An OA repository for nanoscience

The project brings together partners from the EU, China, India and Russia and aims to...[create] an open access electronic archive of nanoscience publications and tools to facilitate networking between scientists in different world regions.....

Economics Portal launching February 2nd

Review of Open Access in 2008

Peter Suber's review of OA progress in 2008 is now available. Heather Morrison introduced this in her OA Librarian blog: "... this piece succinctly captures the major events of 2008 - the widely heralded such as the strong NIH mandate, the Harvard mandate, and the Springer acquisition of BioMedCentral - to the more important but perhaps less noticed events - such as the fact that BMC achieved profitability before being bought by Springer. Highly recommended as a review for those who keep up, or an overview for those who don't always have the time"

Dramatic Growth of Open Access in 2008 reported

Highlights: a quick snapshot of the continuum of access to scholarly journals suggests not only strong growth of open access journals, but a scholarly communications system well on its way to transitioning from toll to open access, with the pure toll access journal (no author self-archiving allowed, no back issues, etc.) a small, and diminishing, portion of the total. The growth of open access journals continues to be dramatic; there are now over 3,700 journals in DOAJ, 781 more journals than last year, 2 new titles per day. While content recruitment at the local repository may seem painfully slow, on a global basis the content and growth are phenomenal, with more than 24 million publications available through Scientific Commons, 19 million through OAIster. Every week, close to 150,000 new items become available through Scientific Commons.

Society publishers' attitude towards OA - survey results

Peter Suber reports in his blog

"SAGE has released Meeting the challenges: societies and scholarly communication (November 2008), the results of a survey it launched in September. .... (21 pages)

....for respondents in this survey, it was particularly interesting to see both HSS and STM responses fairly evenly split on OA as an opportunity or a threat.

Responses viewing OA as an opportunity highlighted the ability to broaden access. The negative responses related to revenue, copyright, and the lack of funds within certain disciplines to support the model....

The evenly split results pro- and anti- OA across the disciplines in this study is surprising and suggests there may be a greater level in favour of free access to research than anticipated...."

Google Booksearch now includes digitized magazines

"Today, we're announcing an initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony. ......

For years, we've worked to make as much information as possible accessible online, whether that information comes from books, newspapers, or images. We think that bringing more magazines online is one more important step toward our long-standing goal of providing access to all the world's information...."

Author rights, your rights

Many academic authors believe it is necessary to transfer their copyright to the publisher when they publish a scientific article. This however, is not the case. Copyright is something that lies with the author, and that he can dispose of as he sees fit. He can choose to transfer his copyright to the publisher, but this often leads to him not being able to do what he wants with his work. He does not have to do this. An author can also authorize the publisher to publish his work by using a licence. With this licence a publisher can publish as usual and if necessary still take measures against illegal copy making. For the author a licence means that he retains the right to publish his work somewhere else, for example freely accessible on the internet, or on a department’s website, or an improved version in a different medium.

SURFdirect, SURF’s digital rights expert community, has produced a short film on Author rights, your rights.