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Open Access in Biomedical Research This Science…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Open Access in Biomedical Research :

« This Science Policy Briefing aims to accelerate the adoption of open access to research articles in the biomedical sciences. Open access refers to the free availability on the public Internet of scholarly articles published in an electronic format, permitting any user to read and re-use the
content provided only that the author is properly acknowledged and cited. We consider open access to be crucial for the free flow of information between researchers and within society as a whole, and the digital revolution of recent years provides an opportunity that has not yet been fully realised to transform access to scholarly publications. »

URL : http://www.arl.org/sparc/bm~doc/esf-emrc-science-policy-briefing.pdf

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Anatomy of open access publishing a study of…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure :

« Background : Open access (OA) is a revolutionary way of providing access to the scholarly journal literature made possible by the Internet. The primary aim of this study was to measure the volume of scientific articles published in full immediate OA journals from 2000 to 2011, while observing longitudinal internal shifts in the structure of OA publishing concerning revenue models, publisher types and relative distribution among scientific disciplines. The secondary aim was to measure the share of OA articles of all journal articles, including articles made OA by publishers with a delay and individual author-paid OA articles in subscription journals (hybrid OA), as these subsets of OA publishing have mostly been ignored in previous studies.

Methods : Stratified random sampling of journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (n = 787) was performed. The annual publication volumes spanning 2000 to 2011 were retrieved from major publication indexes and through manual data collection.

Results : An estimated 340,000 articles were published by 6,713 full immediate OA journals during 2011. OA journals requiring article-processing charges have become increasingly common, publishing 166,700 articles in 2011 (49% of all OA articles). This growth is related to the growth of commercial publishers, who, despite only a marginal presence a decade ago, have grown to become key actors on the OA scene, responsible for 120,000 of the articles published in 2011. Publication volume has grown within all major scientific disciplines, however, biomedicine has seen a particularly rapid 16-fold growth between 2000 (7,400 articles) and 2011 (120,900 articles). Over the past decade, OA journal publishing has steadily increased its relative share of all scholarly journal articles by about 1% annually. Approximately 17% of the 1.66 million articles published during 2011 and indexed in the most comprehensive article-level index of scholarly articles (Scopus) are available OA through journal publishers, most articles immediately (12%) but some within 12 months of publication (5%).

Conclusions : OA journal publishing is disrupting the dominant subscription-based model of scientific publishing, having rapidly grown in relative annual share of published journal articles during the last decade. »

URL : http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124

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OpenAIRE — Building a Collaborative Open Access Infrastructure…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

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

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Licensing Revisited Open Access Clauses in Practice …

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

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

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Publisher Library Partnership for Accessibility A Case Study…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

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

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

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

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/

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Repositories in Google Scholar Metrics or what is…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

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