ISSUES IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION:
News for the University of Illinois Community

June 27, 2008

Georgia State: Downloading Texts is Fair Use

Many of us have been following the lawsuit three publishers have brought against Georgia State University for copyright infringement with great interest. In its response to the suit, Georgia State has now asserted that its online distribution of course material is permitted under copyright law's fair-use exemption. In papers filed earlier this week, the university admitted that it was offering the material online to students through electronic reserves in the library, the Blackboard/WebCT Vista course-management system, department Web pages, and other Web sites. But, it says the practice is allowed under the fair-use doctrine of the Copyright Act.

There is no clear interpretation of "Fair Use" relating to the amount of material that can be used for such activities as scholarship, teaching, reporting, and review.

In addition to advancing its fair-use argument, the university also says it is protected from federal lawsuits by sovereign immunity protections guaranteed by the 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The outcome of this lawsuit will impact the ways in which colleges and universities distribute course materials and provide access to digital materials.

Read more in today's Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted by P. Kaufman at 7:50 AM

June 24, 2008

U of Illinois Signs Intent to Participate in SCOAP3

From SCOAP3 News (23/06/2008):

Five more U.S. partners have joined SCOAP3: three laboratories, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, SLAC, the Thomas Jefferson Laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - University of California, Berkeley and two universities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Northwestern University.

SCOAP3 now counts 29 institutions in the U.S., which have pledged to redirect their current subscriptions to High-Energy Physics journals to the initiative. More U.S. partners are expected to join in the near future. SCOAP3 is also supported by partners from 15 European countries, Australia and one international organisation. In total, SCOAP3 has received pledges for about 4 million euros, over 6 million dollars, corresponding to 40% of its budget envelope.

Note: SCOAP3 = Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics

Posted by Katie Newman at 12:06 PM

University Presses Start to Sell Via Kindle

From Inside Higher Ed (June 24, 2008):

The Subprime Solution: How Today’s Global Financial Crisis Happened, and What to Do About It is a promising new title from Princeton University Press. ...

The Princeton press is planning something new for the release: Two weeks before print publication the book will be available as a Kindle e-book. Kindle is Amazon.com’s portable reader that allows for downloading of complete books. Launched in November, ... Kindle has been hailed as potentially opening up a new kind of reading experience. ... Kindle’s Amazon backing has given it a market that is attractive to many publishers — including university presses.

By the beginning of the fall, Princeton plans to have several hundred books available for sale through Kindle. Yale University Press and Oxford University Press already have a similar presence there. The University of California Press recently had about 40 of its volumes placed on Kindle and is ramping up.

... The experimentation with Kindle comes at a time that many experts are urging university presses to try new business models.

Readers would save some on Kindle books, but at least now modestly, and only after recouping the costs of the reader (currently at $359). The Kindle version of an Oxford book called Punishment and Democracy: Three Strikes and You’re Out in California sells for $21.96, compared to $24.40 for the paperback through Amazon. The latter also takes two to four weeks to ship and requires shipping fees. A Yale book, Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft, is available for $25.20 via Kindle and $28 plus shipping in hardcover.

Read the full article.
Learn more about Kindle.

Posted by Katie Newman at 11:56 AM

May 8, 2008

Harvard Law School Mandates Open Access

The Harvard Law School joined its Faculty of Arts & Sciences in mandating open access for all its peer-reviewed publications. As reported here earlier, the Faculty of Arts & Sciences unanimously mandated open access in February of this year.

Read the full announcement.

From the announcement:

The Harvard Law School faculty produces some of the most exciting, groundbreaking scholarship in the world," said Dean Elena Kagan '86. "Our decision to embrace 'open access' means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School....
Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit. ...

Posted by Katie Newman at 1:34 PM

May 7, 2008

New Open-Access Humanities Press Makes Its Debut

Jennifer Howard, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, is reporting today that a new venture with prominent academic backers wants to help humanists put their work online.

Open Humanities Press, will open it's doors on Monday (May 12) with the publication of seven peer-reviewed journals, which have established track records as open access titles.:
Cosmos and History (2005-)
Culture Machine (1999-)
Fibreculture (2003-)
Film-Philosophy (1997-)
International Journal of Žižek Studies (2007-)
Parrhesia (2006-)
Vectors (2005-)

From the OHP website: "Open Humanities Press journals are fully peer reviewed, scholarly publications that have been chosen by OHP's editorial advisory board for their outstanding contribution to contemporary theory. OHP's journals are independent, published under open access licenses and free of charge to readers and authors alike."

Each journal will retain editorial independence. The press will "provide editorial and technical-development services, using the Open Journal Systems software created by the Public Knowledge Project, and it will help with distribution and promotion". Aside from the editorial boards of the various journals, the Open Humanities Press has, according to the Chronicle, put together a

star-studded lineup of literary critics and theorists as its editorial advisory board. The panel includes Alan Badiou, professor of philosophy emeritus at France's École Normale Supérieure; Jonathan Culler, professor of English and comparative literature at Cornell University; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, professor in the humanities at Columbia University; and J. Hillis Miller, professor of English at the University of California at Irvine. Another member is Stephen Greenblatt, professor of the humanities at Harvard University. In 2002, as president of the Modern Language Association, Mr. Greenblatt issued a rallying cry to humanists about the crisis in traditional scholarly publishing.

How is this being paid for? And what is are it's long-term goals? From the Chronicle article:

To begin with, the press will have no operating budget and no formal staff. Internet hosting is being provided gratis by ibiblio, a sort of Internet library—or "conservancy," as they call it—based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The founders will draw on their professional networks, and those of the journals, to get things done in the near term.

Those involved with Open Humanities Press hope to expand beyond critical theory, perhaps even beyond journals and into open-access monographs, once the enterprise has a reputation for what Mr. Ottina called "rigorous academic quality."

"Ultimately," he said, "the goal is to get as much academic content into an open-access distribution model as possible."

Posted by Katie Newman at 5:30 PM

May 6, 2008

Rockefeller Press to License Works from Authors

In an editorial entitled "You wrote it, you own it", Emma Hill and Mike Rossner (Executive Editor of The Journal of Cell Biology and Executive Director of The Rockefeller University Press, respectively) announced in the Journal of Cell Biology, April 30, 2008 that the Rockefeller University Press, rather than requiring that authors assign their their copyrights to the Press, they would henceforth just grant the Press an exclusive license for 6 months. The authors who publish in the three Press journals, The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, or The Journal of General Physiology will henceforth be allowed to keep their copyrights.

Excerpts of the editorial:

This permits authors to reuse their own work in any way, as long as they attribute it to the original publication. Third parties may use our published materials under a Creative Commons license, six months after publication...

In 1787, the Copyright Clause of the United States Constitution gave the United States Congress the power "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." For more than two centuries, however, authors of scientific papers have been giving up that right. ... On the positive side, the publisher defended against improper use of the authors' work; on the negative side, restrictions were placed on authors (and third parties) that limited the reuse of the published work.

In a further step to enhance the utility of scientific content, we have now decided to return copyright to our authors. In return, however, we require authors to make their work available for reuse by the public. Instead of relinquishing copyright, our authors will now provide us with a license to publish their work. This license, however, places no restrictions on how authors can reuse their own work; we only require them to attribute the work to its original publication. Six months after publication, third parties (that is, anyone who is not an author) can use the material we publish under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

The Creative Commons License will apply retroactively to all work published by The Rockefeller University Press before November 1, 2007... Authors who previously assigned their copyright to the Press are now granted the right to use their own work in any way they like, as long as they acknowledge the original publication.

We are pleased to finally comply with the original spirit of copyright in our continuing effort to promote public access to the published biomedical literature.

Full text of our new copyright policy is available here: http://www.jcb.org/misc/terms.shtml.

Posted by Katie Newman at 12:40 PM

April 8, 2008

University of Illinois is Now a Member of BioMed Central

The University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana is now a Supporting Member of the open access publisher, BioMed Central.

What this means is that when you submit a journal article for publication in one of nearly 200 BMC titles, you will receive a 15% discount off the article processing charge!

Here's a list of the BMC titles:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/browse/journals/.
This discount also applies to articles submitted to Chemistry Central
http://www.chemistrycentral.com/ and to PhysMath Central http://www.physmathcentral.com/.

Here's a list of the article processing charges for the various BMC journals (before discount):
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/authors/apcfaq
For most of the journals, the fee is $1690, but may be as high as $2685 or as low as $500. A few are even free.

Many of the BMC journals have already earned quite respectable Impact Factors. See:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/faq?name=impactfactor
e.g., Genome Biology (7.17); BMC Bioinformatics (3.62); BMC Biology (4.43); BMC Evolutionary Biology (4.46)

Why should you consider publishing in a BMC journal?
First of all, know that all research submitted will receive rigorous and rapid peer review. If the article is accepted:

• It will be accessible to anyone with an Internet connection - open access means no subscriptions or 'pay-per-view' charges for original research articles.
  
• It is more likely to be cited, as it will be freely available to the entire global biological and medical community
  
• It will be listed in PubMed within days of publication
  
• You retain the copyright of your work
  
• You will be able to view your article's access statistics, which average over 200 downloads per month per article
  
• Your articles will be securely and permanently archived in PubMed Central

Papers published by our colleagues:
The University of Illinois' "homepage" lists papers that were published in BMC jouranls by U of I authors in the last year -- at this point 30 research articles, software, protocols, etc:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/inst/11700
For your interest, here's the U of I-Chicago's home page:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/inst/48900

Submitting a paper:
If you are on campus within our recognized IP range when submitting a manuscript you will be identified as belonging to a member institution and automatically granted a 15% discount on article processing charges If you are at home or at an external terminal when submitting your paper, you can still claim this discount by stating that you are a affiliated with the U of I. Papers may be submitted either via a journal home page or via http://www.biomedcentral.com/manuscript/.

Posted by Katie Newman at 4:03 PM

March 31, 2008

Cancer Literature Through PubMed: Currently 13% is free

Writing in her blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, Heather Morrison has reported an analysis of the % of free cancer literature that's available thorugh PubMed. I'm sure she'll be tracking the availablity of this literature over time, considering the NIH Public Access mandate that is set to go into force in just a week -- April 7th. What she's finding at this point in time is that most of the cancer literature is NOT freely accessible.

Cancer: 13% of the literature in PubMed on cancer links to Free Fulltext.

By publication date range:
7% - within last 30 days
10% - within the last year
17% - within the last two years
21% - within the last 10 years

Data on other topics indicates a range of percentages of literature that is Free Fulltext. Of the topics selected, the highest percentage was for genetics, with 30% Free Fulltext, and the lowest was dentistry, with 4% fulltext. Most topics appear to be close to the 13% range.

Please refer to the blog entry for a link to the data, which Heather has made freely available via Google's Spreadsheets.

Posted by Katie Newman at 1:40 PM

Orphan Works Legislation: Another Try?

From Georgia Harper at @ollecteana

Congress reportedly will try to pass orphan works legislation again this session, introducing a bill as early as this week. After its March 13 hearing, at which 6 interested parties presented testimony (including the Register of Copyrights, Marybeth Peters, and representatives of the 2006 bill's most vehement opponents, free-lance photographers), the stage appears set for another try.

Georgia voices doubts about the value of the legislation to non-profits, but time will tell if the legislation is passed. Stay tuned for the next act.

Posted by P. Kaufman at 10:17 AM

March 7, 2008

Access Barriers to Information are Bad for Capitalism

From that bastion of capitalism, the Wall Street journal comes this pronouncement...

... barriers to the spread of information are bad for capitalism. The dissemination of knowledge is almost as crucial as the production of it for the creation of wealth, and knowledge (like people) can't reproduce in isolation...In fact, open access might help to moderate some of the worst forms of academic hokum, if only by holding them up to the light of day -- and perhaps by making taxpayers, parents and college donors more careful about where they send their money ...

Keeping knowledge bottled up is also bad for the world's poor; indeed, opening up the research produced on America's campuses via the Internet is probably among the most cost-effective ways of helping underdeveloped countries rise from poverty ...

The context for these quotes was an article, Information Liberation, in the March 7, 2008 issue of the Wall Street Journal. (Currently available for all to read.)

The focus of the article is on the problems that the current barriers to research findings cause to the citizenry. The blame is placed on the rising serials costs. However, it is noted that there are signs that the barriers to access are falling with the advent of open access mandates. The recent NIH mandate is applauded

Congress has mandated that by April 7 papers arising from NIH-sponsored research -- roughly 80,000 of them a year -- be made freely available in the federal PubMed database, which can be read by anyone with an Internet connection. Alas, the new NIH policy will allow a 12-month lag between publication and posting on PubMed.

As is the recent mandate by the Harvard Arts & Sciences faculty

hose members voted to publish on the Internet for all to see -- gratis. These professors will give Harvard world-wide nonexclusive license to their work, and the university will exercise it by posting their papers. The journals won't have much choice if they want the work of Harvard professors. The faculty members will still publish in expensive journals, but the move to put the same materials on the Internet is a stake poised at the heart of a vampire that has been sucking dollars out of academic institutions for years through the ever-sharper bite of subscription prices.

Posted by Katie Newman at 4:21 PM

February 13, 2008

Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences Adopts New Open Access Requirement

Yesterday Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences unanimously approved a motion that would allow Harvard to place the final peer-reviewed version of all journal articles into an open access repository (an institutional repository similar to UIUC's IDEALS - http://ideals.uiuc.edu/).

This kind of requirement is becoming more common in Europe and at a few institutions in the UK and Australia, but this is close to the first - if not the first - such requirement in the United States. Alongside the new NIH requirement for deposit into PubMed Central, this may indicate the beginnings of a real sea change.

The full text of the Harvard motion is below:

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles written while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy. The Dean or the Dean's designate will waive application of the policy for a particular article upon written request by a Faculty member explaining the need.

To assist the University in distributing the articles, each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Provost's Office in an appropriate format (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office. The Provost's Office may make the article available to the public in an open-access repository.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. The policy will be reviewed after three years and a report presented to the Faculty.

See also the Chronicle of Higher Education's entry
and Peter Suber's comments.

Posted by Sarah Shreeves at 10:12 AM

January 22, 2008

Peer Review and Blog Comments Go Head-to-Head

An unusual experiment to compare traditional peer review with anonymous blog comments begins today, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. Noah Wardrip-Fruin, assistant professor of communication at UCSD, working with the Institute for the Future of the Book's CommentPress (and with the agreement of his publisher, MIT Press), will post sections of his book (Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies) on Grand Theft Auto, making it available to readers to add critiques in the margins. MIT Press also will use its traditional peer review process, allowing for a side-by-side comparison of traditional and new review techniques. Professor Wardrip-Fruin expects to receive many more helpful comments through the blog than through the traditional peer review approach. Although the blog comments may be helpful, it's unlikely that they will replace the traditional peer review process -- at least not quite yet.

Posted by P. Kaufman at 9:37 AM

January 18, 2008

More on the NIH Mandate from the journal, Science

The January 18th Science adds or clarifies several points about the recent NIH mandate (see previous posting), including:

• NIH is not offering grantees additional money to make their articles open access, but will allow grantees to use their grant money for this purpose.
  
• "To give scientists a nudge, NIH will require them to include the PMC number when they cite their own papers in grant applications and progress reports. Other possible ways of forcing scofflaws to comply range from having a program director call with a reminder to "the most extreme: suspending funds," says NIH Deputy Director for Extramural Research Norka Ruiz Bravo. "We hope we're not going to get there," she says."
  
• "The new law puts NIH in line with some other funding agencies that require grantees to send their papers to PMC or a U.K. version of the archive; these include the U.K.'s Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust, which adopted such policies in 2006, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Bethesda, Maryland, whose rule goes into effect this month. All three institutions require that papers be posted within 6 months of publication in a journal" whereas the NIH mandate requires access within 12 months of publication.
  

Not surprisingly, publishers will be (and have been) monitoring what their authors put in PubMed Central:

...some publishers say they will need to police the site for articles mistakenly posted, such as those not yet released from the journal's embargo or those published before 2005. Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society, says APS asked NIH to remove 78 papers last year, and he expects "hundreds" of similar errors when the mandatory policy kicks in. Lipman acknowledges that NIH had to remove some papers. But complying with copyright, he says, is not NIH's responsibility; it's "between the author and the publisher."

For a growing list of other funder-mandates, take a look at ROARMAP (Registry of Open Access Repository Material Archiving Policies).

Posted by Katie Newman at 10:08 AM

January 16, 2008

Open Access Mandate from the European Research Council

The European Research Council (ERC), a relatively new granting agency with deep pockets, has released its Guidelines for Open Access:

The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication.

This news is especially exciting as the ERC will shortly be announcing (PDF) it's first round of grant recipients, some 300 up-and-coming scientists from 21 countries and 170 institutions. Together they will share around 6 billion Euros over the next six years. Grant sizes will be for up to 2 million Euros per 5 year period.

The ERC joins a growing list of granting agencies that are requiring that publications resulting from their funds be made openly accessible within 6-12 months of publication.

Posted by Katie Newman at 5:43 PM

NIH Reveals Details of the Open Access Mandate

As previously reported, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has been directed by new legislation to mandate that all peer-reviewed journal articles published as a result of NIH grant funds be made freely available through PubMed Central, the digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.

The NIH has now filled in many implementation details concerning the mandate and they may be found on the NIH Public Access site, FAQ, and Guide Notice for Public Access.

Details that will be of interest to the University of Illinois community:

TIMING
The policy applies to all peer-reviewed articles that are accepted for publication on or after April 7, 2008.

PUBLISHER AGREEMENTS & COPYRIGHT
From the FAQ:
“Authors should work with the publisher before any rights are transferred to ensure that all conditions of the NIH Public Access Policy can be met. Authors should avoid signing any agreements with publishers that do not allow the author to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy.”

A publisher’s compliance with the NIH policy can be checked by reviewing the SHERPA site. For example, from Sherpa one learns that both Nature and Science allow authors to comply with the NIH mandate, subject to restrictions, with just a 6 month embargo. In neither publication can the author archive the publisher's PDF (though it should be referenced); rather the author's final peer-reviewed version should be posted to PubMed Central. (The most convenient time to do this would be at the same that you send in the final version to the publisher.)

In our experience, authors are having some success with modifying the copyright transfer agreements when they strike through the objectionable portions of copyright transfer forms and write in the rights that they wish to maintain. The new NIH policy does not change the author’s copyrights’ status. The author can still “assign [copyrights] to journals, subject to the limited right that must be retained…to post the works in accordance with the Policy” in PubMed Central.

The NIH suggests some possible language that can be used to modify a publisher’s agreement: "Journal acknowledges that Author retains the right to provide a copy of the final manuscript to the NIH upon acceptance for Journal publication, for public archiving in PubMed Central as soon as possible but no later than 12 months after publication by Journal.”

Additionally, the University of Illinois provides authors with a copyright amendment form to publisher agreements that is supported by the provosts of the CIC, and was developed to support authors who wanted to retain some rights over the works that they produce. The amendment language, if accepted by the publisher, would allow authors to comply with the NIH mandate. Download the CIC amendment. To use the addendum, authors need only to fill in the form and staple it to the publisher's agreement form that they return to publishers prior to the publication of their article.

PUBLICATION COSTS
NIH will reimburse for publication costs, including author fees. (Some journals charge article processing fees for articles that will be made openly available. NIH’s policy is to cover such costs.)

POSTING TO PUBMED CENTRAL
Posting is required even if you publish in an open access journal, or if the article is freely accessible on the publisher’s website.

CITING NIH-FUNDED RESEARCH
"Beginning May 25, 2008, anyone submitting an application, proposal or progress report to the NIH must include the PMC or the NIH Manuscript Submission reference number when citing applicable articles that arise from their NIH-funded research. This policy includes applications submitted to the NIH for the May 25, 2008 due date and subsequent due dates."

QUESTIONS?
Be sure to read the NIH Public Access site, FAQ, and Guide Notice for Public Access.

Send questions concerning the mandate or other aspects of the NIH Public Access Policy to:
Office of Extramural Research
National Institutes of Health
1 Center Drive, Room 144
Bethesda, MD 20892-0152
Email: PublicAccess@nih.gov
Website: http://publicaccess.nih.gov

For local assistance, please contact Katie Newman, University of Illinois Library Scholarly Communication Officer. florador@uiuc.edu or 217-265-5386

With thanks to the MIT Libraries for some of the organization of this message.

Posted by Katie Newman at 3:54 PM

January 15, 2008

University Presses Band Together to Produce More Books

From Research Information (1/7/2008)....

Top university presses announce a collaboration to find a way to reduce costs of scholarly publishing and to allow for more books to be released. Set up as a joint operation for copy-editing, design, layout and typesetting for the work in American literatures, the collaboration will be funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The five university presses involved are: the NYU Press, Rutgers University Press, Fordham University Press, Temple University Press and the University of Virginia Press.

The NYU will manage a $1.37 million grant to be spread out over five years. The grant includes royalties for authors and marketing funds. It is expected that Mellon will follow this grant with several others promoting collaboration, in sectors such as Slavic studies, ethnomusicology and East Asian studies.

The new system is likely to generate adequate savings to allow each of the presses to increase output by five books a year.

Read more:
Inside Higher Ed (12/28/2007)

Posted by Katie Newman at 12:06 PM

January 2, 2008

America's Most Literate Cities

The annual rankings of the "most literate cities" have been released by Central Connecticut State University, accounting for per capita booksellers; educational attainment; internet resources; library resources; newspaper circulation; and periodical publications. The study ranks only the 69 largest U.S. cities (population 250,000 or more)

And the winners are:

1 Minneapolis, MN
2 Seattle, WA
3 St. Paul, MN
4 Denver, CO
5 Washington, DC
6 St. Louis, MO
7 San Francisco, CA
8 Atlanta, GA
9 Pittsburgh, PA
10 Boston, MA

Posted by P. Kaufman at 10:49 AM

December 27, 2007

Public Access Mandate Now Law

Yesterday, President Bush signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.

Readers may recall that the NIH's existing public access policy was implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005. With the enactment of this new law, researchers will be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine's online repository, no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

Many leading scientists, patient advocates, librarians, and others had lobbied for years to make research funded by tax dollars accessible to the public. This new mandate now will provide unfettered access to scientific findings for everyone seeking them.

The text of the law reads:

SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

Posted by P. Kaufman at 7:15 AM

December 5, 2007

U of Pittsburgh Press Makes It's Older Books Openly Accessible

Press Release from U. Pittsburg...
(with thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News)

Pitt’s Libraries and University Press Collaborate on Open Access to Press Titles, a press release from the University of Pittsburgh, November 29, 2007. Excerpt:

The University of Pittsburgh’s University Library System (ULS) and University Press have formed a partnership to provide digital editions of press titles as part of the library system’s D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program. Thirty-nine books from the Pitt Latin American Series published by the University of Pittsburgh Press are now available online, freely accessible to scholars and students worldwide. Ultimately, most of the Press’ titles older than 2 years will be provided through this open access platform.

For the past decade, the University Library System has been building digital collections on the Web under its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program....

More titles will be added to the University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions each month until most of the current scholarly books published by the Press are available both in print and as digital editions....

The University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions may be viewed at http://digital.library.pitt.edu/p/pittpress/
and and through direct links from the Press website, http://www.upress.pitt.edu/.

Posted by Katie Newman at 5:27 PM

November 30, 2007

Million Book Project Reaches 1.5 Million Book Mark

From the Carnegie Mellon newsletter...
http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/November/nov27_ulib.shtml

Online "Universal Library" Gives Readers Access to 1.5 Million Books: International Project Makes Complete Texts Available Through Single Web Portal

PITTSBURGH: The Million Book Project, an international venture led by Carnegie Mellon University in the United States, Zhejiang University in China, the Indian Institute of Science in India and the Library at Alexandria in Egypt, has completed the digitization of more than 1.5 million books, which are now available online. For the first time since the project was initiated in 2002, all of the books ... are available through a single Web portal of the Universal Library (www.ulib.org), said Gloriana St. Clair, Carnegie Mellon's dean of libraries.

"Anyone who can get on the Internet now has access to a collection of books the size of a large university library," said Raj Reddy, professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon. "This project brings us closer to the ideal of the Universal Library: making all published works available to anyone, anytime, in any language. The economic barriers to the distribution of knowledge are falling," said Reddy, who has spearheaded the Million Book Project.

Though Google, Microsoft and the Internet Archive all have launched major book digitization projects, the Million Book Project represents the world's largest, university-based digital library of freely accessible books. At least half of its books are out of copyright, or were digitized with the permission of the copyright holders, so the complete texts are or eventually will be available free.

The collection includes a large number of rare and orphan books. More than 20 languages are represented among the 1.5 million books, a little more than 1 percent of all of the world's books.

Many of the books, particularly those in Chinese and English, have been digitized - their text converted by optical character recognition methods into computer readable text. That allows these books to be searched and, eventually, reformatted for access by PDAs and other devices. ..
Though the long-term goal of the Universal Library is to make books, artwork and other published works available online for free, about half of the current collection remains under copyright. Until the permission of the copyright holders can be documented, or copyright laws are amended, only 10 percent or less of those books can be accessed at no cost.

The project has surpassed one million books, but the participants are looking to expand to all countries and eventually every language...

For a full list of partners in the Million Book Project, see the "people" menu at www.ulib.org.

Read the full news release...
http://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2007/November/nov27_ulib.shtml
Access the Universal Library...
http://www.ulib.org

(With thanks to Karen Wei for informing us of this news)

Posted by Katie Newman at 9:48 AM

November 19, 2007

Americans Are Reading Less

The National Endowment for the Arts today released an interesting and disturbing report of American reading today. Gathering and collating available data, it reports that the data are simple, consistent, and alarming. Although there has been measurable progress in recent years in reading ability at the elementary school level, all progress seems to stop as children enter their teens. There is a general decline in reading among teenagers and adults and both reading ability and the habit of regular reading have greatly declined among college graduates.

The report reaches three conclusions:
* Americans are spending less time reading.
* Reading comprehension skills are eroding
* These declines have serious civic, social, cultural, and economic implications.

These conclusions are, as the report notes, "unsettling." Clearly, more research is needed to explore factors that might contribute to this trend and to weigh the relative effectiveness and costs and benefits of programs to foster lifelong reading and skills development.

Posted by P. Kaufman at 7:13 AM

November 15, 2007

Scholarly Societies with Open Access Journals

Scholars are often concerned that if their society journal becomes "open access", subscription revenues to their society will dry up. Many learned societies are very interested in offering their articles to the widest possible audience, which OA offers, but are concerned about the sustainability of business models that provide for open access.

Caroline Sutton and Peter Suber have recently begun a two-phase project to look at OA publication initiatives from learned societies.

The goal of phase one is to make a comprehensive list of scholarly societies worldwide that support gold OA for their own journals - this is often referred to as the author-pays model. In the preliminary spreadsheet, they've divided the journals into those that are fully open access (currently 478 journals) and those that follow a hybrid model (72 journals) where some of the articles are open and others are not.

Among the information that is being gathered:
Journal title
Scholarly Society name
URL
Publisher
Copyright
Geographic location
Subject
Field (STM, HUM, ARTS, SS, Multi)
Print edition
Submission fee
Publication / Page charge
ISI Impact Factor
Where indexed
Date OA starts

Once they have secured funding, the authors plan to probe the societies to "learn details about their turn to OA, their business models, and the financial and academic consequences of their OA policies."

Read more about the project:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-07.htm#list
http://www.co-action.net/projects/OAsocieties

Access the most recent spreadsheet:
http://www.co-action.net/projects/OAsocieties/OAsocieties.xls

Posted by Katie Newman at 10:39 AM

November 13, 2007

Update: Library-led Educational Initiatives in Scholarly Communication

Last week we noted that excerpts from the ARL-sponsored SPEC Kit report #299, "Scholarly Communication Educational Initiatives" had been posted to the University of Illinois research archive, IDEALS.

The entire report has now been made freely available on the ARL (Association of Research Libraries) web site! The ARL really wants this report widely disseminated, so are making the entire report freely available. Find it at:
http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/spec/complete.shtml

The difference between the full report and what I was able to post is that I only posted the part of the report that I wrote together with my co-authors, Deb Blecic (UIC) and Kim Armstrong (formerly UIS, now CIC). That is, I posted the Executive Summary, the Survey Instrument and Results, and Selected Articles and Web Resources). In addition to these, the full report includes more than 100 pages of representative documents submitted by the seventy or so ARL member libraries that participated in the survey -- documents such as examples of Committee Charges/Proposals for Scholarly Communication (SC) initiatives; SC position descriptions; SC web sites; Copyright web sites; SC blogs; Newsletters; and, Presentation descriptions, handouts, and slides.

The record for the excerpt of the report in IDEALS will shortly be amended to include a reference to the openly accessible full text version of the document at the ARL web.

Posted by Katie Newman at 10:03 AM

November 5, 2007

Library-led Educational Initiatives in Scholarly Communication

Scholarly Communication Education Initiatives, SPEC Kit 299, was recently published by the Association of Research Libraries. Authored by Katie Newman, Deborah Blecic, and Kim Armstrong, this report surveyed the ARL libraries concerning their activities in getting the word out to their students and researchers about their scholarly communication options. What worked? What didn't? What's the best way to reach the researchers?

Since the author-agreement for the report allowed the authors to deposit the report in an institutional repository, the following portions of the report are available at the University of Illinois repository, IDEALS at the durable URL, http://hdl.handle.net/2142/2458

• The Executive Summary (7 pgs)
• The Survey Questions and Responses (64 pgs)
• The lists of Selected Resources (6 pgs).

The openly accessible portion of the report does not include the Representative Documents that were submitted by the respondents (106 pgs) which included proposals for education initiatives, scholarly communication and copyright Web pages, job descriptions, and education materials.

To purchase this report or for a list of other SPEC Kits, see: http://www.arl.org/resources/pubs/spec/index.shtml

Posted by Katie Newman at 3:20 PM

October 30, 2007

The State of the University Press

This entry is a little behind in noting this article, but, apropos of the Ithaka Report, there is an interesting piece on the state of the university press from the September 14th Inside Higher Education: Ronald Reagan vs. the University Press by James F. Reische, a former senior executive editor at the University of Michigan Press. Especially interesting is the conversation among readers in the comments at the end of the article. Well worth reading.

Posted by Sarah Shreeves at 9:29 AM

October 29, 2007

Science Has a Serious Marketing Problem

The Scientist (Vol 21, Issue 10) ran an interesting article, "The Future of Public Engagement" about the need for scientists to "frame" their research for public consumption. They should not just "dumb down" their science, so "the public" can understand it. Rather

...scientists must learn to focus on presenting, or "framing," their messages in ways that connect with diverse audiences. This means remaining true to the underlying science, but drawing on research to tailor messages in ways that make them personally relevant and meaningful to different publics. For example, when scientists are speaking to a group of people who think about the world primarily in economic terms, they should emphasize the economic relevance of science - such as, in the case of embryonic stem cell research, pointing out that expanded government funding would make the United States, or a particular state, more economically competitive.

How framing works..

Frames simplify complex issues by lending greater importance to certain considerations and arguments over others. In the process, framing helps communicate why an issue might be a problem, who or what might be responsible, and what should be done. A typology of frames specific to science-related issues summarizes a common set of frames specific to science.

The article gives examples from research in successes in communicating stem cell research, plant biotechnology, and nanotechnology.

Some scientists already frame their communications. Consider, for example, E.O. Wilson's Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth. In his book, by recasting environmental stewardship as not only a scientific matter, but also one of personal and moral duty, Wilson has generated discussion among a religious audience that might not otherwise pay attention to popular science books.

Perhaps because I just read a similar idea in Alan Alda's book "Things I Overheard While Listening to Myself", this Scientist article resonated for me. In his book, Alda suggests that, along with all the science classes students take, perhaps they should also be taking communication classes!

We can't leave the popularization of science just to the science news writers. Their articles certainly help. But citizens need to hear about research from the scientists themselves. Last night I watched a wonderful program on Nature about colony collapse in honeybees, "Silence of the Bees". Two of our scientists from the U of I entomology department, May Berenbaum and Gene Robinson (together with other scientists) spoke eloquently of the catastrophe that will occur if honeybees continue to decline. One couldn't help but be drawn into the story and into the CSI-like research effort that's going on to solve this problem.

Posted by Katie Newman at 2:29 PM

October 26, 2007

Mandate For Public Access to NIH-Funded Research to Become Law

Press Release from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access
www.taxpayeraccess.org

For immediate release
October 24, 2007

MANDATE FOR PUBLIC ACCESS TO NIH-FUNDED RESEARCH
POISED TO BECOME LAW

Full U.S. Senate Approves Bill Containing Support for Access To
Taxpayer-Funded Research

Washington, D.C. ­ October 24, 2007 - The U.S. Senate last night approved
the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill (S.1710), including
a provision that directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to
strengthen its Public Access Policy by requiring rather than requesting
participation by researchers. The bill will now be reconciled with the House
Appropriations Bill, which contains a similar provision, in another step
toward support for public access to publicly funded research becoming United
States law.

³Last night¹s Senate action is a milestone victory for public access to
taxpayer-funded research,² said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC
(the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a founding
member of the ATA). ³This policy sets the stage for researchers, patients,
and the general public to benefit in new and important ways from our
collective investment in the critical biomedical research conducted by the
NIH.²

Under a mandatory policy, NIH-funded researchers will be required to deposit
copies of eligible manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine¹s
online database, PubMed Central. Articles will be made publicly available no
later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

The current NIH Public Access Policy, first implemented in 2005, is a
voluntary measure and has resulted in a de deposit rate of less than 5% by
individual investigators. The advance to a mandatory policy is the result of
more than two years of monitoring and evaluation by the NIH, Congress, and
the community.

³We thank our Senators for taking action on this important issue,² said Pat
Furlong, Founding President and CEO of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy.
³This level of access to NIH-funded research will impact the disease process
in novel ways, improving the ability of scientists to advance therapies and
enabling patients and their advocates to participate more effectively. The
advance is timely, much-needed, and ­ we anticipate ­ an indication of
increasingly enhanced access in future.²

³American businesses will benefit tremendously from improved access to NIH
research,² said William Kovacs, U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice president for
environment, technology and regulatory affairs. ³The Chamber encourages the
free and timely dissemination of scientific knowledge produced by the NIH as
it will improve both the public and industry¹s ability to become better
informed on developments that impact them ­ and on opportunities for
innovation.² The Chamber is the world¹s largest business federation,
representing more than three million businesses of every size, sector, and
region.

³We welcome the NIH policy being made mandatory and thank Congress for
backing this important step,² said Gary Ward, Treasurer of the American
Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). ³Free and timely public access to
scientific literature is necessary to ensure that new discoveries are made
as quickly as feasible. It¹s the right thing to do, given that taxpayers
fund this research.² The ASCB represents 11,000 members and publishes the
highly ranked peer-reviewed journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell.

Joseph added, ³On behalf of the taxpayers, patients, researchers, students,
libraries, universities, and businesses that pressed this bill forward with
their support over the past two years, the ATA thanks Congress for throwing
its weight behind the success of taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded
research.²

Negotiators from the House and Senate are expected to meet to reconcile
their respective bills this fall. The final, consolidated bill will have to
pass the House and the Senate before being delivered to the President at the
end of the year.

Posted by P. Kaufman at 7:55 AM

October 11, 2007

Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer Theory of Superconductivity Papers Now Open Access

Thanks to Mary C. Schlembach, Assistant Engineering Librarian and Physics and Astronomy Librarian at the University of Illinois for this note...

From the American Physical Society...

To honor the 50th anniversary celebration of the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer Theory of Superconductivity being held Oct 10-13 at the Univ. of Illinois, the APS has made the three original BCS papers "Free-to-Read":

• Bound Electron Pairs in a Degenerate Fermi Gas (L.N. Cooper, Phys. Rev.104, 1189 (1956))
  
• Microscopic Theory of Superconductivity (J. Bardeen, L.N. Cooper, and J. R. Schrieffer, Phys. Rev. 106, 162 (1957))
  
• Theory of Superconductivity (J. Bardeen, L. N. Cooper, and J. R. Schrieffer, Phys. Rev. 108, 1175 (1957))

We are honored to have published these seminal works that have become the basis for many important technological developments.
Sincerely,
Gene D. Sprouse, Editor in Chief, American Physical Society
Joseph W. Serene, Treasurer/Publisher, American Physical Society
-----------------------------
For links to these papers, go to http://www.conferences.uiuc.edu/bcs50/papers.html

Posted by Katie Newman at 5:09 PM

October 3, 2007

Forum on Open Access, Alternative Publishing Models, and Author Rights at UIUC

The University Library, the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and the Office of Technology Management are sponsoring a Forum on Open Access, Alternative Publishing Models, and Author Rights on November 9th from 8:30 - 3:00 at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center Ballroom. Lunch and light morning and afternoon refreshments will be provided.

The objective of this forum is to inform and engage faculty concerning open access to intellectual property. Topics will include current trends and issues in scholarly communication, open access and teaching, open access and tools for discovery, and the potential for open access to increase the dissemination and impact of research publications. This forum will also discuss various models for, or degrees of, openness, from open-access institutional repositories the (like University of Illinois' IDEALS) to other alternative publishing models, including independent and non-profit open-access publishing, as well as low-cost commercial publishing.

Speakers include:

• Provost Linda Katehi (UIUC)


• Karla Hahn (Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication, Association of Research Libraries)


• Michael Jensen (Director of Web Communications, National Academies Press)


• Peter Kaufman (President and Executive Director, Intelligent Television)


• Bill Cope (Managing Director, Common Ground Publishing)


• Alexander Scheeline (Professor of Chemistry, UIUC)


• Paul Arroyo (Electronic Publisher, University of Illinois Press)


• Sarah Shreeves (Coordinator, IDEALS)

The Forum is free, but we do ask that you register so that we can get a headcount for refreshments. See http://www.otm.uiuc.edu/openaccess.asp.

Posted by Sarah Shreeves at 9:57 AM

Suit Over Restrictions on Authors in Nations Under Embargo Settled

A long-standing dispute between the U.S. Treasury Department and U.S. publishers over how publications may deal with works submitted by scholars in nations under embargo has ended. The U.S. Treasury Department has now issued new regulations clarifying publishers' rights and has agreed to settle a lawsuit initiated by groups representing publishers and authors.

New regulations were issued in the August 30 Federal Register. On Oct. 1, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced it had agreed to settle the lawsuit filed by the Association of American University Presses and other groups.

The settlement appears to be a win-win situation for both groups. OFAC will retain its general-license requirement but will no longer require a special case-by-case license for editing or publishing works by authors in Cuba, Iran, Sudan, or Myanmar (the special license requirement actually was eased in 2004); the general-license requirement seems to be a formality except in unusual cases involving military sensitivity or direct involvement of embargoed foreign governments in research papers, which will continue to be restricted. The group representing publishers and authors won a stipulation that works published in electronic formats have the same protections as those published in print.

Read more in today's Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted by P. Kaufman at 7:28 AM

September 27, 2007

Howard Hughes Medical Institute Announces Further Support for Open Access

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) the largest private funder of biomedical research in the U.S. has announced several new policies that strongly demonstrate it's support for open access:

• Starting with papers submitted for publication after January 1, 2008, HHMI will will require its scientists to publish their original research articles in journals that allow the articles and supplementary materials to be made freely accessible in a public repository within six months of publication.
  
• HHMI will pay up to $2,000 in open access charges per article with the balance coming from laboratory budgets or other sources....
  
• Under an agreement reached with Springer, if an HHMI sponsored article is accepted for publication in a Springer journal (after a process of rigorous peer-review), it will be immediately published with full open access and deposited in repositories such as PubMed Central. HHMI has agreed to pay Springer a flat-rate fee per article of $3,000. Springer's Open Choice programme applies to all its journals. In Springer Open Choice, authors are not required to transfer their copyright to Springer; instead, these articles are published under a Creative Commons License....
  

This agreement with Springer is much better than the earlier agreement HMMI made with Elsevier whereby HMMI agreed to pay for delayed access ("green access") to articles that their authors publish in Elsevier journals rather than the immediate access ("gold access") offered through Springer's Open Choice program.

Posted by Katie Newman at 2:10 PM

Harvard Faculty Council recommends an OA policy

With thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News and the Harvard Crimson ...

Harvard Faculty Council recommends an OA policy
Alexandria Hiatt, Profs Might Make Their Articles Free: Faculty Council proposes ‘open access’ for journal articles, Harvard Crimson, September 27, 2007.

Excerpt:
The Faculty Council, the 18-member governing body of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), advanced a measure yesterday that would make articles written by Harvard professors in scholarly journals available online at no cost.

The proposal would create a system of “open access” whereby the authors could make their work available either on a personal or university Web site for free, according to Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith L. Ryan, who serves on the council.

Professors would have the option to opt out of the new system, Ryan said.
“The problem this is supposed to address is the increasing monopoly that has developed on the part of scholarly journals, who are now making it increasingly difficult for people to access the material they publish,” she said.

“Libraries everywhere are paying huge amounts to scholarly journals,” she added, “and that means the amount of money they can spend on other purchases is increasingly squeezed.”

The program has been spearheaded by Welch Professor of Computer Science Stuart M. Shieber. According to Ryan, Shieber has appeared before the council three times in the past year and a half and has worked closely with the University Office of General Counsel to address any possible legal issues....

The proposal will now come before the full faculty for a vote. Ryan said she expected it to be addressed at a Faculty meeting this term.

The measure will immediately take effect if passed, according to Ryan, and the publishers will have little recourse.

“It is pretty certain that other universities would follow,” she said, “And that is crucial because it would put pressure on big publishers.”

Local perspective --
University of Illinois' Provost Linda Katehi has strongly urged faculty to retain the rights to use their own articles and to make them as widely accessible as possible. The University Senate concurred, passing a resolution that urges faculty to modify the copyright agreement forms they sign when submitting their papers for publication, using an addendum created for use by CIC members.

From Katehi's 7/10/07 note to the faculty:
"It [the Addendum] supports authors rights to use their own published work in teaching and research, to post a publication on a personal website, or to deposit it in a repository maintained by their institution or a professional association. IDEALS (www.ideals.uiuc.edu) is the University of Illinois institutional repository."

Katehi goes on to say:
"It is our responsibility as scholars to ensure that our work is available as widely as possible to maximize its scholarly impact, accessibility, and educational use. I encourage you to use the Addendum and to deposit your research and scholarship in IDEALS, which provides reliable and persistent access to its holdings."

Posted by Katie Newman at 1:51 PM

September 20, 2007

Sinking or Swimming: NY Times Select Removes Fee Barrier

Yesterday, the New York Times suspended its "Times Select" fee-paid service, choosing instead to make everything, including its archives, free to all readers. See http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/ts/ for more information.

This is a significant event in the evolution of online newspapers and newspaper services. Could it be a harbinger of things to come? Last night, NPR's "All Things Considered" ran a story on the Times' change of heart (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14537587) in which it focused on the Times' (and others') new ad-based revenue models that are being used instead of the traditional subscription/ad models. The story also reported that Rupert Murdoch is considering a similar open access model for the Wall Street journal after he takes over its ownership.

Posted by P. Kaufman at 8:24 AM

September 18, 2007

Publish and Perish: The Future Fate of Not-for-Profit Society–sponsored Journals?

In a Journal of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry editorial (Volume 55 (10): 981-982, 2007) Kevin A. Roth, Editor-in-Chief, Denis G. Baskin, Executive Editor recently announced a plan by which they hope to keep their society's journal afloat. After acknowledging the slow erosion of institutional print subscriptions, they've taken the bold move of going to a "Print on Demand" model. The journal will no longer be published and distributed in print. In addition to online subscriptions,

"the JHC will continue to be available in hard copy for those institutions or individuals who prefer to have the gorgeous print issue available or simply have limited access to the online version of the JHC. There will be no diminution in the quality of the print journal...Authors may benefit from reduced costs, because digital printing will eliminate traditional color printing costs, which can be considerable."

They go on to discuss the issues that many scholarly society publishers are facing these days as they struggle to remain afloat. Interestingly, they are not considering going "open access", though it can be noted that they are OA after a 12 month embargo. (See other Highwire titles that have similar embargo periods.)

Posted by Katie Newman at 1:16 PM

September 14, 2007

Free Online Bioscience Course from Lehigh University

Lehigh University (Bethlehem PA) is offering a totally free online biology course, Bioscience in the 21st Century. It is described as:

A multidisciplinary survey course in which several theme-based topics in bioscience and their social/ethical considerations will be explored. ...
A major goal of the course will be to communicate the importance of a systems-driven, multidisciplinary approach in bioscience. Several contemporary issues (e.g., obesity, infectious diseases, cancer, stem cell biology, advances in cell biology and medicine, genome-based medicine, neurophysiology-related topics, bioinformatics, interfaces between organic chemistry and biology, advances in engineered biomedical systems, advances in bioimaging, social/ethical considerations) will be discussed.
Lectures will be presented by faculty from different disciplines in order to highlight cross-disciplinary perspectives on fundamental problems and potential solutions in bioscience. This course is envisioned as the initial tool for shaping an intellectual approach to bioscience that routinely values interconnections among disciplines and reduces/eliminates the tendency to compartmentalize learning “by subject.”
A second goal of the course is to provide scientific literacy for non-majors and the public. Students who are not formally registered for the course are encouraged to attend lectures based on their interests. Course materials including the syllabus, course materials, and all lectures are available on the web with full access for the entire Lehigh community and interested members of the public.
Lecturers will include Lehigh University professors from a variety of departments, as well as special guests. Check for weekly postings of lectures, and class resources.
This virtual classroom opportunity is funded through a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The grant recognizes Lehigh’s innovative approach to preparing students to address emerging issues in modern biology and biomedical research.

Check out the

• Syllabus
• Schedule
• Lecture PowerPoints
• Videos

  Posted by Katie Newman at 2:14 PM

  September 11, 2007

  Project of Publishers' Association Is Criticized by Some of Its Members and Open-Access Advocates

  From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an article by Jennifer Howard on the reaction by some publishers to the PRISM initiative undertaken by the Association of American Publishers on behalf of it's members. Some of the AAP members are not pleased to be associated with PRISM.
  Project of Publishers' Association Is Criticized by Some of Its Members and Open-Access Advocates

  By JENNIFER HOWARD

  The Association of American Publishers has landed in hot water with university presses and research librarians, as well as open-access advocates, thanks to a new undertaking that is billed as an attempt to "safeguard the scientific and medical peer-review process and educate the public about the risks of proposed government interference with the scholarly communication process."

  That effort, known as the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine, or PRISM, is the latest twist in a continuing public-relations war between the association and the open-access camp.

  In January, the association created a ruckus by hiring Eric Dezenhall, a high-powered media consultant described by the journal Nature as a "pit bull" (The Chronicle, January 26). Mr. Dezenhall's advice to the publishers' association, says Nature, included a suggestion that it focus on messages such as "Public access equals government censorship."

  That advice echoes throughout PRISM's Web site in language like this: "Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research."

  The site, announced late last month, decries "bureaucratic meddling," and warns that the peer-review process will be undermined "by compromising the viability of nonprofit and commercial journals that manage and fund it."

  PRISM arrives as the U.S. Senate prepares to consider a spending bill for the National Institutes of Health that would require research supported by the agency to be made publicly available, as part of the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central, no later than 12 months after its publication . The House of Representatives has already approved such a measure in its bill.

  Fault Found With Message

  Reactions to PRISM have been widespread and vigorous, with some commentators calling for a boycott of the association. The news provoked one university-press director, Mike Rossner of Rockefeller University Press, to make a public request that a disclaimer be placed on the PRISM Web site "indicating that the views presented on the site do not necessarily represent those of all members of the AAP." Mr. Rossner continued, "We at the Rockefeller University Press strongly disagree with the spin that has been placed on the issue of open access by PRISM."

  The Association of Research Libraries sent its members a talking-points memo, dated September 4, that deals with some of the arguments made on the PRISM site. The librarians' group wrote that PRISM "repeatedly conflates policies regarding access to federally funded research with hypothesized dire consequences ultimately resulting in the loss of any effective system of scholarly publishing. Many commentators agree that inaccuracies abound in the initiative's rhetoric."

  One of those commentators, Tom Wilson, took his own advice that "academics should resign from editorial boards of journals published by the supporters of PRISM": He posted an open letter on the Information Research Weblog announcing his resignation from the editorial board of the International Journal of Information Management. Mr. Wilson, a professor emeritus of information technology at the University of Sheffield, in England, was founding editor of that journal. He is also publisher and editor in chief of Information Research, an online, open-access scholarly journal.

  Brian D. Crawford, chairman of the executive council of the AAP's professional and scholarly publishing division, acknowledged that the strength of the negative reaction had taken his group by surprise. "We did not expect to have encountered the sort of criticism that we have seen thus far," Mr. Crawford told The Chronicle. "We were truly hoping to establish this as a way to have a very productive dialogue on what are important and nuanced issues."

  A task force composed of members of the executive council put PRISM together. It had been in the works about a year, according to Mr. Crawford. (Representatives of three academic presses -- those of the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Columbia University -- sit on the council.) The press association's general membership was not consulted during that process. "We sought the input of the executive council that's representative of our membership," Mr. Crawford said.

  He added that the association was "using the announcement of the initiative itself as the initial means to engage in the outreach and recruitment of individual publishers."

  It is not clear how many publishers have responded positively to that call.

  Mr. Crawford also confirmed that Mr. Dezenhall, the PR maven, was still consulting for the publishers' group, although he would not say whether the consultant had been directly involved in formulating PRISM.

  Disclaimer Considered

  Mr. Crawford defended his group against charges that it is anti-open access. "We're definitely not saying that open access equals faulty science," he said. "What we're saying is, It's important for publishers to have the flexibility to introduce and experiment with whatever business model they wish to, without government intervention."

  Because of the criticisms, however, the publishers' group is taking "under advisement" the idea of adding a disclaimer, as Mr. Rossner suggested. It's also possible that the association will decide to revise the language on the PRISM Web site in response to the concerns of university presses and libraries.

  Peter Suber, a professor of philosophy at Earlham College and one of the leaders of the open-access movement, has been closely tracking responses to PRISM on his Open Access News blog. In an interview, he confirmed that the reaction to PRISM had spread beyond the open-access community.

  "In the past couple of years, there have been a couple of events that have mobilized newcomers" to the open-access debate, he said. "The hiring of Eric Dezenhall in January was one such event. PRISM is another."

  Asked what effect PRISM is likely to have, Mr. Suber noted that the publishers' group has the resources to back it up on Capitol Hill. "The message is no threat at all," he said. "The message is a laughingstock. But the lobbying behind the message might be effective."

  Posted by Katie Newman at 10:43 AM

  September 10, 2007

  Paying for Journal e-Access by Ads

  Many web sites are supported by ad revenue -- e.g., google, yahoo -- delivering eyeballs to relevant ads. The sci-tech publisher Elsevier, perhaps looking to the future when more articles are Open Access, is taking the novel approach of delivering registered eyeballs to ads from pharmaceutical companies in exchange for "open access" to some of it's higher costing journals.

  As reported on the OA Librarian Blog...
  Monetized Open Access? Elsevier's Move Into Ad Profits
  With its revenues flat and business models changing, Reed Elsevier has made a bold move into offering free journal content via a web portal in oncology called www.OncologySTAT.com - the site provides free access to current journals from Elsevier's expensive journal titles, paying for it using ads. While Web adverts are nothing new, this combination of open access and ads is new.

  www.OncologySTAT.com asks health workers (including librarians) to register and, in exchange, provides immediate access to current cancer-related content from Reed Elsevier's gold standards such as The Lancet and Surgical Oncology. Elsevier wants to sign up 150,000 professional users in the first year to attract advertising from pharmaceutical companies. Is this a new publishing model?

  Even though Elsevier posted profits of billions in 2006, it obviously is aware of the impact of open access on the industry and the search enterprise. This move into providing free oncology content using ads might be a viable business model, and may mean a move away from its traditional expensive subscriptions-based model. Time will tell.

  --- Note added later: ---
  After registering for access, users get a note informing them that they'll have access to:
  - Search and download current articles from 100+ Elsevier cancer related journals.
  - Literature scans from the top 20 cancer related journals (JCO, JNCI, CA, Blood, NEJM, JAMA, etc.)
  - Daily medical and regulatory news from Elsevier Global Medical News Group and FDC Reports' "The Pink Sheet Daily."
  - 25+ Cancer Type Spotlights (Breast, Lung, Prostate, etc)
  - Professional Drug Monograph and Interactions Database; patient handouts
  - Chemotherapy Regimens (The Elsevier Guide to Oncology Drugs & Regimens, 2006 edition)
  - Coverage of all major cancer conferences and meetings
  - Plus MEDLINE, expert interviews, blogs, videos, and more

  --
  

  Posted by Katie Newman at 1:39 PM

  September 7, 2007

  SPARC on PRISM

  As reported in Open Access News...
  SPARC has released a letter to its members about PRISM, September 6, 2007.  It was written by Heather Joseph, SPARC’s Executive Director. 
  Excerpt:
  

  
  I'm writing to bring to your attention the recent launch of an anti-open access lobbying effort. The initiative, called PRISM – the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine”, was launched with development support from the Association of American Publishers and specifically targets efforts to expand public access to federally funded research results – including the National Institute of Health’s Public Access Policy.
  The messaging on the PRISM Web site, which is aimed at key policy makers, directly corresponds to the PR campaign reportedly undertaken by the AAP earlier this year. As Nature reported in January, AAP publishers met with PR “pit bull” Eric Dezenhall to develop a campaign against the “free-information movement” that focuses on simple messages, such as “public access equals government censorship,” and suggested that “the publishers should attempt to equate traditional publishing models with peer review”. News of this proposed campaign met with immediate and heavy criticism in the academic community.
  The new PRISM Web site closely tracks with the recommended PR strategy, highlighting messages that include:
  * Public access/open access will destroy the peer review system
  * Public access equals government censorship
  * The government is trying to expropriate publishers’ intellectual property
  This campaign is clearly focused on the preservation of the status quo in scholarly publishing, (along with the attendant revenues), and not on ensuring that scientific research results are distributed and used as widely as possible. The launch of this initiative provides a timely opportunity for engaging faculty members, researchers, students and administrators in dialogue on important issues in scholarly communications.
  To assist in this conversation, the Association of Research Libraries has prepared a series of talking points that explicitly address each of the PRISM messages listed above....
  The reaction to the launch of PRISM by the academic research community has been immediate and quite strong. Of particular note are reactions by these important constituencies:
  1) Some publishers have called for the AAP to post a disclaimer on the PRISM Web site, indicating that PRISM does *not* represent their views on the issues of open access and public access. (See open letter from Mike Rossner, Executive Director of Rockefeller University Press.)
  2) Some journal editors have also expressed displeasure with the initiative. For example, Tom Wilson, Editor (and Founder) of the International Journal of Information Management, resigned from that editorial board in protest of Elsevier's involvement with PRISM.
  Others, including Peter Murray Rust of the University of Cambridge (UK), have written to publishers with which they are affiliated as author or editor and asked them to take action to publicly disassociate themselves with PRISM.
  3) Researchers are also questioning how their choices may result in unwanted association with PRISM. Some are calling for colleagues to register displeasure over publishers’ involvement with PRISM by reconsidering submitting work, reviewing, or editing for publishers who support the coalition (See ). Others are going even further, calling for a boycott of those publishers....
  PRISM developments will be of interest to many on campus – including those who follow open access and anyone who is involved with PRISM publishers as an author, editor, or subscriber. Please feel free to share this information. To stay abreast of related news, visit the SPARC Web site or Peter Suber’s Open Access News blog....
  

  Posted by Katie Newman at 5:06 PM

  September 4, 2007

  Faculty Attitudes and Behaviors Regarding Scholarly Communication

  The University of California's Office of Scholarly Communication has just released a new report that is the result of a faculty survey designed to help UC understand trends in scholarly publishing. Perhaps not surprisingly, the survey shows a gap between attitudes and behaviors. Although UC faculty widely express concerns about the need for changes in the current systems of scholarly communication, they largely conform to conventional behavior. Faculty consistently identify the obstacle to change as the existing reward systems of tenure, promotion, and grant-making, which favor traditional publishing forms and venues.

  UC faculty appear to be under-informed on a range of issues and initiatives designed to foster innovation in scholarly communication, including some that emanate from their own governance structure and from UC's programs and services. And although they tend to agree that management of copyright is an important factor in the evolution of scholarly publishing, fewer than half of the respondents report that it is an important factor in their own scholarly publishing, and even fewer take action to retain copyright rights.

  The report reaches two counter-intuitive conclusions: that the arts and humanities disciplines may be the most fertile disciplines for university-sponsored initiatives in scholarly communication and that senior faculty may be the most fertile targets for innovation in scholarly communication.

  Posted by P. Kaufman at 7:43 AM

  August 28, 2007

  Add Your Thoughts to University Publishing in a Digital Age

  We've noted in earlier entries the Ithaka Report titled University Publishing in a Digital Age.

  Now the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan has released the Ithaka Report in CommentPress which allows readers to share online, paragraph by paragraph annotation and commentary of the Report. CommentPress was recently developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book to allow readers to share annotations and commentary on texts. The hope is that all of us that have a stake in the outcomes of the Ithaka Report will share our thoughts and commentary in this new forum.

  Posted by Sarah Shreeves at 1:38 PM

  August 27, 2007

  Library & Information Science Journals - 30% are Open Access

  Heather Morrison recently posted the following analysis on how many library science journals are open access, to her blog, the OA Librarian..  If you're interested in seeing the underlying data, she's posted it in an open access Google spreadsheet, LIS and the Gold Road.

  You'll find that she's apparently not yet made an analysis of the LIS publishers or journals, just the gross numbers, comparing Ulrich's and the DOAJ.   Still, the percentage is impressive!

  =======================
  Heather Morrison, LIS literature and the gold road: 30% there! OA Librarian, August 25, 2007.
  

  
  

  The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) currently lists 77 fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly LIS journals. This list includes 2 titles with title changes, so the actual total is 75.
  

  
  

  An Uhlrich's search for active, scholarly / academic refereed journals with "library" as a subject yields 246 titles.
  

  
  

  This means that librarianship is already 30% of the way on the gold road, full open access publishing.
  

  
  

  Analysis of recent journal start-ups is even more encouraging! For example, all of the journals listed in either DOAJ or Ulrich's with a start year of 2007 are open access. There are 9 journals in Uhlrich's with a start year of 2006, 8 in DOAJ (88%). There are more scholarly LIS journals with a start year of 2000 or later in DOAJ (39) than there are in Uhrich's (31)!
  

  
  

  Posted by Katie Newman at 11:58 AM

  August 22, 2007

  BioMed Central Announces Open Access Publishing Agreement with Howard Hughes Medical Institute

  The Howard Hughes Medical Institute and BioMed Central have announced a membership agreement under which HHMI will pay the article processing charges for all research published by HHMI investigators in BioMed Central journals. Articles published under this agreement will be made immediately and freely available on the web in their final published form, and will be deposited in international archives including PubMed Central (PMC). The agreement between HHMI and BioMed Central takes effect for articles submitted after September 1, 2007.

  This agreement complements HHMI's recently announced open access policy, which requires that the results of research funded by the Institute must be deposited in PubMed Central, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, not more than six months after publication.

  Posted by P. Kaufman at 7:18 AM

  August 21, 2007

  SciVee: Web Video for the Sciences

  Thanks to if:book for word about SciVee, which could be a major innovation in science publishing. The National Science Foundation, the Public Library of Science and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have joined forces to launch SciVee, an experimental media sharing platform that allows scientists to synch short video lectures with paper outlines:

  "SciVee, created for scientists, by scientists, moves science beyond the printed word and lecture theater taking advantage of the internet as a communication medium where scientists young and old have a place and a voice."

  The site is in alpha and has only a handful of community submissions, but it's enough to give a sense of how useful it could become. Video entries can be navigated internally by topic segments, and are accompanied by a link to the full paper, jpegs of figures, tags, a reader rating system and a comment area.

  Peer networking functions are supposedly also in the works, although this seems geared solely as a dissemination and access tool for already vetted papers, not a peer-to-peer review forum. It has the potential to grow into a resource not just for research but for teaching and open access curriculum building.

  Hop on over to take a look at the pubcast and paper on the structural evolution of the protein kinase

  Posted by P. Kaufman at 8:16 AM

  August 20, 2007

  Trying to Get More Court Rulings Online and for Free

  Last week Carl Malamud, an activist who founded public.resource.org in March, with the broad intent of building “public works” accessible via the network, and with the specific plan to force the federal government to make information more publicly accessible, began a project that will challenge two large publishers who provide access to federal and state rulings for a fee.

  Mr. Malamud has begun to use advanced computer scanning technology to copy decisions, which have been available only in law libraries or via subscription from the Thomson West unit of the Canadian publishing conglomerate Thomson, and LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier, based in London.

  Mr. Malamud has already put about 1,000 pages of court decisions from the 1880s online.

  You can read much more about this maverick's track record and plans in today's New York Times.

  Posted by P. Kaufman at 9:59 AM

  August 9, 2007

  Yale Drops It's Pre-Pay Membership to BioMed Central

  As widely reported in the media, Yale University has dropped it's institutional membership in BioMed Central.

  This isn't a reflection on lack of support on Yale's part for the idea of open access. In fact, membership was dropped because Yale authors are apparently flocking to publish their articles in the openly accessible BMC journals, which then made the cost to the library - which was picking up the publication fees for the papers -- soar out of hand! There were 41 BMC papers published by Yale authors in 2006; already in 2007 there have been 43. (Note: The corresponding author, whose institution pays the publication fee, was not necessarily a Yale author in all these cases.) By taking an institutional "pre-pay" membership in BMC, the Yale Library had opted to try to pay the BMC author publication fees (via the Institutional Membership program) and these fees just got to be too much for them to bear as more and more Yale authors opted for publishing in BMC titles.

  To be sure, the article charges for publishing in BMC journals have been rising, too. Yale authors can, of course, continue to publish in BMC journals, and it will be interesting to see how many still opt for this. They will have to pay the page charges out of their grant money, as over half of the BMC authors have been doing.

  As David Stern, Yale's science librarian, reported in his posting:

  The libraries’ BioMedCentral membership represented an opportunity to test the technical feasibility and the business model of this OA publisher. While the technology proved acceptable, the business model failed to provide a viable long-term revenue base built upon logical and scalable options. Instead, BioMedCentral has asked libraries for larger and larger contributions to subsidize their activities. Starting with 2005, BioMed Central article charges cost the libraries $4,658, comparable to a single biomedicine journal subscription. The cost of article charges for 2006 then jumped to $31,625. The article charges have continued to soar in 2007 with the libraries charged $29,635 through June 2007, with $34,965 in potential additional article charges in submission.

  He goes on to conclude...

  "We believe in the widest possible access to scholarly research supported by workable business models and should BioMed Central develop a viable economic model which allows them to more equitably share costs across all interested stakeholders, we would consider renewing our financial support. "

  BMC Publisher, Matthew Cockerill, has of course replied to the Yale news, pointing out that the article processing charges that BMC charges are still less than most commercial publishers. He goes on to suggest that libraries consider the future where instead of purchasing some subscriptions to journals it may be a role of the library to support open access publishing for the greater good. From his posting:

  That is why BioMed Central introduced its institutional membership scheme, which allows institutions to centrally support the dissemination of open access research in the same way that they centrally support subscription journals, thereby creating a 'level playing field'.

  In order to ensure that funding of open access publication is sustainable, we have encouraged institutions to set aside a small fraction of the indirect funding contribution that they receive from funders to create a central open access fund.

  It should be noted that BMC's Institutional Membership program, whereby universities (usually the library) pre-pay all or most of the author's article fees is not the only way in which the institution can show it's support for the BMC flavor of open access. BMC also offers a "Supporting Membership" which is not tied to the number of articles submitted from an institution; it offers a modest (usually 15%) reduction in the article publication charge.

  At this point, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is neither an Institutional nor Supporting member of BMC.

  Posted by Katie Newman at 1:34 PM

  Report Tracks Search Engine Privacy

  A report published recently by the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) tracks the efforts of the leading Internet search companies as they begin to compete aggressively with one another to offer stronger privacy protections. In a string of recent announcements, the companies announced steps they were taking to delete old user data, strip the personally identifiable information out of stored search records, and, in one case, give users the option to have all of their search records deleted. CDT's Search Privacy Practices report details and compares the revamped privacy policies of the five largest search providers and offers recommendations for both the industry and lawmakers for how to strengthen privacy protections further.

  Posted by P. Kaufman at 1:23 PM

  August 6, 2007

  Flattening of the U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988–2003

  As reported in the Aug. 3 Science, a recent NSF analysis of U.S. scientific publishing output during the time period 1988-2003 shows that the number of articles produced has remained fairly constant in all areas of science.

  Citation:
  National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Statistics. 2007. Changing U.S. Output of Scientific Articles: 1988–2003. NSF 07-320. Derek Hill, Alan I. Rapoport, Rolf F. Lehming, and Robert K. Bell. Arlington, VA.
  Please also visit the site for access to numerous Tables and Figures:
  Tables
  Figures
  Appendix Tables

  About the Study
  The research examined the research output of the top 200 universities in the U.S. in the following areas:
  Agricultural sciences
  Astronomy
  Biological sciences
  Chemistry
  Clinical medicine
  Computer science
  Engineering
  Geosciences
  Mathematics
  Medical sciences
  Physics
  Psychology
  Social sciences
  U.S. output was compared with the output from the EU-15, Japan, and East Asia-4.

  The analysis was performed by the NSF largely from data derived from Thomson Scientific's citation database. [Note: Thomson Scientific data forms the basis for the Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports, the source of journal "Impact Factors".]

  From the Executive Summary
  

  
  In an unexpected development in the early 1990s, the absolute number of science and engineering (S&E) articles published by U.S.-based authors in the world's major peer-reviewed journals plateaued. This was a change from a rise in the number of publications over at least the two preceding decades. With some variation, this trend occurred across different categories of institutions, different institutional sectors, and different fields of research. It occurred despite continued increases in resource inputs, such as funds and personnel, that support research and development (R&D).

  In other developed countries—a group of 15 members of the European Union (the EU-15) and Japan—the absolute number of articles continued to grow throughout most of the 1992–2003 period. During the mid- to late 1990s, the number of articles published by EU scientists surpassed those published by their U.S. counterparts, and the difference between Japanese and U.S. article output narrowed. Late in the period, growth in the number of articles produced in some of these developed countries showed signs of slowing.

  On the whole, the U.S. share of the world's S&E articles remained relatively more robust in biomedical fields than in the physical sciences and engineering, ...

  Although the U.S. share of the world's influential articles dropped substantially, the United States remained dominant in this area. At the end of the period studied, U.S. institutions were at least partially responsible for half of the world's influential articles; no other major publishing center approached this figure. Moreover, compared with other major publishing centers, a considerably higher percentage of total U.S. output was classified as influential.

  The U.S. academic sector, which dominates U.S. article production, largely mirrored the overall U.S. trends, although its growth in article output over the entire period compared favorably with that of other sectors. The most prestigious academic institutions, however, experienced relatively slow output growth. The increase in collaboration across national, institutional, and sectoral boundaries, which is most fully documented in academic sector data, was perhaps the most striking trend in S&E research and publication during this period.

  The cause of this flattening remains a mystery. Several hypotheses from the Science article...

  ... Two popular ones offered by the bibliometric community include an aging scientific work force that is growing less productive as it nears retirement and an emphasis on quality over quantity in hiring, promotion, and other rewards. Diana Hicks of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta argues strongly for a third reason: Governments around the world have been demanding greater productivity from their scientists as the price for continued support. Many Asian countries have enhanced that effort "to extract latent capacity" with additional funding, she notes. The resulting increased flow of papers has "pushed out some mediocre work" by U.S. authors, Hicks says. But the effect is so subtle, she adds, that U.S. scientists "don't think to blame anybody but themselves."

  Lehming favors a fourth cause: the steep learning curve associated with collaborative research, an increasingly popular mode of operation.

  Also released at the same time was a paper that summarizes the views expressed when the NSF sent it's staff out into the field to talk to experienced researchers, to obtain their views on this puzzling data. See:

  The Changing Research and Publication Environment in American Research Universities.
  

  This report, a working paper being released concomitantly with the present report, summarizes the views of experienced observers and practitioners in research universities about how the worlds of academic S&E research and publication changed during the 15-year period between 1988 and 2003. The qualitative data in this exploratory report cannot answer these causal questions. But, in discussing some of the changes that occurred in how research is performed and disseminated, how universities function, and how researchers in universities divide their time among their various activities, this exploratory report may suggest some causal hypotheses that warrant further examination.

  
  

  Posted by Katie Newman at 11:42 AM

  July 31, 2007

  New Model for University Presses

  From Inside Higher Education, July 31, 2007.
  Scott Jaschik, New Model for University Presses

  As posted in Open Access News...
  It’s the nightmare-come-true scenario for many an academic: You spend years writing a book in your field, send it off to a university press with an interest in your topic, the outside reviewers praise the work, the editors like it too, but the press can’t afford to publish it. The book is declared too long or too narrow or too dependent on expensive illustrations or too something else. But the bottom line is that the relevant press, with a limited budget, can’t afford to release it, and turns you down, while saying that the book deserves to be published.

  That’s the situation scholars find themselves in increasingly these days, and press editors freely admit that they routinely review submissions that deserve to be books, but that can’t be, for financial reasons. The underlying economic bind university presses find themselves in is attracting increasing attention, including last week’s much awaited report from Ithaka, “University Publishing in a Digital Age,” which called for universities to consider entirely new models.

  One such new model is about to start operations: The Rice University Press, which was eliminated in 1996, was revived last year with the idea that it would publish online only, using low-cost print-on-demand....

  Rice is going to start printing books that have been through the peer review process elsewhere, been found to be in every way worthy, but impossible financially to publish....

  Some of the books Rice will publish, after they went through peer review elsewhere, will be grouped together as “The Long Tail Press.” In addition, Rice University Press and Stanford University Press are planning an unusual collaboration in which Rice will be publishing a series of books reviewed by Stanford and both presses will be associated with the work….

  Alan Harvey, editor in chief at Stanford, said he saw great potential not only to try a new model, but to test the economics of publishing in different formats. Stanford might pick some books with similar scholarly and economic potential, and publish some through Rice and some in the traditional way, and be able to compare total costs as well as scholarly impact. “We’d like to make this a public experiment and post the results,” he said.

  Another part of the experiment, he said, might be to explore “hybrid models” of publishing. Stanford might publish most of a book in traditional form, but a particularly long bibliography might appear online….

  Read the complete Inside Higher Education Column
  Read the complete Ithaka Report

  Posted by Katie Newman at 3:30 PM

  July 30, 2007

  University Publishing in a Digital Age

  In case you've not seen the notices, the non-profit organization Ithaka has just released a report on the state of university press publishing today, University Publishing in a Digital Age. Based on a detailed study of university presses, which morphed into a larger examination of the relationship among presses, libraries and their universities, the report's authors suggest that university presses focus less on the book form and consider a major collaborative effort to assume many of the technological and marketing functions that most presses cannot afford; they also suggest that universities be more strategic about the relationship of presses to broader institutional goals.

  Posted by P. Kaufman at 7:39 AM

  July 27, 2007

  Oxford Decreases Subscription Costs as Journals Become Increasingly More "Open Access"

  Oxford University Press has announced that it is REDUCING the subscription price of many of it's journals!

  Now THAT'S news!

  The price reduction is in recognition of the fact that, increasingly, authors are choosing to make their articles available to all (via Oxford's Oxford Open program) by paying the optional author publication charge. This charge is currently set at $1500, if the author's institution holds an institutional subscription for the title.

  As