November 21, 2007
OpenDOAR now includes 1000 repositories

SHERPA has announced that its OpenDOAR directory, which contains an authoritative list of institutional and subject-based repositories, now boasts 1000 repository entries from across the globe.

With each of the repositories listed by the OpenDOAR service having been visited by project staff, the gathered information is both accurate and precise, and contains a quality-controlled list of repository features.

November 18, 2007
Now 100 Institutional Repositories in eIFL-net countries
(from Peter Suber’s Open Access News Blog)
Kudos to eIFL for organizing this important development. Institutional repositories are an affordable, effective way to provide worldwide open access to the research output of an institution. They are a natural solution any research institution, even the most affluent, but are an urgent solution where money is tight and conventional forms of research visibility are low. Unlike HINARI and related initiatives, which make some research from the North visible in the South, OA (through repositories or journals) is a two-way street and can make research from the South visible in the North.

November 17, 2007
DOAJ/SPARC Europe seal of approval program
(From Peter Suber's Open Access News Blog)
I like this approach. I like the way it's bottom-up rather than top-down, and decentralized rather than centralized. I like the way it focuses on the endorsement and support of respected organizations rather than on the control of word usage. I like the way it will provide new clarity and precision without requiring the agreement of everyone using a certain word or phrase. I expect that it will succeed in making OA journal policies, on average, more consistent and more open. And I like the way it will have that kind of unifying effect while at the same time respecting pluralism through its compatibility with similar programs from other organizations supporting a different standard. I look forward to the details.

November 13, 2007
Murdoch May Make Wall Street Journal Free
Murdoch hasn’t made any final decisions about access to the Wall Street Journal Online, but he told shareholders, “We are studying it and we expect to make that free, and instead of having 1 million (subscribers) having at least 10-15 million in every corner of the earth.”

November 10, 2007
Version 1.0 of SWORD, A Smart Deposit Tool for Repositories, Has Been Released
SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) is a protocol for interoperable deposit between repository platforms. It was developed by a JISC project during 2007, building on earlier work to define a deposit protocol.

November 9, 2007
CERN has created a home page for the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3)

November 6, 2007
Expanding medical library support in response to the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy
Responding to recent changes in the scholarly publishing process, Coy C. Carpenter Library is expanding its scholarly communications program to better support the research publication efforts of the faculty at Wake Forest University Health Sciences (WFUHS). Recent advances in open access publishing and archiving initiatives, adoption of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) “Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research” (Public Access Policy) in 2005, the rapidly increasing pool of published biomedical research, rising costs of subscription rates, and continued barriers to access have necessitated an internal redesign of the library's Faculty Publications (FP) database.

October 30, 2007
Release of IRStats for institutional repositories
We are happy to announce the beta release of the IRStats package - a tool for analysing usage of institutional repositories.
Headline features:
- Agnostic to repository software - support for EPrints and (beta) DSpace
- Aggressive filtering of robots and other automated agents (using AWStats and bespoke techniques)
- Analyse groups of eprints based on a simple CSV-format specification - by-author, by-school etc.

October 29, 2007
How to Find Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research
...Thousands of thoughtful bloggers report on the latest studies, use blogs teaching tools for the classroom, and even speculate about future directions for their own research. But sometimes they also use their blogs to share links to news articles or press releases, or even photos, jokes, or personal rants. The Research Blogging icon makes serious blog posts by serious researchers, teachers, students, and others easy to locate.

October 29, 2007
Open Access: the New World of Research Communication
On October 10 the University of Ottawa Library Network, in association with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) hosted Open Access: the New World of Research Communication. An enthusiastic audience of about 110 students, faculty, researchers and librarians attended.

October 28, 2007
Particle physicists push for publishing changes
The high-energy physics community wants all of its published research to be freely available to everybody. Jens Vigen reports on how a radical new initiative hopes to achieve this (Research Information, October/November 2007)

October 23, 2007
Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences Considering Open Access For Their Work

October 22, 2007
Australia's RUBRIC project (Regional Universities building research infrastructure collaboratively) has released the RUBRIC Toolkit: Institutional Repository Solutions
...The RUBRIC Project was funded to establish and develop institutional repositories in participating universities. The development of the repositories incorporates best practice emerging from other projects funded by DEST between 2002 and 2005, [especially] FRODO (Federated Repositories of Digital Objects) [and] MERRI (Managed Environments for Research Repository Infrastructure)....

October 11, 2007
Practices and Challenges in Preservation and Access for Scientific and Scholarly Digital Repositories DCC/DPE/DRIVER/Nestor Joint Workshop
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC), Digital Preservation Europe (DPE), Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER), and Network of Expertise in Long-Term Storage of Digital Resources (nestor) are delighted to announce that they will be delivering a joint
workshop on the long-term curation of scientific and scholarly digital repository content. This event will be held over one and a half days at the Campus Adlershof, Humboldt University in Berlin on 27-28 November 2007.

October 3, 2007
Open Access and Institutional Repository in Asia-Pacific
The Steering Committee invites you to attend the DRF International Conference 2008 (DRFIC2008) from 30th to 31st January 2008 in Osaka, JAPAN DRFIC2008 will focus on the open access movement in the world, in the Asia, and in Japan in order to contribute to a better scholarly communication in the world.

October 3, 2007
Academic Authorship, Publishing Agreements and Open Access Survey

The OAK Law Project seeks to promote strategies for the management of copyright so as to facilitate optimal access to research output, especially that which is publicly funded.

The Project is undertaking a survey of academic and scholarly authors in Australia to obtain an understanding of authorsx2019; knowledge of publishing agreements and their experience in dealing with publishers in order to provide an accurate perspective on current academic publishing practices. The results received from the survey will be used in developing model publishing agreements, toolkits and training materials for academic authors and publishers.

October 3, 2007
JISC adopted an OA policy in the April 2007 version of its Generic terms and conditions of grant[s]

(from Peter Suber’s Open Access News Blog)
There have long been rumors that JISC was planning to adopt an OA mandate. For example, when UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) was launched in January 2007, JISC issued a press release explaining that all nine members of the UKPMC Funders Group would soon require OA for the research they fund. At the time, JISC was a member, although it's no longer listed on the member page. All eight other members have since adopted OA mandates.

I consider the April 2007 grant guidelines to be an OA mandate even if it's not the rumored policy. Many other OA mandates use the same language of expectation rather than requirement, and even the policies that use stronger language succeed because they create expectations, not sanctions. The policy three other strengths: the reasonable embargo, the flexibility about the destination repositories, and the firmness that asks grantees to change publishers rather than compromise on OA. Kudos to all involved.

October 2, 2007
NIH Launches Extensive Open-Access Dataset of Genetic and Clinical Data
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) x2014; the nation's medical research agency x2014; is launching one of the most extensive collections of genetic and clinical data ever made freely available to researchers worldwide. Called SHARe (SNP Health Association Resource), the Web-based dataset enables qualified researchers to access a wealth of data from large population-based studies, starting with the landmark Framingham Heart Study.

September 30, 2007
Transfer of DSpace copyright to the Foundation
...As a result of the size and complexity the Dspace codebase has now acquired, as well as the significant DSpace user constituency, both HP and MIT now feel that it is time to pass over stewardship of the DSpace codebase to the new DSpace Foundation so that the Foundation can support the ongoing development of the code and seek funding that will be necessary to implement enhancements in the future...

September 30, 2007
WIPO Launches New Agenda On IP And Development
(from Peter Suber's Open Access News Blog)
This is important. WIPO controls the direction of copyright and patent law worldwide, and the development agenda converts the WIPO mission from knee-jerk maximalism to something much closer to balance. For background, see my previous posts on the WIPO development agenda and its connection to OA issues.
The development agenda includes a number of Access to Knowledge (A2K) proposals, including a draft A2K Treaty (May 9, 2005), which includes a provision (Article 5-2) mandating OA for publicly-funded research. (Disclaimer: I took part in the drafting of the OA provision of this treaty.)
The 15 nations in the Friends of Development coalition, and the many associated NGOs, deserve all our thanks for tireless diplomacy in a system of Byzantine complexity.

September 29, 2007
The Future of Scholarly Communication:xA0; Building the Infrastructure of Cyberscholarship
Developments of cyberscholarship are hampered by the profusion of intellectual property rights and business practices that restrict access to information. Some of these restrictions are necessary, particularly those that protect privacy or trade secret information, but there is less justification for others. Science and scholarship have a privileged position in society. Governments fund scientific research and national libraries. Universities are supported by taxpayers, enhanced by the generous tax benefits given to not-for-profit organizations. A fundamental goal of the new infrastructure is to make the results of these efforts benefit the society that supports them.

September 27, 2007
HHMI Expresses Support for Springer Open Choice
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has expressed support for Springer's Open Choice program whereby articles are — if accepted for publication after a process of rigorous peer-review — immediately published with full open access and deposited in repositories such as PubMed Central, at a flat-rate fee per article of $3,000.