Heading for the open road costs and benefits…

Heading for the open road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications :

“This new report investigates the drivers, costs and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. It identifies five different routes for achieving that end over the next five years, and compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK.

The report suggests that policymakers who are seeking to promote increases in access should encourage the use of existing subject and institutional repositories, but avoid pushing for reductions in embargo periods, which might put at risk the sustainability of the underlying scholarly publishing system. They should also promote and facilitate a transition to open access publishing (Gold open access) while seeking to ensure that the average level of charges for publication does not exceed c.£2000; that the rate in the UK of open access publication is broadly in step with the rate in the rest of the world; and that total payments to journal publishers from UK universities and their funders do not rise as a consequence.

At a time of financial stringency for universities, research funders and publishers, it is important that all the stakeholders in the scholarly communications system work together to find the most cost-effective ways of fulfilling their joint goal of increasing access to the outputs of research. This report provides the first detailed and authoritative analysis of how this might be achieved over the next five years. We hope that it will stimulate new dialogue and new approaches to policy and practice across all stakeholders.”

URL : http://www.rin.ac.uk/our-work/communicating-and-disseminating-research/heading-open-road-costs-and-benefits-transitions-s

Did Online Access to Journals Change the…

Did Online Access to Journals Change the Economics Literature? :

Does online access boost citations? The answer has implications for issues ranging from the value of a citation to the sustainability of open-access journals. Using panel data on citations to economics and business journals, we show that the enormous effects found in previous studies were an artifact of their failure to control for article quality, disappearing once we add fixed effects as controls. The absence of an aggregate effect masks heterogeneity across platforms: JSTOR boosts citations around 10%; ScienceDirect has no effect. We examine other sources of heterogeneity including whether JSTOR benefits “long-tail” or “superstar” articles more.”

URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1746243

WattJournals: Towards an Economic and Li…

WattJournals: Towards an Economic and Lightweight Search Tool Alternative for Libraries To Help Their Students and Researchers Keep Up-To-Date :

“Learn how Heriot-Watt University Library’s WattJournals could be just the search tool your patrons need to efficiently find the content that your library subscribes to. Built on top of a RESTful search API created by the JISC-sponsored JournalTOCs Project, WattJournals is a toolkit for connecting fulltext articles to the people who need them. This article provides a technical overview of the system, showing how it uses citation data pulled from the JournalTOCs table of contents awareness service to provide access to just your library’s subscriptions.”

URL : http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/4134

Open Access repositories and journals fo…

Open Access repositories and journals for visibility: Implications for Malaysian libraries :

“This paper describes the growth of Open Access (OA) repositories and journals as reported by monitoring initiatives such as ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories), Open DOAR (Open Directory of Open Access Repositories), DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals), Directory of Web Ranking of World Repositories by the Cybermetrics Laboratory in Spain and published literature. The performance of Malaysian OA repositories and journals is highlighted. The strength of OA channels in increasing visibility and citations are evidenced by research findings. It is proposed that libraries champion OA initiatives by making university or institutional governance aware; encouraging institutional journal publishers to adopt OA platform; collaborating with research groups to jumpstart OA institutional initiatives and to embed OA awareness into user and researcher education programmes. By actively involved, libraries will be free of permission, licensing and archiving barriers usually imposed in traditional publishing situation.”

URL : http://majlis.fsktm.um.edu.my/detail.asp?AID=960

Analyse prospective du libre accès en Fr…

Analyse prospective du libre accès en France :

“Dresser un panorama et identifier les enjeux liés au développement du libre accès en France ont été les objectifs de l’étude que nous avons menée. Pour réaliser cette étude, nous avons emprunté une méthode de travail d’une autre discipline, la prospective, qui est souvent utilisée dans le domaine du management stratégique. L’analyse structurelle, la première étape de la prospective, est utilisée dans le cadre général de cette méthode à la fois pour dresser un panorama de l’environnement de l’entreprise et pour identifier les questions clés liées au développement de celle-ci. Par le biais de la méthode MICMAC (Matrice d’Impacts Croisés—Multiplication Appliquée à un Classement), nous avons pu identifier que les principaux enjeux liés au développement du libre accès en France seraient le développement des mandats obligatoires, les politiques de l’Union européenne et les embargos liés à l’auto-archivage. Ces enjeux devront s’articuler autour de deux spécificités françaises, à savoir HAL, l’archive ouverte disciplinaire et nationale, et l’environnement disparate de la recherche publique française.”

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00537239/fr/

10 years of Malaria Journal: how did Ope…

10 years of Malaria Journal: how did Open Access change publication patterns ? :

“Fifteen years ago, most publications were paper-based, accessible only by subscription. By the late 1990s, this ‘traditional’ mode of access to scientific literature was about to change dramatically, as the result of the development of Open Access. This Editorial, written as Malaria Journal reaches its 10th birthday, looks at the impact of the Open Access movement on publication in the field of tropical medicine in general and malaria in particular.”
URL : http://www.malariajournal.com/content/9/1/284

First results of the SOAP project. Open …

First results of the SOAP project. Open access publishing in 2010 :

“The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has compiled data on the present offer for open access publishing in online peer-reviewed journals. Starting from the Directory of Open Access Journals, several sources of data are considered, including inspection of journal web site and direct inquiries within the publishing industry. Several results are derived and discussed, together with their correlations: the number of open access journals and articles; their subject area; the starting date of open access journals; the size and business models of open access publishers; the licensing models; the presence of an impact factor; the uptake of hybrid open access.”

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1010.0506