IN THIS ISSUE:

1. SPARC News: SPARC Partners with Science Commons;
   New SPARC Europe Award
2. Partner News
3. Industry Roundup
4. Open Access News
5. Upcoming Workshops

SPARC Partners with Science Commons

SPARC and Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons, have teamed up to enhance the functionality of the SPARC Author Addendum. The SPARC Author Addendum allows authors to retain critical rights, including the right of authors to post articles in online repositories. Science Commons is creating a machine-readable version of the SPARC Author Addendum that can be read by Internet search engines, as well as a text version that functions as a legal tool. The enhanced SPARC Author Addendum will be made available on the SPARC Web site (www.arl.org/sparc) once the project is completed in early spring.

The effort represents a continuation of Science Commons' effort to promote access and voluntary sharing in scientific publications. This cooperation advances three goals shared by SPARC and Science Commons: to support authors right to distribute scholarship over the Internet, to promote access and reuse of the scientific literature, and to facilitate author self-archiving. For more information about the enhanced SPARC Author Addendum, please see www.arl.org/sparc.

New SPARC Europe Award

SPARC Europe has announced the inauguration of the SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications. The new annual Award will be presented to an individual or group within Europe that has made significant advances in our understanding of the issues surrounding scholarly communications and/or in developing practical means to address the problems with the current systems.

The judging panel, formed from members of the SPARC Europe Board of Directors, has issued a call for nominations for the Award. Nominations are open to all who have made major contributions in the field of scholarly communications, and the judging panel particularly wishes to receive nominations of individuals of groups working in any of the following areas:

--Research that helps illuminate the scholarly communications landscape
--Advocacy for new models of scholarly communications
--Development of new tools to aid scholarly communication (e.g. repository software)
--Interesting new projects or products
--Implementation of policies that promote new scholarly communication models.

Nominations (together with a short outline of the nominee’s work) should be sent to David Prosser (d.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk), Director of SPARC Europe, no later than February 10, 2006. The Award will be present at the Third Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication, to be held at Lund, Sweden, April 24-25, 2006.

SPARC members are encouraged to apply their purchase commitment to support these worthwhile publications.

Project Euclid
http://projecteuclid.org

The Cornell University Library (CUL) has drafted an interim plan to manage, archive and preserve all the participating Project Euclid journals in advance of the launch of Cornell University Library's Open Archival Information System (OAIS) in 2008. Cornell's OAIS will ensure the long-term management and digital preservation of Cornell's digital assets, including the 40+ mathematics and statistics journals that participate in Project Euclid.

The interim asset management plan acknowledges that digital preservation is a shared responsibility and commits Cornell and the Project Euclid publishers to a series of activities over the next two years that will firmly establish a digital preservation program for protecting and maintaining their digital content. The interim plan will be implemented in early 2006 and cover the two-year period when the OAIS is under development. In 2008 Project Euclid, CUL, and Euclid's partner publishers will review and devise an extended OAIS-compliant preservation plan and explore opportunities for cost recovery to ensure access for future generations of mathematicians and statisticians. A copy of the interim plan is available at http://projecteuclid.org/webdocs/ProjectEuclid-Preservation2006.pdf.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu

The California Digital Library (CDL), on behalf of the ten campuses of the University of California, approved sponsorship of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). This represents a full commitment by all of the libraries in the UC system, eight of whose campuses offer degrees in philosophy. In related news, SEP is steadily progressing towards its goal of raising $2.5 million in total three-year commitments from the library community, which, if successful, would generate an additional $500,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities. By the end of December, SEP had registered commitments of $1.195 million, which is nearly half-way toward its three-year goal.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy International Association (SEPIA), the membership organization formed to support SEP, continues to collect membership dues from other libraries and library consortia worldwide. Learn more about SEPIA at http://www.libraries.iub.edu/index.php?pageId=3563. To register your commitment, go to http://www.solinet.net/survey/sep.htm. For a list of libraries already committed to the project, see http://plato.stanford.edu/fundraising/commitments.html. SPARC recommends that its member use their purchase commitment to support SEP.

New University of California White Papers

The University of California's Academic Council has approved five white papers and one policy proposal for System-wide Academic Senate Review. The papers are the product of the Council's Special Committee on Scholarly Communication (SCSC) and, under the collective title "Responding to the Challenges Facing Scholarly Communication," include:

* Evaluation of Publications in Academic Personnel Processes
* The Case of Journal Publishing
* The Case of Scholarly Book Publishing
* Scholarly Societies and Scholarly Communication
* The Case of Scholars' Management of Their Copyright
* Proposal for UC Faculty - Scholarly Work Copyright Rights Policy

For more information: http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/.

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Elsevier MDL Collaborates with NIH

Elsevier MDL has announced an agreement with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to contribute to the NIH effort to catalog information on the biological properties of small molecules in its freely available PubChem database. Elsevier MDL will enrich the growing PubChem resource for the scientific community by furnishing chemical structures from Elsevier's xPharm database, giving scientists with an xPharm license the ability to move from biological data in PubChem to more focused pharmacology data in xPharm for drug research.

xPharm is a comprehensive and authoritative collection of pharmacological data, with chemical agents representing examples of pharmacological activity. The contribution of xPharm structures marks the first step in Elsevier MDL's efforts to support the NIH Roadmap initiative, according to Elsevier.

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Grants to Enable Developing World to Access Leading Scientific Research

Two grants totaling $500,000 will support Yale University's participation in an international consortium to make prestigious scientific journals in the environmental sciences available online, at little or no cost, to the developing world. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation each have given $250,000 to Yale to help establish Online Access to Research in the Environment (OARE). OARE, a digital internet library for developing countries, will provide access to the peer-reviewed scientific literature of leading international publishing houses. Organizations eligible to use OARE will include approximately 1,000 public, non-profit institutions in more than 100 underdeveloped nations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. Literature in environmental chemistry, economics, law and policy, and other environmental subjects such as botany, conservation biology, ecology and zoology will be available through a portal presented in several world languages, including Arabic, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.

Next year, OARE will be offered to users in 70 developing nations with a per capita gross national product (GNP) of $1,000 or less in the first phase of the project's implementation. In the project's second phase, approximately 45 more countries with GNP per capita between $1,000 and $3,000 will be enrolled. Yale will develop OARE in cooperation with the United Nations Environment Programme, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, Cornell University and leading scientific publishers around the world.

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DSpace Federation Governance Advisory Board Formed

MIT Libraries and HP Labs have formed the DSpace Federation Governance Advisory Board. This ad hoc board is being convened to draft a recommendation for governance and funding mechanisms to advance the DSpace community. The Board, nominated from the community and invited by MIT and HP, is comprised of leaders from higher education and industry that are stakeholders in the DSpace community as well as experts on open source software.

Establishing governance and, possibly, funding mechanisms for the DSpace open source community will help to ensure that the technology platform remains sound, protecting the investment that institutions have made. Updates will be sent to DSpace-general and posted on http://wiki.dspace.org/DSpaceGovernance.

“Cures” Legislation

Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and Thad Cochran (R-MS) have announced the introduction of a bill to create the American Center for Cures (the "Cures" bill). The proposed legislation contains a particularly important public access component. Section 499H-1 details a "Public Access Requirement for Research," whereby federal grantees are required to submit articles accepted for publication to PubMed Central within four months of their appearance in a peer-reviewed journal. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), a national coalition of patient groups, libraries, and public interest organizations founded in part by SPARC, praised the research access proviso of legislation introduced to establish the American Center for Cures within the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The bill calls for DHHS-funded research be made available in NIH’s PubMed Central online digital archive within four months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The NIH already has a policy that asks its investigators to deposit their manuscripts in PubMed Central, but the policy is voluntary and public access can be delayed up to a year. NIH estimates that less than five percent of eligible research is making its way into PubMed Central under their current policy. The Cures Bill would require deposit of refereed articles and reach beyond NIH. It would also provide access sooner than the NIH policy. For more information: http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/.

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DOAJ Marks 2000th Journal

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, http://www.doaj.org) now contains 2000 open access journals: quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web. The goal of the DOAJ is to increase the visibility and accessibility of open access scholarly journals, and thereby promote their usage and impact. The directory aims to comprehensively cover all open access scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system. Journals in all languages and subject areas will be included in the DOAJ. The selection criteria have been updated based on feedback from users; see http://www.doaj.org/articles/about#criteria.  

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New Resource From OpenDOAR

OpenDOAR (the Directory of Open Access Repositories) has announced the release of its primary listing of open access archives, available from http://www.opendoar.org. Each of the repositories listed in OpenDOAR have been examined by project staff.  While reviewing these archives, project staff are building a picture of the world-wide development of open access repositories, noting new features and directions.  This information is being analysed to create the next version of the listing, with further information and categories being noted for each repository. In the meantime, the newly released list will continue to grow as new repositories are added. For further information:
http://www.opendoar.org/documents/OpenDOAR_Press_Release_Jan06.pdf

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Ukranian Parliament Passes Resolution on Open Access

In late December, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a resolution calling open access a priority in the Ukraine’s developing information society. Among the recommendations: creating favorable conditions for developing open access repositories in archives, libraries, museums and other cultural institutions; creating accessible electronic information resources; developing model regulation on electronic document repositories; and speeding up development of open access resources in science, technology and education, with conditions on state-funded research. (The Ukrainian version of this resolution is available at: http://zakon.rada.gov.ua/cgi-bin/laws/main.cgi?nreg=3175%2D15). Open access recommendations in Ukraine were first introduced by the participants of last year’s Open Access Scholarly Communication Workshop.

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New Weblog: _OA Librarian_

_OA Librarian_ is a new, cooperatively produced weblog, which combines a pathfinder function with news and commentary on open access and librarianship. Postings vary widely and include news items pertinent to librarians, relevant conference presentations, and other blogs or resources about open access developed by librarians.

One theme of _OA Librarian_ is highlighting the work of librarians who advocate for apen access. Recent articles focus on Antonella de Robbio, the originator of E-LIS; Anita Coleman, the driving force behind DLIST; and Charles W. Bailey, Jr., the author of the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals. Please visit: http://oalibrarian.blogspot.com/.

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NIH Director talks about Public Access

NIH Director Dr. Elias Zerhouni responds to students’ question about the NIH Public Access Policy at <http://www.nih.gov/about/director/publicaccess.ram> Students from Norwin High School in North Huntingdon, Pennsylvania sent letters to the NIH Director about the implications of NIH's new public access policy designed to accelerate the public's access to published articles resulting from NIH-funded research. The policy calls on scientists to release to the public manuscripts from research supported by NIH as soon as possible, and within 12 months of final publication. Dr. Zerhouni responded to students' questions with a video.

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Open Access Programs Web site

SPARC has launched a Web page (http://db.arl.org/oap) on which librarians, faculty and administrators can share the concept and execution of open access programs held at their universities. On this page, SPARC members and other can submit information about the open access programs on their campus and browse information about other institutions’ efforts. The site also contains information on institutional repositories and scholarly communication programs in general. Much of the information on the site was originally gathered by Rebecca Kemp, Electronic Resources/Serials Librarian at UNC Wilmington. Contributions are encouraged.

***SAVE THE DATE***
SPARC Europe Institutional Repositories Conference
October 18-20, 2006
University of Glasgow, Scotland
(Details and registration information forthcoming)

Information Society Project/Access to Knowledge Conference
April 21-23, 2006
Yale Law School, New Haven, CT

The goal of this conference is to bring together leading thinkers and activists on access to knowledge policy from North and South to generate concrete research agendas and policy solutions for the next decade. This conference will be among the first to synthesize the multifaceted and interdisciplinary aspects of access to knowledge, ranging from textbooks and telecommunications access to software and medicines. For more information: http://islandia.law.yale.edu/isp/a2k.html.

Third Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication:
Beyond Declarations - The Changing Landscape of Scholarly Communication
April 24-25, 2006, Lund, Sweden
http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc2006/

Send corrections, comments and responses to Alison Buckholtz.

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