UCD Library News

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

U of Calgary funds Open Access Authors Fund

The new fund will provide U of C faculty and graduate students with financial support to cover Open Access author fees.

Open Access publishing is a rapidly expanding development in the exchange of research information.

An increasing number of academic journals make research literature openly available via the internet without the restrictions on authors and without the high costs to users imposed by traditional subscription-based publications.

This new publishing model does, however, often require that authors pay fees contributing to the costs of publication. With the establishment of this new fund, researchers at the University of Calgary will have the freedom to exercise their own choice in publishing decisions....

Copyright toolbox for redrafting publisher agreements

SURFfoundation and JISC have created a copyright toolbox which academics could use in redrafting their publishing agreements.

The copyright toolbox also has a licence to publish academics could use in their contacts with publishers.

The tool box can be found at http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl/copyrighttoolbox/

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Open Access Self-Archiving Mandate at the University of Helsinki, Finland

Open access to output of publicly funded research enhances the visibility and the impact of the work of the University as well as of individual researchers.
The goals of the University of Helsinki are
• To support open access to research results
• To make results of publicly funded research openly accessible online to anyone interested
• To encourage other funding bodies as well to require research results funded by them be made public
• To increase the visibility, use and impact of research publications of the University of Helsinki by providing open access through the University’s own repository
• To make its repository and publication records openly available online and available for linkage to other repositories internationally
• To ease the reviewing of research results with open access research publications

By a unanimous decision of the university management team the University of Helsinki requires that researchers working at the University deposit copies of their research articles published in academic research journals in the open repository of the University.

This decision applies to articles approved for publication from 1st January 2010 onwards. The University of Helsinki recommends the depositing of articles in the repository of the University also for articles published before this date.

The researcher is responsible for submitting a full-text version of his/her article to the open repository which is maintained by the University library. The University will offer the support services needed in the deposit process for all its researchers.
In addition to the research articles, other kinds of publications such as popular articles, other published texts, serial publications of University departments, teaching material and, publishing contracts permitting, monographs may be stored in the open repository of the University of Helsinki.

University of Helsinki is the first university in Finland to mandate open access self-archiving of its scholarly output. With its more than 38 000 students and nearly 8000 employees University of Helsinki is the biggest multidisciplinary institution of higher education and research in the country. University of Helsinki web pages http://www.helsinki.fi/university/

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Unpaid peer review is worth £1.9bn

From the THES

"Study tallies 'hidden subsidy' of global scholarly communications system. Zoe Corbyn reports
The idea of being paid for the time spent assessing colleagues' research might only fleetingly cross most academics' minds.

The advancement of the academy's collective body of knowledge has traditionally been held to be reward enough for the time and effort put into peer review.

But a new report has attempted to quantify in cash terms exactly what peer reviewers are missing out on. It puts the worldwide unpaid cost of peer review at £1.9 billion a year, and estimates that the UK is among the most altruistic of nations, racking up the equivalent in unpaid time of £165 million a year."