The potential effect of making journals free after…

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The potential effect of making journals free after a six month embargo :

“This report was commissioned by the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers [ALPSP] and The Publishers Association. It follows a straw-poll survey commissioned from Gold Leaf by ALPSP inMarch 2012 in order to obtain sample information on how the acquisition policies of academic libraries might be affected by an across-theboard mandate to make journals articles available free of charge six months after publication. The ALPSP survey obtained responses from thirty-four libraries worldwide. The results from this small sample suggested that such a mandate would have a significant impact on publishers’ revenues, especially in the fields of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences [AHSS] publishing. ALPSP and The Publishers Association therefore commissioned Gold Leaf to conduct a larger, more statistically significant survey, to include corporate and specialist libraries as well as academic ones, in order to obtain more robust results on what the likely impact of a six months’ embargo might be.”

URL : http://www.publishingresearch.net/documents/ALPSPPApotentialresultsofsixmonthembargofv.pdf

Establishment of Institutional Mechanism for Building National Repository…

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Establishment of Institutional Mechanism for Building National Repository in Health Sciences :

“National consolidation of published and unpublished literature in the field of biomedical sciences can playa major role in scholarly communication to help the end users in providing research published in the country.Institutional repositories are a good approach for a cost-effective publishing with a cooperation and participationof each institution for capturing, preserving, managing, and nurturing the discussion. In turn, metadata can be harvested centrally to access the digital information of common interest whereas individual libraries shouldable to preserve digital assets. Institutionalisation mode has been recommended for building national digitalrepository system for the country. The public funding should be provided to apex body so as to formulatethe requisite policies for the spread of open access movement in the country and also formulate a long termsustainable model for building national level system in the country.”

URL : http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit/article/view/2386

Open Access to Scientific Information A Review of…

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Open Access to Scientific Information: A Review of Initiatives :

“Open access journals are the one’s which are available online to the reader without financial, legal, ortechnical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet. Some of the scholarlyjournals are subsidised, and some require payment. However, a number of challenges remain, such as highand rising subscription prices to scientific publications, an ever-growing volume of scientific data, and theneed to select, curate, and preserve research outputs. Open access benefits researchers, innovators, teachers,students, media professionals, and the general public. It promotes global knowledge flow for the benefit ofscientific discovery, innovation, and socio-economic development.”

URL : http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit/article/view/2386

India’s Efforts in Open Access Publishing

For a long time, India has been generating a great deal of scholarly resources in all disciplines. After independence, there was a lot of investment in science and technology, and S&T were used to leverage development efforts and to improve the standard of living. However, one in four Indians still lives below the poverty line. There is a considerable research effort in a wide variety of areas including science, technology, medicine, humanities and social sciences. Research is performed essentially in three sectors: (1) higher educational institutions, such as universities and deemed universities (2) laboratories under different government agencies such as the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), and (3) laboratories in the industrial sector, both public and private.

With difficulties such as lack of funds and infrastructure for good quality research, a very common problem for Indian scientists is access and visibility. The accelerating cost of subscriptions to academic serials has created a serials crisis in almost all libraries around the world, including India. Most Indian libraries cannot afford to subscribe to key journals needed by their users/scientists. As a result, it becomes difficult for researchers to have current knowledge. After spending so much effort on research and getting it published in journals, small or big, from around the world, their work is often not noticed by others elsewhere, even within India, working in the same and related areas. No wonder Indian work is poorly cited due to low visibility or circulation of such journals where their works have been published.

To overcome both these handicaps, one possible solution may be the publishing through Open Access (OA). Open-access publishing is the provision of free online access to quality scholarly material that is available on “open domain,” and not having any restriction of copyright. Although the open access movement began before the advent of the Web, it became more widespread with the adoption of Web access in scholarly activities. The movement spread to all disciplines. There are many different models of open access publishing, for example sponsored OA, OA supported by author fees, and embargoed OA. The intention of all such models is to provide access to scholarly contents to clients. It is, however, assumed as one of the useful media to share research and getting wide visibility from around the world. Some countries like the UK and the US have made better progress, whereas many other countries are lagging behind. The primary goal of this study is to discover the present status of Indian open access ventures and help librarians to understand the opportunities in OA scholarly resources in India.

URL : http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/mukherjee-mal.htm

Digital Librarians and the Challenges of Open Access…

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Digital Librarians and the Challenges of Open Access to Knowledge: The Michael Okpara University of Agriculture (MOUAU) Library Experience :

“The development of Internet technology has provided academic and research institutions with a very high level of visibility on the web. As a result, teaching, learning and research is widely improved in the global society today. The intellectual call for knowledge and information dissemination by countless organizations and educational meetings has given birth to a terminology called open access. This initiative is aimed at bringing the knowledge society to a state of free access to all kinds of information and learning material using the Internet and ICT tools. The library plays an important role in sustaining the open access initiative (Das, 2008). Librarians who ensure the organization and dissemination of full-text content of knowledge materials to online communities are the digital librarians.”

URL : http://unllib.unl.edu/LPP/uzuebgu-mcalbert.htm

The Accessibility Quotient A New Measure of Open…

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The Accessibility Quotient: A New Measure of Open Access :

INTRODUCTION: The Accessibility Quotient (AQ), a new measure for assisting authors and librarians in assessing and characterizing the degree of accessibility for a group of papers, is proposed and described. The AQ offers a concise measure that assesses the accessibility of peer-reviewed research produced by an individual or group, by incorporating data on open availability to readers worldwide, the degree of financial barrier to access, and journal quality. The paper reports on the context for developing this measure, how the AQ is calculated, how it can be used in faculty outreach, and why it is a useful lens to use in assessing progress towards more open access to research.

METHODS: Journal articles published in 2009 and 2010 by faculty members from one department in each of MIT’s five schools were examined. The AQ was calculated using economist Ted Bergstrom’s Relative Price Index to assess affordability and quality, and data from SHERPA/RoMEO to assess the right to share the peer-reviewed version of an article.

RESULTS: The results show that 2009 and 2010 publications by the Media Lab and Physics have the potential to be more open than those of Sloan (Management), Mechanical Engineering, and Linguistics & Philosophy.

DISCUSSION: Appropriate interpretation and applications of the AQ are discussed and some limitations of the measure are examined, with suggestions for future studies which may improve the accuracy and relevance of the AQ.

CONCLUSION: The AQ offers a concise assessment of accessibility for authors, departments, disciplines, or universities who wish to characterize or understand the degree of access to their research output, capturing additional dimensions of accessibility that matter to faculty.”

URL : http://jlsc-pub.org/jlsc/vol1/iss1/7/