Open Access Coalition

Today Kansas and 21 other
universities and colleges announced that they’re joining forces to form the
Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, or Coapi. The new group will
“collaborate and share implementation strategies, and advocate on a national
level,” it said in a
 statement. 

 

Read more: http://bit.ly/p8A9eo

Source:  Trevor Dawes, Circulation Services Director, Princeton Univ.

Open Access — 1st North American Meeting

SPARC to host first North American meeting on Open Access in 2012

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) will host its first North American meeting on Open Access in 2012. The first of its kind, the event will expand on the successful biennial SPARC Digital Repositories meeting.
More

Source:  Knowledgespeak Newsletter July 27, 2011

Cambridge Journals — Open Access through August 30, 2011

” Cambridge Journals open access to online content published during 2009 and 2010 – 18 Jul 2011

Cambridge Journals, a division of Cambridge University Press (CUP), UK, is celebrating recent achievements by making all its online journals content from 2009 and 2010 free for six weeks.

Cambridge has enjoyed accelerating success in recent years with increasing numbers of journals published, improved impact factors and multiple enhancements made to Cambridge Journals Online (CJO). Usage has significantly increased with the digitisation of new and archive content, and more people are now able to access Cambridge Journals than before. Currently over 1.3 million articles are downloaded from CJO every month.

To celebrate these successes, and to reach out to new customers, Cambridge Journals has announced that it is making all online content published during 2009 and 2010 free between July 15 and August 30, 2011.

During the trial, the Cambridge Journals team will also be looking for feedback to help shape the future of the service. The CJO website is continually developing, informed by consultation with key customers in the academic and library communities. Users will be encouraged to give their feedback on CJO and content, to ensure the service keeps on developing according to their needs.”

Knowledgespeak Newsletter, July 18, 2011

American Physical Society offers Open Access option to authors

” APS announces new alternative for Physical Review journal authors to pay article-processing charges – 16 Feb 2011

The American Physical Society has announced that as of February 15, 2011, authors in most Physical Review journals will have a new alternative to pay an article-processing charge whereby their accepted manuscripts will be available barrier-free and open access on publication. These manuscripts will be published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY). The most permissive of the CC licenses, CC-BY grants authors and others the right to copy, distribute, transmit, and adapt the work, provided that proper credit is given. This new alternative is in addition to traditional subscription-funded publication. Authors may choose one or the other for their accepted papers.

The new article-processing charges, which will cover all costs and provide a sustainable funding model, have been set at $1700 for papers in the Physical Review and $2700 for those in Physical Review Letters. The resulting open access articles will appear alongside and mixed in with subscription-funded articles, converting these journals into ‘hybrid’ open access journals. Revenue from the article-processing charges will decrease the need for subscription income and help to keep the APS subscription price-per-article among the lowest of any physics journals.

Also as of February 15, Physical Review Special Topics – Accelerators and Beams (PRST-AB) and Physical Review Special Topics – Physics Education Research (PRST-PER) will have their full archives and all future papers made available under the CC-BY license, thereby converting both of these journals to ‘gold’ open access journals. PRST-PER’s publication-charge scheme has been realigned with the new programme. PRST-AB will continue to be funded by its sponsors. Finally, APS’s Free to Read program will be phased out, and all of these papers covered by the CC-BY license.

These developments for existing APS journals follow the announcement in January of a new journal, Physical Review X (PRX), an online-only, fully open access, primary research journal covering all of physics and its applications to related fields.”

Source:  Knowledgespeak Newsletter 2/16/11

Open Access study in Europe shows ~10% of articles published in OA journals

 Study of Open Access Publishing project presents findings of two-year EC funded study on OA publishing17 Jan 2011

The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project presented the results of its two-year European Commission (EU) funded examination of open access publishing at an open symposium on January 13, 2011, in Berlin, Germany. Over the two-year study duration, the SOAP project performed a comprehensive study of open access journals, publishers and business models, including analysis of publishing houses, learned societies and licensing along with the overall supply and demand for open access.

The study surveyed over 50,000 researchers for their opinions on open-access journals, which make all their papers freely available online and usually charge authors a fee for each published paper. According to the study, while scientists like open-access papers as readers, as authors, they are still skeptical. The study found overwhelming support for the concept, with 89 percent of respondents stating that open access is beneficial to their field. However, this support did not always translate into action, the study noted. While 53 percent of respondents said they had published at least one open-access article, overall only about 10 percent of papers are published in open access journals.

The study found two main reasons as to why researchers do not submit their work to open-access journals. About 40 percent said that a lack of funding for author fees was a deterrent, while 30 percent cited a lack of high-quality open-access journals in their field.

Requiring authors to make sure the results of their work are freely available has reportedly had only partial success. Robert Kiley, head of digital services at the Wellcome Trust’s Wellcome Library in London, said at the symposium that open-access rates had risen from 12 percent to 50 percent since the funder began requiring its grantees to publish in open-access journals or deposit their papers in a freely available repository. However, Kiley acknowledged that Wellcome Trust had not imposed sanctions on researchers who failed to comply.

The study also makes it clear that open-access journals are proliferating, especially among small publishers. It was observed that one-third of open-access papers were published by the more than 1600 open-access publishers that publish only a single journal. The study also identified 14 ‘large publishers’ that publish either more than 50 journals or more than 1000 articles per year. The group accounts for roughly one-third of open-access publications, the study noted.”

Source:  Knowledgespeak Newsletter, 1/17/11

Open Access Week, October 18 – 24, 2010 (4th Annual)

“Leading the event is O[pen] A[ccess] advocate Dr. Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist who currently directs the US National Cancer Institute. He is joined by Dr. Cameron Neylon, a biophysicist and open research advocate; Dr. Mona Nemer, professor and vice-president for research at the University of Ottawa; Dr. Roger Wakimoto, Director of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research; and a host of other researchers from around the globe.

“Presenters are expected to paint a clear picture of how OA has contributed to changing the research landscape and point to opportunities that lay ahead. Dr. Varmus has described OA as an ‘incredibly important development in the history of science’. Dr. Neylon noted how popular news stories now highlight a growing amount of research published in OA journals, which make that material directly available to people who want to dig deeper.”
Open Access Week is organised by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with guidance from an international panel of OA leaders.”

Source:  Knowledgespeak Newsletter Oct. 19, 2010

National Library of Medicine’s MedlinePlus — new features

The National Library of Medicine announced today that their MedlinePlus websitefor consumer health went live today with a new look and new features.  One of the more interesting features is here: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/videosandcooltools.html

There are videos available on topics such as human anatomy, surgical procedures and health news. "Test your knowledge with the interactive tutorials and games."  NLM has employed social networking connections, and provides a medical dictionary.

Source:  Terri Ottosen, M.L.I.S., AHIP Consumer Health Outreach Coordinator,  National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Baltimore

 

BMC Biology + Journal of Biology = BMC Biology

"BMC Biology and Journal of Biology are joining forces as a single journal committed to the publication of high-quality commissioned content and research articles of exceptional
importance. The combined journal will operate under the name BMC Biology, reflecting the strong relationship with the subject-specific BMC-series journals, and will be edited by Miranda Robertson, who explains in an inaugural editorial how she sees the fusion combining the strengths of both journals, with continuation of the re-review opt-out experiment initiated by Journal of Biology."

Read more at the BioMed Central Blog.

Source: Info@Biomedcentral.com

PubMed adds citations to books and chapters — from “Bookshelf”

Source:  NLM-ANNOUNCES@LIST.NIH.GOV

The National Library of Medicine  Week of Apr 5, 2010

 
 *NLM Technical Bulletin, Mar-Apr 2010, Book Citations Added to PubMed and Changes to Displays

It’s new and books are not retrievable labled as such in PubMed, but they will be retrieved in Medline searches.  Bookshelf is separately searchable.

For example, if you search (in PubMed/Medline) feingold syndrome in the title, you will retrieve the book, chapter, or document, as well as articles, too.  NIH is now using color highlights to clearly indicate full text availability.

Feingold syndrome searched in the field labeled book, will retrieve 0.

The following search terms can be used to retrieve the Bookshelf citations in PubMed, e.g.,    pmcbook feingold syndrome:

  To retrieve books and chapters: pmcbook
  To retrieve books: pmcbooktitle
  To retrieve book chapters: pmcbookchapter