New report: Key Concerns Within the Scholarly Communication Process

A report to the JISC Scholarly Communications Working Group has recently been announced.


The main findings regarding concerns about accessibility (thanks to Peter Suber blog) were:
Availability does not equal accessibility: researchers’ top concern about scholarly communication is that they cannot access all the content they wish to access...

The main problem with discovery is coming up against an access barrier

Researchers do not always know how to seek out a freely-available copy of an article that they want and which they have discovered behind a toll barrier...

Discovering research datasets can be a difficult and time-consuming process. Accessing them once discovered can also be difficult, requiring specialised software tools

e-journals are extremely popular and researchers would like all their journals delivered digitally.

Access problems occur when digital backfiles are not available, when the subscription to a journal is cancelled and access to the backfile ceases or when site licence terms debar some users

Site licences may debar certain constituencies of user, such as remote workers, off-campus workers or visiting faculty not normally based on campus

Access to research monographs is a concern. Researchers in the arts and humanities, where monographs are the most important literature type, perceive that access is reducing and that this is because the purchase of monographs is suffering because the science journal budget is taking an increasing proportion of the library’s funds....

Accessing intrinsic data – facts that reside in the text of an article – is made difficult by the preponderance of PDF as an output format. XML is the optimal format for authoring and specialised mark-up languages can be built upon that

Researchers remain poorly informed about Open Access. Awareness is growing but still only slowly and there remain many misconceptions. Researchers are eager to maximise their own impact and reputation but do not understand what means and opportunities are available to them...

UCD Institutional Repository, Full time project manager sought

A full time project manager post is currently advertised and details can be found at

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/NM423/Project_Manager/

Open Access features in Guardian libraries supplement

Today the Guardian has a special supplement related to the JISC launch of the Libraries unleashed iinitiative.

Included is some material on the development of Open Access and institutional repositories, which you can view directly at http://education.guardian.co.uk/librariesunleashed/story/0,,2275369,00.html

Complete works of Charles Darwin Online

Thousands of papers written by Charles Darwin, including the first draft of his famous Origin of Species, are now accessible on the internet at the Darwin Online website.
The historic texts, totalling about 20,000 items in nearly 90,000 images, were previously available only to scholars at Cambridge University Library.

"Charles Darwin is one of the most influential scientists in history," said Dr John van Wyhe, director of The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online at Cambridge University.
"This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free.

"His publications have always been available in the public sphere, but these papers have until now only been accessible to scholars."

A searchable electronic catalogue has been created to help users navigate the collection, which is so large that even if someone viewed one image per minute, it would still take more than two months to see all of the material.

"Darwin changed our understanding of nature forever," added van Wyhe. "This is one of the most important collections of primary materials in the history of science."

UCD Today includes publicity on the Institutional Repository project

Turn to page 5...

Stirling issues institutional mandate to deposit research in IR

The University of Stirling has become the first academic institution in the UK to oblige staff to make all their published research available online. Stirling is leading the way in open access to its research work, after the University’s Academic Council issued an institutional mandate which requires self-archiving of all theses and journal articles. Professor Ian Simpson, Deputy Principal (Research and Knowledge Transfer) said: “We believe that the outcomes of all publicly funded research should be made available as widely as possible. By ensuring free online access to all our research output, we will maximise the visibility and impact of the University’s work to researchers worldwide.” The four year project to create STORRE (Stirling Online Research Repository) has been brought to fruition by information technology specialists Clare Allan and Michael White. Clare Allan said: “The University now requires all published journal articles to be deposited by authors, as soon as possible after they are accepted for publication, and in compliance with the publishers' copyright agreements.

Top researchers talk about Open Access

BMC have a YouTube channel and this includes some interesting short videos where researchers talk about scholarly communication and Open Access.