IN THIS ISSUE:

1. SPARC News: SPARC Partners with Theoretical Economics; New Steering Committee Chair Elected
2. Partner News
3. Industry Roundup
4. Open Access News
5. Article: "Jeremy Greenwood Gets It: Examining One Faculty Member’s Creative Use of an Institutional Repository," by Suzanne Bell, University of Rochester
6. Upcoming Workshops
7. Articles of Interest

SPARC has partnered with the Society for Economic Theory to support _Theoretical Economics_ (http://econtheory.org), an open access journal created to serve as an alternative to two high-cost publications. The new, peer-reviewed outlet for high-quality research in economic theory provides an alternative to the _Journal of Economic Theory_ and _Games and Economic Behavior_, both published by Elsevier.

As an open access journal, _Theoretical Economics_ allows authors of articles to retain unrestricted rights to use their articles for non-commercial purposes, including the right to make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and the right to post accepted papers on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open access repositories. _Theoretical Economics_ submits the metadata of published papers to RePEc and encourages authors to place their articles in appropriate open access repositories in order to render the article metadata accessible to third-party search and discovery services via Open Archives Initiative metadata harvesting protocols. _Theoretical Economics_ has a long-term data archiving plan in place via T-Space (based at the University of Toronto) to guarantee that published research will be available into the future. Volume 1, Issue 1 of _Theoretical Economics_ was published on March 2, 2006.

In other SPARC news, the SPARC Steering Committee, whose newest members began their three-year terms on January 1, elected Ray English to serve in the position of Chair. English, the Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries at Oberlin College, has served as a SPARC Steering Committee member since 1999. English was also recently named the 2006 Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Academic/Research Librarian of the Year, an award that recognizes an outstanding member of the library profession who has made a significant national or international contribution to academic/research librarianship and library development.

SPARC's voting membership, which includes representatives from over 150 academic libraries in the U.S. and Canada, also elected the following individuals to serve on the SPARC Steering Committee for three-year terms which began January 1: Larry Alford, Temple University; Sherrie Bergman, Bowdoin College (by re-election); Ray English, Oberlin College (by re-election); Diane Graves, Trinity University; John Ober, University of California; Sarah Pritchard, University of California, Santa Barbara.

The new members join the current members of the SPARC Steering Committee: Nancy Baker, University of Iowa; Deb Carver, University of Oregon; Gwendolyn Ebbett, University of Windsor; Joyce Ogburn, University of Utah; Carolyne Presser, University of Manitoba; Bas Savenije, University of Utrecht. For further information about SPARC governance, please see http://www.arl.org/sparc/org/gov.html.

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

2a. SPARC Scientific Communities

Project Euclid
http://projecteuclid.org

Cornell University Library will be launching a major upgrade to the Project Euclid web site to address the evolving needs of scholars working in the areas of theoretical and applied mathematics and statistics. The opportunity to enhance and generalize the Euclid production and delivery environment is made possible by the forthcoming upgrade to DPubS (http://dpubs.org), the publishing system that provides services for Project Euclid and other electronic publishing projects supported by the lLibrary. The new version of DPubS will allow Euclid to broaden its publishing options to include monographs, conference proceedings, and non-textual content along side its expanding journal collection. The upgrade of Project Euclid will showcase the wide variety of configurable and extensible features incorporated into DPubS v.2.

The new version of DPubS is scheduled for release under an open source license in the summer of 2006 and is made possible by a generous grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. DPubS v.2 is being developed by Cornell University Library in collaboration with the Pennsylvania State University Libraries and Press. For more information about DPubS v.2, please contact David Ruddy <dwr4@cornell.edu>, Head of Systems Development and Production, Cornell University Library.

2b. SPARC Leading Edge

BioMed Central
http://www.biomedcentral.com

BioMed Central has launched Biology Direct, a new online open access journal which showcases a novel system of peer review. Biology Direct will operate a completely open system of peer review, with named peer reviewers' reports published alongside each article. The journal also requires that each author approach Biology Direct Editorial Board members directly to review the manuscript.

The journal, available online at www.biology-direct.com, launches with publications in the fields of Systems Biology, Computational Biology, and Evolutionary Biology, with an Immunology section to follow soon. Biology Direct considers original research articles, hypotheses, and reviews and will eventually cover the full spectrum of biology.

Biology Direct is led by Editors-in-Chief David J. Lipman, Director of the National Center Biotechnology Information (NCBI) a division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at NIH; Eugene V. Koonin, Senior Investigator at NCBI; and Laura Landweber, Associate Professor at Princeton University. More information is available in the press release: http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/pr-releases?pr=20060205

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

SEP is steadily building toward its three-year fundraising goal of $2.5 million from the library community worldwide. In order to qualify fully for a $500,000 grant from National Endowment for the Humanities, SEP needs an additional $238,000 by July 31, 2006. Of this amount, SEP has new, registered commitments totaling $170,000, and so needs to raise an additional $68,000 by July to receive the entire NEH match. SPARC encourages libraries to use SPARC commitment dollars to support this innovative venture.

A membership organization called Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy International Association (SEPIA) was created exclusively to support the SEP. Indiana University Libraries sponsors SEPIA, and Southeastern Library Network, Inc. (SOLINET) acts as its fiscal agent. SEPIA membership dues support free and open access to the SEP. SEPIA 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 a commitment with SOLINET, 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.

Creative Commons License Upheld in Court

The Creative Commons license, which offers more flexibility than traditional copyright licenses, was tested in a court of law when former MTV VJ Adam Curry sued _Weekend_, a Dutch gossip magazine, for copyright infringement after the magazine published photos of Curry's daughter without his authorization. The photos, which Curry had posted on the Flickr photo-sharing site, were covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. The license states that while the licensed content can be used freely for noncommercial purposes as long as the source is made clear, the content cannot be used for commercial purposes unless the creator of the content agrees to waive the conditions. The court ruled that _Weekend_ must not use Curry's pictures again or it would face fines of 1,000 euros (about $1,200) for each photo used without permission. (Source: C-Net|News.com)

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_Journal of Electronic Publishing_ Returns

The _Journal of Electronic Publishing_ (JEP) has been reintroduced with the debut of the February 2006 issue, its first issue in more than three years. This online, open access journal is published by the University of Michigan University Library Scholarly Publishing Office. It is available free at http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org. To contribute to the _Journal of Electronic Publishing_, see the submission guidelines at http://www.hti.umich.edu/j/jep/info.html?gui.

NIH Report to Congress on Public Access Policy

The NIH has issued its report to Congress on its progress towards achieving the goals of its Public Access Policy. Previously, both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees endorsed the goals of the policy, but expressed concerns that the policy as currently constructed might not be able to achieve them. Both Committees requested that NIH provide a report on the progress of the policy by the end of February, containing specific information on: 1) the number of manuscripts available for deposit since its inception; 2) the number of manuscripts actually deposited during this time frame; and 3) the embargo periods chosen by authors.

The NIH report indicates that, to date, less than four percent of NIH-funded manuscripts have been deposited into PubMed Central as a result of this policy. The report highlights outreach efforts that the NIH has carried out to promote the policy and clearly states that lack of awareness is not the reason for low compliance.

Most importantly, it reiterates the recommendations that the NIH Public Access Working Group made in its meeting last fall: specifically that, for the policy to be effective, it must be made mandatory rather than voluntary and that, except in special instances, the embargo period should be no longer than 6 months. SPARC and the Alliance for Taxpayer Access, the group SPARCit founded to follow this issue, will continue to remain active in their advocacy of public access.

In related news, the Publishing Research Consortium, which represents publishers and societies supporting global research into scholarly communication, has produced a report on the NIH policy at http://www.publishingresearch.org.uk. (Click on “Research Reports.”)

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Open Access for _The Journal of Neuroscience_

Earlier this year, the Society for Neuroscience changed _The Journal of Neuroscience_’s publishing policy to allow unrestricted access for the scientific community and the public to articles six months after publication. Previously, the access control policy allowed non-subscribers to view articles 12 months after publication. In addition, the submission fee will rise to $75 and the publication fee to a flat $750 per regular article. For further information: http://apu.sfn.org/content/Publications/NeuroscienceNewsletter/index.htm.

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Open access for the _Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine_

Sections of the _Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine_ (JRSM) are now on its web site for free. JRSM is the flagship journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, which has been published continuously since 1809. All research and original articles, as well as issues more than three years old, are now available for free at http://www.jrsm.org. By early 2007 complete issues of the JRSM dating back to 1809 will be available online for free. The digitization of the JRSM was supported by the Wellcome Trust in partnership with the Joint Information Systems Committee. For further information: http://www.rsm.ac.uk/media/pr185.htm.

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Thomson Scientific Names OA Journal its “Hottest” Pick

_Nucleic Acids Research_ (NAR) was ranked as the "hottest" single-discipline journal in the world and the fifth "hottest" journal overall by Thomson Scientific. NAR is a fully open access journal, providing rapid publication of leading edge research into the nucleic acids. In January 2005 it became the first title from Oxford Journals and the first journal of its size and prestige to adopt a fully open access model. Thomson Scientific's "red-hot" series note areas that have been of significant interest to the research community over the last year. The journal is available at http://nar.oxfordjournals.org.

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Hindawi Expands Open Access Publishing Program

Hindawi Publishing Corporation has announced a major expansion in its open access publishing program through the immediate conversion of over a dozen journals into the OA model. All current and back volumes of these journals are immediately available free of any subscription or registration barriers on the Hindawi web site. All new articles in these journals will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. For a complete list of the OA journals, please see http://www.hindawi.com. For analysis of this development, please see Peter Suber’s posting on the SPARC Open Access Newsletter at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-06.htm#topstories.

By Suzanne Bell, Economics/Data Librarian and Research Projects Coordinator,
University of Rochester, sbell@library.rochester.edu

Jeremy Greenwood really gets it.

In this era of Institutional Repositories, as we pass from the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and enter the “Trough of Disillusionment” (Swanepoel 2005), it is thrilling to encounter and work with a faculty member who not only “gets it,” that is, understands the importance and usefulness of the IR, but is taking the concept to new and creative heights. Let me tell you all about it.

The University of Rochester, thanks to a far-sighted and enthusiastic Provost, jumped on the Institutional Repository bandwagon early on: we were one of the original members of the DSpace Federation, setting up our DSpace repository in late 2003/early 2004. Like almost every other installation, our IR failed to fill up immediately with content (surprise, surprise!). Since then we have studied our faculty, trying to understand how to align the repository to their needs, interests, and work habits (Foster and Gibbons 2005), tweaked the software to try to achieve some of those needs and interests, engaged the help of the rest of our subject librarians to recruit users (Bell, Foster, and Gibbons 2005), and made sure we knew what types of material we should be targeting to fill the repository (Sulouff and others 2005). We believe our “Researcher Pages” will go a long way in terms of attracting users – but even with those, we are still having to recruit, recruit, recruit. (At some point critical mass will take over, but we’re not quite there yet.)

And then there are people like Jeremy Greenwood. Jeremy is a member of the Economics Department at the University of Rochester, which makes him one of “my” faculty. I also occasionally run into him in the fitness center at the campus gym. One day in early 2004, while I was mindlessly working away at the bicep machine, Jeremy appeared and we chatted - I can’t imagine what made me bring up DSpace in that setting, and fully expected the slightly fish-eyed, “I’m not interested yet, try again” reaction I usually get from faculty, but he snapped at the idea immediately. Phrases like “yes, we have to do that – that’s great, I definitely want to” were so stunning I almost dropped the weights. So Jeremy was on board from the beginning, was one of the faculty we studied, and was helpful in the design of the Researcher Page. Now he’s done something even more interesting.

If you go to Jeremy Greenwood’s Researcher Page (https://urresearch.rochester.edu/researcher?
action=viewResearcherPage&researcherId=4), and look through the descriptions accompanying the links to his research deposits, you’ll find frequent mentions of “referee reports,” “handwritten notes,” a computer program or two, and “photographs.” That is, in addition to the paper itself, he is depositing the editorial correspondence that accompanied the paper on its journey through the publication process, pages of handwritten formulae that didn’t fit into the confines of the journal, and photos of the authors dating from the time the paper was written. (When he couldn’t obtain a period photo of one of the authors, he had to use a current one, and was really disappointed: the point was – literally – to provide a snapshot in time, of the time.)

What I find striking in these deposits is the exploitation of the DSpace capability to store several files of varying formats together in one record, and simply the vision to see that in the future it is not just the scholarly paper that will be of interest, but the process of creating that work, and the authors of the work. If the hit counters are anything to go by, the world at large agrees with Jeremy’s vision: several of the editorial files have been viewed more often than the papers themselves! Not to mention that this is exactly one of the functions IRs were designed to accommodate: making available extra materials that do not, by nature of format (computer programs), length (extensive mathematical proofs), or custom (editorial correspondence) - fit within the confines of commercial publishing.

I don’t wish to make Professor Greenwood a poster-boy for Institutional Repository usage, but we hear so many stories of frustration and lack of success in getting faculty interested in using IRs, it seemed important to share a truly shining success story. My hope is that this example will be useful in sparking your faculty’s interest and creativity in using your IR.

Please see end of SPARC e-news for article bibliography.

Researchers and Open Access
1st European Conference on Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine (ECSP)
April 21-22, 2006
Lund, Sweden
http://www.ecspbiomed.net/

The Access to Knowledge Conference (A2K)
Yale Law School, New Haven
April 21-23, 2006
http://islandia.law.yale.edu/isp/a2kspeakers.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/

Open Access Institutional Repositories
Current Research Information Systems (CRIS2006)
Bergen, Norway
May 11-13, 2006
http://ct.eurocris.org/CRIS2006/

FM10 Openness. Code, Science and Content: Making Collaborative Creativity Sustainable
Sponsored by First Monday
May 15-17, 2006
University of Illinois at Chicago
http://firstmonday.org/call.html. Registration at http://numenor.lib.uic.edu/fmconference/

“Open Access - threat or blessing?"
2nd Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF)
Munich, Germany
July 15-19, 2006
http://www.esof2006.org/programme2.php4

Open Scholarship: New Challenges for Institutional Repositories
SPARC/LIBER European conference
October 18-20, 2006
University of Glasgow, Scotland
(Details and registration information forthcoming)

Kantor, Andrew. “Net writing new chapter for science journals.” USA Today, March 23, 2006. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/andrewkantor/2006-03-23-net-science_x.htm

Poynder, Richard. “Open and Shut: Institutional Repositories, and a Little Experiment.” (blog entry) March 1, 2006.
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/03/institutional-repositories-and-little.html

Weiss, Rick. “Government Health Researchers Pressed to Share Data at No Charge.” Washington Post. March 10, 2006.

Bibliography for “Jeremy Greenwood Gets It”

Bell, Suzanne, Nancy Fried Foster, and Susan Gibbons. "Reference Librarians and the Success of Institutional Repositories." Reference Services Review 33, no. 3 (2005): 283-290, http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=897517741&Fmt=7&clientId=65345&RQT
=309&VName=PQD
(accessed 3/16/2006).

Foster, Nancy Fried, and Susan Gibbons. " Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories." D-Lib Magazine 11, no. 1 (January, 2005), http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january05/foster/01foster.html
(accessed 3/1/06).

Sulouff, Pat, Suzanne Bell, Judi Briden, Stephanie Frontz, and Ann Marshall. "Learning about Grey Literature by Interviewing Subject Librarians: A Study at the University of Rochester." College & Research Libraries News 66, no. 7 (2005): 510-515 (accessed 2/24/2006).

Swanepoel, Marinus. "Digital Repositories: All Hype and no Substance?" New Review of Information Networking 11, no. 1 (May, 2005): 13-25 (accessed 01/31/06).

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SPARC E-News is an open access publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.