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In this issue:
2. Partner News ___________________________________________________________________
1.
SPARC News: New England Provosts Issue Support for Federal Research Public Access Act; SPARC Introduces Author Rights Initiative; New SPARC Discussion Paper on Non-profit Publishing Cooperatives
SPARC Introduces Author Rights Initiative The rise in support for public access policies has infused the question of author rights with added urgency. Questions about whether or not authors can post their articles on course web sites or institutional repositories, or if an author can freely share work after assigning copyright to the publisher, are being heard more and more frequently on campuses. To address these questions and others, SPARC has developed Author Rights - an initiative to help educate faculty about their rights as authors of journal articles. The initiative works hand-in-hand with the SPARC Author Addendum, an online tool that authors may use to modify their agreements with publishers. The SPARC Author Addendum enables authors to to keep selected key rights, such as:
* Distributing copies in the course of teaching and research * Posting the article on a personal or institutional Web site, or * Creating derivative works.
SPARC's new Author Rights brochure supports the SPARC Author addendum by identifying the rights faculty have as copyright holders, and encouraging them to retain these rights. It explains how to use the SPARC Author Addendum, and gives tips on what to do if a publisher rejects the Addendum. It also offers specific language authors can insert in a publisher agreement when their article will be deposited in NIH's PubMed Central.
Please take advantage of this new resource to inform your campus about the key issue of author rights. Visit http://www.arl.org/sparc/author/letter_authorrights.html to find out how.
New SPARC Discussion Paper Explores Publishing Cooperatives SPARC has also introduced a new discussion paper from SPARC Senior Consultant Raym Crow, "Publishing Cooperatives: An alternative for non-profit publishers." The paper was adapted for publication in the September issue of First Monday. See Articles of Interest, below, for the article. The full-length discussion paper is available at http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/papers/Cooperatives_v1.pdf.
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New SPARC Alliance With Public Knowledge Project SPARC has teamed with the Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.sfu.ca/), an open source publishing initiative funded by the Canadian government and based in the Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia (UBC), and the Simon Fraser University Library. Since 2001, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) has offered free, open source software for the management and publishing of journals and conference proceedings. PKP software reduces publishing costs, improves management, enhances indexing, and increases access to knowledge. PKP's proven open source software technologies are used in digital publishing programs at Rutgers University Library, University of Toronto Library, City University of New York Grad Center, and others. More than 800 journals currently use OJS software; a sample of the journals using OJS is at http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs-journals. For further information about the partnership, please see: http://www.arl.org/sparc/announce/06-0921.html.
BioOne
BioOne has launched BioOne.2, a second collection of online editions in the fields of organismal and integrative biology. Similar to the original collection (BioOne.1), which now includes 84 publications from 68 publishers. the new collection will include the full texts of peer-reviewed journals and supplemental research materials published by scholarly societies, university presses and other not-for-profit organizations. Many of the titles included have not previously been available electronically or have had limited electronic access until now. The BioOne.2 collection will be available to subscribers in January 2007, either in combination with BioOne.1, as a separate subscription. BioOne.2 will initially include25 to 30 titles, and will be expanded progressively, with further additions planned for later in 2007.. An expert panel of scholars and librarians has collaborated to advise BioOne on identifying publications of high quality and impact, appropriate for inclusion in the aggregation.
Chemistry Central (www.chemistrycentral.com), is a new open access website for chemists from BioMed Central. It brings together peer-reviewed research in chemistry from a range of open access journals. All the original research articles on Chemistry Central are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication.
Chemistry Central features open access articles from Geochemical Transactions, the online journal of the American Chemical Society's Division of Geochemistry, and from the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry, which is published by the Beilstein Institut in association with BioMed Central. Chemistry Central also features chemistry-related articles published in BioMed Central's biological and medical journals, including BMC Pharmacology, BMC Biochemistry and BMC Chemical Biology. Journals featured on Chemistry Central incorporate special features to make them suitable for chemistry-related content, such as instant thumbnail previews and graphical abstracts. Chemistry Central users can discuss articles, submit manuscripts, sign up for email alerts and find out more about starting a new open access chemistry journal or transferring an existing title to the Chemistry Central open access model. Chemists who wish to support open access to published research by playing an editorial role on this major new journal should contact: editorial@chemistrycentral.com.
New Journal of Physics
New Journal of Physics (NJP) was recently identified by Essential Science Indicators as having the highest percentage increase in total citations out of all journals in the field of physics. NJP was given "Rising Star" status, and the latest analysis reveals that 829 NJP papers have now been cited a total of 3187 times. This analysis coincides with the journal surpassing 1,000,000 article downloads. This year NJP's Impact Factor rose for a fourth consecutive year to 3.585. (This is seventh highest in the Thomson ISI defined category of "physics, multidisciplinary" journals). To accompany the citation analysis, a feature on NJP appears in the September 2006 issue of "In-cites." The interview with Professor Eberhard Bodenschatz, the NJP Editor-in-Chief and and NJP's Publisher, Tim Smith, can be accessed at: http://in-cites.com/journals/NewJofPhysics.html.
Project Euclid recently added five titles from independent Japanese publishers to its growing collection of peer-reviewed journals in mathematics and statistics. Four will be available via open access - these include: The Hiroshima Mathematical Journal, a continuation of the Journal of Science of the Hiroshima University (1930-1960), and the Journal of Science of the Hiroshima University (1961-1970). The complete backfile will be also available at the end of 2006; Japan Journal of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the official journal of The Japan Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics; the Osaka Journal of Mathematics, published quarterly under the joint editorship of the Departments of Mathematics at Osaka University and Osaka City University. The complete backfile will be available at the end of 2006, along with the Publications of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences, the official journal of the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Kyoto University. Finally, the Journal of the Mathematical Society of Japan, founded in 1948 by the oldest academic society in Japan, is now available on a subscription basis.
Public Library of Science
The Gates Foundation has announced a $1.1. million grant to the Public Library of Science to launch a new open access journal on neglected diseases. The grant is part of a larger Gates Foundation initiative to find cures for neglected tropical diseases. The open access, peer reviewed journal, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, will cover science, policy, and advocacy on neglected tropical diseases. The new journal will provide a forum for scientists from developed and developing countries to share the latest information on neglected disease research. For further information:
http://www.plos.org/news/announce_plosntds.html.
Scholarly Publishing Office - University of Michigan Library
The Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan University Library now hosts Plagiary, a journal referred to SPO through the Publisher Assistance Program partnership with SPARC. International in scope, the journal is devoted specifically to the study of plagiarism and related fabrications and falsifications within the professional literature (i.e., scholarly journals and books) and popular discourse domains (i.e., journalism, politics, audio-visual texts). Providing a forum for scholarly discussion and research on trends and phenomena (both recent and historical) related to plagiarism, Plagiary features refereed research articles, "Perspectives" articles, book reviews, editorials, and responses as a point of focus on issues of vital importance to professional and popular discourse domains. SPO's archive of the content can be found at
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/plag/ , and the journal's website is at
http://www.plagiary.org/.
Two new articles about SEP and its unique business model have recently appeared.
"From SEP to SEPIA: How and why Indiana
University is helping the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy," by
Colin Allen and Cecile Jagodzinski, in Against the Grain, Volume 18/4
(September 2006). http://www.against-the-grain.com/
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Topology Editorial Board Resigns in Protest Over Journal Pricing The entire editorial board of the Elsevier journal Topology resigned in August to protest Elsevier's refusal to lower the journal's subscription price. The editors' letter to Elsevier says in part: "...As you are well aware, the Editors have been concerned about the price of Topology since Elsevier gained control of the journal in 1994. We believe that the price, in combination with Elsevier's policies for pricing mathematics journals more generally, has had a significant and damaging effect on Topology's reputation in the mathematical research community, and that this is likely to become increasingly serious and difficult, indeed impossible, to reverse in the future. "As you know, we have made efforts over the last five to ten years to negate this effect....
Future issues of SPARC e-news will include information on the Editors' plans as they evolve.
UC libraries partner with Google to digitize books
The University of California libraries has announced its partnership with Google to digitize books from the libraries' collections. UC becomes the latest partner in the Google Books Library Project, which was launched in December 2004 to digitize books drawn from the libraries of the University of Michigan, Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University, and the New York Public Library.
The digitized books will be searchable through Google Book Search. Google respects copyright law and has specifically designed Book Search to comply with it. Anyone will be able to freely view, browse, and read UC's public domain books, including many of the treasures in the libraries' historic and special collections. For books protected by copyright, users just get basic background (such as the book's title and the author's name), at most a few lines of text related to their search, and information about where they can buy or borrow a book. If publishers or authors don't want to have their books digitized, they will be excluded. Further information is available at: http://www.cdlib.org/news/index.html
Canadian Institutes of Health Research Issues Public Access Report
In April, The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) posted a survey to collect input from the community to help inform the process of crafting a public access policy. The results of this survey are now available at:
http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/31935.html. For an analysis of the survey findings from the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, please see http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/canada/cihr_analysis.html. ___________________________________________________________________
4. Create Change: New Interview
How have the Internet and digital technologies changed the way academics research and communicate in computer science?
For a long time, we've been electronically sharing papers. We were very early adopters of this system. The thing that is dramatically different is how we figure out what other work is going on. CiteSeer is an online system that indexes computer science literature and finds the citations for online papers. You just type in a name and click. It's amazing. That's changed everybody's life.
What barriers have you faced as you try to effectively communicate in light of this transformation?
When it was first possible to post papers on a Web site, journal publishers started to be worried and shake their fists. In the 1990s, some universities adopted policies to prohibit posting copyrighted papers on the Web, but authors typically ignored them. Scholars want people to read their stuff. We just want people to know about our work.
How did the Journal of Machine Learning
Research get started and how has it benefited scholarship?
I was on the editorial board of a journal called Machine Learning, the main journal in the field. The price kept going up and we'd say, "This is ridiculous" - especially because libraries couldn't afford it. Plus, the journal had an official policy about not putting stuff on the Web. We explained it was counter productive, to no avail. Finally, I got tired and said, "Forget it, let's publish our own journal." Two-thirds of the Machine Learning board resigned and started the new journal in 2000. (See
http://www.jmlr.org - available free.) ___________________________________________________________________
5. Upcoming Workshops
The program is designed for an audience representative of all of the communities within university and research institutions, especially senior decision makers and policy advocates. This includes provosts and vice presidents for research and academic affairs, legislative affairs officers, directors of research libraries and senior library managers, and CIOs and other senior information technology managers. To encourage federal legislative affairs officers to attend, individuals who have job titles that reflect federal relations or legislative liaison responsibilities on behalf of nonprofit research institutions are invited to attend the forum at no cost. The registration deadline is September 29, 2006. The fee is $275 for each individual from ARL, SPARC, and CNI institutions; $350 for others.
Open Scholarship 2006: New Challenges for Open Access Repositories ___________________________________________________________________
Editor's Note: The Journal of Neuroscience has published an editorial
in its September issue by Editor-in-Chief Gary Westbrook on the ongoing
debate about open access in the scientific community
(http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/26/36/9077).
According to
the journal, this issue included the first in a series of weekly
Commentaries on science publishing that will appear in issues leading
up to the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
Recent commentaries include: Willinsky, John. "Why Open Access to Research and Scholarship?" J. Neurosci. 2006 26: 9078-9079. http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/26/36/9078
Johnson, Richard K. "Will Research Sharing Keep Pace with the Internet?" J. Neurosci. 2006 26: 9349-9351. http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/26/37/9349
Ginsparg, Paul. "As We May Read." J. Neurosci. 2006 26: 9606-9608. http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/26/38/9606
Forthcoming: Matthew Cockerill and Vitek Tracz: "Open access and the future of the scientific research article." (October 4)
Additional articles of interest:
Crow, Raym. "Publishing Cooperatives: An alternative for non-profit publishers." First Monday. September 2006. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/crow/index.html.
Jaschik, Scott. "Momentum for Open Access Research." Inside Higher Ed. September 6, 2006. http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/09/06/access
Kaiser, Jocelyn. "Particle Physicists Want to Expand Open Access." Science. 1 September 2006. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/313/5791/1215
Murray-Rust, Peter. "Open Data--The Time has Come." A Scientist and the Web. September 12, 2006. http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=32
Squires, Bruce. "The right to medical information" (Editorial). CMAJ. September 12, 2006.
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/175/6/557
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