Heading for the open road: costs and benefits of transitions in scholarly communications

This new report investigates the drivers, costs and benefits of potential ways to increase access to scholarly journals. It identifies five different routes for achieving that end over the next five years, and compares and evaluates the benefits as well as the costs and risks for the UK.

UCD Open Access Institutional Repository informational sessions

A series of talks and workshops will be held on a new service that allows you to put your research publications online, free of charge, without subscriptions or other barriers to access, open to all UCD researchers and staff engaged in scholarly publication .

Providing open access to your publications through the UCD Institutional Repository will increase your visibility, showcase your research, enhance your School, College or Research Centre's reputation, fulfil funding requirements and build valuable research and industry connections.

An informational leaflet is available at: http://www.ucd.ie/library/repository/files/guide.pdf

Each talk will cover reasons and incentives for putting your research online via the Institutional Repository; workshops will be practical sessions on how to upload items and track usage trends (downloads) for individual items, Schools, Colleges and Research Centres.

Talks:
1:15 Tuesday 22nd March, C108 Arts building
1:15 Thursday 24th March, B109 Health Sciences Building

Workshops:
1:15 Tuesday 29th March, Health Sciences Library Information Skills room
1:15 Wednesday 30th March, G30 Agricultural Sciences Building

Expressions of interest are welcome but booking in advance is not required.

For more information, please contact Joseph Greene, Institutional Repository Project Manager on 01 7167398 or joseph.greene&ucd.ie

Open Folklore launches

Ireland Creative Commons License enters public discussion to end of March

Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography

Ben Wagner's recent publication considers and weighs the evidence on the OA citation impact advantage.

Key findings: the overwhelming weight of the evidence suggests a strong OA citation impact advantage, with a download differential found across studies averaging at least 100%, followed by a citation impact differential of between 25-250% in favour of open access for the majority of studies, and particularly for larger studies, with a minority of studies finding no effect. Possible explanations for these anomalies include small sample size (one study refers to an a statistically insignificant OA impact advantage), disciplinary citation patterns, and failure to allow sufficient time to observe the citation impact difference. As the author points out - NO studies found a citation disadvantage for OA.

Article: Wagner, A. Ben. "Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography" (Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Winter 2010), available at:
http://www.istl.org/10-winter/article2.html

Wiley announces launch of Wiley Open Access

Hoboken, NJ, February 1st, 2011 - Wiley announces the launch of Wiley Open Access, a new publishing program of open access journals. The first journals will launch shortly, publishing primary, peer-reviewed research in a range of broad-based subject disciplines in the life and biomedical sciences, including neuroscience, microbiology, ecology and evolution.

Wiley Open Access will provide authors wishing to publish their research outcomes in an open access journal with a range of new high quality publications which meet the requirements of funding organizations and institutions where these apply.

"The development of Wiley Open Access is an example of our commitment to offer authors the widest possible choice in publishing with Wiley", said Steve Miron, Senior Vice President, Wiley-Blackwell. He added, "Wiley has a strong history of innovation in journal publishing and we see this as a natural extension of our service to our learned society partners, authors, and the scholarly community in its broadest sense".

The new journals are being launched in collaboration with a group of international professional and scholarly societies with which Wiley currently partners. Each journal will appoint an Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Board responsible for ensuring that all articles are rigorously peer-reviewed, and each journal will be offered with the full functionality of Wiley Online Library.

Submission fees could pave way to open-access future

From Times Higher
Most open-access journals are currently funded solely via charges to the authors of papers accepted for publication.

However, high-profile journals such as Science and Nature do not offer open-access options on the grounds that their high rejection rates would force them to impose prohibitively high charges in order to cover the cost of administering peer review.

But a new report commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, the European association of organisations committed to open access, says that a better business model for journals that reject more than 70 per cent of submitted articles would be to combine charges for accepted papers - known as article-processing charges - with submission fees.

The study, Submission Fees: A Tool in the Transition to Open Access?, says that for such journals, the combined cost of processing charges plus submission fees would allow the charges to be set at a substantially lower level, while also allowing publishers to increase and diversify their revenue.

Submission fees "would most likely limit author acceptance" if they were not offset by processing charges, it says.

The report concedes that while there is interest among publishers in introducing submission fees, they are concerned about higher administration costs and lower submission rates to journals.