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.

ImpactStory

The site previously known as total-impact has been relaunched as ImpactStory. If you're not familiar, this is a site for gathering alt-metric measures on research articles. From their FAQ:

ImpactStory is a website that makes it quick and easy to view the impact of a wide range of research output. It goes beyond traditional measurements of research output -- citations to papers -- to embrace a much broader evidence of use across a wide range of scholarly output types. The system aggregates impact data from many sources and displays it in a single report, which is given a permaurl for dissemination and can be updated any time.

Basically, researchers can see the impact of their research in places that we previously may not have considered, such as via Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare, Mendeley, and some more traditional sources such as Scopus and PubMed. It meshes the world of social media with the world of scholarly communication, to provide a broader picture of impact beyond the number of citations in Web of Science! See what it looks like:

Sample impact report

Something to share with faculty who are interested in looking beyond the traditional measures of impact.

Altmetric for Scopus

Scopus has announced that it has incorporated a new Altmetric service for article level metrics within its database. The altmetric service will capture information from social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, mainstream media, and reference managers such as Mendeley, to illustrate how scholarly articles are being used beyond academia. I think this is a nice complement to the citation information currently contained in Scopus, and integration of these different sources in one place is great.

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

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