Scholarly Publishing News

University Librarian Charles Eckman has made his webcast and presentation available from the Simon Fraser University Presidential Lecture, held March 9, 2011.

At the dawn of the 21st century we are witnessing a dramatic growth in the production of knowledge, posing immense challenges for its dissemination, management and long-term preservation. Recent studies out of Australia, Denmark, Netherlands, UK, and US attempt to quantify the costs and benefits of each component of the scholarly communication lifecycle. These and related studies provide the basis for developing sustainable models to meet the challenge.

Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 is now available online.

The Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 presents over 3,800 selected English-language articles, books, and other textual sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. It covers digital copyright, digital libraries, digital preservation, digital rights management, digital repositories, economic issues, electronic books and texts, electronic serials, license agreements, metadata, publisher issues, open access, and other related topics. Most sources have been published from 1990 through 2010. Many references have links to freely available copies of included works.

You can check out some of the Scholarly Publishing titles owned by SFU Library here.

Through copyright transfer agreements, many publishers have required authors to sign away rights to their work, including the right to reproduce, reuse, and publicly present their work for non-commercial purposes.   The SPARC Canadian Author Addendum is a legal agreement authors can use to retain key rights to their work.  From the Canadian Association of Research Libraries:

The SPARC Canadian Author Addendum enables authors to secure a more balanced agreement [...] The SPARC addendum will help Canadian researchers to comply with granting council public access policies, such as the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Policy on Access to Research Outputs. The Canadian Addendum reflects Canadian copyright law and is an adaptation of the original U.S. version of the SPARC Author Addendum.

Find out more about using the Canadian SPARC addendum or download a copy of the addendum to use the next time you publish an article.