Authors : Jeroen Sondervan, Fleur Stigter
Authors : Jūratė Kuprienė, Žibutė Petrauskien
The future strategies for opening science have become important to libraries which serve scientific institutions by providing institutional repository infrastructures and services.
Vilnius University Library provides such an infrastructure for Vilnius University, which is the biggest higher education institution in Lithuania (with more than 20,200 students, 1,330 academic staff members, and 450 researchers ), and manages services and infrastructure of the national open access repository eLABa and the national open access data archive MIDAS.
As the new platforms of these repositories began operating in the beginning of 2015, new policies and routines for organizing work with scientific publications and data had to be implemented.
This meant new roles for the Library and librarians, too. The University Senate approved the new Regulations of the Library on 13 June 2017 with the task to develop the scholarly communication tools dedicated to sustaining open access to information and open science.
Thus, Vilnius University Library performs the leading role in opening science by providing strategic insights and solutions for development of services dedicated to researchers, students and the public in Lithuania.
As it was not presented properly at the international level before, this article presents the case of Vilnius University Library which actively cooperates with other Lithuanian academic institutions, works in creating and coordinating policies, conducts research on the improvements and services of eLABa and MIDAS, and suggests and implements the integral solutions for opening science.
URL : Opening Science with Institutional Repository: A Case Study of Vilnius University Library
Author : Josh Bolick
In the last round of author-sharing policy revisions, Elsevier created a labyrinthine title-by-title embargo structure requiring embargoes from 12 to 48 months for authors sharing via institutional repository (IR), while permitting immediate sharing via an author’s personal website or blog. At the same time, all prepublication versions are to bear a Creative Commons-Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) license.
At the time this policy was announced, it was criticized by many in the scholarly communication community as overly complicated and restrictive. However, this CC licensing requirement creates an avenue for subverting an embargo in the IR to achieve quicker and wider open distribution of the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM).
To wit, authors may post an appropriately licensed copy on their personal site or blog, at which point the author’s host institution may deposit without an embargo in the IR, not through the license granted in the publication agreement, but through the CC license on the author’s version, which the sharing policy mandates.
This article outlines the background and rationale of the issue and discusses the benefits, workflows, and remaining questions.
URL : Leveraging Elsevier’s Creative Commons License Requirement to Undermine Embargo
Author : Elizabeth Moll-Willard
Although access to primary legal materials in South Africa is now easily accessible as a result of the Free Access to Law movement, access to legal scholarship is not as easy.
Through using the University of Cape Town (UCT) as a case study, due to its research intensive nature, it is possible to see how academics are publishing their legal scholarship through the use of bibliometrics and data mining.
After the success of a Research Visibility month, law librarians were able to attest to the perceptions of legal academics around the importance of the openness and visibility of their research.
The author contrasts these two to see if the perception of legal academics around the visibility of their resources reflects their publishing practices. It is seen that although academics at UCT publish mostly in closed journals, the publishing in open and hybrid journals has slowly increased during the period 2011-2015.
Further it is evidenced that legal academics are exploring other avenues, including that of self-archiving, to boost the visibility of their work. Law Librarians are able to assist in boosting at least the visibility, if not the openness of legal academics’ work.
Alternative location : https://ojs.law.cornell.edu/index.php/joal/article/view/78
Author : Katherine Stephan
The Research Support Team at Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU) runs events called research cafés throughout the academic year.
During these cafés, we bring together PhD students, early career researchers and more established academics over lunch to give them an opportunity to talk about their work to a lay audience of their peers and the public.
From its inception in 2013 we have maintained the overall format of the research café, based as it is on promoting interdisciplinary dialogue in an informal setting, while also making a few small but significant changes.
These changes have in turn increased the visibility and reach of research promotion within the Library. Against that backdrop, this article – which is based on a lightning talk and poster session presented at the 41st UKSG Annual Conference, Glasgow, in April 2018 – will outline why the library is ideally placed to facilitate this type of scholarship sharing and why research and community engagement should be viewed as an integral part of a university library’s agenda.
It will also discuss how its success has allowed our Team to work in partnership with colleagues from across the University in new and exciting ways. Finally, it will address what further developments we can make to continue to improve and help the research community at LJMU and beyond.
URL : Research cafés: how libraries can build communities through research and engagement
Authors : Wanyenda Leonard Chilimo, Omwoyo Bosire Onyancha
The study investigates Library and Information Science (LIS) journals that published research articles between 2003 and 2013, which were about open access (OA) and were indexed in LIS databases.
The purpose was to investigate the journals’ OA policies, ascertain the degree to which these policies facilitate OA to publications, and investigate whether such texts are also available as OA. The results show that literature growth in the domain has been significant, with a total of 1,402 articles produced during the eleven years under study.
The OA policies of the fifty-six journals that published the highest number of articles were analysed. The results show that most articles (404; 41%) were published in hybrid journals, whereas 272 (29.7%) appeared in OA journals.
Some 143 (53%) of the articles published in hybrid journals were available as green OA copies. In total, 602 (66%) of all the articles published were available as OA.
The results show that the adoption of OA for research articles on that very subject is somewhat higher than in other fields. The study calls on LIS professionals to be conversant with the OA policies of the various journals that may publish their research.
URL : How open is open access research in Library and Information Science?
Alternative location : http://sajlis.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/1710
Authors : Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer, Jaroen Kuijper
In Amsterdam, the libraries of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS) cooperate closely. In this cooperation, the differences between a research university (i.c. UvA) and a university of applied sciences (i.c. AUAS) become particularly clear when we look at the aim and implementation of open access policies.
The open access plan of the AUAS removes not only financial and legal barriers, but also language barriers.
This makes the research output FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) to the primary target group of the product, and more importantly, it enables interaction between the AUAS and a wide audience, consisting of researchers from other disciplines, and a wide range of professionals, enterprises, civil servants, schools and citizens.
In the search for co-financing by enterprises and other stakeholders, and to fulfil their valorisation requirements, these target groups are currently becoming more important for research universities as well. Here, we show what research universities can learn from the open access policy of the AUAS.