Sage launches new Open Access journal for social science and humanities

SAGE Open to launch Spring 2011

Los Angeles, CA (17 November, 2010) – SAGE, the world's leading independent academic and professional publisher today announced the launch of SAGE Open: a new publication to support open access publishing in the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities.

SAGE Open will publish peer-reviewed original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format. The journal will offer authors quick review and decision times; a speedy, continuous-publication format; and global distribution for their research via the SAGE Journals Online platform. The articles will also be guaranteed professional copyediting and typesetting.

The publication supports the growing number of authors who require their articles to be freely available on publication, either because of personal preference or because of university or government mandates......

Open bibliographic metadata and academic libraries

JISC website provides guidance and case studies at http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/

UCD Library repository, an article about its management and development

Project Management and Institutional Repositories: A Case Study at University College Dublin Library: ... an article focusing particularly on use of the PMBOK project management methodology.

Trinity College Dublin introduces an Open Access mandate for research output

From their launch release in Open Access Week...

TCD to Provide Free Online Access to its Research

Oct 20, 2010

In a move aimed at broadening access to its research and scholarship, Trinity College Dublin has adopted a policy to make its scholarly articles available to the public for free and open online access. The new policy confirms Trinity’s commitment to disseminating its research outputs and scholarship as widely as possible. This move places Trinity at the forefront of academic institutions worldwide that are pioneering the move to Open Access.

Open Access week October 18-24

Dramatic growth of Open Access in last quarter

"The growth rate of open access is robust and growing. DOAJ added 312 titles this quarter (more than 3 per day), for a total of 5,452. There are now more than 6,600 journals using OJS. The number of journals fully participating in PMC continues to grow, while the NIH Public Access Policy compliance rate is about 60%, indicating significant progress but still room for improvement..."

Single search point for Japanese research in full text

Japan's JAIRO http://jairo.nii.ac.jp/en/ contains 700,000 full-texts self-archived in Japan's 158 Institutional Repositories since 2007.

Experimenting with the open access monograph

Experimenting with the open access monograph by Maria Bonn

"For many of us who are interested in advancing the case for OA books, there was an initial flush of enthusiasm about the potential for such publishing that is now being tempered by awareness that books are not journals and monograph people are different from article people. It is important to learn from the experiments that are taking place, and to embark upon more of them, so that we can design distribution and publication models that meet the needs of our scholars and ensure the vitality of the monograph for as long as it continues to serve as a useful vehicle for communicating research and ideas."


Maria Bonn’s essay, a review of the challenges of applying open access models to monograph publishing, is based on her presentation at the ALA 2010 Midwinter SPARC-ACRL Forum in Boston, MA. The entire Forum, “The ebook transition: Collaborations and innovations behind open-access monographs,” may be viewed online at www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/ala10mw/

Germany's largest scientific organization to fund OA publishing author charges

Last week Germany's largest scientific organization, the Helmholtz Association, signed a new open access agreement which will cover the article processing charge for any of its researchers wishing to publish in a SpringerOpen or BioMed Central journal

Emerging-technology expert calls for open access to academic knowledge

From the Times Higher, article generating much comment:
It is almost "criminally irresponsible" to hoard academic knowledge in the digital age, according to a Canadian specialist in the field.

Brian Lamb, manager of emerging technologies and digital content at the University of British Columbia, also said that open educational resources (OERs) could help to reassert the academy's role as a "leader and guardian of free and open enquiry".

He made the comments at the Open Educational Resources International Symposium in London, which was sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee.

Mr Lamb said that OER - freely available course material - was "one small piece" of a broader movement. "Yes, we want open content, but also open source tools, the adoption of open standards, open data and open and transparent practices," he said.

He added that it was possible universities did not have the answers to the world's problems and that the human race was "doomed", but that hoarding knowledge was "perverse".

Springer goes Open Access

A new range of OA journals announced by Springer at ALA

Open Access policy in Europe, handy summary from David Prosser

Enabling Open Scholarship has just released David Prosser's Open Access Policies in Europe. This succinct overview by one of open access' most noteworthy champions is a must-read for anyone involved in OA policy development or advocacy.

An introduction to Open Access - new guide

This guide has been produced to give researchers, publishers, librarians and information professionals a basic understanding of the Open Access movement and where we currently stand

Ireland's National Portal for Open Access to Research Goes Live!

Ireland’s new national portal for Open Access to Irish published research goes live today.

RIAN - http://www.rian.ie will act as a single point of access to national research output, and contains content harvested from the institutional repositories of the seven Irish Universities and Dublin Institute of Technology. RIAN will significantly increase the visibility and impact of Irish research and will expand to harvest content from other Irish Open Access providers as the service develops.

Researchers - your views on open access publishing are needed!

The SOAP Project (*), funded by the European Commission, would like to announce the release of an online survey to assess researchers' experiences with open access publishing. This survey aims to inform the most comprehensive analysis of attitudes to open access publishing to date and is seeking views from a wide a range of interested parties. It is primarily aimed at active researchers in public and private organizations, from all research fields in science and the humanities and focuses on publication of research articles in (open access) peer-reviewed journals.



If you would like to contribute to shaping the public discourse on open access, please visit http://surveymonkey.com/soap_survey_d. It should take 10-15 minutes to complete. We would appreciate if you would share this link with your work colleagues and research collaborators so that the views of your discipline are properly represented. The survey outcome will be made public and the resulting insights as well as recommendations will be openly shared with the European Commission and other research funding agencies, publishers, and libraries.



(*) Note: The SOAP consortium is coordinated by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. It represents key stakeholders in open access, such as publishers BioMedCentral, SAGE and Springer; funding agencies (the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council) and libraries (the Max Planck Digital Library of the Max Planck Society). The project runs for two years, from March 2009 to February 2011.



Thank you in advance on behalf of LIBER and the SOAP Project Team (info@project-soap.eu).

Nature expands Open Access options

7 more titles from NPG have introduced an Open Access option for authors

Open Access options for UCD Researchers

UCD researchers funded by the SFI, IRCSET, HEA, EU FP7, HRB and various other funding bodies are required by these funders to make research outputs available on an Open Access basis. In most cases, depositing the final draft of your research publication into the institutional repository is the preferred method of meeting this requirement.

The Library has guidelines in place to help you fulfill your Open Access requirements

The real future of Open Access - mining the literature

a challenge to researchers from Dr. Philip E. Bourne, Professor of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego and Founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Computational Biology. In a video posted to the OA Week Web site, Bourne calls upon scholars to think beyond free and ready access to the literature – made possible by Open Access – and consider how technology may be deployed to advance research, to truly mine the increasing amount of available literature.

More open access to public funded research would aid the knowledge economy

In this issue, Houghton and Oppenheim put forward a proposition for a widespread shift to Green Open Access publication of research, based on the Houghton Report, and the Editor, Professor Stuart Macdonald, gives key figures the chance to respond. Read the articles that form this lively and interesting debate!

Tools to search RePEc

Currently, there are three different websites that offer bibliographic searches based on the data collected by RePEc: EconPapers, IDEAS and EconomistsOnline. Why use them instead of simply Google or Google Scholar? First, RePEc services allow fielded search: given the structure of the underlying metadata, it is possible to separate search results by authors, topical area, date, publication type and other attributes. EconomistOnline goes here the furthest, by allowing to narrow result sets successively according to various criteria. Second, the database and the search engines are updated as soon as publishers post new material, thus search results always reflect current holdings.

Now free - world's most comprehensive bibliography of scholarly writing about the history of western art

As of April 1, 2010, the Bibliography of the History of Art (BHA) will be available free of charge on the Getty Web site at http://library.getty.edu/bha. Free Web access to BHA is an advantage not only to all traditional users of the database but also to such potential users as institutions in developing countries and independent scholars worldwide, who until now have been unable to afford access to the BHA. Since ending its collaboration with the Institut de l'Information Scientifique et Technique (INIST)–CNRS in December 2007, the Getty has been searching for partners to continue the production and distribution of BHA. This process has been complicated, and with no suitable arrangement immediately available, the Getty decided to act on its commitment to the scholarly community by providing access to BHA directly from its own Web site.

Open Sesame - Nature editorial on Open Access developments

Government influence favouring enhanced openness is rightly diversifying practices in science publishing.

The rise of the Internet in the 1990s helped spark a radical idea for turning primary science publishing on its head. If journals charged authors a fee to publish, instead of charging readers and libraries a fee to subscribe, said the advocates, published peer-reviewed papers could be provided free to anyone in the world.

This simple-sounding notion provoked visceral debate..........

UK Ordnance Survey to free up information

Prime minister Gordon Brown has said that the government will be making “a substantial package of information held by ordnance survey freely available to the public, without restrictions on re-use.”

By Peter Williams, Information World Review 22 Mar 2010
The announcement came in a speech on building Britain’s digital future. He said further details on the package and government’s response to the consultation will be published by the end of March.

HSE’s Lenus joins global science gateway

The HSE’s online repository for health research, has been accepted as part of the WorldWideScience Alliance, the internet-based global science gateway.

This is a considerable achievement and represents an important step in Lenus’ innovative programme to increase the profile and effectiveness of research in the Irish health services. The Lenus repository is maintained by the Regional Library in Dr Steevens’ Hospital, and since its inception has worked to provide a platform for researchers working in the HSE to make their work available to colleagues, both in Ireland and around the world. In Lenus, researchers create their own web pages to share information and contacts online with others engaged in similar work. This facilitates the inter-disciplinary exchange of ideas and findings, making Lenus a key research hub in the Irish health sector.

Read the full press release www.hse.ie/eng/services/news/lenus.html

and visit the WorldWideScience Alliance here http://worldwidescience.org/news.html

OA citation advantage: paper summarizing research to date

Paper by Alma Swan

Science Foundation of Ireland and the Health Research Board (HRB) are introducing a mandatory open access publication policy for all research

The Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) and the Health Research Board (HRB) are introducing a mandatory open access publication policy for all SFI and/or HRB-funded research, providing unrestricted access to published research.

HRB Director of Research Strategy and Funding Dr Mairead O’Driscoll said the HRB, along with the SFI, has consequently become a member of the UK PubMed Central Repository – a free-to-access digital archive of full-text peer reviewed biomedical and life sciences research.

“While the published research must still be subject to rigorous quality assurance through the peer review process, the public should not have to ‘pay twice’ for it by having to pay a fee to access the academic publication in question,” Dr O’Driscoll said.

The research community will be circulated detailed instructions on the practicalities of the move.

Report on Jan 2010 conference to launch Economists Online

A report by Dave Puplett on the conference held in January 2010 to launch Economists Online, an EU project to create an economics full text portal, in which UCD is a participant

Simon Fraser University Library initiates fund to pay OA charges

Beginning in February 2010, SFU is creating an OA Central Fund to encourage SFU authors to publish in OA Journals. The fund will pay the APCs for SFU authors who lack other sources to cover these fees. It’s all part of the Library’s new Open Access Strategy....

You can search OAISTER (only) again!

As of today, an OAIster only interface to more than 23 million bibliographic records is online and ready to use. You’ll find the OAIster Only interface at: http://oaister.worldcat.org/. An advanced interface is also available. You’ll also see many of the options WorldCat offers to narrow and focus a search. In essence, this is a version of WorldCat that only searches a single database of content.

Maney launches hybrid option for 39 journals

Maney Publishing is pleased to announce the launch of a new open access (OA) business model, MORE OpenChoice. Twenty-four materials science and engineering journals and fifteen health science titles are initially included in MORE OpenChoice, with the intention to expand this to humanities journals in the future.

OA mandate at Dublin Institute of Technology

OA News blog reports:

Academic staff, research assistants, research students and other members of the Institute are entitled and required to deposit digital copies of refereed and other research publications and documents. ...

The OA advantage is real

Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for
Higher Quality Research

http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0361

Yassine Gargouri, Chawki Hajjem, Vincent Lariviere, Yves Gingras, Les
Carr, Tim Brody, Stevan Harnad

ABSTRACT: Articles whose authors make them Open Access (OA) by
self-archiving them online are cited significantly more than articles
accessible only to subscribers. Some have suggested that this "OA
Advantage" may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because
authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this
we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory
self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in
1,984 journals. The OA Advantage proved just as high for both.
Logistic regression showed that the advantage is independent of other
correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of
co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and
greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real,
independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with
quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles
receive about 80% of all citations). The advantage is greater for the
more citeable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors
self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage,
from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the
constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only.