Gabriel Weisberg , a reviews editor at an open-access journal called "Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide," said open access journals are becoming a necessity.

Weisberg, who is also a professor of art history at the University, said textbooks, especially art books, are becoming prohibitively expensive. It has also become more difficult for researchers to publish their material, he said.

Weisberg said his journal, which was launched in 2001, is now collecting about 500,000 hits per month.

Find the complete article at:

http://www.mndaily.com/2009/10/25/u-supportive-open-access-movement

The University of Michigan Press is joining with HathiTrust Digital Library to open electronic content for free online access. U-M Press plans to have 1,000 or more titles available for full viewing by the end of this year.

Launched in 2008, HathiTrust is a digital preservation repository and research management tool for the world's great research libraries, focused on providing scholars in the digital age with the largest collection of electronic research material this side of Google Book Search and large-scale, full-text searching and archiving tools to manage it.

"Presses have had online previews and PDFs of sample chapters, tables of contents, and sometimes entire books on their Web sites for years," said Phil Pochoda, director of the U-M Press. "The HathiTrust partnership is something entirely new that takes into account the actual pursuit of broad dissemination of scholarly information.

"Security restrictions are in place to protect the integrity of the product, but with HathiTrust, a full view of the material is there. It's searchable and it's available to anyone with access. If you want to either search for or happen to come across Michigan Press books, you can look through them onscreen anywhere, anytime."

The full text of the letter is available at:
http://www.oberlingroup.org/files/FRPAA%20Presidents%20letter%202009FNL.pdf

The list of signers is here:

Elizabeth Kiss, President, Agnes Scott College
Donna M. Randall, President, Albion College
Anthony W. Marx, President, Amherst College
Steven C. Bails, President Augustana College
Marjorie Hass, President, Austin College
Leon Botstein, President, Bard College
Debora Spar, President, Barnard College
Elaine Tuttle Hansen, President, Bates College
Scott Bierman, President, Beloit College
Barry Mills, President, Bowdoin College
Jane McAuliffe, President, Bryn Mawr College
Brian C. Mitchell, President, Bucknell University
Robert A. Oden, President, Carleton
William D. Adams, President, Colby College
Grant H. Cornwell, President, The College of Wooster
Lyle D. Roelofs, Interim President, Colgate University
Michael McFarland, President, College of the Holy Cross
Richard F. Celeste, President, Colorado College
Leo I. Higdon Jr., President, Connecticut College
Thomas W. Ross, President, Davidson College
Dale Knobel, President, Denison University
Brian W. Casey, President, DePauw University
William G. Durden, President, Dickinson College
Douglas C. Bennett, President and Professor of Politics, Earlham College
Donald R. Eastman III, President, Eckerd College
John A. Fry, President, Franklin and Marshall College
David E. Shi, President, Furman University
Janet Riggs, President, Gettysburg College
Russell K. Osgood, President, Grinnell College
Jack R. Ohle, President, Gustavus Adolphus College
James E. Bultman, President, Hope College
Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran, President, Kalamazoo College
S. Georgia Nugent, President, Kenyon College
Daniel H. Weiss, President, Lafayette College
Jill Beck, President, Lawrence University
Brian C. Rosenberg, President, Macalester College
Ronald D. Liebowitz, President, Middlebury College
Robert Franklin, President, Morehouse College
Marvin Krislov, President, Oberlin College
Rock Jones, President, Ohio Wesleyan University
Colin S. Diver, President, Reed College
William Troutt, President, Rhodes College
Lewis M. Duncan, President, Rollins College
William L. Fox, President. St. Lawrence University
David R. Anderson, President, St. Olaf College
Karen R. Lawrence, President, Sarah Lawrence College
Philip A. Glotzbach, President, Skidmore College
Carol T. Christ, President, Smith College
Rebecca Chopp, President, Swarthmore College
Beverly Tatum, President, Spelman College
John R. Brazil, President, Trinity University (TX)
Catherine B. Hill, President, Vassar College
Patrick E. White, President, Wabash College
Kenneth P. Ruscio, President, Washington and Lee University
H. Kim Bottomly, President, Wellesley College
George Bridges, President, Whitman College
M. Lee Pelton, President, Willamette University

The group's web site is here:

http://www.oacompact.org/

And an article by Harvard's Stuart Shieber in PLOS Biology explains the group's thinking in more depth:

http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1000165

From The RePEc Blog:

The month of July is generally calm. Regular classes are not in session on campuses, researchers are on vacation or at conferences, thus it is to be expected that RePEc sees little new material or traffic. [...]

We still managed to pass a few thresholds:

400000 online articles
12500 listed book chapters

The Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC) today unveiled the beta‐test site for its open access repository, http://dash.harvard.edu, to the public. DASH, for Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, is intended to serve as a university‐wide institutional repository.

[...]

Hundreds of scholarly works have been added to DASH in recent months, mainly by Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and Harvard Law School (HLS) professors, with the assistance of student Open Access Fellows as well as HLS and other library staff. To date, over 350 Harvard authors have contributed to the repository, including roughly a third of FAS's 718 faculty members. Of the 1,500+ items in DASH today, the vast majority are peer‐reviewed journal article manuscripts.

[...]

Contributors include Harvard President Drew Faust and University professors Robert Darnton, Peter Galison, Stanley Hoffman, Barry Mazur, Stephen Owen, Amartya Sen, Irwin Shapiro, Helen Vendler, and George Whitesides. Harvard's science and engineering departments have contributed the largest proportion of items in the repository, but humanities and social science departments including economics, anthropology and philosophy are also represented by dozens of submissions.

http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

Here is Hitchcock's introduction:

Despite significant growth in the number of research papers available through open access, principally through author self-archiving in institutional archives, it is estimated that only c. 20% of the number of papers published annually are open access. It is up to the authors of papers to change this. Why might open access be of benefit to authors? One universally important factor for all authors is impact, typically measured by the number of times a paper is cited (some older studies have estimated monetary returns to authors from article publication via the role citations play in determining salaries). Recent studies have begun to show that open access increases impact. More studies and more substantial investigations are needed to confirm the effect, although a simple example demonstrates the effect.

This chronological bibliography is intended to describe progress in reporting these studies; it also lists the Web tools available to measure impact. It is a focused bibliography, on the relationship between impact and access. It does not attempt to cover citation impact, or other related topics such as open access, more generally, although some key papers in these areas are listed as jump-off points for wider study.

http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/oapublishers.php

The following journal publishers have formally indicated cooperation with Harvard's open access policies and have agreed that Harvard faculty who publish in their journals may deposit those articles in Harvard's DASH repository under the open access policy without modification of their publication agreements, attachment of addenda, or waiver of Harvard's prior license. We are grateful to these publishers for their full support of access to Harvard faculty's writings.

We expect to add additional publishers and journals to this list in the near future. Publishers interested in being listed here should contact us for further information.

Publisher/Journal Confirmed as of
American Economic Association June 5, 2009
American Mathematical Society June 11, 2009
American Physical Society April 9, 2009
Berkeley Electronic Press June 10, 2009
BioMed Central June 5, 2009
Duke University Press June 29, 2009
Hindawi Publishing Corporation June 8, 2009
Public Library of Science June 8, 2009
Rockefeller University Press June 29, 2009
University of California Press June 29, 2009

On average, it cost nearly $10,000 to publish an article in a humanities or social-science journal in 2007, more than three times what it did to publish an article in a science, technical, or medical journal, a study found.

Thank you for your help!

*****

Senator Al Franken (D)
1-202-224-5641
info@franken.senate.gov

Senator Amy Klobuchar (D)
1-888-224-9043
http://klobuchar.senate.gov/emailamy.cfm

*****

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/s1373_june2009.html

Yesterday, Senators Lieberman (I-CT) and Cornyn (R-TX) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (S.1373), a bill that would ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by eleven U.S. federal agencies. S.1373 would require those agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from such funding no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The bill gives individual agencies flexibility in choosing the location of the digital repository to house this content, as long as the repositories meet conditions for interoperability and public accessibility, and have provisions for long-term archiving.

The bill specifically covers unclassified research funded by agencies including: Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

S. 1373 reflects the growing trend among funding agencies - and college and university campuses - to leverage their investment in the conduct of research by maximizing the dissemination of results. It follows the successful path forged by the NIH's Public Access Policy, as well as by private funders like the Wellcome Trust, and universities such as Harvard and MIT.

Detailed information about the Federal Research Public Access Act is available at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/frpaa.

All supporters of public access - universities and colleges, researchers, libraries, campus administrators, patient advocates, publishers, consumers, individuals, and others - are asked to ACT NOW to support this bill.

Colleagues: I am pleased to inform you that the Faculty Senate has approved an Open Access Policy for KU at its final meeting on April 30, 2009. On May 19th and 22nd, respectively, the Provost and Chancellor approved the policy. The approval of this policy is significant in that it makes KU the first public university to pass such a faculty-initiated policy and puts KU faculty in the company of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard's Law School, Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Stanford's School of Education, and most recently, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology [...]. These are all institutions whose faculties voted and approved policies very similar to the policy passed by our Faculty Senate.

Please note: The policy has been approved in concept, but the details have yet to be determined. Details of the policy implementation will be developed in the 2009-2010 academic year by a faculty senate task force. The KU Faculty Senate decided that additional details of the policy would be developed by faculty governance in consultation with the Provost's Office, to be voted on by the Faculty Senate in the coming academic year. Whatever implementation plan is created will provide faculty with an option to seek a waiver from the policy (to opt out). As such an implementation task force is being created to develop the policy details and provide a report during the 2009-2010 school year. The entire policy is included at the end of this message.

Open Access Policy at KU
"The faculty of the University of Kansas (KU) is committed to sharing the intellectual fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible and lowering barriers to its access. In recognition of that commitment and responsibility, the KU faculty is determined to take advantage of new technologies to increase access to its work by the citizens of Kansas and scholars, educators, and policymakers worldwide. In support of greater openness in scholarly endeavors, the KU faculty agrees to the following concept: Each faculty member grants to KU permission to make scholarly articles to which he or she made substantial intellectual contributions publicly available in the KU open access institutional repository, and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. This license in no way interferes with the rights of the KU faculty author as the copyright holder of the work. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while a faculty member of KU. Faculty will be afforded an opt out opportunity. Faculty governance in consultation with the Provost's office will develop the details of the policy which will be submitted for approval by the Faculty Senate."

Also, the week before, Harvard issued this press release (excerpted):

The faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) voted overwhelmingly at its last faculty meeting to allow the university to make all faculty members' scholarly articles publicly available online. The resolution makes HGSE the fourth of Harvard's 10 schools to endorse open access to faculty research publications. The Faculties of Arts and Sciences, the Harvard Law School, and the Harvard Kennedy School all passed similar policies in recent months.
[...]
As a result of the resolution, HGSE faculty will now provide their scholarly articles to the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication for deposit in an open access digital repository that is currently under development. When the repository launches later this year, the contents will be freely available to the public, unless an author chooses to embargo or block access. The policy makes rights sharing with publishers and self-archiving the default, while allowing faculty to waive Harvard's license on a case-by-case basis, at the author's discretion.

Position Statement From University Press Directors on Free Access to Scholarly Journal Articles:

1. The undersigned university press directors support the dissemination of scholarly research as broadly as possible.

2. We support the free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than 12 months after publication. We understand that the length of time before free release of journal articles will by necessity vary for other disciplines.

3. We support the principle that scholarly research fully funded by governmental entities is a public good and should be treated as such. We support legislation that strengthens this principle and oppose legislation designed to weaken it.

4. We support the archiving and free release of the final, published version of scholarly journal articles to ensure accuracy and citation reliability.

5. We will work directly with academic libraries, governmental entities, scholarly societies, and faculty to determine appropriate strategies concerning dissemination options, including institutional repositories and national scholarly archives.

The participating presses:

1. Athabasca University Press
2. Penn State University Press
3. Rockefeller University Press
4. University Press of Florida
5. University of Akron Press
6. University of Calgary Press
7. University of Massachusetts Press
8. University of Michigan Press
9. University Press of New England
10. Wayne State University Press

The statement was covered by the Chronicle of Higher Education in its June 5 Wired Campus.

Peter Suber from Open Access News comments: "This is significant. It's the first statement in support of OA from a group of mostly-TA publishers and the first from a group of mostly-book publishers. It's also an important reproach to the American Association of University Presses, which publicly supported the Conyers bill last September without consulting its members."

*****

OPEN LETTER TO LICENSED CONTENT PROVIDERS

The University of California Libraries ask all information providers with whom we negotiate content licenses to respond to the major fiscal challenges affecting higher education in California in a spirit of collaboration and mutual problem-solving. We expect to work with each of our vendors at renewal to develop creative solutions that can preserve the greatest amount of content to meet the information needs of the University of California’s students, faculty, and researchers.

The University of California Libraries, including the California Digital Library (CDL), share the economic concerns expressed in the Statement to Scholarly Publishers on the Global Economic Crisis issued by the Association of Research Libraries <http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/economic-statement-2009.pdf> and the Statement on the Global Economic Crisis issued by the International Coalition of Library Consortia <http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/icolc-econcrisis-0109.htm>. The economic crisis affecting libraries is particularly acute in California, which as of this writing (May 2009) is forecasting a $21 billion state budget shortfall for 2010 despite previous efforts to close a $42 billion budget gap in 2009.

As a state-supported institution, the University of California has experienced significant budget reductions in fiscal year 2009, with more reductions to come. The $531 million shortfall now anticipated in state funding for the 2009-10 fiscal year amounts to nearly 17 percent of the $3.2 billion the state provides UC annually. Numerous cost containment measures are in place across the university, including salary and other compensation freezes for senior managers, hiring curtailments for other staff, travel restrictions, and other mandated reductions. More information about the UC budget situation is available on the University’s Web site at http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/budget

UC Libraries are being hit hard by the budget reduction mandates in effect at each of the UC campuses. Targeted reductions to library materials budgets for fiscal year 2010 vary across the campuses, with some as high as 20%. Many campuses have been alerted that additional cuts will be levied in fiscal year 2011. Coupled with the typical inflationary increases for scholarly publications, the erosion of library buying power will have a profound and lasting impact on all of the UC libraries. Monographic purchasing has already been seriously curtailed, and every electronic content license is being placed under careful scrutiny.

While we will not be able to spare every product, we will pursue every possible creative option to maintain access to resources important to the UC mission. These options may include developing processes for individual campuses to disengage from systemwide agreements without penalty to other campuses and without penalties being levied upon re-entry; deeper overall discounts when new or add-on products are acquired; and in some if not many cases, outright cost reductions. We welcome all innovative proposals for managing through these difficult times.