From the Sep 23, 2009 press release from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access:
The Presidents of 57 liberal arts colleges in the U.S., representing 22 states, have declared their support for the Federal Research Public Access Act (S. 1373) in an Open Letter released today. The letter is the first from higher education administrators to be issued in support of the 2009 bill, and further reinforcement that support for the Act exists at the highest levels of the higher education community. The presidents' letter notes, "Adoption of the Federal Research Public Access Act will democratize access to research information funded by tax dollars. It will benefit of education, research, and the general public."
The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), introduced in June by Senators Lieberman (I-CT) and Cornyn (R-TX), is a bi-partisan measure to ensure online public access to the published results of research funded through eleven U.S. agencies. The bill would require that journal articles stemming from publicly funded research be made available in an online repository no later than six months after publication.
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
On June 3, the directors of ten U.S. and Canadian university presses released this statement:
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:
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."
This week Ivy Anderson, Director of Collections for the California Digital Library, sent the following open letter to most of CDL's key content providers.
*****
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.
Four major university associations have issued a call for action:
* Association of American Universities (AAU)
* Association of Research Libraries (ARL)
* Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
* National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (NASULGC)
The document is called "The University’s Role in the Dissemination of Research and Scholarship – A Call to Action." The statement has separate recommendations aimed at campus leaders and at associations serving research institutions or university consortia.
According to Charles Lowry of ARL:
"The statement is the outgrowth of a roundtable discussion held last August that engaged provosts, chief research officers, chief information officers, senior faculty, and library and university press directors. The roundtable was initiated by ARL and jointly organized with AAU, NASULGC, and CNI to identify actions that should be taken to expand the dissemination of the products of the university community’s research and scholarship. Leadership bodies at all four organizations reviewed the statement and voted their support for the recommended actions."
The Association of Research Libraries has just issued a report studying the many new kinds of works that researchers and scholars are using. Last summer twenty U-MN librarians interviewed faculty members across a range of disciplines to inform the report. The full report and a searchable database of the collected examples are linked from ARL's press release. An excerpt:
The study had two segments: the first phase—the field study—engaged librarian volunteers in arranging structured conversations with faculty members at their institutions to learn about new model publications that are currently in use by scholars and researchers, while the second phase consisted of interviews with selected managers of new model works and the preparation of a study report. ARL contracted with Ithaka to manage the field study and to write the final report based on analysis of the collected works.
Both the study report and a searchable collection of new model resources gathered during the study are now freely available. The report provides a detailed picture of the patterns and trends that have emerged to date. Emergent genres, disciplinary patterns, and peer review practices are all described. The accompanying searchable collection offers 206 examples of new model works along with descriptive information gathered for the study.
Over 300 librarians participated in the field study phase and interviewed hundreds of faculty members from across the disciplinary spectrum. They contributed records of more than 300 new kinds of scholarly works that are currently in use in a broad range of disciplines.
If you're looking at a long list of published works that may be candidates for deposit to the University Digital Conservancy or another repository, it's difficult to know where to begin. SHERPA/RoMEO made determining which of those items are the "low hanging fruit" a little easier last week when they added this page to their site:
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PDFandIR.html
The page lists all publishers that allow authors to deposit the published version of their article into their institutional repository. As of today, the list includes 51 publishers that allow deposit with no embargo or fee. You'll still need to check the individual publisher's record--some require things like a link to the publisher's site--but you won't need to find the author's post-refereed final draft.
From the June 26, 2008 Chronicle of Higher Education ("Colleges Should Change Policies to Encourage Scholarship Devoted to the Public Good, Report Says," by Audrey Williams June):
A national consortium of more than 80 colleges and universities is urging higher education to revamp its tenure and promotion policies so that what it calls public scholarship is recognized and rewarded.
In a new report, the group, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, details the obstacles that exist for faculty members in the arts, humanities, and design whose scholarly or creative work is done with, for, or about the public, and contributes to the public good. The report [pdf], "Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University," also offers strategies that colleges can use to create attractive environments for such work to be done and reviewed.
"The bottom line is excellent scholarship is just that—excellent scholarship," said Timothy K. Eatman, assistant professor of higher education at Syracuse University and a co-author of the report, which was produced by the consortium's tenure team. "What we want to do is make sure there are ways for public scholarship to be evaluated so we can discern what is excellent and what isn't."
[...]
Imagining America will continue the dialogue on the value of public scholarship at its national conference at the University of Southern California in October and at regional conferences held this year and next. However, the report's authors say that people can use the report to begin the discussion about reshaping tenure and promotion policies now.
The University of Minnesota was represented on the group by Gail Dubrow, Dean of the Graduate School and Vice Provost.
President Bruininks is also mentioned in the report:
Robert Bruininks, former provost and current president of the University of Minnesota, made public engagement his issue, starting a reexamination of the university’s public mission and the implications of this mission for scholarship and creative practice. This civic thrust, sustained by the Council on Public Engagement and the Vice President for Engagement, is now in its seventh year.
In a report dated June 12, 2008, the International Mathematical Union (IMU), in cooperation with the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), express concern about overreliance on journal impact factors in decisions about library subscriptions and granting of tenure.
From the report's Executive Summary:
Using citation data to assess research ultimately means using citation�based statistics to rank things—journals, papers, people, programs, and disciplines. The statistical tools used to rank these things are often misunderstood and misused.
• For journals, the impact factor is most often used for ranking. This is a simple average derived from the distribution of citations for a collection of articles in the journal. The average captures only a small amount of information about that distribution, and it is a rather crude statistic. In addition, there are many confounding factors when judging journals by citations, and any comparison of journals requires caution when using impact factors. Using the impact factor alone to judge a journal is like using weight alone to judge a person's health.
• For papers, instead of relying on the actual count of citations to compare individual papers, people frequently substitute the impact factor of the journals in which the papers appear. They believe that higher impact factors must mean higher citation counts. But this is often not the case! This is a pervasive misuse of statistics that needs to be challenged whenever and wherever it occurs.
• For individual scientists, complete citation records can be difficult to compare. As a consequence, there have been attempts to find simple statistics that capture the full complexity of a scientist's citation record with a single number. The most notable of these is the h�index, which seems to be gaining in popularity. But even a casual inspection of the h�index and its variants shows that these are naïve attempts to understand complicated citation records. While they capture a small amount of information about the distribution of a scientist's citations, they lose crucial information that is essential for the assessment of research.
The Wall Street Journal, in a June 16 article covering the report, gives an example from the authors' field:
Mathematicians are particularly vulnerable to quirks in the impact factor, Mr. Ewing said, noting that his colleagues are more likely to cite older work — while impact factors use citations within two years of publication — and that in general they cite much less than other scientists. “Some dean somewhere in a small university might conclude biologists are six times as smart as mathematicians,� Mr. Ewing said, adding that it makes about as much sense as ranking people’s popularity by the number of people whose hands they’ve shaken.
From SPARC's June 10 press release:
The Create Change Web site emphasizes the rapid and irreversible changes occurring in the ways faculty share and use academic research results. The site outlines how the advancement of knowledge is fueled by accelerating and enhancing sharing - of journal articles, research data, simulations, syntheses, analyses and other findings. Create Change offers faculty practical ways to look out for their own interests as researchers and delivers the personal perspectives of scholars in 10 different disciplines, from music therapy to chemistry to microbiology, on the benefits of sharing. New interviews are added regularly.
[...]
Comments are drawn from full-length interviews published on the Create Change Web site at http://www.createchange.org and target the advantages of depositing works in a digital repository, the ways communication should change in the digital environment, the impact of Open Access and how to maximize scientific progress.
http://www.createchange.org/cases/index.shtml
Interview subjects:
* Linda Hutcheon, Professor of English, University of Toronto
* David Morrison, Professor of Mathematics and Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara
* Carolyn Kenny, Professor of Human Development and Indigenous Studies, Antioch University
* Gary Ward, Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, University of Vermont
* Gordon Henry Guyatt, Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Ontario
* Roy Rosenzweig, former Professor of History and New Media, George Mason University
* Martin Osborne, Professor of Economics, University of Toronto
* Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
* Zhigang Suo, Professor of Mechanics and Materials, Harvard University
* R. Stephen Berry, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Chemistry and the James Franck Institute, University of Chicago
In a new working paper published in the California Digital Library's eScholarship repository, economist Ted Bergstrom (University of California, Santa Barbara) and colleagues look at Differences in Impact Factor Across Fields and Over Time.
The Abstract:
The impact factor of an academic journal for any year is the number of times the average article published in that journal in the previous two years are cited in that year. From 1994-2005, the average impact factor of journals listed by the ISI has been increasing by an average of 2.6 percent per year. This paper documents this growth and explores its causes.
The Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers issued a press release on January 3 (PDF). Though the new NIH policy had a lengthy public comment period, the association vows to continue its fight and outlines its strategy. Excerpt:
[J]ournal publishers who have opposed the policy will continue to pursue their concerns with Congress regarding the policy’s negative impact on science publishing and the protection of related intellectual property rights. Publishers will also urge NIH to conduct a rulemaking proceeding, with opportunity for public comment, before implementing the new policy.
Peter Suber of Open Access News predicts that there will be "a publisher lawsuit to halt or delay the OA mandate at the NIH" and suggests that AAP's press release is "the public version of a legal brief." His point-by-point response is available in the January 4 edition of his newsletter.
Peter Suber of Earlham College and Caroline Sutton of Co-Action Publishing have produced "a comprehensive list of scholarly societies worldwide that support gold [Open Access] for their own journals." The Excel spreadsheet is sharable under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
http://www.co-action.net/projects/OAsocieties
In Phase Two of their research, the authors hope to "survey the societies turned up in Phase One in order to learn details about their turn to OA, their business models, and the financial and academic consequences of their OA policies."
More information about the project is available at Prof. Suber's Open Access Newsletter:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/11-02-07.htm#list
Excerpted from Scott Jaschik's article "Momentum for Open Access Research" in the September 6 edition of Inside Higher Ed:
[...] Now the presidents of 53 liberal arts colleges  at the behest of their librarians  are issuing a joint letter backing the [Federal Public Research Access Act] legislation. And while it is unlikely that the bill will pass this year, the new letter that was released Tuesday is part of a broader effort by open access supporters to place higher education in a new position when the debate is renewed next year.
[...]
The letter from the liberal arts college presidents is straightforward. It says that their institutions can’t afford rising journal prices, that their faculties and students want more access to journals than the institutions can provide, and that liberal arts colleges play a key role in producing future Ph.D.’s, so their exposure to journals matters. Oberlin is among many liberal arts colleges with unusually high percentages of graduates who go on to earn doctorates.
[...]
[Diane Graves, university librarian at Trinity University, in Texas] said that in five years in her position, her library has received “generous� overall budget increases from the university, but that they are never enough to keep up with journal inflation. Dozens of journals have been cut, and she is forced each year to go to each academic department to seek agreement on what to eliminate. What frustrates her the most, she said, is continuing to cut off access to information professors and students want  when the model being pushed by the legislation would provide that knowledge without increasing the college’s costs.
As for the scholarly societies, Graves said that she knew that they did valuable work, but questioned why that work needed to be subsidized by journals. “A lot of societies have relied on journals to fund other activities. But why should libraries at colleges  nonprofit entities within nonprofit entities  fund those activities? Shouldn’t members be funding those activities? We need to have this conversation.�
[...]
[Barbara Allen, director of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which coordinated the letter from university provosts] said that the publishers’ arguments were “speculative� and “alarmist,� and that her members didn’t want to destroy peer review. She said that they were committed to keeping peer review viable, and that all kinds of models could support it  once people stop trying to defend the current system at all costs.
Excerpted from Scott Jaschik's article "Rallying Behind Open Access" in the July 28 edition of Inside Higher Ed:
If universities pay the salaries of researchers and provide them with labs, and the federal government provides those researchers with grants for their studies, why should those same universities feel they can’t afford to have access to research findings?
That’s part of the argument behind a push by some in Congress to make such findings widely available at no charge. The Federal Public Research Access Act would require federal agencies to publish their findings, online and free, within six months of their publication elsewhere. Proponents of the legislation, including many librarians and professors frustrated by skyrocketing journal prices, see such “open access� as entirely fair. But publishers — including many scholarly associations — have attacked the bill, warning that it could endanger research and kill off many journals.
In an attempt to refocus the debate, the provosts of 25 top universities are jointly releasing an open letter that strongly backs the bill and encourages higher education to prepare for a new way of disseminating research findings. “Widespread public dissemination levels the economic playing field for researchers outside of well-funded universities and research centers and creates more opportunities for innovation. Ease of access and discovery also encourages use by scholars outside traditional disciplinary communities, thus encouraging imaginative and productive scholarly convergence,� the provosts write.
[...]
The letter originated with the provosts of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which includes the universities of the Big Ten Conference plus the University of Chicago. Others joining the effort include the provosts of such institutions as Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Texas A&M University, the University of California, the University of Rochester, Vanderbilt University, and Washington University in St. Louis.
[...]
It’s not at all clear that the legislation will go anywhere this year, with Congress already headed into pre-election season and debates over scholarly publishing not exactly competing with Iraq or the economy for voters’ attention. But the proposal is almost sure to return next year  and the provosts’ action marks a shift of sorts for academic leaders.
Two excerpts from the LJ article on the survey by Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born:
Academic libraries saw [journal] price increases just under 8% overall in 2006...
*****
Some [open access journals] are demonstrating the power of open access by accruing impressive impact factors as young journals. In its second year of publication, PLoS Biology had an impact factor of 13.9, making it the highest ranked general biology journal in the world, and five OA journals from BioMed Central ranked in the top five journals in their specialties. These successes are backed by research showing that OA articles generate between 25% and 250% more citations than non-OA articles in the same journal from the same year. The oft-quoted report can be found at eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11688.
From the listserv AmSci Forum
John Willinsky's (2005) excellent book on Open Access is now available Open Access. Its only short-coming is that it makes absolutely no mention of its predecessor, the first book on Open Access, edited by Okerson & O'Donnell (1995), published over a decade earlier:
Okerson, A.S. & O'Donnell, J.J. (1995) (Eds.) Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing. Association of Research Libraries.
http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/intro.html
Willinsky, J. (2005) The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship MIT Press
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/ebook.asp?ttype=2&tid=10611
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/willinsky/TheAccessPrinciple_TheMITPress_0262232421.pdf
From the 3-23-06 Library Journal Academic Newswire:
Looking at mathematics journals in the arXiv repository at Cornell, researchers Phil Davis and Michael Fromerth crunched numbers hoping to shed light on two pressing questions. First, do the articles in arXiv get more citations than non-deposited articles? And second, are the articles in arXiv associated with fewer downloads from publishers' sites? Both answers appear to be yes. According to their study, an analysis of 2,765 articles published from 1997-2005 in four journals, the articles deposited in arXiv received 35 percent more citations on average than non-deposited papers, and 23 percent fewer publisher downloads. Those findings are now initiating some intense discussion. "Personally, I was skeptical of finding any evidence for reduced download," Davis told the LJ Academic Newswire. "I had seen reports from several publishers and thought they were jumping to unsupportable conclusions. The data, however, spoke for itself." Davis, a life sciences librarian and bibliographer, says there is "clear evidence" that articles deposited in the arXiv receive "significantly fewer downloads" from the publishers' websites. Equally eye-opening, however, is another aspect of the paper: why the articles they looked at had more citations.
Since 2001, Davis notes, the general assumption was that increased access led to increased citations. "It was a simple model and it seemed to confirm what librarians wanted to hear," he said. "What we did in our analysis that wasn't done in most of the studies before us was to attempt to ascertain how [the citation increase] really happens." Davis says his research indicates that a number of factors, not just open access, are responsible for the increase in citations. The authors tested a number of postulates, including evidence of a "quality differential" postulate—that is that better articles are deposited in arXiv—and found "a lot of evidence" supporting this explanation. "We are not arguing that open access has no effect on citations," he said, "just that its effect may be severely limited to highly-cited articles." While the authors acknowledge the limitations of their research, they say that, for some, their conclusions "challenge the dogma that open access is a single and unqualified cause" for increased citations. Instead, "there are likely multiple behavioral causes working simultaneously," Davis asserts. Meanwhile, that conclusion seems to have generated some unease among OA advocates. "This paper has started some really stimulating dialog," Davis said, adding that it has also "upset many people," who fear the results will be used to impugn OA. "I've been told that it will unfairly benefit publishers, and we have received multiple requests to change the wording of our abstract." Davis says he is resisting those requests, but welcomes others to test his study, and to conduct their own in other disciplines.
Conditions set for free availability one year after publication
The American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, is broadening access to research articles published in its 33 scholarly journals. The Society is introducing two new experimental policies that define how readers can view free digital versions of ACS articles beginning one year after publication.
First, in response to public access guidelines recently released by the NIH, the ACS will post, for public accessibility 12 months after publication, the peer-reviewed version of authors' manuscripts on the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central during 2005. The NIH policy encourages authors whose work it funds to submit their peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central, the agency's free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
Commenting on this new service, ACS Publications Senior Vice President Brian Crawford said, "We understand that NIH-funded authors will wish to comply voluntarily with the NIH's policy request. By introducing this service, the ACS will take on the administrative burden of compliance and at the same time will ensure the integrity of the scientific literature by depositing the appropriate author version of the manuscript after peer-review."
Second, as a value-added service to ACS authors and a method of further opening access to its content, the full-text version of all research articles published in ACS journals will be made available at no charge via an author-directed Web link 12 months after final publication. Allowing unrestricted access to articles 12 months after publication is an expansion of the Society's current practice of permitting 50 downloads of authors' articles free of charge during the first year of publication. This initiative will go into effect during 2005.
"We are very pleased to expand access in this way to research published in ACS journals," said Crawford. "It is fundamental to the ACS mission to support and promote the research enterprise and to foster communication among its scientists. Providing unrestricted access via author-directed links 12 months after publication - in addition to the 50 free e-prints currently allowed during the first year of publication - reinforces that mission."
Robert Bovenschulte, president of the ACS Publications Division, said, "These experimental policies balance the important goal of expanding dissemination of research with the need to preserve the integrity of the scientific record as well as the viability of our journals program."
The American Chemical Society is a nonprofit organization, chartered by the U.S. Congress, with a multidisciplinary membership of more than 158,000 chemists and chemical engineers. It publishes numerous scientific journals and databases, convenes major research conferences and provides educational, science policy and career programs in chemistry. Its main offices are in Washington, D.C., and Columbus, Ohio.
Released: March 7, 2005
#13859
Related Press Releases
Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research (Notice Number NOT-OD-05-022/ http://acsjl-media.com/lrd0_AAI3QgAAAJwB )
American Chemical Society broadens author-directed article access <http://acsjl-media.com/lrd1_AAI3QgAAAJwB>
American Chemical Society policy will offer service to authors of NIH-funded research <http://acsjl-media.com/lrd2_AAI3QgAAAJwB>
ACS PUBLICATIONS
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From PLoS:
“The US government has now endorsed the principle that the results of federally funded research should be freely available to the public,” said Michael B. Eisner, Ph.D., co-founder of PLoS. “Scientists and the scientific community now have an historic opportunity to make this principle a reality.”
Yesterday the U.S. National Institutes of Health announced its new Public Access Policy, requesting that NIH funded authors deposit their published research articles in the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central, making them freely available online as soon as possible after publication (but within 12 months). You can view the full press release and other information about the policy at: http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/index.htm.
Because you are a supporter of open access and an Institutional Member, we wanted to send you our most recent position on the NIH announcement and encourage all of our members to inform themselves and faculty members about this policy. You can read our press release here: http://www.plos.org/news/announce_nihpapolicy.html.
We also hope that you will encourage faculty and authors at your institution to comply with this policy by requesting that their papers be made available in PubMedCentral immediately upon publication. We will keep you informed and share our ideas and resources on this policy, and hope you will let us know if you have any questions or ideas about how its successful implementation can be achieved.
Donna Okubo
Institutional Relations Manager
185 Berry Street, Suite 1300
San Francisco, CA 94107
(415) 624-1213
(415) 546-4090 (Fax)
dokubo@plos.org
www.plos.org
From Clifford Lynch, Coalition for Networked Information:
Last week, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill held a two day convocation on the changing shape of scholarly communications in the digital world. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend part of the meeting. As background for the convocation, a number of members of the campus community developed white papers to help inform the discussion.
These include a number of superb and rather unusual papers written by faculty and taking a very valuable disciplinary perspective on the evolution of scholarly communication. These papers are available at
http://www.unc.edu/scholcomdig/
I learned a great deal from reading these papers, and I believe that they may be valuable not just to readers interested in scholarly communications developments, but perhaps specifically as resources and sources of ideas for other institutions planning similar campus-wide discussions.
The final version of the Report from the CIC Summit on Scholarly Communications: Access to Journal Literature is now available on the CIC website: http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/groups/CICMembers/archive/Report/SCSreportJan2005.pdf
Following a remarkable year for the spread of open access ideas and the gathering of momentum for real change, the New Year begins with an announcement by JISC of the winners of funding under the second round of its Open Access programme. Following the success of the first year of the JISC programme, the decision has been made to award five publishers funds to support open access delivery for their journals.
A total of £150,000 will be awarded to some of the key scholarly publications in their fields. These journals are: The New Journal of Physics (published by the Institute of Physics Publishing); Nucleic Acids Research (Oxford University Press); Journal of Medical Genetics (BMJ Publishing Group Ltd); the journals of the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr); and The Journal of Experimental Botany (The Society for Experimental Biology). JISC funding will ensure the waiving of all or part of the submission/publication fees for all UK HE authors. The New Journal of Physics, the IUCr and the Journal of Experimental Botany were successful bidders in the first round of funding, these further funds enabling them to consolidate the considerable gains made during the first year of the programme.
Preliminary results from the first year of the open access programme show that JISC funding has enabled significant advances to be made by the successful publishers and their journals in terms of submissions, access, visibility and costs:
The New Journal of Physics has seen UK submissions increase by 300% in the last six months, while access to articles from UK users has risen 71%. The journal's impact factor has risen from 1.76 to 2.48. The Journal of Experimental Biology has seen access rise by 27%, with JISC support enabling the journal to maintain its subscription costs at the 2004 level. Access has risen by some 300% for the journals of the International Union of Crystallography, "making UK crystallographic research much more visible worldwide." Uptake of PLoS Biology, a new journal, has been "remarkably robust", and JISC support has helped PLoS's strong advocacy role, including oral testimony to the House of Commons Select Committee by Harold Varmus, founder of PLoS.
Peter Strickland, Managing Editor of the IUCr journals, welcomed the continued investment represented by the second round of the JISC programme: "I am very pleased that the IUCr has been awarded a second round of funding by JISC. This will give valuable impetus to our open-access publishing initiative, which has received very positive feedback from our authors and editors, and has significantly increased access to structural science research worldwide."
"With the rapid growth in Open Access options, the ability to fund publication charges has become an important consideration in the decision where to publish," said Ken Lillywhite, Journals Business Director at Institute of Physics Publishing, another second-time recipient of funding. "By funding publication charges for New Journal of Physics, JISC has effectively removed this barrier for every British scientist working in a HEFCE-funded institution. Since JISC's decision to offer financial support for authors publishing in our journal, we have received many more UK papers from scientists working in British universities. We look forward to further growth in 2005."
Mary Traynor, Managing Editor of the Journal of Experimental Botany said: "The Journal of Experimental Botany is the only high ranking plant science journal offering an Open Access option to all plant scientists. We have been highly encouraged by the initial success of our policy and the JISC award will support development of our initiative in addition to enabling us to waive Open Access fees for UK authors."
Professor Eamonn Maher, Editor of Journal of Medical Genetics, commented: "I think this is a very exciting development that will be followed with great interest by journal editors, authors and subscribers. The JISC support has provided a wonderful opportunity to study the possible consequences of an open-access policy for a clinical medical journal."
"We are delighted that JISC is supporting our open access initiative with Nucleic Acids Research," said Martin Richardson, Managing Director of Oxford Journals at Oxford University Press. "NAR is one of the most prestigious journals to make a complete switch to open access, and our University Press status means that we're keen to experiment with, and learn from, new distribution models that might help make research more accessible. Support from JISC will really help us and our authors test the viability of this model."
Lorraine Estelle, JISC Collections Team Manager, who announced the results of the second round, said: "The first round of this programme has been a significant success, giving us some much-needed evidence of the potential of open access to stimulate research and to make visible the outputs of researchers in the UK. We look forward to the further success of this programme."
A further round of funding will be made available to the publishing community later in 2005.
For further information, please contact:
Lorraine Estelle (JISC) on 020 7848 2563 or 07767 297171 or e-mail:
mailto:l.estelle@jisc.ac.uk
Or
Fred Friend (JISC) on 01494 563168, or 07747 627738, or e-mail:
mailto:f.friend@ucl.ac.uk
Publishers
Peter Strickland, Managing Editor, IUCr Journals - 01244 342878 or
mailto:ps@iucr.org
Mary Traynor, Managing Editor, Journal of Experimental Biology - 01524
594587 or mailto:m.traynor@lancaster.ac.uk
Tim Smith, Publisher, New Journal of Physics mailto:tim.smith@iop.org
Andrea Horgan, Managing Editor, BMJ Publishing Group Ltd - 020 7383 6263
or mailto:ahorgan@bmjgroup.com
Rachel Goode, Communications Manager, Oxford Journals, OUP - +44 (0)1865
353388 or mailto:rachel.goode@oupjournals.org