Open Access Week

It's Open Access Week! Here's what's happening at the University of Alberta Libraries:
http://guides.library.ualberta.ca/content.php?pid=45302&sid=3117074

SCOAP3 Open Access Initiative launched

In case you missed it, on Monday SCOAP3 was officially launched at CERN. From the Press Release:

Publishers of 12 journals, accounting for the vast majority of articles in the field, have been identified for participation in SCOAP3 through an open and competitive process, and the SCOAP3 initiative looks forward to establishing more partnerships with key institutions in Europe, America and Asia as it moves through the technical steps of organizing the re-direction of funds from the current subscription model to a common internationally coordinated fund. SCOAP3 expects to be operational for articles published as of 2014.

Open-access deal for particle physics

And in other open access news, this is exciting (from Nature):
Open-access deal for particle physics

The SCOAP3 initiative has been slowly moving things forward for a number of years, and now they have reached a milestone after negotiating contracts for 12 journals that cover 90% of the research output in the field of high-energy physics. It will be exciting to watch this play out over the coming year.

AHA Statement on Scholarly Journal Publishing

Yesterday, the American Historical Society released a statement on scholarly journal publishing, specifically relating to open access. They have concerns about payment for open access, maintaining high standards, and  the potential loss of peer review. It's good to see their concerns laid out and that they are starting to talk about this within their Society. For librarians, its a good chance to speak with History faculty about these kinds of issues and maybe quell some of their fears.

New Recommendations to Make Research Freely Available to All Online

Ten years after the Budapest Open Access Initiative, recommendations for the next 10 years have been made.

Scientists, Foundations, Libraries, Universities, and Advocates Unite and Issue New Recommendations to Make Research Freely Available to All Online

Further reading on this from SPARC:

Advocates Set Ambitious Goal: Setting the Default to Open Access in Ten Years’ Time

Report: Moving Towards an Open Access Future

Here's a recent report from SAGE and the British Library, on the role of academic libraries with respect to open access publication. The content of the report is based on an international roundtable meeting of 14 librarians and industry experts. There are some predictions here that really don't hold any weight, but otherwise the report does provide a good overview of current issues relating to OA and academic libraries.

Moving towards an open access future: The role of academic libraries

The state of California passes a bill to create open access digital library for textbooks

Here's an interesting bit of news from California that's worth keeping an eye on:

California passes bills to create open-source digital library for college textbooks

California Passes Nation’s First Open Source Textbook Legislation

According to the Sacramento Observer, Bill SB 1052 "provides for the selection, development and administration of the free open digital textbooks for the most popular lower-division courses overseen by the establishment of the California Open Education Resources Council (COERC)."  These textbooks will be open access and open source, with a creative commons license allowing for reuse.

Giving ebooks to the world

Here's an interview with the founder of unlgue.it, which the University of Alberta Libraries has supported with the first unglued book, Oral Literature in Africa. We chose to support unglue.it because of its new approach to making scholarly books widely available and open access.

Giving ebooks to the world

Springer Publishing extends their Springer Open program to e-books

Springer Open is now publishing open access ebooks. It's not exactly clear what the author fee is - looks like it's based on the number of pages in the book. Since the University of Alberta Libraries supports BioMed Central (a Springer division) with membership, our membership also applies to Springer Open for both journal articles and books. This means that UAlberta authors will receive a discount (50%) on the author fee should they wish to publish this way.

The Simons Foundation provides funding for arXiv

Today, Cornell University Library announced that the Simons Foundation is providing an operating grant to assist with the stewardship of arXiv. The grant will match membership fees paid by libraries, to a maximum of $300,000. The University of Alberta Libraries has made a 5 year commitment to support arXiv and it is nice to know that our contribution is now going further through this matching grant.

Ensuring arXiv's Future

How to Succeed in Publishing Without Really Trying

A brilliant piece in Inside Higher Ed:. Sums up the current state of scholarly publishing very accurately, and with humour.  Definitely worth a read.

How to Succeed in Publishing Without Really Trying

Article: New Journals in Education and Psychology

Today I sat in on a journal club at our Education Library. We discussed the following article by Bernadette Lear in College & Research Libraries (March 2012):

New Journals in Education and Psychology: General Trends, Discoverability, and Ubiquitous Journals of the Decade, 2000–2009

Lear looks at English language refereed journals that began publication between 2000-2009, in the fields of education and psychology.  It is quite a long article, with much information about the publication and coverage of these new journals in indexes, databases, etc. If your liaison area is education or psychology, the findings will be fascinating. For example, of the 683 journal titles included in the study, 259 (37.9%) were open access; only 38.4% of titles had any coverage in ERIC, PsycINFO, or Web of Science; only 34.8% of the titles had any coverage in Ebsco's Academic Search Complete, Gale's Academic OneFile, and ProQuest's Central.  There's a lot more data in this article -- lots to think about when making collections decisions, and also when helping students and faculty. Our small group was inspired since the article gave us lots to think about and sparked some future research possibilities.

Opening Access to Research

Here's a good current overview article about open access from Peter Suber, in berfrois: Intellectual Jousting in the Republic of Letters:

Opening Access to Research