Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009 :
The Internet has recently made possible the free global availability of scientific journal articles. Open Access (OA) can occur either via OA scientific journals, or via authors posting manuscripts of articles published in subscription journals in open web repositories. So far there have been few systematic studies showing how big the extent of OA is, in particular studies covering all fields of science.
The proportion of peer reviewed scholarly journal articles, which are available openly in full text on the web, was studied using a random sample of 1837 titles and a web search engine. Of articles published in 2008, 8,5% were freely available at the publishers’ sites. For an additional 11,9% free manuscript versions could be found using search engines, making the overall OA percentage 20,4%. Chemistry (13%) had the lowest overall share of OA, Earth Sciences (33%) the highest. In medicine, biochemistry and chemistry publishing in OA journals was more common. In all other fields author-posted manuscript copies dominated the picture.
The results show that OA already has a significant positive impact on the availability of the scientific journal literature and that there are big differences between scientific disciplines in the uptake. Due to the lack of awareness of OA-publishing among scientists in most fields outside physics, the results should be of general interest to all scholars. The results should also interest academic publishers, who need to take into account OA in their business strategies and copyright policies, as well as research funders, who like the NIH are starting to require OA availability of results from research projects they fund. The method and search tools developed also offer a good basis for more in-depth studies as well as longitudinal studies.
URL : http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0011273
Rebooting the CS Publication Process : M…
Rebooting the CS Publication Process :
Many computer science academics have been grousing about failures in our publication process. This
paper catalogs many of the specific complaints that are raised and proposes some radical new solutions
based on the assumption that, by eliminating physical paper entirely and going with a centralized system
to manage papers, we can rethink the entire process: paper submission, revision and publication. Fur-
thermore, having all of the metadata standardized and easily available, ranking algorithms can be easily
conceived to aid in tenure cases and departmental rankings.
URL : http://bit.ly/aeuLa0
Post Title
Interactive Open Access Publishing and Peer Review: The Effectiveness and Perspectives of Transparency and Self-Regulation in Scientific Communication and Evaluation :
The traditional forms of scientific publishing and peer review do not live up to the demands of efficient communication and quality assurance in today’s highly diverse and rapidly evolving world of science. They need to be advanced by interactive and transparent forms of review, publication and discussion that are open to the scientific community and to the public.
The advantages of open access, public peer review and interactive discussion can be efficiently and flexibly combined with the strengths of traditional publishing and peer review. Since 2001 the viability of this approach is demonstrated by the highly successful interactive open access journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics ( ACP) and a growing number of sister journals of the European Geosciences Union ( EGU) and Copernicus Publications.
The achievements and statistics of these journals and their publishers clearly prove both the scientific benefits and the financial sustainability of open access. Future perspectives are outlined with regard to critical rationalism, open societies and the global information commons.
URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2009-3_4/index.html?000479
Economic Implications of Alternative Pub…
Economic Implications of Alternative Publishing Models: Self-archiving and Repositories :
A knowledge economy has been defined as one in which the generation and exploitation of knowledge has come to play the predominant part in the creation of wealth. It is not simply about pushing back the frontiers of knowledge; it is also about the more effective use and exploitation of all types of knowledge in all manner of economic activities. One key question is whether there are new opportunities and new models for scholarly publishing that might better serve researchers and more effectively communicate and disseminate research findings.
Building on previous work, this paper looks at the costs and potential benefits of alternative models for scientific and scholarly publishing, describing the approach and methods used and summarising the findings of a study undertaken for JISC in the United Kingdom. It concludes that different publishing models can make a material difference to the costs faced by and benefits realised from research communication, and it seems likely that more open access would have substantial net benefits.
URL : http://liber.library.uu.nl/publish/issues/2009-3_4/index.html?000478
Half term report: Licence to publish – p…
Half term report: Licence to publish – promoting Open Access and authors’ rights in the Nordic social sciences and humanities :
As stated in the original application to Nordbib’s Focus Area “Policy and visibility” (Work Package 1), the purpose of the project was to increase the awareness and understanding of the principles of Open Access by providing a dialogue among stakeholders on authors’ rights and Open Access principles. The Nordbib Board pledged the grant with clauses for the project framework thereby changing the project deliverables to the following: 1. Legal translation of the Knowledge Exchange “Licence to Publish” document into Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Icelandic, and disseminating these to the Nordic researchers in general. 2. Devising a strategy for substantial outreach with respect to “Licence to publish”, authors’ rights, self-archiving and the principles of Open Access, focusing on a number of cases in the Nordic social sciences and humanities but with the stipulation that the strategy be relevant and implementable to the STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) communities as well.
URL : http://www.hprints.org/hprints-00437866/fr/
Educating Europe – Exploiting the benefi…
Educating Europe – Exploiting the benefits of ICT :
This report looks at how information and communication technology (ICT) is playing a key role in the education and training of European citizens. ICT offers far more than a convenient way to deliver educational content. Today, researchers are demonstrating how ICT can actually enhance the learning process for all Europeans and make lifelong learning part of everyday activity.
URL : http://cordis.europa.eu/ictresults/pdf/policyreport/INF%207%200100%20IST-R%20policy%20report-education_final.pdf
The creation of an information repository: a perspective from Mozambican higher education sector
Open Access Repositories are seen as an opportunity for knowledge exchange and scholarly communication, especially in a country like Mozambique, where the spread and access to information is still very poor and there are few journals where the researchers and academic staff can publish the results of their work.
Due to this situation, the common sense is that there is not research activity in the country, even in the higher education institutions. In order to change this vision and taking advantage of the technology available, a group of university librarians has decided that, even if they are few, it is possible to present the research results which have been still hidden within the walls of each university, by establishing a joint Open Access information repository.
The paper aims to describe the project of establishing an information repository in Mozambique, the implications of having a joint project, the challenges for getting contents, bearing in mind all the issues related to copyright, and also the inclusion of other institutions in the project.
Also, it looks at the impact of the repository in the academic and research community within the country and some strategies that have to be defined in order to increase the readership on the repository contents, either by Mozambican users, or from other parts of the world.