OpenAIRE — Building a Collaborative Open Access Infrastructure…

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OpenAIRE — Building a Collaborative Open Access Infrastructure for European Researchers :

“This paper outlines the efforts of the OpenAIRE networking team to establish a Europe-wide open access initiative. OpenAIRE is an effort to realize the open access policies of the European Commission, and has built an infrastructure to support the widest possible dissemination of project results within a certain funding area, FP7. The purpose of the paper is to highlight how such a service can be established through the work of a successful network of European open access desks and by effective communication with a range of stakeholders. The paper also outlines the flexible technical infrastructure and research activities within the project. Not without its challenges, the approaches to tackling existing barriers, such as achieving repository interoperability, are explored. The paper also introduces the aims and initial activities of the continuation project, OpenAIREplus.”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8110/8514

Licensing Revisited Open Access Clauses in Practice …

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Licensing Revisited: Open Access Clauses in Practice :

“Open access increases the visibility and use of research outputs and promises to maximize the return on our public investment in research. However, only a minority of researchers will “spontaneously” deposit their articles into an open access repository. Even with the growing number of institutional and funding agency mandates requiring the deposit of papers into the university repository, deposit rates have remained stubbornly low. As a result, the responsibility for populating repositories often falls onto the shoulders of library staff and/or repository managers. Populating repositories in this way – which involves obtaining the articles, checking the rights, and depositing articles into the repository – is time consuming and resource intensive work.

The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), a global association of repository initiatives and networks, is promoting a new strategy for addressing some of the barriers to populating repositories, involving the use of open access archiving clauses in publisher licenses. These types of clauses are being considered by consortia and licensing agencies around the world as a way of ensuring that all the papers published by a given publisher are cleared for deposit into the institutional repository. This paper presents some use cases of open access archiving clauses, discusses the major barriers to implementing archiving language into licenses, and describes some strategies that organizations can adopt in order to include such clauses into publisher licenses.”

URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/index.php/lq/article/view/8055/8536

Publisher Library Partnership for Accessibility A Case Study…

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Publisher-Library Partnership for Accessibility: A Case Study of Scholarly Publishing for Public Audiences :

“Public outreach and access are becoming more and more important across institutions of higher education. Sustainable information technology approaches are necessary to communicate and preserve public education materials generated as part of this new era of “outreach and engagement.” This paper describes the partnership between Oregon State University’s Extension Service publishing arm and the Oregon State University Libraries to make Oregon State University the first land-grant institution to systematically publish outreach materials using the university’s institutional repository. This partnership models how institutional repositories can be used to publish outreach products developed through faculty scholarship; the university’s outreach materials are thus simultaneously digitally preserved and made discoverable and accessible to a wide public audience. Intra-institutional partnerships, such as the one described in the case study, can be mutually beneficial in the current environment of limited resources and desire for cross-disciplinary collaboration.”

URL : http://hdl.handle.net/1957/34398

Confronting the Crisis in Scientific Publishing: Latency, Licensing and Access

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The serials crisis in scientific publishing can be traced to the long duration of copyright protection and the assignment of copyright by researchers to publishers. Over-protection of scientific literature has enabled commercial publishers to increase subscription rates to a point at which access to scientific information has been curtailed with negative social welfare consequences. The uniformity costs imposed by such over-protection can be addressed by tailoring intellectual property rights, either through legal change or private ordering.

Current open access channels of distribution offer alternative approaches to scientific publishing, but neither the Green OA self-archiving nor the Gold OA author-pays models has yet achieved widespread acceptance. Moreover, recent proposals to abolish copyright protection for academic works, while theoretically attractive, may be difficult to implement in view of current legislative and judicial dispositions.

Likewise, funder open access mandates such as the NIH OA Policy, which are already responsible for the public release of millions of scientific articles, are susceptible to various risks and political uncertainty.

In this article, I propose an alternative private ordering solution based on latency values observed in open access stakeholder negotiation settings. Under this proposal, research institutions would collectively develop and adopt publication agreements that do not transfer copyright ownership to publishers, but instead grant publishers a one-year exclusive period in which to publish a work.

This limited period of exclusivity should enable the publisher to recoup its costs and a reasonable profit through subscription revenues, while restoring control of the article copyright to the author at the end of the exclusivity period. This balanced approach addresses the needs of both publishers and the scientific community, and would, I believe, avoid many of the challenges faced by existing open access models.

URL : http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/research/33/

Repositories in Google Scholar Metrics or what is…

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Repositories in Google Scholar Metrics or what is this document type doing in a place as such? :

“The present paper analyzes GS Metrics, Google’s newest product aiming at ranking journals according to their H-Index. Specifically, we analyze GS Metrics’ decision of considering journals and repositories as equal and therefore, including them in the product. In this sense, the authors position themselves against this decision and provide several arguments of different nature warning against the shortcomings this product has. The first one is of a conceptual nature and is related to the definition of journal and repository. Secondly, they refer at the methodological issues mixing repositories and journals can bring out. Then, they deepen on many other flaws GS Metrics presents. Finally, GS Metrics and its possible use as an evaluation tool are discussed and possible solutions to its shortcomings are provided.”

URL : http://cybermetrics.cindoc.csic.es/articles/v16i1p4.html

Sustainability of Open Access Services

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“Although some services that support Open Access have developed a sustainable business model, many started as projects and continue to run on recurrent project funding or goodwill. If these are critical components of the evolving scholarly communication system the foundation of Open Access is vulnerable. Knowledge Exchange has commissioned this study as part of a larger programme of work to look at the issue of sustaining key services into the long term.

This report focuses on phases one and two of the programme. Phase one was a scoping exercise, carried out mainly through a literature review and an extensive stakeholder interview exercise, to describe the services that are currently available or would be valuable in the future. It also investigated what roles stakeholders could play in this future scenario.

Phase two was a stakeholder consultation and engagement exercise. The aim was to engage stakeholders with the work programme so that they could contribute their views, get involved with the work and have a voice in the thinking about future scenarios.

The key services are presented for three future scenarios: ‘Gold’ Open Access, fully ‘Green’ Open Access and Green’ Open Access supplementing subscription access as ‘Gold’ OA grows.

Three strategic areas are identified as having particular potential for future work. These are embedding business development expertise into service development; consideration of how to move money around the system to enable Open Access to be achieved optimally; and governance and coordination of the infrastructural foundation of Open Access. The report concludes with seven recommendations, both high-level and practical, for further work around these strategic areas.”

URL : http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/event/sustainability-oa-services

Jarrow Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Software Collecting…

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Jarrow, Electronic Thesis, and Dissertation Software :

“Collecting and disseminating theses and dissertations electronically is not a new concept. Tools and platforms have emerged to handle various components of the submission and distribution process. However, there is not a tool that handles the entirety of the process from the moment the student begins work on their thesis to the dissemination of the final thesis. The authors have created such a tool which they have called Jarrow. After reviewing available open-source software for theses submission and open-source institutional repository software this paper discusses why and how Jarrow was created and how it works. Jarrow can be downloaded and the project followed at http://code.library.unbc.ca .”

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/7486