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Citing irreconcilable disagreements with publisher Elsevier’s business model, the editorial board of the Journal of Informetrics on January 10 unanimously announced its resignation and subsequently launched a new journal, Quantitative Science Studies.
Peter Potter, director of publishing strategy for the University Libraries at Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, was appointed by the Association of Research Libraries as visiting program officer to advance TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem).
MIT Press and MIT Media Lab recently launched the Knowledge Futures Group (KFG), a first-of-its-kind collaboration between a major academic publisher and academic lab to create and share research information.
The MIT Press announced today the launch of the Knowledge Futures Group (KFG), a first-of-its kind collaboration between a leading publisher and a world-class academic lab to transform how research information is created and shared.
The Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum Foundation has abandoned a proposal that would have split the museum and library between Theodore Roosevelt National Park and Dickinson State University.
Digital Science has debuted Dimensions. The free core version of the platform delivers one-click access to over nine million open access articles and 860 million abstracts and citations.
EBSCO Information Services and BiblioLabs will launch OpenDissertations.org, an open access initiative that will facilitate the discovery of electronic theses and dissertations beginning early this year.
The good news is that more academic librarians are leading textbook affordability and open educational resources initiatives at their institutions. What if we could do even more good work with statewide efforts? Fortunately, there are some good models to lead the way.
This year’s Charleston Conference, held from November 6–10, addressed the theme “What’s Past Is Prologue.” As always, the conference was too packed with content for a single editor to do more than dip into a small sample. However, some commonalities did emerge across the sessions attended.
After a group of middle schoolers from Wilmington, NC had the chance to share in the discovery of some rare primary source documents, transcribe them, and get an up-close look at the digitization process, North Carolina may have a few more aspiring archivists ready to help preserve its past.
While intellectual freedom and open access (OA) are two ideals widely held and strongly advocated for across all disciplines of librarianship, each touches on different values. The panel “Intellectual Freedom and Open Access; Working Toward a Common Goal?” at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Chicago, sponsored by ALA’s Intellectual Freedom Round Table, invited three librarians from different sectors to weigh in on where and how the two principles overlap, and how they can support each other.
MIT Press has joined forces with the Internet Archive (IA) to scan, preserve, and enable lending of hundreds of the press’s books that are currently unavailable in digital form. With support from British funding agency Arcadia, IA will scan a selection of MIT Press’s backlist titles, which will then be available for any library that owns a physical copy of each book to lend or make openly available, and will also be accessible through IA’s archive.org.
Nonprofit altmetrics pioneer Impactstory has launched Unpaywall, a free extension for Google Chrome and Firefox browsers that helps users obtain free full text copies of open access (OA) research papers.
The shift to digital delivery of serials content has had a profound effect on the information ecosystem. Powerful discovery and social networking tools expose users to an incredibly rich world of commercially produced and open access (OA) content. Most publishers have explored new ways of pricing their content—such as population served, FTE (full-time equivalent), tiered pricing based upon Carnegie classification, or other defining criteria—or the database model, which treats all content within an e-journal package as a database, eliminating the need for title by title reconciliation. However, in the end, the pricing conversation always seems to circle back to the revenue generated by the annual subscription model.
Open Access publishing—both Green and Gold varieties—are gaining greater acceptance. Librarians need to focus on ways to promote and improve the process.
Academic librarians are pleased with the progress they’ve made in leading their campuses to recognize the value of Open Educational Resources (OER). Now publishers are responding to OER with new learning platforms. It may be time for a new strategy.
The Navajo Nation Library (NNL) is working to secure the funding necessary to digitize and catalog thousands of hours of stories, songs, and oral histories of the Navajo people, originally recorded in the 1960s by the Navajo Culture Center of the Office of Navajo Economic Opportunity (ONEO).
The trend to make scientific journal articles freely (and easily) accessible also extends to the underlying research data and methodology. Academic libraries are the key to making Open Science practical.
Librarians are leaders when they advocate for a culture of openness in their organizations and communities. Whether it’s open source, open access, or open educational resources, we support the principles of openness. What does open leadership look like?
Early in 2017, Adam Matthew, a database vendor known for its collections of digitized historical primary sources, will release a new collection called Race Relations. The database will offer access to a trove of previously undigitized civil rights material from the Race Relations Department of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries, 1943–70, an organization that was based at Fisk University in Nashville and whose records are now housed at the Amistad Center at Tulane University in New Orleans. Chianta Dorsey, an archivist at the Amistad Center, explains, “The formal program of the department began in 1943 as a forum to engage in a national discussion regarding numerous topics including racial and ethnic relationships, economics, education, government policy, housing and employment.”
Academic database and streaming media publisher Alexander Street is beta testing the Open Music Library (OML), a new online resource that will eschew database paywalls, enabling non-subscribers to discover and use high-quality open access and public domain content from contributors such as the Library of Congress (LC) and the British Library (BL), while offering subscribers a seamless experience discovering and using free and for-fee content together.
On August 12, the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication published a comprehensive literature review detailing strategies for digitizing copyright-protected works for which rights holders cannot be found or contacted—colloquially called “orphan works.” This 112-page peer-reviewed report, “Digitizing Orphan Works: Legal Strategies to Reduce Risks for Open Access to Copyrighted Orphan Works,” is the culmination of the 2015–16 Orphan-Works Project at Harvard.
As part of the growing efforts to openly share the results of social science research, the steering committee of SocArXiv—an open source, open access archive for the social sciences—on July 9 announced plans to partner with the Center for Open Science on the development of a preprint server that enables the sharing of data and code, with the potential for post-publication review.
In a June 25 session at the ALA Annual conference in Orlando, John Bracken, VP of media innovation for the Knight Foundation, said that the foundation has been focused on three key questions when working with libraries: What can be done to foster cross-discipline collaboration, possibly learning from projects in other civic sectors such as Code for America, 18F, or the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews collaboration; how can community be put “even more robustly” at the center of the foundation’s work; and how can the foundation help libraries tell their stories to wider audiences? “To succeed, particularly in a time of reduced public investment, it is vital to tell our stories in ways that people can understand the breadth of our work, and on platforms” where the public is present and listening, Bracken said.
Mandates from governments, funding sources, and institutions, have made the switch to open access all but inevitable. This puts increasing pressure on traditional journals to change, a process commonly known as “flipping,” but a new study reveals the many ways to convert from subscriptions to OA.
Academic profile platform SelectedWorks has been redesigned and was recently relaunched as a librarian-facing faculty support tool, enabling academic libraries to manage the creation and organization of consistent, institution-branded faculty profiles that showcase open access articles and other scholarly work. The redesign was the result of “a change in understanding” of how the platform was being used, according to Jean-Gabriel Bankier, president and CEO of bepress, developer of SelectedWorks, as well as the Digital Commons institutional repository software suite and other academic publishing and communication products.
The increase of Open Access (OA), as a percentage of all peer-reviewed research articles, is not in dispute. There are even scientific studies on the rate of increase and its significance. Given the ascendency of OA, researchers and libraries must address some basic issues resulting from a movement that has no single, unified standard.
The promise of Open Access is colored by concerns over financial models and their potential to disrupt established academic publishing. In this installment, we take a closer look at the issues surrounding the APC-supported Gold publishing model.
In this webcast, our experts will highlight how librarians are tackling this important issue, and how the library can shape the future of funding Open Access.
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The Open Educational Resources (OER) phenomenon promises access to information with fewer barriers to academics, but the change will be disruptive. As Open Access has created turmoil among peer-reviewed journal publishers, OERs have similarly challenged curriculum. Learning content—from textbooks to course readings, assessment tools, and other material—was traditionally the domain of a few specialized publishers. However, with the advent (and dramatic proliferation) of digital content, traditional publishers have struggled to keep up.
What does fracking have to do with scholarly publishing and journal pricing? While the library financial landscape has improved since the depth of the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, it still cannot be considered robust. As articles such as this one chronicle annual serials price increases, libraries, publishers, and vendors search for innovative ways to fulfill information needs within the finite, predefined budget environment. New business and access models ranging from the initial e-journal big deal packages, article pay per view, open access, mega-journals, and publisher e-journal database pricing have evolved in response to the environment; libraries, publishers, and vendors have merged, consolidated, or disappeared along the way. Just as fracking keeps the oil and gas flowing, these strategies enable the current scholarly publishing ecosystem to extract the necessary resources—intellectual and financial—to survive.
As a reference librarian, I’m keenly following developments in the Open Access (OA) movement, because I (along with all of you folks also working with researchers) am aware of how journal and serial costs have gotten so large and burdensome to libraries that titles must be cut, and thus, access to important research is becoming ever more difficult for students, faculty, and other scholars around the world. So I was intrigued when I saw last June that Harvard Library’s Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) had awarded a contract to three individuals—David Solomon, Bo-Christer Björk, and Mikael Laakso—to “write a comprehensive literature review on methods for converting subscription-based scholarly journals to open access.” The OSC calls this the “journal flipping project.” When I heard that the preliminary version of their report, Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences, was available for public comment, I took a look at what it says.
Open Access publishing has led to a proliferation of peer-reviewed articles. Librarians and researchers have a more challenging task when it comes to finding what they need. It has never been a simple task to locate relevant information. Entire disciplines of library science are devoted to the complicated task of indexing and retrieving published findings. However, under traditional models, that process was relatively predictable.
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As the first in a series of discussions about Librarians & the Changing Scholarly Environment, sponsored by Sage, we explored the Open Science initiative with Jill Emery, Collection Development Librarian, Portland State University, OR, and Robin Champieux, School of Communication Librarian, Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). Readers will get a better understanding of how open our literature is today, the perspective of senior scientists, and how open science applies to aggregated databases.
A look at the EU’s newly announced Open Science Policy Platform, and the long-term implications of Open Science for librarians and other information curators. In this series, we’ll be examining the implications of Open Access (or OA) publishing of peer reviewed journal content on academic and public libraries. OA is of course part of a larger phenomenon—the movement to make science itself accessible to everyone. Like OA, Open Science (OS) has broad implications for those charged with the curation of knowledge.
The financial shift from subscribers to authors will have long term and potentially positive effects on peer-reviewed scientific and medical reporting.
Whether you’re just getting started or want to take your program to the next level, thinking strategically about campus adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) can make a difference.
So you’ve established an institutional repository, where users can put papers, theses, and experimental data on file, making it easily accessible to the larger world. While getting an institutional repository up and running is no small feat, it’s only the first step. To make the most of this tool, you have to fill it, and that means getting ongoing participation from faculty and students.
As more and more researchers are committed to sharing their data, libraries are seizing the opportunity to demonstrate their value across the research lifecycle and support open culture. Mandates from funding agencies have made data management and sharing a high priority for researchers; new strategies for reuse and visualization are shining a spotlight on the importance of discoverability. Libraries have an important role to play in research data management and sharing; they are taking the opportunity to remind their partners across campus that managing research data, like most efforts in scholarly communication, is a team sport.
CHORUS (the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States) has partnered with a number of federal agencies over the past six months to help them comply with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directives requiring open access to federally funded research. The United States Department of Energy (DOE), the Smithsonian Institution, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and U.S. Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have all reached agreements with CHORUS.
As part of the ongoing celebration of International Open Access Week, Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) and the Greater New York Metropolitan Area Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL/NY) organized a panel discussion on November 2 titled “Leveraging Open Educational Resources in the Classroom and Beyond.”
Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) Releases “Strategy and Workplan 2016-2018″ Document
From the COAR Strategic Directions 2016-2018 Plan: To realize our mission and achieve this vision, COAR will focus on community, leadership and engagement at the international level. Four strategic directions will guide COAR’s activities: Promote the development of a sustainable, global network of open access repositories as key elements of international research infrastructures in support […]
On April 30 the academic publishing company Elsevier announced that it would be updating its article sharing policies. In a post on its website titled Unleashing the power of academic sharing, Elsevier’s director of access and policy Alicia Wise outlined a framework of new sharing and hosting policies, which include guidelines for sharing academic articles at every stage of their existence, from preprint to post-publication, and protocol for both non-commercial—that is, repository—and commercial hosting platforms.
In what at first looked to be a decisive move in the direction of open access (OA), Nature Publishing Group announced December 2 that it would officially adopt two initiatives that would provide access to articles previously available exclusively by subscription. But the new features come with restrictions that many see as a nod to OA in name only, and Nature News quickly corrected its initial headline, which read “Nature Makes All Articles Free to View”—but not before it was picked up by a number of news and social media outlets.
Primary sources publisher Adam Matthew Digital, an imprint of SAGE Publications, launched its newest digital collection in September. Apartheid South Africa, sourced from The National Archives (TNA), London, offers comprehensive coverage of previously classified files from the Apartheid Governments of South Africa. LJ recently spoke to Martin Drewe, Senior Publisher at Adam Matthew and the key person in the National Archives relationship, about this new project, the process of working with TNA material, and the documentary the two produced about the making of the collection.
California has become the first state to mandate open access for the products of some taxpayer-funded research. On September 29 Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act, coauthored by Assemblyman Brian Nestande (R–Palm Desert) and Assemblyman Mike Gatto (D–Los Angeles). AB 609, as the bill is known, ensures that those who stand to benefit most from state-funded research, such as healthcare providers, students and professors, biotech professionals, and anyone with an interest in the field, will have access to current research results free of charge. Beginning January 1, 2015, the products of more than $200 million in annual research paid for by California taxpayers will be freely available—with some restrictions: AB 609 applies only to research funded by the Department of Public Health.
Tyler Walters, dean of university libraries at Virginia Tech, was named founding director of SHARE (SHared Access Research Ecosystem) October 6. SHARE was established in 2013 by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) in response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo on “Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research.” SHARE’s mission, as stated in its press release, is “to help ensure the preservation of, access to, and reuse of research outputs.”
Martin Eve is in a good position to spread the word about how open access publishing can benefit the humanities. He is a lecturer on 20th- and 21st-century American fiction at the University of Lincoln in the UK, with an impressive list of journal articles, book chapters, conference papers, and professional affiliations. His most recent book, Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future, will be published by Cambridge University Press this November. At the moment, however, he is on research leave in order to concentrate on developing his new venture, the Open Library of the Humanities.
This fall, as part of a $10,000 grant program funded by the NC State University Foundation, NCSU Libraries has invited faculty members to develop alternative course materials. The Alt-Textbook Project is a competitive grant for faculty members to develop free or low-cost alternates to traditional textbooks using open source material.
Looking back, the irony is so heavy-handed that it seems contrived. As my colleagues and I were preparing for our MOOC on Copyright for Educators and Librarians, which launched for the first time last week, the only resource that we wanted to use but could not successfully negotiate the permission for was Susan Bielstein’s book about negotiating permissions. It would have been great for us and, I am convinced, for the Press if we could have offered a single chapter of it for our over 8,000 MOOC participants to read. In the event, however, we rediscovered the fear and lack of sound business sense that grips the publishing industry, but also discovered the richness of the free resources that were available to us.
Missouri library patrons can now rest assured that their library records for checkout of digital materials will remain private, thanks to a new state law.
In response to my column a few months ago on ebooks and the demise of ILL, I received a depressing email from an independent scholar noting the numerous obstacles he faces because of the increasing restrictions on access to ejournals and now ebooks. He wrote that he lives near a major public university in the southeast and has been using the university library for years. Despite being publicly funded (at least as much as any state university is publicly funded these days), the library has restricted access to all the databases only to university affiliates with IDs, which means most of the journals are inaccessible to guests. And with the increasing licensing of ebooks, more and more books are inaccessible as well.
The Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL) and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) are teaming to launch a new collection of agricultural research and resources from ASERL’s 38 member libraries. From photographs to field notes, the ‘Deeply Rooted’ collection will mark the first time many of these items have been made available outside of the walls of their host libraries.
The American Museum of Natural History's (AMNH) research library last month hosted the official launch of its new online image database for Digital Special Collections. Begun as a project to digitize 1,000 of the museum's photos and rare book illustrations, the Digital Special Collections program has evolved into a long-term project that will offer the public free online access to the museum's research library collection. The new database includes more than 7,000 archival images, including photographs from 19th century scientific expeditions and illustrations from rare books dating back to the 16th century.
The library community has been talking about a “journal pricing crisis” for over two decades. What we have not seen so far is any kind of concerted effort to break through this cycle. But two growing movements—the push toward open access and the growth of library publishing programs—make me think that we may be reaching a tipping point. In a white paper released last month, library administrators Rebecca R. Kennison and Lisa R. Norberg describe the need for “deep structural changes” in the systems through which scholarship is created and communicated. I honestly do not know if their proposal is the one that will trigger these changes, but I know that they are pointing us in the right direction.
Journal price data is important for budget management processes, but price alone is not the sole factor determining value. Some metrics, like Impact Factor, have become important in assessing value, and similar value metrics will only increase in importance in the future. The implementation of the Counter 4 during 2014 will expand the availability of usage data from journals, databases, ebooks, and multimedia to support better decision-making. Building upon COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources) and working with the digital object identifier (DOI) and ORCID (open researcher and contributor ID) identifier, the PIRUS (Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) Code of Practice is designed to provide usage data at the individual article level, consolidating usage across platforms.
The birth of the World Wide Web 25 years ago was the big bang event that spurred more change in the serials and scholarly publishing world than seen in the century that preceded it. Since that time, we have rapidly evolved from the print world to that of e-journals, e-journal packages, and open access (OA). But in the serials ecosystem, as in nature, not all things evolve at the same rate, and the cumulative impact of subtle steps can bring about profound change over time. Despite some notable events, such as the purchase of Mendeley by Elsevier, the sale of Springer to BC Partners, and the launch of SCOAP 3, there was no major disruption in the serials world during 2013.
Oregon State University (OSU) is helping faculty produce their own open access textbooks for courses. The university press, an arm of the OSU libraries, is starting work on a series of open source e-textbooks that officials hope will ease the rising textbook costs that are a consistent cause of student complaints. To make the etextbook program work, the library and press are partnering with OSU’s Ecampus program, which administers distance and online learning programs for the college.
Open Access (OA) is usually associated with academic scholarship and its relationship to the “paywall” by proponents and critics alike. It is essential to consider the question of OA not only in terms of its impact on publishers and scholars, but in terms of its teaching and learning potential for students and educators.
The first phase of the Lever Initiative is nearly complete, so it seems a good time to share what we’ve learned. In 2010, I sent an email to a group of liberal arts college library directors suggesting a crazy idea: what if we jointly investigated the possibility of starting an open access press? We formed a task force to explore the idea. The next step, should we decide to go forward, will be to explore what exactly we might do and how we would fund it.
Open Access Week is an event with which academic librarians are not only familiar, but in which many participate by organizing campus events. There’s another week that celebrates openness that needs their attention. Open Education Week takes place March 10–15.
My last column critiqued a science/religion analogy regarding debates about the future of libraries and scholarly publishing. It seems to be the season for science and religion analogies when discussing scholarly publishing, because this post at Scholarly Kitchen also uses the analogy, sort of. The post argues, rightly in my opinion, that extremists make discussion and cooperation impossible.
Public libraries in the United Kingdom are set to play a role in expanding public access to academic research via the recently announced “Access to Research” plan. Thousands of research journal articles will be made available for free: but only on computers located physically within a public library, not remotely.
One of the biggest names in scholarly publishing announced it was entering the open access ecosystem on February 14, as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced that it would launch Science Advances, an online only, open access journal covering the same broad range of research topics addressed by the AAAS flagship journal, Science.
By putting distribution and storage of papers and datasets in the hands of their authors, Academic Torrents brings even more DIY ethos to the world of academic publishing, and may help to solve a few problems in the field in the bargain. While libraries and colleges disintermediate scholarly publishing by hosting their own institutional repositories and backing up to offsite services like LOCKSS and Portico, Academic Torrents goes a step further, offering researchers the opportunity to distribute the hosting of their papers and datasets to authors and readers, offering easy access to scholarly works and simultaneously backing them up on computers around the world.
Codes of conduct and anti-harassment policies were listed among the leading current trends during the annual LITA Top Tech Trends panel, along with digital forensics, open content, next steps in social media, and more.
The omnibus spending bill signed into law by President Obama on January 17 has plenty of wrinkles and details, but one of them is a change that expands the number of federal agencies operating under a mandate to make research they fund available to the public after one year.
How do you judge how much a scientific study or academic article has been used? You can see how frequently it’s cited, but since researchers and academics read and are influenced by plenty of things that don’t get formally checked in their work, that doesn’t tell the whole story. Researcher Philip Davis is trying to provide some new answers to that question by taking a look at ‘usage half-life,’ in an effort to learn more about the academic publishing life cycle.
Just before he accepted a Nobel Prize in December for his work exploring how cells regulate and transport proteins, UC Berkeley professor Randy Schekman penned an indictment in the pages of UK newspaper The Guardian criticizing the role of what he calls the “luxury journals” – Nature, Cell, and Science in particular – for damaging science by promoting flashy or controversial papers over careful scientific research. Library Journal spoke with Schekman, who also edits the open-access journal eLife, about what he sees wrong with academic publishing today, and how it can be fixed.
When Amherst College opens its first press early next year, the open access publication will publish its entire catalog in digital editions first. Following a growing trend, the press will also be a new arm of Amherst’s library, and Mark Edington will be at its helm, the college announced on December 6. He will start January 1, 2014. Currently the director of the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, Edington comes from a diverse work background, encompassing everything from editorial work at the journal Daedalus to social entrepreneurship. Library Journal caught up with Edington to talk about the new model Amherst is pursuing, the opportunities it opens up in the publishing world, and the challenges of presenting scholarly work for free while staying sustainable.
With the help of Operation Photo Rescue, a non-profit, volunteer network of photographers, image restoration artists, and graphic designers, Fondulac District Library (FDL), IL, recently launched “Saving Memories,” a program to help community members digitize and restore photographs that were damaged when 24 tornadoes touched down in Illinois on the night of November 17.
This year, several announcements and blog posts combined to focus my attention on a slightly different question. What problems can open access solve? The answer seems obvious; open access will solve the problem of highly restricted and limited access to scholarship. A somewhat different problem that OA can help solve is the problem of scholarship locked up in the hands of badly run businesses that have come to believe that their inefficient and ineffective ways of doing business must be preserved at all costs.
When Purdue University Press was brought under the wing of the university’s library in 2009, it was a marriage of necessity, brought on by the flagging financial fortunes of the press. Since being absorbed into the library in 2009, the press has moved from reporting to library administrators to participating in planning with them, said Dean of Libraries James Mullins at a recent conference sponsored by education non-profit Ithaka. Purdue is one of a growing number of universities and colleges across the country where the in-house press and library are working more closely together, offering a glimpse into the possible future of academic publishing.
Agricultural research can take seasons to come to fruition, meaning the data researchers gather is voluminous, tracking things like weather patterns and crop yields over years. A failure to establish data standards and sharing practices means that most of these raw figures never make it out of the hands of the researchers who gather them. With new open access standards coming to federally funded research, though, agricultural researchers will need share their data more effectively, and a team of scientists and librarians at Purdue University may have the first blueprint for the field.
As more and more countries embrace policies that drive government funded research into Open Access publishing, an Open Access standard in the future is looking less like a possibility and more like an inevitability. But in a paper released earlier this week, Dr. Richard Wellen of York University, Toronto, argues that an Open Access future in practice could be very different from what it looks like on paper.
I am always amazed that people who have ideas to share don’t actually take steps to share them. Yes, academic librarians, I’m looking at you. Why is it that librarians agitate for open access and, at the same time, are content to put our own scholarship behind paywalls?
I have for years been a huge fan of the WAC Clearinghouse—a remarkably deep collection of open access resources for those who teach writing across the curriculum (WAC) and want to share scholarship on the teaching of writing. That’s in part because there’s a lot in common between writing instruction and information literacy programs. But I’m also a fan because it’s such a good example of high quality open access publishing. I decided this week to contact Mike Palmquist, founding editor of the Clearinghouse, to ask him how it all works.
Last weekend I went to Spring Green, Wisconsin for a treat I’d been anticipating most of a year: a double-bill of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at American Players Theatre. I drove home from the theater with lines and themes from the play pulling together disparate threads in my mind, such as opportune moments and their opposites, MIT’s report on its behavior during Aaron Swartz’s prosecution, the Biss bill as the latest twist in the movement toward open access to scholarly literature, and sundry other past and present information-related struggles in academe, and I want to share some of my musings.
Global information services company Swets this month launched a new service to help academic libraries pay and manage article processing charges (APC) on an institutional scale. The move comes in response to a sharp increase in fee-based open access publishing in the United Kingdom.
The HathiTrust Digital Library will become The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)’s single largest content hub, the two institutions announced on June 18. The metadata records associated with some 3,384,638 volumes (and growing daily) held by the HathiTrust will be accessible on the web at dp.la, and through the DPLA application programming interface (API). (The digitized volumes themselves will continue to reside in HathiTrust.)
From the DPLA Blog: The HathiTrust Digital Library will partner with the recently launched Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) to expand discovery and use of HathiTrust’s public domain and other openly available content.
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), in cooperation with the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU), offered a proposed solution to the open access mandate of the recent Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo. The plan, called the Shared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE), posits a network of cross-institutional digital repositories based in research universities as the digital home for both the finished papers and the underlying data sets resulting from research produced with federal funds.
Creating an open environment for reading and research; analyzing copyright shades of grey; and linking libraries, archives, and museums together to better explore new ways of accessing digital collections. This and much more in this week’s episode of TWIL: your weekly dose of library innovation!
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has put forward its bid for a coalition of publishers to handle many of the requirements outlined in the recent Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo requiring open access to federally funded research, in the form of the Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States (CHORUS).
On May 9, President Obama signed an open data executive order and released an open data policy. Only a couple of weeks later, on May 22, Data.gov responded by launching a new data catalog on an open source data management system called CKAN, which, the site says, will enable the central implementation of the Open Data Policy, as it will harvest the data inventories that federal agencies will be creating under the directive. LJ caught up with members of the library and data-driven research communities to see what this may mean for their missions.
Why would one decide to publish a journal on public health? It sound like a rhetorical question, but it may be more serious than we think. The obvious answer is to improve the health of the public. But if that really is the goal, a publisher in public health would need to try to reach the largest audience of the public that was possible. So a recent announcement from one prominent public health publisher casts doubt on that intent, and the purpose of the journal overall.
A bill which would require California-funded research to be deposited in open access repositories passed the state’s Assembly Accountability and Administrative Review Committee on May 1.
The stock market has hit record highs, and unemployment has reached the lowest level since the recession began. Despite this good news, the library economic environment has not seen commensurate improvement. There continues to be a struggle to find the resources needed to support library collections and services, and conditions remain highly unsettled.
Launched yesterday, the Digital Public Library of America's portal offers browsing and search access to a still growing aggregation of cultural heritage records from dozens of US cultural heritage institutions. At the same time, DPLA began offering programmatic access to its metadata stores, urging developers to create their own interfaces and access points to the collections. First impressions have been almost uniformly positive, though many have suggested avenues for further enhancements and refinements.
Librarians rejoice! The Supreme Court of the United States insisted in its Wiley v. Kirtsaeng decision that we can legally lend foreign-manufactured materials! The case was about textbooks and textbook-market arbitrage, though. That’s worth keeping sight of. Extrapolating from reactions on all sides, what does the Wiley v. Kirtsaeng decision likely mean for the textbook-publishing business, and what can textbook publishers and libraries do if they don’t like that?
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