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.

New papers on digital preservation

A few recent papers that will be of interest to those who care about digital preservation:

Economics of Long Term Digital Storage

LOCKSS Boxes in the Cloud

Curation in the Cloud

The Disappearing Web

Thanks to my colleague, Kathy West, for pointing out this article in Business Week. At the University of Alberta Libraries, we've been concerned with preservation for some time now, and have been using ArchiveIt to archive materials on the web that we've identified as priorities.

The Disappearing Web: Decay Is Eating Our History

Here's the research study mentioned in the article:

Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?

Bottom line from the authors: " From this model we conclude that after the first year of publishing, nearly 11% of shared resources will be lost and after that we will continue to lose 0.02% per day."

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.

Serial prices likely to rise 5-7% in 2013

On Friday, EBSCO released its 2013 Serials Price Projection Report. Their projection is that serial prices for academic libraries will rise 5-7% in 2013. This is not good news for academic libraries facing very tight budgets with far smaller increases than 5%.

Article on academic libraries and e-books in University Affairs

This article in University Affairs gives a good overview of the situation in Canadian academic libraries with respect to e-books. 

The latest academic book (hopefully) one click away

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

In the digital era, we own nothing

This is a good story in The Guardian re: long term ownership of digital media. For academic libraries, the ownership of what we buy is of great importance, and magnified from what this story illustrates.  While the University of Alberta Libraries try to "own" and "purchase" what we buy (vs. rent/subscribe to something where we lose all content should our subscription end, or should a publisher choose to remove content from a package), sometimes that is not possible, and there are still lingering questions about what a purchase actually means. Publishers are very wary of allowing local hosting of digital content, or for that content to be held by the library, so this puts us in a position of managing content in a very different way than what we do with print materials. We want to build collections that last a very long time, for use by future generations, not just for short-term use. Digital materials are here to stay and that's for the better, considering the advantages in terms of access and use of those materials; but there are still a lot of problems to work out regarding how these materials can be purchased, owned and shared.  The story also makes me think about our donations, and while print book donations show no signs of slowing down, the potential donations of electronic books or music is something that we need to start thinking of as well. Will our libraries be poorer for the loss of materials that people like Bruce Willis might want to give us but cannot due to restrictions around use of that material, simply because it is digital? So many questions and lots of work to do...

The Bruce Willis dilemma? In the digital era, we own nothing

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.