Scholarly Publishing News

Last week the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) announced that as of January 2013 researchers must:

• “ensure that all research papers generated from CIHR funded projects are freely accessible through the Publisher’s website or an online repository within 12 months of publication;
• deposit bioinformatics, atomic, and molecular coordinate data into the appropriate public database (e.g. gene sequences deposited in GenBank) immediately upon publication of research results;
• retain original data sets for a minimum of five years (or longer if other policies apply);
• and acknowledge CIHR support by quoting the funding reference number in journal publications.”

This is a change from the previous policy, which had a much shorter embargo period – 6 months.  The rationale in the news release talks about the importance of OA, but not about why the allowed embargo has been doubled in length.  For more discussion on the possible fallout, check out the the BC Library Association Info  Policy Blog.

A few months ago the UK announced a bold move towards Gold OA (we talked about it here), but as of yet nobody seems to be following suit.  A post yesterday in the Times Higher Education, Finch access plan unlikely to fly across the Atlantic, indicates that there might be a real lag in uptake, which will have an impact on how long British authors have to pay both Author Processing Charges for their own publication and subscription fees to access material from around the world.    However, the article also indicates that folks in the White House are paying attention to OA, just trying to balance it with existing business models.  How it will all play out remains to be seen…

I have to admit I haven’t yet finished the long version of this article, an interview with Stuart Shieber , the Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Director of Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication,  and chief architect of the Harvard Open Access Policy.

But what I’ve read so far has been amazing.

Shieber is a passionate advocate and policy-maker for both Green and Gold OA and was behind getting the strong support of Harvard faculty for an OA mandate at their institution.  The article (which is available in its entirety here) is a clear explanation of the history and current state of OA in academia and will be my new go-to “about OA” article for those who express interest in the topic.

The Physics community has been active in OA and new publishing avenues for ages now.  Projects like arxiv are well established and new ones, like SCOAP3, are being set up.  But where has this left the publishers in the field?  In last week’s edition of APS News, the American Physical Society published APS and the Challenge of Open Access, outlining the policies and plans of the society publisher.

The article is interesting, and is summarized by them as:”(1) APS supports the principle of Open Access to its journals to the fullest extent consistent with financial stability; (2) peer-reviewed journals continue to be essential to scientific research; (3) high-quality peer-reviewed journals have significant, irreducible costs; (4) the leading approaches to Open Access all carry both promise and potential problems; (5) Open Access is a thoroughly international issue, which brings both complications and stability. “

Choosing the right journal to publish in has always been a challenge, so how is choosing the right open access journal to publish in different?  Martin Enserink discusses the importance of selection and the indicators one should watch out for and consider to determine the quality of an open access journal.

Read this informative article: As Open Access Explodes, How to Tell the Good from the Bad and the Ugly?

What does open access mean to you?  Join members of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in sharing and discussing various perspectives on what open access means.

Is open access only for rich countries?  What does OA imply and offer the developing world in terms of production, publication and consumption of academic materials and research activities?  What are the specific challenges and opportunities for access to knowledge in developing countries?

Participate now in this online dialogue on open access and the developing world!

SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, has announced a deal to make particle physics journals in 12 journals Open Access.   Particle Physics is already on the forefront of OA publishing, with almost all pre-prints going into arxiv.org, but this move would open up 90% of post-prints (the published versions of articles) in the field as well.   This means that, as of 2014, upwards of 7,000 articles a year from the field will become freely available.  Article Processing Charges will be paid not by the authors,  through system funded by libraries, funding bodies, and research institutions.  At the same time, publishers are to reduce the cost of packages including the 12 journals to reflect the money they’re receiving from SCOAP3.

It will be interesting to see how the system works out in the end, but the agreement and plan is intriguing!

More info can be found on the SCOAP3 site and in this Nature article.

Congratulations to the recipients of 2012-2013 SFU Library Scholarly Digitization Fund grants.

Peter Anderson – School of Communication
The digitization of Professor Anderson’s policy studies, government submissions, conference papers, and other material, most of which chronicles the early use of communication systems for community development and other social applications.

Bill Reid Centre
Digitization of the George F. Macdonald Field Photography collection, a collection of photographs from between 1966 and 1975 documenting archaeological digs and the monumental art of the Tsimshian and Gitxsan peoples of British Columbia.

Elise Chenier – Dept. of History
Bachelors and China Dolls: Sex and Race in Postwar Toronto’s Chinatown, 1920-1970
Digitization of photographs from a private collection and of newspaper articles about Chinese Canadians and white women (Chinadolls) in Toronto’s Chinatown, published between 1920 and 1962 (due to copyright restrictions) in the Toronto Chinese press. It will also include interviews with people concerning everyday life in Toronto’s Chinatown and the experiences of mixed-race couples and children in Toronto’s Chinatown.

Andrea Geiger – Dept. of History
Japanese Canadian Oral History Digitization Project
A continuation of the Japanese Canadian Oral History Project begun in 2011, which involves digitizing the Japanese Canadian Oral History Collection in the possession of the Japanese Canadian National Museum in Burnaby. These digitized oral histories (over 400 tapes of 1-2 hours each) will be hosted by the SFU Library. The collection is comprised of interviews with Japanese Canadians on topics ranging from early immigration; their participation in various pre WWII industries including fishing, farming and forestry; and internment during WWII.

Gerontology Research Centre
Money awarded to offset a portion of the production cost of created a web-ready video of selected portions of the 21st John K. Friesen conference “Innovations in Home Care: A Public Policy Perspective”

Margaret Linley – Dept. of English
SFU Lake District Collection Scholarly Digitization Project.
Purpose is to create a digital archive of the outstanding rare book Lake District Collection held in SFU Library’s Special Collections. The SFU Lake District Collection Scholarly Digitization Project will overhaul the original online bibliography and substantially expand access to the SFU Lake District Collection. This project will cover phase one of this three phase project.

Alexis Ohman – Dept. of Archaeology
Digitization of “Codrington Papers: West Indies Correspondence” from Microfilm.
This project will create a digital archive of the Codrington family’s West Indies correspondence. The Codrington family held numerous estates throughout the Caribbean region and will be of value to historians, archaeologist and other researchers in plantation studies.

Gary Teeple – Dept. of Sociology
Canadian Farmworkers Union Project
This is phase two of the Canadian Farmworkers Union Project, a SFU online resource. Phase two will include the digitization and preservation of CFU multimedia assets held by SFU Library’s Special Collections and their inclusion in the on-line website. The CFU media items to be digitized include: three videos produced by the Canadian Farmworkers Union; thirty audio oral history interviews with CFU principals; and, scanning recently acquired 35mm negatives and photos of CFU activities in the 1980s.

SFU Women’s Centre
SFU Women’s Centre Live and Digitized
Selected publications and records of the SFU Women’s Centre will be digitized for this project to show the work of the Centre since its inception in 1974.

In the article “Whither Science Publishing?” publishers, scientists and information scientists offer their thoughts on the future of science publishing.  They are asked these and more questions:

-Will open access eventually become the dominant mode of publishing science?
-Are there unseen challenges that await such a dramatic shift?
-Are there ways to improve the traditional system of peer review, a practice introduced nearly 350 years ago?

This debate, published in the August issue of the Scientist, is one amongst many in the scientific community.  Scientists, and academics more generally, also debate whether the wide scale adoption of open access journals will put at risk the peer review system and the quality of scientific journal publishing.  Bo-Christer Bjork and David Solomon address these questions in their recent article “Open Access Versus Subscription Journals: A Comparison of Scientific Impact” published in BMC Medicine.

Learn more about the funding and impact of open access publishing in the articles “Open Access, Readership, Citations” and “Ensuring Open Access for Publicly Funded Research.”

As a follow-up to our post about the UK report that recommended the adoption of open access for publicly funded research, it looks like the British government has now done exactly that.

The new plan requires that, by 2014, publicly funded research must be freely available immediately, with no embargo period.  This will allow researchers around the world to access up-to-date research information.  The scheme, which seems to be welcomed in theory by many academics, has one big hurdle – cost to researchers.  Article Processing Fees, often charged by OA journals to authors to cover the costs of peer review, editing, and hosting, are not covered by the the government funding that require publishing in OA journals.  How that will play out remains to be seen.

For more info, check out this article from The Guardian and this news release from the Department for Business Innovation and Skills.