« Two years after the publication of the European Commission recommendation on open access to scientific information, the critical threshold of accessibility to fifty percent of papers has been crossed. However, this figure is an average and the implementation of the EC recommendation varies from one country to another. The topical issue now is to observe the different steps of implementation and to wonder about the reaseons of such a disparity. In order to suggest many elements of the response, this research compares the different levels of implementation in the EU28. »
Étiquette : open access
« This special issue of Cultural Science Journal is devoted to the report of a groundbreaking experiment in re-coordinating global markets for specialist scholarly books and enabling the knowledge commons: the Knowledge Unlatched proof-of-concept pilot. The pilot took place between January 2012 and September 2014. It involved libraries, publishers, authors, readers and research funders in the process of developing and testing a global library consortium model for supporting Open Access books. The experiment established that authors, librarians, publishers and research funding agencies can work together in powerful new ways to enable open access; that doing so is cost effective; and that a global library consortium model has the potential dramatically to widen access to the knowledge and ideas contained in book-length scholarly works. »
URL : http://microblogging.infodocs.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/96-625-1-PB.pdf
Alternative URL : http://cultural-science.org/journal/index.php/culturalscience/article/view/96
« This report examines, and seeks to clarify, the range of issues that emerge when we think about the relationship between open access and monographs (including under this latter term other long scholarly publications). It arises from the immediate need of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and its sister funding councils in the UK, to examine the issues for open access in relation to books in a context where both funding and research councils in the UK have already established open-access requirements for publications in journals and conference proceedings, but the issues are much greater than those of defining the practicalities of mandates and the sustainability of open-access models. Furthermore, although the principal focus of the report is defined by the culture and policy preoccupations of higher education in this country, the international character of research, publishing, and academic careers has to be acknowledged. »
« Introduction. This study explores the extent to which an institutional repository (IR) makes papers available and accessible on the open web by using 170 journal articles housed in DigiNole Commons, the IR at Florida State University.
Method. To analyze the IR’s impact on availability and accessibility, we conducted independent known-item title searches on both Google and Google Scholar (GS) to search for faculty publications housed in DigiNole Commons.
Analysis. The extent to which the IR makes articles available and accessible was measured quantitatively, and the findings that cannot be summarized with numbers were analyzed qualitatively.
Results. Google and GS searches provided links to DigiNole metadata for a total of 145 (85.3%) of 170 items, and to full texts for 96 (96%) of 100 items. With one exception, access to either metadata or full text required no more than three clicks.
Conclusions. Overall, the results confirm the contribution of the IR in making papers available and accessible. The results also reveal some impediments to the success of OA: including impediments linked to contractual arrangements between authors and publishers, impediments linked to policies, practices, and technologies governing the IR itself, and the low level of faculty participation in the IR. »
URL : http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/slis_faculty_publications/27/
« This report arises from a roundtable event hosted by Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) at University College London on 6 October 2014. The roundtable brought together representatives from academic institutions, publishers and vendors to discuss the challenge of “making open access work”.
Recent policy changes in the United Kingdom are driving a rapid increase in the number of article processing charges, or APCs, being paid to publishers in order to make articles open access. The attendees gathered to discuss the challenges faced by their organizations as APC volumes rise, and to explore the role that third-party vendors such as CCC can play in helping to address these. Discussions during the course of the day covered a wide range of issues. Institutions and publishers offered a range of different perspectives, but there was a striking commonality in the challenges faced, and a high degree of consensus on what is needed to address them:
Author engagement – Author engagement is crucial to the success of open access, but the complexity of the process at present means many need support at an early stage. This requires a fundamental shift from a two-way relationship between author and publisher, to a three- or four-way relationship that also involves the institution and potentially an external funder.
Streamlining the APC process – Workflows for handling APCs remain unstable, with institutions and publishers both grappling with the need to constantly adapt processes and systems as volumes rise. Greater consistency and automation is needed if efficiencies are to be achieved.
Copyright and licensing – Authors lack familiarity with the range of licensing options available and the licensing requirements of funders. Direct engagement between publishers and institutional administrators can help address this in the short term, but in the long term authors must be equipped to make informed licensing choices that take account of funder mandates.
Management and billing of APCs – The payment of individual APC invoices is not a sustainable solution for either institutions or publishers, but some institutions have concerns over a loss of transparency where alternative models are used. The complex relationships among APC pricing, subscription revenues, licensing, and embargo periods remain a subject for debate.
Standards and interoperability – The need to improve sharing of information through development of common vocabularies and data standards was universally agreed. Identification of suitable persistent identifiers is part of the solution, but even where these exist low levels of uptake remain a concern.
Reporting and compliance – Achieving compliance with funder requirements places a significant burden on institutional administrators, and results in growing demands for information from publishers. »
URL : http://www.copyright.com/content/dam/cc3/marketing/documents/pdfs/Report-Making-Open-Access-Work.pdf
« The digital revolution has made it easier for political scientists to share and access high-quality research online. However, many articles are stored in proprietary databases that some institutions cannot afford. High-quality, peer-reviewed, top-tier journal articles that have been made open access (OA) (i.e., freely available online) theoretically should be accessed and cited more easily than articles of similar quality that are available only to paying customers. Research into the efficacy of OA publishing thus far has focused mainly on the natural sciences, and the results have been mixed. Because OA has not been as widely adopted in the social sciences, disciplines such as political science have received little attention in the OA research. In this article, we seek to determine the efficacy of OA in political science. Our primary hypothesis is that OA articles will be cited at higher rates than articles that are toll access (TA), which means available only to paying customers. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the mean citation rates of OA and TA articles from eight top-ranked political science journals. We find that OA publication results in a clear citation advantage in political science publishing. »
Aims to measure quantitatively the scholarly journals which were produced with full immediate open access (OA) from 2003 to 2013. Focuses on the amount of India’s contribution to scholarly literature through the repositories of their institutions, amount of literature produced in various disciplines and the open source software’s (OSS) used for it.
Aims to know the current status of open access publishing in India. A survey of the open access journals indexed in the Directory of Open access Journals (DOAJ) and the repositories indexed in the Open DOAR is followed for this study. India started making its journals open access in 2003 with about 13 journals in a year and has reached about 197 journals till September 2013, which shows a growth of 15 fold of the open access journal output within a year.
The percentage of the multidisciplinary repositories is highest with 43% and the repositories of the disciplines such as Technology, Chemistry and Chemical Technology and Physics and Astronomy are 18%, 15% and 14% respectively among the 64 repositories listed in OpenDOAR.
With about 650 open access journals and about 64 open access directories, India has made important contributions towards the growth of Open access publishing.