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Open Access monographic publishing in th…

Open Access monographic publishing in the humanities :

« In recent years, it has become widely recognized that in the case of monographs, the traditional business model for books is losing its sustainability. Academic publishers have been forced to become more selective in the books they publish, and authors, in particular young researchers and first time authors, have found it harder to find a press willing to publish their work. In response to the economic restraints of printed monographs, many publishers and academic institutes, in particular research libraries, have started to experiment with digital and Open Access publication of monographs.

OAPEN is the first international project to develop an Open Access model for publishers and stakeholders in scholarly communication. OAPEN stands for Open Access Publishing in European Networks. It is a 30 month project co-funded by the European Union, to develop and implement an Open Access (OA) publication model for peer reviewed academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). »

URL : http://iospress.metapress.com/content/l6wg61l0mg6426w8/

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Support for gold open access publishing …

Support for gold open access publishing strategies at QUT :

« INTRODUCTION : Since the introduction of its QUT ePrints institutional repository of published research outputs, together with the world’s first mandate for author contributions to an institutional repository, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) has been a leader in support of green road open access. With QUT ePrints providing our mechanism for supporting the green road to open access, QUT has since then also continued to expand its secondary open access strategy supporting gold road open access, which is also designed to assist QUT researchers to maximise the accessibility and so impact of their research.

METHODS : QUT Library has adopted the position of selectively supporting true gold road open access publishing by using the Library Resource Allocation budget to pay the author publication fees for QUT authors wishing to publish in the open access journals of a range of publishers including BioMed Central, Public Library of Science and Hindawi. QUT Library has been careful to support only true open access publishers and not those open access publishers with hybrid models which “double dip” by charging authors publication fees and libraries subscription fees for the same journal content. QUT Library has maintained a watch on the growing number of open access journals available from gold road open access publishers and their increased rate of success as measured by publication impact.

RESULTS : This paper reports on the successes and challenges of QUT’s efforts to support true gold road open access publishers and promote these publishing strategy options to researchers at QUT. The number and spread of QUT papers submitted and published in the journals of each publisher is provided. Citation counts for papers and authors are also presented and analysed, with the intention of identifying the benefits to accessibility and research impact for early career and established researchers.

CONCLUSIONS : QUT Library is eager to continue and further develop support for this publishing strategy, and makes a number of recommendations to other research institutions, on how they can best achieve success with this strategy. »

URL : http://eprints.qut.edu.au/39416/

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Rethinking The Role and Funding of Acade…

Rethinking The Role and Funding of Academic Book Publishing :

« 500 years ago the Cambridge University had a collection of 122 volumes, each of which cost as much as a vineyard. Today, a book costs as much as a bottle of wine. With the advent of online publishing, customers want books that cost only as much as a glass of wine, and some times, not even that much. However, producing quality content comes with a cost.

This ho-hum attitude of expecting everything for less (or even for free) has discouraged the sales of monographs. As a result, the production of these pieces of scholarly work has become less viable. This is especially true of long-form publications such as those in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) where there is reliance on the book form as the required length to convey an idea or present an argument.

What would be an economically sustainable business model to make these publications available as open access journals? Who would fund such a venture? Following the Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) model of publication where the author pays to have the article published is not agreeable as the costs of getting to first copy (in long form publication) are prohibitive. Migrating all monographs to ebook form will not solve the problem either.

A new business model is needed. While options abound, none of them are economically justified. Frances Pinter thinks she has cracked the puzzle, with a bit of help from Albert Greco and Harold Wharton who gave her the idea. Her proposal is to form a coalition of libraries, pool the money from their budgets and use that money to pay the publishers to meet the first copy costs, let the publisher publish the content as open access, and then sell POD versions. By the way, here’s a brain teaser. If you can come up with a better name than International Library Coalition for Open Access Books (ILCOAb) for the library consortia she envisions, she promises to send you a bottle of champagne. »

URL : http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4754.html

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Chercheurs à l’ère numérique (cas des mathématiciens et informaticiens en France)

La communication scientifique est influencée par la tendance actuelle vers le « tout-électronique ». Cette mutation de l’édition du support papier vers l’édition électronique modifie aussi le rôle des bibliothèques de recherche.

Trois enquêtes (2005, 2007 et 2010) ont visé les pratiques documentaires et les pratiques de l’auto-archivage des articles d’une partie de la communauté mathématique et informatique en France liée aux bibliothèques du Réseau National des Bibliothèques en Mathématiques.

L’analyse comparative des résultats donne l’occasion de voir le changement dans le temps des comportements des usagers.

URL : http://archivesic.ccsd.cnrs.fr/sic_00561480/fr/

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Highlights from the SOAP project survey….

Highlights from the SOAP project survey. What Scientists Think about Open Access Publishing :

« The SOAP (Study of Open Access Publishing) project has run a large-scale survey of the attitudes of researchers on, and the experiences with, open access publishing. Around forty thousands answers were collected across disciplines and around the world, showing an overwhelming support for the idea of open access, while highlighting funding and (perceived) quality as the main barriers to publishing in open access journals. This article serves as an introduction to the survey and presents this and other highlights from a preliminary analysis of the survey responses. To allow a maximal re-use of the information collected by this survey, the data are hereby released under a CC0 waiver, so to allow libraries, publishers, funding agencies and academics to further analyse risks and opportunities, drivers and barriers, in the transition to open access publishing. »

URL : http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5260

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Supporting Science through the Interoper…

Supporting Science through the Interoperability of Data and Articles :

« Whereas it is established practice to publish relevant findings of a research project in a scientific article, there are no standards yet as to whether and how to make the underlying research data publicly accessible. According to the recent PARSE.Insight study of the EU, over 84% of scientists think it is useful to link underlying digital research data to peer-reviewed literature.This trend is reinforced by funding bodies, who — to an increasing extent — require the grantees to deposit their raw datasets at freely accessible repositories. And also the publishing industry believes that raw datasets should be made freely accessible. This article presents an overview of how Elsevier as a scientific publisher with over 2,000 journals gives context to articles that are available on their full-text platform SciVerse ScienceDirect, by linking out to externally hosted data at the article level, at the entity level, and in a deeply integrated way. With this overview, Elsevier invites dataset repositories to collaborate with publishers to create an optimal interoperability between the formal scientific literature and the associated research data — improving the scientific workflow and ultimately supporting science. »

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Open access to scholarly communications:…

Open access to scholarly communications: advantages, policy and advocacy :

« The Open Access (OA) movement regards OA modes of disseminating research as the unequivocal future of scholarly communication. Proponents of the open access movement itself have, over the last ten years, carried out systematic research to show how OA can tangibly benefit researchers, institutions and society at large. Even so, the number of research papers being uploaded to OA institutional repositories remains relatively low, frequently based on concerns which often contradict the facts. Policies for OA have been introduced to encourage author uptake, and these are also discussed here. Briefly delineating aspects of these phenomena, this paper will then move on to outline and discuss advocacy for OA in organisations, and whether this should be “downstream”, in the form of informational campaigns, or “upstream”, in the form of top-down change management. This paper seeks to make a contribution to these issues in the OA sphere, by brining into the debate strands from the literature of the sociology of science and management science that will hopefully elucidate aspects of author reactions to OA, and the perceived changes that its adoption gives rise to. »

URL : http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/1419/