exceeded five million full-text downloads, according to the university.

The eScholarship Repository, a service of the California Digital Library, allows scholars in the University of California system to submit their work to a central location where any users may easily access it free of charge. Catherine Mitchell, acting director of the CDL publishing group, says the number shows that both content seekers and creators have embraced the service, allaying concerns that researchers wouldn't contribute to the repository.

From their web site at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/brii/ the University of California has announced a pilot project co-sponsored by UC Berkeley's Vice Chancellor for Research and the University Librarian. The brief announcement reads as follows...

"The Berkeley Research Impact Initiative (BRII) supports faculty members who want to make their journal articles free to all readers immediately upon publication.

An 18-month pilot program, BRII will subsidize, in various degrees, fees charged to authors who select open access or paid access publication. The pilot will also yield data that can be used to gauge faculty interest in, as well as the budgetary impacts of, these new modes of scholarly communication on the Berkeley campus."

Additionally offered is a new program announcement, a program description, frequently asked questions and instructions for application and reimbursement.

Significant revisions were made to the NIH Public Access Policy Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page on May 2, 2008. The revisions were intended to provide additional clarity on the compliance process and do not point to any changes in the policy itself. Among the changes are clarification about the PMCID number and who should submit the paper in the event of multiple authors. For a list of the new changes and revisions, consult the information provided by SPARC.