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Infrastructure Development for Strengthening the Capacity of International…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

Infrastructure Development for Strengthening the Capacity of International Scholarly Communication :

« Japan has achieved social and economic growth through its strengths in science and technology. However, in the face of globalisation, various factors, including the continued appreciation of the yen, the emerging economic powers, and a declining birth rate combined with an aging population have weakened Japan’s competitiveness in the world and resulted in a prevalent sense of stagnation in society.

Intellectual assets are among such important resources for Japan, which is a country with limited material resources, that greater efforts on the promotion of science and technology, and the promotion of creative and forward-looking scientific research, in particular, have to be taken than ever in order to enhance Japan’s international competitiveness.

To promote scientific research, it is essential that timely and wide access to information be guaranteed to those who need it. At the same time, it is important to promptly publish and distribute outstanding research results domestically and internationally, and to make use of them in society. Doing so will increase Japan’s intellectual presence and attract excellent researchers from around the world, leading to further development of science in Japan and stimulation of society as a whole. »

URL : http://www.mext.go.jp/component/b_menu/shingi/toushin/__icsFiles/afieldfile/2012/10/25/1323890_4_2.pdf

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The Current State of Open Access Repository Interoperability…

Posted on by Hans Dillaerts

The Current State of Open Access Repository Interoperability (2012) :

« In the past few years, Open Access repositories and their associated services have become an increasingly important component of the global e-Research infrastructure. The real value of repositories is their potential to be connected in order to develop a network of repositories which enables unified access to an open, aggregated mass of scholarship and related materials that machines and researchers can work with in new ways.

However, this potential to create a unified body of scholarly materials is entirely reliant on interoperability – specifically, that repositories follow consistent guidelines, protocols, and standards for interoperability which allow them to communicate with each other; connect with other systems; and transfer information, metadata, and digital objects between each other. The repository infrastructure is still relatively new, leading to an evolving interoperability landscape that at first sight may appear chaotic, confusing, and complex.

This report is designed to be the first stage of a multi-phase process aiming to establish the COAR Roadmap for Interoperability. The second phase is planned to be completed with the release of a follow-up report: Future Directions for Interoperability. The follow-up report will address emerging issues and current research & development efforts. »

URL : http://www.coar-repositories.org/files/COAR-The-Current-State-of-Open-Access-Repository-Interoperability.pdf

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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