Happy Open Access Week!

This week is "Open Access Week".

About the OA movement

Open Access is a growing international movement that uses the Internet to throw open the locked doors that once hid knowledge. It encourages the unrestricted sharing of research results with everyone, everywhere, for the advancement and enjoyment of science and society.

Open Access is the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication, and it’s gaining ever more momentum around the world as research funders and policy makers throw their weight behind it.

The Open Access philosophy was firmly articulated in 2002, when the Budapest Open Access Initiative was introduced. It quickly took root in the scientific and medical communities because it offered an alternative route to research literature that was frequently closed off behind costly subscription barriers.

Now Open Access is on a roll. Recent Funder Mandates — including that of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (the world’s largest research funder), which now requires that all their funded research be placed in an openly accessible database, and Harvard University — have further strengthened the prospects for Open Access to all research.

Overview of the ACRL Scholarly Communication 101 Workshop

I went to the ACRL Scholarly Communication 101 "Road Show" Workshop way back on August 7, 2009. It was an all day affair held on the Auraria Campus here in Denver.

Presentation materials are here. For example, they began the day with "Scholarly Communication 101: Starting with the Basics".

• Introduction: Scholarly communication system
• Economics
  
• Copyright and author rights
  
• Open access and openness as a principle
  
• New models and modes of scholarly publishing

Handouts are here, such as:

• Workshop overview & outline
  
• Ten things you should know
  
• Assessing copyright management exercise
  
• Copyright MadLibs story exercise
  
• Copyright transfer agreement comparison exercise
  
• Openness exercise
  
• Final reflection activity
  
• Workshop evaluation

Videos are here.

The organizers of the event recorded audio during the day, but it is not available yet.

Scholarly Communication and Open Access Resources

This is a presentation that I gave at the three Library Liaison Advisory Group (LLAG) meetings, May 12-13, 2009.

Scholarly Communication May 12-13, 2009

View more presentations from jokrausdu.

I also created a research guide to go along with this presentation.

The NIH public access policy will persist

This is very good news for Open Access proponents.
"Washington, D.C. – March 12, 2009 – President Obama yesterday signed into law the 2009 Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes a provision making the National Institutes’ of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy permanent. The NIH Revised Policy on Enhancing Public Access requires eligible NIH-funded researchers to deposit electronic copies of their peerreviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central (PMC). Full texts of the articles are made publicly available and searchable online in PMC no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

The NIH policy was previously implemented with a provision that was subject to annual renewal. Since the implementation of the revised policy the percentage of eligible manuscripts deposited into PMC has increased significantly, with over 3,000 new manuscripts being deposited each month. The PubMed Central database is a part of a valuable set of public database resources at the NIH, which are accessed by more than 2 million users each day."For more information, go to the Alliance for Taxpayer Access website.

Happy Open Access Day

Hope you all have a great Open Access Day. If you are interested, submit a blog post so you can enter a contest and win lots o' swag. It is simple, just answer the following questions in your post:

• Why does Open Access matter to you?
• How did you first become aware of it?
• Why should scientific and medical research be an open-access resource for the world?
• What do you do to support Open Access, and what can others do?

For more info on Open Access, take a look at posting from Peter Suber and John Wilbanks. You should also take a look at some of the great journals that are in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The Open Access Wiki is another great place to start.

Library budgets, open access, and the future of scholarly communication

This is a new article in College & Research Libraries News. May 2008, Vol. 69(5):271- Fact one -- We need to begin with a fundamental fact—the cost of scholarly journals has increased at 10 percent per year for the last three decades. This is over six times the rate of general inflation and over two-and-a-half times the rate of increase of the cost of health care. Between 1975 and 2005 the average cost of journals in chemistry and physics rose from $76.84 to $1,879.56. In the same period, the cost of a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline rose from 55 cents to $1.82. If the gallon of gas had increased in price at the same rate as chemistry and physics journals over this period it would have reached $12.43 in 2005, and would be over $14.50 today.

What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution

This is a good report from the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) -- "OPEN DOORS AND OPEN MINDS: What faculty authors can do to ensure open access to their work through their institution," A SPARC / SCIENCE COMMONS WHITE PAPER (April 2008) Overview: The Internet has brought unparalleled opportunities for expanding availability of research by bringing down economic and physical barriers to sharing. The digitally networked environment promises to democratize access, carry knowledge beyond traditional research niches, accelerate discovery, encourage new and interdisciplinary approaches to ever more complex research challenges, and enable new computational research strategies. However, despite these opportunities for increasing access to knowledge, the prices of scholarly journals have risen sharply over the past two decades, often forcing libraries to cancel subscriptions. Today even the wealthiest institutions cannot afford to sustain all of the journals needed by their faculties and students.Be on the lookout for the University of Denver Institutional Repository, coming in the near future. The PDF is available here.

Scientific American Article -- Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?

This is a good article covering new venues for scholarship (wikis, blogs, etc.), particularly in the sciences."The explosively growing World Wide Web has rapidly transformed retailing, publishing, personal communication and much more. Innovations such as e-commerce, blogging, downloading and open-source software have forced old-line institutions to adopt whole new ways of thinking, working and doing business.

Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers--and not just the younger ones--have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open blogs, wikis and social networks of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement--yet--their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based "Science 2.0" is not only more collegial than the traditional variety, but considerably more productive."

The effect of open access and downloads on citation impact

This looks like it provides some interesting research.

The Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact

Another interesting article from an IEEE source -- "Ten-Year Cross-Disciplinary Comparison of the Growth of Open Access and How it Increases Research Citation Impact," by Chawki Hajjem, Stevan Harnad, and Yves Gingras. Summary -- In 2001, Lawrence found that articles in computer science that were openly accessible (OA) on the Web were cited substantially more than those that were not. We have since replicated this effect in physics. To further test its cross-disciplinary generality, we used 1,307,038 articles published across 12 years (1992-2003) in 10 disciplines (Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Health, Political Science, Economics, Education, Law, Business, Management).... Comparing OA and NOA articles in the same journal/year, OA articles have consistently more citations, the advantage varying from 25%-250% by discipline and year.

Yet even more on the Harvard OA Plan

Library Journal Academic Newswire -- This Week's News
* A Shot Heard 'Round the Academic World: Harvard FAS Mandates Open Access
* After Harvard, the Open Access Deluge?
* Shieber: Librarians Very Involved with Harvard OA Motion

Open Access News
Here are some comments on the Harvard OA mandate. They are from Paul Courant at Au Courant, Jonathan Eisen at Tree of Life, and Peter Murray-Rust at The CML Blog.

Harvard To Collect, Disseminate Scholarly Articles For Faculty
"In a move to disseminate faculty research and scholarship more broadly, the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted today to give the University a worldwide license to make each faculty member's scholarly articles available and to exercise the copyright in the articles, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit...."

More on the Harvard Opt-in plan

Here is an article from Inside Higher Ed.

"Harvard Opts In to ‘Opt Out’ Plan" Harvard University’s arts and sciences faculty approved a plan on Tuesday that will post finished academic papers online free, unless scholars specifically decide to opt out of the open-access program. While other institutions have similar repositories for their faculty’s work, Harvard’s is unique for making online publication the default option.... Thanks to Robert Michaelson at Northwestern U. for noting.

Harvard Proposal to Publish Free on Web

This looks like an interesting NY Times article.

At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on Web
By PATRICIA COHEN "Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish — on the Web, at least — free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs."

Etc., etc., etc. See also this article in the Crimson.

Open Access from BMC

Thinking of Open Access, the Penrose Library will pay for your articles when they are submitted to BioMed Central journals. We currently have a positive financial balance with them, so if you want to submit an article or two for a high impact and open access publication, this may be the place.

The Right to Research

SPARC has released an interesting new brochure...

The Right to Research

"You know first hand that students are expected to cite articles from scholarly journals when they write research papers.

You’ve probably used journal articles in your coursework. You’ve probably also encountered journal articles that you wanted to read — potentially important articles — but couldn’t get access to.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

OPEN ACCESS — the principle that research should be accessible online, for free, immediately after publication — is improving the way scholarly information is shared."

Etc., etc., etc.

NIH Open Access Mandate

In case you have not heard...

The NIH policy is "an Enormous Step Forward" noted Executive Director Heather Joseph of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).

See: http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6518133.html?nid=2673#news2 and
http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6518133.html?nid=2673#news3.

"Open Access & Science Publishing" report

Open Access & Science Publishing
Results of a Study on Researchers’ Acceptance and Use of Open Access Publishing
Thomas Hess / Rolf T. Wigand / Florian Mann / Benedikt von Walter

http://www.wim.bwl.uni-muenchen.de/download_free/sonstiges/mreport_2007_01.pdf
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY - This Management Report summarizes the main descriptive results of a study on researcher’s acceptance of Open Access publishing. The study was conducted in 2006 by the Ludwig-Maximilans-University Munich, Germany, in cooperation with the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The main focus is centered on the question if and why scientists decide or do not decide to publish their work according to the Open Access principle without access barriers and free of cost to readers. With the responses from 688 publishing scientists it could be demonstrated that the general attitude toward the Open Access principle is extremely positive. However, many seem to be rather reluctant to publish their own research work in Open Access outlets. Advantages like increased speed, reach and potentially higher citation rates of Open Access publications are seen alongside insufficient impact factors, lacking long-term availability and the inferior ability to reach the specific target audience of scientists within one’s own discipline. Moreover the low level of use among close colleagues seems to be a barrier towards Open Access publishing.

Two new articles/reports

Here are some new articles/reports from the Open Access Blog.

1) Future of Scholarly Communication: Building the Infrastructure for Cyberscholarship. ("Institutional repositories were the stated topic for a workshop convened in Phoenix, Arizona earlier this year (April 17-19, 2007) by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). While in their report on the workshop, Bill Arms and Ron Larsen build out a larger landscape of concern, institutional repositories remain a crucial topic, which, without institutional cyberscholarship, will never approach their full potential.")

2) Mike Rossner, Heather Van Epps, and Emma Hill, Show me the data, Journal of Cell Biology, December 17, 2007. (Excerpt: The integrity of data, and transparency about their acquisition, are vital to science. The impact factor data that are gathered and sold by Thomson Scientific (formerly the Institute of Scientific Information, or ISI) have a strong influence on the scientific community, affecting decisions on where to publish, whom to promote or hire, the success of grant applications, and even salary bonuses. Yet...to our knowledge, no one has independently audited the underlying data to validate their reliability....)

More about SCOAP3

Here is some more info about SCOAP3 from Symmetry Magazine.

Free for all -- "Forget about paying for journal subscriptions. If a new proposal takes hold, particle physics journals would get their funding from labs, libraries, and agencies that sponsor research, and readers could peruse them for free." By Glennda Chui

SCOAP3

SCOAP3 is short for the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics. It looks like an interesting organization.

"The Open Access (OA) tenets of granting unrestricted access to the results of publicly-funded research are in contrast with current models of scientific publishing, where access is restricted to journal customers. At the same time, subscription costs increase and add considerable strain on libraries, forced to cancel an increasing number of journals subscriptions. This situation is particularly acute in fields like High-Energy Physics (HEP), where pre-prints describing scientific results are timely available online. There is a growing concern within the academic community that the future of high-quality journals, and the peer-review system they administer, is at risk."