Understanding Open Access in the Academi…

Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors :
The OAK Law Project aims to facilitate seamless access to knowledge and improve social, economic and cultural outcomes. This guide aims to provide practical guidance for academic authors interested in making their work more openly accessible to readers and other researchers. The guide provides authors with an overview of the concept of and rationale for open access to research outputs and how they may be involved in its implementation and with what effect. In doing so it considers the central role of copyright law and publishing agreements in structuring an open access framework as well as the increasing involvement of funders and academic institutions. The guide also explains different methods available to authors for making their outputs openly accessible, such as publishing in an open access journal or depositing work into an open access repository. Importantly, the guide addresses how open access goals can affect an author’s relationship with their commercial publisher and provides guidance on how to negotiate a proper allocation of copyright interests between an author and publisher. A Copyright Toolkit is provided to further assist authors in managing their copyright.
URL : http://eprints.qut.edu.au/14200/

Lessons learned in storing theses and as…

Lessons learned in storing theses and associated materials as compound objects :
In the eTheses project theses were enhanced by adding documents containing data, images, audio, video or even simulations. These documents were not stored separately but connected to the theses itself as a compound object. Experiments were done in storing these compound objects in a Fedora and DSpace respository system.
The project delivered a generic representation of an Enhanced e-thesis using concepts based on the OAI-ORE abstract model. Trying out this new technology several valuable insights were attained: the repository software Fedora is quite suited to the task, but does require some further work to ingest resource maps. Also clients are required to view the compound object. In the case of DSpace the majority of the features required were not supported in the version in use (1.5). From the legal perspective compound e‐theses need to take account of the rights governing the constituent parts and cannot be treated only as an entity in their own right. Searching tools are required to not only show the found objects separately but also in relation to the compound object as a whole.

URL : http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=62&M=News&NewsID=94

Impact of Open Access on stem cell research: An author co-citation analysis

We explore the impact of Open Access (OA) on stem cell research through a comparison of research reported in OA and in non-OA publications. Using an author co-citation analysis method, we find that (a) OA and non-OA publications cover similar major research areas in the stem cell field, but (b) a more diverse range of basic and medical research is reported in OA publications, while (c) biomedical technology areas appear biased towards non-OA publications.

It appears that OA helps maintain diversity of research in this highly interdisciplinary field, and hence contributes to a healthy balance of scientific advancement.
URL : http://conference.ifla.org/past-wlic/2010/155-strotmann-en.pdf

Open Access to the Scientific Journal Li…

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

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