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.