Authors Rights - excellent 2 minute video

ACRL, ARL and SPARC have produced this very short video summarising the reasons to think before signing typical publisher agreements regarding articles accepted for publication, which typically result in handing over many of your rights.

Stanford School of Education introduce OA mandate

Faculty members at Stanford University’s school of education have voted to make scholarly articles available to the public for free, a policy change that the university says makes Stanford’s education school the first such school in the nation to join the growing “open access” movement in academia.
“We think it’s a huge gain in terms of public access, professional access, policymaker access, and lawmaker access,” said John M. Willinsky, the education professor who proposed the idea to his colleagues at the California university. “This is a body of work that is now available to schools that hasn’t been available before.”
Only 15 percent of the 1,600 education journals published around the world provide free access to their content, according to Mr. Willinsky.

Who owns science? Call for open access to science

Sulston argues for open medicine. "A Nobel Prize-winning scientist has hit out at what he terms the "moral corruption" of the medical industry. Britain's Sir John Sulston says that profits are taking precedence over the needs of patients, particularly in the developing world. He was speaking at the launch of a new research institute into science, ethics and innovation"

See also Times letters http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article4271555.ece
Times coverage http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article4272828.ece

RePEc reaches 600,000 works

RePEc have released their June 2008 update.

June was a surpisingly busy month, especially in terms of content expansion. We have now reached 600,000 works listed on RePEc, and it took only 10 months to add the last 100,000. Traffic was also heavy for the season, reaching 584,843 downloads and 2,803,705 abstract views.

The following institutions joined RePEc with an archive: World Scientific Publishing, Queens College (CUNY), GEFRA, Kobe University, Institut für Angewandte Wirtschaftsforschung (IAW), Université d’Auvergne, Universtät Freiburg, Società Italiana degli Economisti.

Finally, here are the thresholds we reached this month:
140,000,000 cumulative abstract views
100,000,000 cumulative abstract views on IDEAS
45,000,000 cumulative abstract views for articles
600,000 listed works
350,000 articles listed
300,000 online articles listed
240,000 working papers listed
180,000 working paper abstracts
150,000 items with references
120,000 article abstracts
20,000 NEP reports

More at the RePEc blog http://repec.org/blog/?p=59

Understanding Open Access in the Academic Environment: A Guide for Authors

This guide aims to provide practical guidance for academic authors interested in making their work more openly accessible to readers and other researchers. The guide provides authors with an overview of the concept of and rationale for open access to research outputs and how they may be involved in its implementation and with what effect.

A Copyright Toolkit is provided to further assist authors in managing their copyright

This is a substantial report of over 114 pages.