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.
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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. Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter July 27, 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
” 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
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=414822
“Nature‘s open-access offering may sound death knell for
subs model [Times Higher Education]”
Source: [LibraryLink] Library Link of the Day for 2011-01-31
“ Study of Open Access Publishing project presents findings of two-year EC funded study on OA publishing – 17 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
“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
Nature Publishing Group and ASGT announce open access and article deposition services for authors – 26 Jan 2009
Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, and the American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT) have announced the launch of two new services to help authors comply with funder and institutional mandates for public access. Under the initiative, Molecular Therapy, the official journal of the ASGT, will now offer authors the option of immediate open access on publication, including deposition in PubMed Central, subject to the payment of a publication fee. In addition, as a further author benefit to aid compliance with several funding body mandates, NPG will deposit all Molecular Therapy articles to PubMed Central upon final publication, to be made public after 12 months.
Upon submission of original research articles, authors have the option of publishing their articles as open access for a publication fee of £2,000 / $3,000 / €2,400. Open access articles will be freely available upon publication. By paying this one-time fee, authors are also entitled to self-archive the final published PDF of their articles on a website, institutional repository, or other free public server upon publication. Open access articles will be designated by the MTOpen logo in both the print and online editions of the journal and will be freely accessible via PubMed Central immediately after publication.
Open access articles will be published under a Creative Commons license. Authors may choose between the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported and the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence. The Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Licence permits derivative works, ensuring that authors can comply with funders such as the Wellcome Trust. Under both licenses, the final published version of MTOpen articles can be downloaded and shared as long as the author and original publication are cited.
Under the terms of NPG’s License to Publish, self-archiving is encouraged on all original research articles published in Molecular Therapy. In all cases, the author’s version of the accepted manuscript can be made publicly accessible six months after publication. This applies regardless of whether the authors choose the MTOpen option.
Molecular Therapy joins The EMBO Journal, EMBO reports and British Journal of Cancer, which already offer an open access option to authors. NPG also announced the introduction of an open access option on ten further journals.
Knowledgespeak Newsletter, 26 Jan., 2009
Open access publishing offers economic benefits, says UK research – 29 Jan 2009
The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has commissioned a new research project to study the economic and social implications of new models for scholarly publishing. According to the findings of the research, sharing research information via a more open access (OA) publishing model would bring millions of pounds worth of savings to the higher education sector apart from benefiting corporate UK. Prof. John Houghton from the Centre of Strategic Economic Studies at Melbourne’s Victoria University and Prof. Charles Oppenheim at Loughborough University were asked to lead the research.
The research centred on three models – subscription or toll access publishing which involves reader charges and use restrictions; OA publishing where access is free and publication is funded from the authors’ side; and OA self-archiving where academic authors post their work in online repositories, making it freely available to all Internet users.
The research and findings reveal that core scholarly publishing system activities cost the UK higher education sector around £5 billion in 2007. Using the different models, the report shows what the estimated cost would have been. When considering costs per journal article, the researchers believe that the UK higher education sector could have saved around £80 million a year by shifting from toll access to OA publishing. They also claim that £115 million could be saved by moving from toll access to OA self-archiving.
In addition to that, the financial return to the UK industry from greater accessibility to research might result in an additional £172 million per annum worth of benefits from government and higher education sector research alone.
Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, Jan. 29, 2009
" Chinese scientist appeals for funding to make Chinese journals OA – 05 Sep 2008
Zhu Zuoyan, a recently retired deputy head of the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC), has reportedly appealed for funding to make several Chinese journals open access (OA). To boost the country’s scientific journals, he urged to give priority to domestic science publications.
According to Zuoyan, government-funded open access journals could be a breakthrough for science publishing in China. He further stated that OA journals prioritise academic merits over commercial interests. A government-funded open access initiative would lessen or eliminate the cost of publishing, thereby allowing Chinese journals to attract more high-quality papers and improve their impact.
Zhu’s remarks come amidst criticisms that Chinese scientists are publishing more in overseas journals than domestic ones. According to a study by Wang Bingsheng, a leading physicist and editor of the journal Chinese Physics Letters, in 2006, over 80 percent of Chinese physics papers published in journals, listed in the Science Citation Index (SCI), were published in international journals.
Also, it has been observed that science institutions in China often assess the outputs of their scientists using the impact factors of the journals where they publish their papers. Many international journals have higher impact factors than domestic ones.
This trend among Chinese scientists to publish more in overseas journals, some say, may endanger the existence of the 5,000 scientific journals published in China."
Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter.
