SPARC introduces Open-access Journal Publishing Resource Index

New resource helps streamline launch and operation of open-access
journals

Washington, D.C. -- SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic
Resources Coalition) today released a free online Open Access
Journal Publishing Resource Index with information and documents
to support the launch and operation of an open-access journal.
Materials in the index will help libraries, presses, and other
academic units on campuses as they work together to make the work
of their researchers more widely available.

This new resource is launched in conjunction with the SPARC
Campus-based Publishing Resource Center
(http://www.arl.org/sparc/partnering), which delivers a guide to
critical issues in campus-based publishing partnerships, case
studies, a bibliography and resource list, an index of
collaborative initiatives (operated in partnership with Columbia
University Libraries), and access to the LIBPRESS online
discussion forum (operated by the University of California). The
Center is overseen by an editorial board representing library and
university press staff who are actively engaged in creating and
managing publishing partnerships.

The new index complements the rich existing resource center by
pointing to relevant sections in existing open-access journal
publishing guides and to sample journal proposals, policies,
bylaws, and other documentation to help with planning,
development, and collaboration issues. Topics covered include:

* New Journal Planning
* Journal Publishing Program Policies
* Governance
* Editorial
* Marketing & Promotion
* Technical Platforms
* Sustainability Planning

Relevant sections of existing open-access publishing guides,
including those by David Solomon, Carol Sutton, Kevin Stranack,
Jan Velterop, Howard Goldstein and Raym Crow, and others are
indicated under each topic area.

By highlighting samples and best practices, the index will help
give campuses the tools they need to develop and maintain
long-term, successful open-access publishing ventures. "As
campus-based publishing gets more ambitious in scope, it's
important to build on the successes and challenges of earlier
initiatives and adopt best practices," said Raym Crow, senior
consultant at SPARC. "Ultimately, campus-based publishing can
offer universities greater control over the intellectual products
they help create. SPARC is pleased to provide another tool to
support libraries and publishers in sustainable, professional,
open-access publishing."

Lee C. Van Orsdel, Dean of University Libraries at Grand Valley
State University, says faculty are beginning to consult
librarians for advice on journal publishing options, including
open-access models, and the SPARC site is a welcome resource.
"We're deepening our knowledge as quickly as possible, but it's a
whole new area of expertise for most of us," she said. "It will
save us time and increase the probability that we can get to the
right solution when advising our faculty on their best options."

The editorial board invites contributions from other campuses to
help build this resource and expand the bibliography --
especially with primary research papers on collaboration issues.
"SPARC hopes this will seed an effort where people will give
documents to share, making it a community hub," said Crow.
Members of the board and how to contact the managing editor with
suggestions are detailed on the Center home page.

The Open Access Journal Publishing Resource Index is available
online at http://www.arl.org/sparc/partnering.

OASIS

OASIS 

OASIS aims to provide an authoritative ‘sourcebook’ on Open Access, covering the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it. The site highlights developments and initiatives from around the world, with links to diverse additional resources and case studies. As such, it is a community-building as much as a resource-building exercise. Users are encouraged to share and download the resources provided, and to modify and customize them for local use. Open Access is evolving, and we invite the growing world-wide community to take part in this exciting global movement

OASIS

The Open Video Project

The Open Video Project

The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries. Because researchers attempting to solve similar problems will have access to the same video content, the repository is also intended to be used as a test collection that will enable systems to be compared, similar to the way the TREC conferences are used for text retrieval.

This repository is hosted as one of the first channels of the Internet 2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure Initiative, a project that supports distributed repository hosting for research and education in the Internet 2 community.

The Open Video Project

Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387

Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387 

Latest Laboratory News from Laboratorytalk

Written by the Laboratorytalk editor Apr 21, 2009

I'm delighted to see two announcements this week which offer small but worthwhile fillips to the open access movement. It seems to me hardly worth stating that knowledge should be free, and in these days of easy and cost-free digital communications there is less and less justification for the stranglehold on knowledge maintained by the old-school academic journals. The arguments are well-rehearsed: a great deal of scientific research is financed with public money, and therefore the fruits of that research should be freely available to the public.

In the bad old days before the global availability of the web, the only practical way to keep up with research was to subscribe - at significant cost - to the these journals. That is no longer the case, but the inertia in the system and the residual prestige of the august organs of knowledge have allowed the profiteering to continue. Slowly and steadily, though, open access is gaining ground. It is a development we welcome and one we would like to see accelerate.

The first news here is from Cambridge Journals, which has just published the journal European Review on behalf of the Academia Europaea, an association of scientists and scholars which aims to promote learning, education and research. European Review is an open access journal all about, err, open access publishing. It includes a series of articles that examine technology developments and what they mean for publishing academic research. Theo D'haen, editor-in-chief of European Review says: "These articles are vital for anyone with an interest in open access and what it means for the future of scholarly publishing. The authors come from a range of disciplines and so are able to present the arguments from a range of viewpoints. The philosophy of Open Access is discussed along with the practicalities of how it can work in a business environment."

To view the articles free of charge, go to: journals.cambridge.org/erw/17:01

The second news item is a little closer to home: the US-based Association for Laboratory Automation (ALA) has had a change of heart regarding open access, and announces that the scientific content published in its official peer-reviewed journal, the Journal of the Association for Laboratory Automation (JALA), will become freely available via (Link) two years after its initial publication. Non-scientific content will continue to be available online immediately upon publication.

While these are both steps in the right direction, they are also of limited impact: the navel-gazing approach of Cambridge Journals allows only the topic of open access to be discussed under open access, while all actual new scientific knowledge remains locked behind an expensive subscription. ALA's toe in the water is encouraging, but the two-year delay makes the policy change somewhat half-hearted. Even so, the days of the exhorbitantly-priced journal subscription must be numbered.

Laboratorytalk newsletter issue 387

Link Library of Open Access English Language Journals

Link Library of Open Access English Language Journals

Blog posted in comments area of Schol comm blog -- need to take a closer look at this ....seems good at first look -- HSM

Link Library of Open Access English Language Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Open J-Gate, Open J Gate, Open Access Journals, Open Access, Free Access, E-Journals, e-journal, Periodical, Periodicals, Magazine, Magazines, Journal, Abstract, Articles, Quarterly, Research

Link Library of Open Access English Language Journals

OCLC and Open Access: Riding to the Rescue or Rustling the Herd?

OCLC and Open Access: Riding to the Rescue or Rustling the Herd? 

OCLC and Open Access: Riding to the Rescue or Rustling the Herd?
by Barbara Quint
Posted On February 5, 2009

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In the midst of a firestorm about its proposed new WorldCat records policy (Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records, www.oclc.org/worldcat/catalog/policy/recordusepolicy.pdf), OCLC (www.oclc.org) has announced a partnership that would ultimately transfer an open access icon, the University of Michigan Library’s OAIster service (www.oaister.org), to OCLC. While some concern has already been expressed about how OCLC’s revenue generation and content control issues might affect OAIster’s future, I have absolute—almost vehement—assurances from Chip Nilges, vice president of business development at OCLC, and John Wilkin, associate university librarian at the University of Michigan, that OAIster will remain a permanently free, open access service. Until the transfer is completed sometime in 2009, the OAIster.org site will remain active. But, when completed, it will move into OCLC’s free, open website—WorldCat.org. It will also become a "no extra charge" addition to OCLC’s subscription FirstSearch service. OCLC has also announced an arrangement to assist the new HathiTrust (www.hathitrust.org) in developing comprehensive bibliographic metadata for the digitized documents of member libraries.

Begun in 2002 under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, OAIster was originally designed as a portal and a search engine reaching open repositories using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Seven years later, it accesses close to 20 million records, mostly scholarly sources, from nearly 1,100 organizations. The records of digital resources harvested in OAIster cover deep web content extending from digitized books and articles, born-digital texts, audio files, images, and movies to data sets. Currently, users can search content by title, author/creator, subject, language, or an entire record. They can limit searches by resource type, sort by title, author, date, hit frequency, and data contributor. These access features will remain in place while OCLC works out the issues of how to handle OAIster content and how to integrate it with other OCLC services.

So why now? Why did the University of Michigan decide to ask OCLC to take over the OAIster service? There seemed to be some minor disagreement among OAIster management as to what drove the decision. Kat Hagedorn, OAIster metadata harvesting librarian and senior associate librarian for the Digital Library Production Service, considered it "untenable for us to run something this big," while her boss, Wilkin, thought it "no problem to keep on doing what we’re doing, to just crawl and search." But both agreed that to advance the service; to provide the improvements needed to make the data more uniform, e.g., reconciling alternative data formats; and to create a better user experience, it would require the commitment of serious development resources. So they turned to OCLC. As Wilkin put it, "It makes sense for someone in the business of global search to do this." Hagedorn thought that OCLC might even try to make the service more comprehensive by expanding its reach beyond OAI-PMH to other digital formats. Wilkin still holds to the grand dream with which he began the OAIster project. "I want to see more digital content on the web in OAIster. If we could have done it more neatly, we would even have added a search of Google."

But why was OCLC interested enough to take over OAIster operations? According to Wilkin, the university had approached OCLC 5 years ago about working with OAIster, but they found OCLC was not interested. The announcement of the new arrangement pointed to OCLC’s recognition that open access collections have become vital to scholarship. Nilges stated, "Adding records for open archive collections is a natural complement to WorldCat and will drive discovery and access of these collections for a broader community of scholars." Content should expand. Nilges pointed out that "We already have some digital repositories in WorldCat that could supplement OAIster. We absolutely see the need for development. We currently aggregate metadata for many ebooks, digitized content, and archival finding aids and now digital archives. This is strategic for OCLC. We’re interested in helping build and discover archival collections."

OCLC already has Collection Gateway software, according to Nilges, "designed to support harvesting. At some point we will use that software, which supports multiple formats." This all needs to be worked out, along with overall econtent synchronization programs at OCLC.

One thing, however, remains clear. Free and open access to the OAIster data will continue permanently. Nilges states, "We are absolutely committed to free and public access. We will run parallel tracks through 2009, while integrating OAIster into WorldCat.org [OCLC’s free service]." Wilkin confirmed that commitment. In fact, the issue of maintaining free open access is included in a clause in OCLC’s contract with the University of Michigan.

HathiTrust

The HathiTrust is a new player in the open access arena, but it’s a major one with more than 2.6 million documents. (For background information, read Beth Ashmore’s Oct. 23, 2008, NewsBreak, "HathiTrust: A Digital Repository for Libraries, by Libraries," http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/nbReader.asp?ArticleId=51225.) Participants currently include 24 major research libraries. Many of the libraries have conducted their own digitization projects to create special collections. Some have also worked with the Open Content Alliance. But admittedly, the vast majority of HathiTrust’s digital repository comes from a source not mentioned once in the press release announcement—Google Book Search. All the current members of HathiTrust are Google Book Search Library partners. Most of them belong to the early joiners in that partnership when Google was still using what John Wilkin calls "the firehose" approach and digitizing every book a library would allow them to digitize. They have grown much more selective with later library partners, according to Wilkin.

Under the new agreement with OCLC, the millions of books and archived documents hosted in a single repository by HathiTrust and made available for reading online will become more visible and accessible with the creation of WorldCat records for content. OCLC will also link to the collections in its Open Web WorldCat.org service as well as its WorldCat Local service. As executive director of the HathiTrust, Wilkin sees "the connection between HathiTrust and WorldCat as a natural. WorldCat and HathiTrust are both built by and for libraries, and their pursuit of comprehensiveness will aid our community in pursuit of more effective collection management, as well as integration of services across our institutions."

Wilkin admits that HathiTrust content comes "overwhelmingly" from Google Book Search. Under early license arrangements, Google agreed to supply its library partners with digital copies of whatever they contributed to Google Book Search. But Wilkin pointed out that university libraries have their own preservation digitization work and special collection digitization in there. "We are working on adding Open Content Alliance material now in an arrangement with the University of California," says Wilkin. "We’re focusing at the outset on monograph and serial literature." Wilkin expects that HathiTrust will take a different slant on the content it handles, aiming to help libraries in making acquisition and retention decisions and building tools for the scholarly community. But to do this, HathiTrust needs good cataloging information. Initially, Wilkin said, "OCLC will adapt WorldCat Local to HathiTrust. When the content moves to WorldCat.org, users will be able to search just HathiTrust content."

Nilges explained OCLC’s role as "making sure the repository’s content is represented in WorldCat and, secondly, working with HathiTrust to build a discovery environment for that collection. WorldCat Local is adapted as a discovery environment, and we’re using the project to understand better what sort of discovery environment would suit this collection." He expects the work to lead to ways to "handle any number of digital collections, to co-locate various versions, and then distinguish versions. We will let users comment and build tools in WorldCat.org and WorldCat Local. It’s an evolving model."

What drives these changes in OCLC policies? Nilges explains, "We need to represent the ‘Collective Collection.’ Special collections have become more important as they are digitized. We have the opportunity to represent those collections with metadata as the demand for access is growing. We’re trying to support HathiTrust in its near- to medium-term needs for discovery by whatever audience. It fits well with who we are."

Nilges and Wilkin both assured me that the controversial record policy was completely separate from this work with the HathiTrust. OCLC has an overall project to catalog or blend catalog information for Google Book Search entries into WorldCat and to supply the "Find in a Library" information to Google and other online book operations. Much of the HathiTrust work will represent a subset of that existing cataloging work.

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Barbara Quint is contributing editor for NewsBreaks, editor-in-chief of Searcher, and a columnist for Information Today.

OCLC and Open Access: Riding to the Rescue or Rustling the Herd?

TheStar.com | Opinion | Open Access would solve piracy issue

 TheStar.com | Opinion | Open Access would solve piracy issue

thestar.com LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Open Access would solve piracy issue

Jan 14, 2009 04:30 AM

Re:Textbook piracy thriving around

city's campuses, Jan. 10

During my engineering undergraduate years at U of T, I found the best textbooks were informal documents maintained by my own professors. We paid only in comments and corrections, which we knew would benefit our juniors in the same courses.

Using the numbers from your thorough article, the $150 provincial grant barely covers two years of 6 per cent price increases on a $1,000 set of books. The student saves nothing, and the grant is pure profit for publishers.

The same publishers receive hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from Canadian universities for subscriptions to academic journals – even when those journals contain the products of publicly funded science. These costs are passed on to students as tuition increases.

The Open Access movement recognizes that this impedes the spread of knowledge, and advocates for free academic materials. MIT's OpenCourseWare project is a laudable example. As in the arts, digital media are allowing creators and consumers to both gain through bypassing the large corporations that have, until now, fed at both ends of the trough.

I hope to see continued treatment of this important issue in the Star's pages in the future.

Paul Kishimoto, Toronto

Your reporter writes that students are now photocopying textbooks to save money due to rising costs of post-secondary education. But copying textbooks was rampant in several Ontario universities I attended in the 1980s.

Dr. Peter Rozanec, Toronto

University textbook prices always ticked me off. I often thought the real criminals were the schools and the publishers. The teacher would say that we needed the "new" edition and that the previous year's edition would not do. But the only difference was that a new index page was inserted with a different publishing year inside. It was a joke, especially when the year was done and you realized how little of the book was actually used for the class.

Many students buy old editions at used bookstores, but aren't the schools and publishers just double-dipping on the sales of the same product? Additionally, how many schools make textbooks available in the school libraries?

And to be fair, why are the books so expensive? I expect an autographed Harry Potter or a first edition of A Tale of Two Cities to be pricey, but Calculus?

I'm glad I don't have to be bullied like that anymore. We should be helping kids, not exploiting them.

David Syrie, Mississauga

As a co-author of a university science textbook, I sympathize completely with the student concerns about the cost of textbooks. They do indeed seem exorbitant. As an author, I am not in a position to justify the publisher's price. I can, however, comment on a few points.

Textbooks are generally a "small market" project. Textbooks are not published in anything close to the volumes of a popular novelist. Most textbooks are also illustrated, which requires the services of an independent art firm to translate author's sketches into final illustrations. Text illustrations also complicate the production process.

Few textbook publishers maintain in-house production teams but, again, rely on outside production and design firms that specialize in technical publications. No matter how you cut it, most textbooks require the input of a lot of people with specialized talents and that drives up the production expense. Those costs have to be recovered with a relatively small number of unit sales. Photocopy piracy serves only to drive down unit sales and drive up the price.

You can't beat the price with soft covers. I am told that there is very little difference in the production costs for hard covers vs. soft covers. And I am not aware of any texts that are "revised" on an annual basis – the costs would be prohibitive. Our own book is revised on a 4- to 5-year cycle and, yes, it is significantly updated each time to reflect new knowledge in the field.

Publishers are in the business of producing and selling a product. They know that in order to sell that product, it must be competitively priced. I know from personal experience that they try everything they can to keep that price down. I can also guarantee you that most textbook authors are first of all teachers and they don't do it for the money.

William G. Hopkins, Professor Emeritus, University of Western Ontario

 

TheStar.com | Opinion | Open Access would solve piracy issue

World's biggest Open Access English Language Journals Portal - OPEN J-Gate

World's biggest Open Access English Language Journals Portal - OPEN J-Gate

What is Open J-Gate?

Open J-Gate is an electronic gateway to global journal literature in open access domain. Launched in 2006, Open J-Gate is the contribution of Informatics (India) Ltd to promote OAI. Open J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online. Open J-Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 3000+ open access journals, with links to full text at Publisher sites.

World's biggest Open Access English Language Journals Portal - OPEN J-Gate