YBP's Annual Book Price update

YBP has released its annual book price update, based on data from their fiscal year of July 1, 2011 - June 30, 2012. This is good information for academic libraries managing budgets and trying to plan spending.

Most interesting is that the average book price for cloth books is $83.59USD, and book prices are up 3.2%. Also, ebook prices from the aggregators that YBP uses (ebrary, Ebsco and EBL) averaged $95.14USD, a decrease of 2% from the previous year.

YBP predicts a 3-4% increase in the cost of both academic print and e-books for this fiscal year.

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.

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."