[GOAL] For OA Week 2015 -- PASTEUR4OA project advocacy resources

[Alma Swan]

The EU-funded PASTEUR4OA project aims to increase the understanding and
awareness of Open Access (OA) amongst institutional, national and research
funder policymakers. PASTEUR4OA also aims to help develop and/or reinforce
OA strategies and policies at  national, university and research funder
levels that align with the European Commission's 2012 Recommendation on
Access to and Preservation of Scientific Information
  and the
Open Access Mandate for Horizon 2020
 .
 
To promote the development and reinforcement of OA policies, PASTEUR4OA has
produced a series of advocacy resources 
that can be used by stakeholders in developing new policies or revising
existing ones. These should be helpful additions to the resource library of
any OA advocate and we encourage you to take a look at the list and use
these resources wherever they can help in your work.




___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] Re: The Funder Identification Pseudo-Problem

[Alma Swan]

David, you might find it helpful to take a look at some comparators here in
Europe where this has all been quietly worked on for some years now.

There are various models, though they all rest on the author providing grant
and project information. For example, the Nordic countries tend to use a
CRIS/repository based model built on CERIF, the European descriptor system
for research: Open Access is built into that infrastructure and monitored
through it. 

In the UK, the RIOXX metadata schema (http://rioxx.net/) has been developed
to record grant and funder information, and thus enable the Research
Councils to collect information about the outputs they have funded across
the national institutional repository network. There are other
national-level examples you could look at as well but they all work in the
same basic bottom-up way.

And on a continental scale, we have the OpenAIRE infrastructure, built to
collect details of outputs from EU-funded projects. This is a metadata
harvester and has developed guidelines for institutional repositories ­
where the material is mandated to be deposited ­ so that the harvester can
identify relevant items, harvest the metadata and point to the full-text in
the local IR (see 
https://www.openaire.eu/for-research-admin/funders-functionalities).
OpenAIRE is therefore both a provider of Open Access and a management tool
for the funder, the European Commission.

Alma Swan
SPARC Europe


On 31/05/2014 01:27, Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com wrote:

 On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 5:58 PM, David
 Wojick dwoj...@craigellachie.us wrote:
  
 Stevan, you seem to think that I am advocating for a publisher based solution
 but I am not. I am simply trying to find a good program design. In fact I
 think CHORUS has wandered away from that design, to the point where the
 funding agencies may not try to use it.
 
 Well that much is very welcome news!
  
 But as for the funder identification problem, it is far from trivial. What
 you describe below does not work. There is at present no simple way to tell
 which program funded the research that led to a given article. The grant
 information does not include this data. How then shall it be created (and
 made uniform)? This is a deep problem.
 
 David, I can only repeat: The author of the article (at the very least) -- and
 hence also the author's institution -- know exactly where they got the funding
 (program, subprogram, grants officer, everything). And they are very eager to
 credit their funders for their article output, to justify the funding, to get
 the next grant instalment, and for renewal or new grant applications.
 
 In the bottom-up option (2), they simply add a metadata tag for the funding's
 program/subprogram (in addition to metadata tag for the
 grant-contract-and-number) in the IR along with the article.
 
 In the perhaps more sensible option (1), the US Federal funders of
 research create a database that links their own grant-contract-and-numbers
 with their own program/subprogram identifiers (and then the IR need only tag
 the grant-contract-and-number).
 
 No need for publishers to do any of that. And I don't know why you are
 suggesting it's such a big deal: There are a finite number of US Federal
 funding agencies, program/subprograms, grant-contract-and-number, and all the
 information is know and a matter of record. They have the data; they need only
 systematically integrate it into a database. 
 
 Alternatively, authors/institutions can do it distributedly.
 
 In neither case is it a big deal.
 
 It only appears like a problem if you look at it from the publisher's
 viewpoint, where authors are only in the habit of crediting their
 grant-contract-and-number in the acknowledgements sections of their articles,
 rather than giving fuller source information. 
 
 But authors and their institutions have the fuller information. And effective
 convergent funder and institutional mandates (to deposit in the institutional
 repository) together with simple, systematic compliance monitoring procedures
 will ensure that all the requisite metadata are deposited with the article.
  
 Moreover, how this funder identification problem is solved will probably
 dictate the form of the US Public Access program. 
 
 Well, we've made some progress: It won't be the publishers' CHORUS doing
 it. That's a  non-started, and has been all along.
 
 Now the choice is between top-down, centrally (1) and bottom-up, distributedly
 (2). 
 
 Maybe it's easiest to start bottom-up, distributedly (authors/institutions)
 and then the funders can harvest the pairs of grant-contract-and-number and
 program/subprogram metadata tags in the the IRs for all of their articles in
 order to build up a central database of their own.
 
 (This institutional-deposit/central harvesting (or institutional export)
 procedure is by far the optimal mechanism for all article metadata in the IRs
 and also, if desired, for the full-texts.)
 
 Stevan Harnad
 
 On May 30, 2014

[GOAL] Fred Friend

[Alma Swan]

A message from Alma Swan (a.s...@talk21.com) and Paul Ayris
(p.ay...@ucl.ac.uk):

Friends,

It is with great sadness that we have to tell you of the death last week of
Fred Friend. 

Fred was one of the staunchest supporters of Open Access and worked to
further its aims for almost two decades. Early in that period he was, of
course, Librarian at University College London, a position that gave him
influence and the means to push arguments for openness that were at the time
new and considered rather heretical. After retirement from that post Fred
served for many years as a consultant to JISC, advising and carrying out
research work for JISC on scholarly communications. He was in his element in
this role as it gave him the opportunities he needed to continue making the
arguments for Open Access and to develop practical initiatives that helped
to advance the cause. Latterly, Fred pursued his aims through continuing
consultancy jobs and indeed at the time of his death he was embarking on an
ambitious analysis of OA policies.

We have lost a very good friend of Open Access and a great humanitarian. For
many there will also be the feeling of losing a kind and loyal personal
friend. 

His daughter, Cate, said to us, ³It means so much to hear about his
professional life - he was so private and so humble that he never really
talked about what he did (I used to joke with him and tell him that I told
everyone that he was a spy!).² We would like the OA community -- Fred¹s
friends -- to let Cate and the rest of Fred¹s family know about the work
Fred did and the great colleague that he was, so we are going to collect
tributes to Fred and his work and will put these together into a book for
his family. 

If you have something to say, please email your words to one of us,
including your job title where relevant to give some context to your
comments for the family. Thank you in advance for your contributions.

For those who can attend the funeral, the ceremony will be held at 12.30pm
on Thursday 1st May at St Michael and All Angels, Hughenden, near High
Wycombe in the UK. The family will welcome anyone who can be with them on
that occasion.

___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] Re: Fred Friend

[Alma Swan]

I second that. Thank you very much, Xiaolin.


On 28/04/2014 16:38, Paul Ayris p.ay...@ucl.ac.uk wrote:

 Xiaolin
  
 Many thanks for this. It will be tremendous comfort to Fred’s family for them
 to learn how extensive his contribution was.
  
 With best regards.
  
 Paul
 UCL
  
 Dr Paul Ayris
 Director of UCL Library Services  UCL Copyright Officer
 Chief Executive, UCL Press
 President of LIBER  (Association of European Research Libraries)
 Chair of the LERU Chief Information Officers Community (League of European
 Research Universities)
  
 From: zhan...@mail.las.ac.cn [mailto:zhan...@mail.las.ac.cn]
 Sent: 28 April 2014 16:12
 To: 'Alma Swan (a.s...@talk21.com)'; Ayris, Paul
 Cc: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
 Subject: Re: [GOAL] Fred Friend
  
 Dear Alma and Paul,
 
 This is really sad news!
 
 Fred is one of those coming to China early on to help us in China to explore
 the challenging territories of open access and then to push forward efforts in
 OA publishing and OA institutional repositories. It is with the guidance from
 people like Fred that we have come this far. Fred will be remembered for all
 his determination and devotion to open access and a healthy  sustainable
 scholarly communication system.
 
 Xiaolin Zhang
 --
 Xiaolin Zhang
 Director, National Science Library, CAS
 33 Beisihuan Xilu, Beijing, 100190, China
 Tel: 86-10-82628347; Fax 86-10-82626600
 zhan...@mail.las.ac.cn
 
 -原始邮件-
 发件人: Alma Swan a.s...@talk21.com
 发送时间: 2014年4月28日 星期一
 收件人: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) goal@eprints.org
 抄送: 
 主题: [GOAL] Fred Friend
 
 A message from Alma Swan (a.s...@talk21.com
 https://mail.cstnet.cn/coremail/XJS/htmleditor/a.s...@talk21.com ) and Paul
 Ayris (p.ay...@ucl.ac.uk
 https://mail.cstnet.cn/coremail/XJS/htmleditor/p.ay...@ucl.ac.uk ):
 
 Friends,
 
 It is with great sadness that we have to tell you of the death last week of
 Fred Friend. 
 
 Fred was one of the staunchest supporters of Open Access and worked to
 further its aims for almost two decades. Early in that period he was, of
 course, Librarian at University College London, a position that gave him
 influence and the means to push arguments for openness that were at the time
 new and considered rather heretical. After retirement from that post Fred
 served for many years as a consultant to JISC, advising and carrying out
 research work for JISC on scholarly communications. He was in his element in
 this role as it gave him the opportunities he needed to continue making the
 arguments for Open Access and to develop practical initiatives that helped to
 advance the cause. Latterly, Fred pursued his aims through continuing
 consultancy jobs and indeed at the time of his death he was embarking on an
 ambitious analysis of OA policies.
 
 We have lost a very good friend of Open Access and a great humanitarian. For
 many there will also be the feeling of losing a kind and loyal personal
 friend. 
 
 His daughter, Cate, said to us, “It means so much to hear about his
 professional life - he was so private and so humble that he never really
 talked about what he did (I used to joke with him and tell him that I told
 everyone that he was a spy!).” We would like the OA community -- Fred’s
 friends -- to let Cate and the rest of Fred’s family know about the work Fred
 did and the great colleague that he was, so we are going to collect tributes
 to Fred and his work and will put these together into a book for his family.
 
 If you have something to say, please email your words to one of us, including
 your job title where relevant to give some context to your comments for the
 family. Thank you in advance for your contributions.
 
 For those who can attend the funeral, the ceremony will be held at 12.30pm on
 Thursday 1st May at St Michael and All Angels, Hughenden, near High Wycombe
 in the UK. The family will welcome anyone who can be with them on that
 occasion.
 
 
 

___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] HEFCE's Open Access consultation announced

[Alma Swan]

The UK¹s Higher Education Funding Council for England has announced its
consultation on Open Access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework.
Details can be downloaded from
http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/2013/201316/#d.en.82765

Responses should be made online by 1700 GMT on 30 October 2013.

Alma Swan
SPARC Europe
___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] Re: Paid Gold vs. Free Gold

[Alma Swan]

Yes, here are some:
http://www.openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_contentview=articleid=553It
emid=378

Wolters Kluwer bought Medknow a couple of years ago but has (so far)
retained its subscription-plus-immediate-free-access model:
http://www.medknow.com/journals.asp

Alma Swan


On 19/04/2013 06:52, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com wrote:

 Are there examples of such subscription journals that make their online
 version freely accessible online (immediately upon publication).
 
 Who would subscribe, and what would a subscription entail?
 
 Jan Velterop
 
 On 19 Apr 2013, at 05:16, Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 4:33 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon
 jean.claude.gue...@umontreal.ca wrote:
 
 The reference to free Gold journals covered by subscriptions is not clear to
 me. Is this a reference to SCOAP3?
 
 It's a reference to all subscription journals that make their online version
 freely accessible online (immediately upon publication).
 
 (No, SCOAP3 is a premature and unnecessary post-hoc consortial membership
 scheme that I think will not prove sustainable. The HEP fields have already
 provided near 100% (Green) OA for 20 years, un-mandated. What's needed next
 is for institutions and funders to mandate that all other disciplines do
 likewise.)
 
  Stevan Harnad
 
 Le jeudi 18 avril 2013 à 07:45 +0100, Stevan Harnad a écrit :
  1. The Green/Gold Open Access (OA) distinction concerns whether it is the
 author or the publisher that provides the OA.
  2. This distinction was important to mark with clear terms because the
 conflation of the two roads to OA has practical implications and has been
 holding up OA progress for a decade and a half.
  3. The distinction between paid Gold and free Gold is very far from being
 a straightforward one.
  4. Free Gold can be free (to the author) because the expenses of the Gold
 journal are covered by subscriptions, subsidies or volunteerism.
 5. The funds for Paid Gold can come from the author's pocket, the author's
 research grant, the author's institution or the author's funder.
  6. It would be both absurd and gratuitously confusing to mark each of
 these economic-model differences with a color-code.
  7. Superfluous extra colors would also obscure the role that the
 colour-code was invented to perform: distinguishing author-side OA
 provision from publisher-side OA provision.
  8. So, please, let's not have diamond, platinum and titanium OA
 http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/993-.html , despite the
 metallurgical temptations.
  9. They amplify noise instead of pinpointing the signal, just as
 SHERPA/Romeo 
 http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/453-SHERPARoMEO-Publishe
 rs-with-Paid-Options-for-Open-Access.html 's parti-colored
 Blue/Yellow/Green spectrum http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeoinfo.html#colours
 (mercifully ignored by almost everyone) does.
  10. OA is about providing Open Access to peer-reviewed journal articles,
 not about cost-recovery models for OA publishing (Gold OA).
  11. The Gold that publishers are fighting for and that researcher funders
 are subsidizing (whether pure or hybrid) is paid Gold, not free Gold.
  12. No one knows whether or how free Gold will be sustainable, any more
 than they know whether or how long subscription publishing can co-exist
 viably with mandatory Green OA.
  13. So please leave the economic ideology and speculation out of the
 pragmatics of OA policy making by the research community (institutions and
 funders).
  14. Cost-recovery models are the province of publishers (Gold OA).
 15. What the research community needs to do is mandate OA provision.
 16. The only OA provision that is entirely in the research community's
 hands is Green OA.
  And, before you ask, please let's not play into the publishers' hands by
 colour-coding OA also in terms of the length of the publisher embargo:
 3-month OA, 6-month OA, 12-month-OA, 24-month-OA, millennial OA: OA means
 immediate online access. Anything else is delayed access. (The only
 quasi-exception is the Almost-OA
 http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/839-Publisher-OA-Embargo
 es,-IDOA-Mandates-and-the-Almost-OA-Button.html  provided by the author
 via the institutional repository's email-eprint-request Button when
 complying with publisher embargoes -- but that too is clearly not OA, which
 is immediate, free online access.)
  And on no account should the genuine, substantive distinction between
 Gratis OA http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/442-guid.html
 (free online access) and Libre OA
 http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/442-guid.html  (free
 online access plus various re-use rights) be color-coded (with a different
 shade for every variety of CC license)!
  Harnad, S., Brody, T., Vallieres, F., Carr, L., Hitchcock, S., Gingras, Y,
 Oppenheim, C., Stamerjohanns, H.,  Hilf, E. (2004) The Access/Impact
 Problem and the Green and Gold Roads to Open Access
 http

[GOAL] House of Lords enquiry

[Alma Swan]

 Alma, could you provide the source of the issues you highlight? The URL you
 gave is just to the format of how to submit, but does not include the actual
 remit of the inquiry.

I can now, but there was nothing available when I posted the news
approximately 24 hours ago. This press release was published 21 hours ago:
http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/lords-select/sci
ence-and-technology-committee/news/open-access/



___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] Re: [SCHOLCOMM] New Year's challenge for repository developers and managers: awesome cross-search

[Alma Swan]

The UK's House of Lords (upper chamber of Parliament) Science  Technology
Committee is conducting an enquiry into Open Access. Written submissions are
welcome. Individuals and organisations are invited to give their views on
the actions taken by Government and RCUK following publication of the Finch
report. 

The HoL has issued guidance
http://www.openscholarship.org/jcms/c_7334/hol-guidance-notes-open-access-e
nquiry on how to make written submissions.

In particular, there are four issues highlighted by the committee:
* support for universities in the form of funds to cover article processing
charges, and the response of universities and HEIs to these efforts
* embargo periods for articles published under the Green model
* engagement with publishers, universities, learned societies and other
stakeholders in the development of research council Open Access policies and
guidance 
* challenges and concerns raised by the scientific and publishing
communities, and how these have been addressed
 
The deadline is 18th January.
___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] New management for the DOAJ

[Alma Swan]

Mutual communication from Lund University Libraries and IS4OA to the public

Press release
New agreement concluded regarding management of the Directory of Open Access
Journals (DOAJ)

17 December 2012: Lund University Libraries and Infrastructure Services for
Open Access C.I.C. (IS4OA - a UK-registered Community Interest Company)
jointly announce important changes regarding the future operations and
development of the DOAJ.

The DOAJ was initiated at Lund University, Library Head Office in May 2003.
Initially the service was based on project grants but over the years the
major share of support was generated from income from the membership
programme. Having launched with a list of 300 journals, the DOAJ is now the
leading source of Open Access journals, and this month lists more than 8 300
journals in all subject areas, published in more than 100 countries in over
50 languages. 

In response to the growth that the service has experienced in combination
with increased demands for further developments,  Lund University concluded
during 2012 that a new community-based solution for operating and developing
the DOAJ had become timely. Following a series of discussions, the
University concluded an agreement with Infrastructure Services for Open
Access, C.I.C. (IS4OA) according to which the newly formed organisation will
manage the trademark as well as assume operations and development of the
Directory of Open Access Journals. Further plans will be announced shortly.
IS4OA was founded by Dr. Alma Swan (convener of EOS, co-founder and co-owner
of Key Perspectives Ltd. and Director SPARC Europe ) and Dr. Caroline Sutton
(co-founder Co-Action Publishing  and President of OASPA ).

Both parties are confident that this transition will ensure that the
scholarly community of the future will continue to benefit from a resource
that has proven very important for the ongoing changes in the scholarly
communication system.

Jette Guldborg Petersen
Director of Libraries
Lund University

Caroline Sutton
Director
IS4OA

For further information contact:

Caroline Sutton, Director IS4OA
e-mail: caroline.sutton@co-action-net
tel: +4790690506

Follow developments on www.doaj.org and www.is4oa.org


___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] Appointment of Lars Bjornshauge as Managing Director of the DOAj

[Alma Swan]

ANNOUNCMENT

17 December 2012: Infrastructure Services For Open Access C.I.C. (IS4OA) is
pleased to announce the appointment of Lars Bjørnshauge as Managing Director
of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). During his earlier work as
Director of Libraries at Lund University, from 2001 to 2011, Lars led the
initial development of the DOAJ and internationally he became known as the
face of the directory.

As Managing Director Lars is tasked with implementing and further developing
the DOAJ in line with a new business plan that has been devised. Agreements
regarding hosting and staffing are underway. The DOAJ will be governed
through an Advisory Board, the members of which are currently being
recruited from a broad specter of the Open Access community. Announcements
regarding the Advisory Board will be made in the next few weeks along with
further plans for development of the DOAJ as well as plans for developing
new certification criteria for journal inclusion in the DOAJ.

IS4OA and the new DOAJ organization look forward to working with its
supporters and the community to further develop the DOAJ such that it can
continue to play a key role within the emerging infrastructure to support
open access.

For more information, contact:
Caroline  Sutton (caroline.sut...@co-action.net)
Alma Swan (a.s...@talk21.com)



___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber

[Alma Swan]

David Prosser wrote:
 
 APCs make up just one business model that can be used to support Gold OA.
 Gold is OA through journals - it makes no assumption about how the costs of
 publication are paid for.  I think it is helpful to ensure that we do not
 equate Gold with APCs.
 
Seconded. And there is also an inclination in some quarters to call Green OA
Œdelayed OA¹, even though 60+% of journals allow immediate OA by
self-archiving. We should also ensure that Green OA is not equated with
embargoes.

Alma Swan
 
 
 
 
 On 3 Dec 2012, at 18:51, Richard Poynder wrote:
 
 Stuart Shieber is the Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard
 University, Faculty Co-Director
 http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/sshieber  of the Berkman Center for
 Internet and Society http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/sshieber ,
 Director of Harvard¹s Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC
 http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/ ),  and chief architect of the Harvard Open
 Access (OA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access ) Policy ‹ a 2008
 initiative that has seen Harvard become a major force in the OA movement.
  
 http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-oa-interviews-harvards-stuart.html
  
 ATT1..txt
 
 
 
 ___
 GOAL mailing list
 GOAL@eprints.org
 http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber

[Alma Swan]

I don¹t know. To find that out some computational whizz-kid will need to
dredge and compare data from Yassine Gargouri¹s web-trawl and SHERPA¹s
database.


On 12/12/2012 09:33, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com wrote:

 Alma, the 60% of green journals without embargoes you mention, what percentage
 of annual green published articles do they represent (not counting gold
 articles, which are of course also green by definition)?
 
 Best,
 
 Jan
 
 Johannes (Jan) J M Velterop
 AQnowledge - Concept Web Alliance
 M +44 7525 026991
 
 Sent from Jan Velterop's iPhone. Please excuse for brevity and typos.
 
 On 12 Dec 2012, at 07:28, Alma Swan a.s...@talk21.com wrote:
 
 Re: [GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber David Prosser wrote:
 
 APCs make up just one business model that can be used to support Gold OA.
 Gold is OA through journals - it makes no assumption about how the costs of
 publication are paid for.  I think it is helpful to ensure that we do not
 equate Gold with APCs.
 
 Seconded. And there is also an inclination in some quarters to call Green OA
 Œdelayed OA¹, even though 60+% of journals allow immediate OA by
 self-archiving. We should also ensure that Green OA is not equated with
 embargoes.
 
 Alma Swan
 
 
 
 
 On 3 Dec 2012, at 18:51, Richard Poynder wrote:
 
 Stuart Shieber is the Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard
 University, Faculty Co-Director
 http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/sshieber  of the Berkman Center for
 Internet and Society http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/sshieber ,
 Director of Harvard¹s Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC
 http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/ ),  and chief architect of the Harvard Open
 Access (OA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access ) Policy ‹ a 2008
 initiative that has seen Harvard become a major force in the OA movement.
  
 
http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/the-oa-interviews-harvards-stuart.htm
l
  
 ATT1..txt
 
 
 
 ___
 GOAL mailing list
 GOAL@eprints.org
 http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
 ___
 GOAL mailing list
 GOAL@eprints.org
 http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
 
 
 ___
 GOAL mailing list
 GOAL@eprints.org
 http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] Radio interviews about Open Access

[Alma Swan]

The BBC picked up the Guardian?s article of Monday
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-boycott-s
cientific-journals) and covered the topic in two interviews yesterday on
main news shows.

1. The Wellcome Trust's Mark Walport was interviewed about Open Access on
 the BBC's flagship radio news programme, Today, yesterday morning. The
 interview is 72 minutes into the programme:
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01dcmbf
 
2. Prof Stephen Duffy and Graham Taylor (Publishers Association) debated
 Open Access on the BBC's early evening radio news programme yesterday. The
 interview is 24 minutes into the programme:
 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01ddxcs

-- next part --
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: 
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120411/759dceae/attachment.html
 

[GOAL] Radio interviews about Open Access

[Alma Swan]

The BBC picked up the Guardian’s article of 
Monday(http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/apr/09/frustrated-blogpost-boycott-scie
ntific-journals) and covered the topic in two interviews yesterday on main news
shows.

1. The Wellcome Trust's Mark Walport was interviewed about Open Access on
  the BBC's flagship radio news programme, Today, yesterday morning.
  The
  interview is 72 minutes into the programme:
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01dcmbf

2. Prof Stephen Duffy and Graham Taylor (Publishers Association) debated
  Open Access on the BBC's early evening radio news programme
  yesterday. The
  interview is 24 minutes into the programme:
  http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b01ddxcs




[ Part 2: Attached Text ]

___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] Re: UK Research Councils plan to strengthen OA policy

[Alma Swan]

The use of the term ?libre? was mine, not RCUK?s, Peter. If you want to
decide whether their definition counts as libre, this is what the document
says:

?The Research Councils define Open Access to mean unrestricted, on-line
access to peer reviewed and published scholarly research papers.
Specifically a user must be able to do the following free of any
publisher-imposed access charge:
- Read published papers in an electronic format.
- Search for and re-use the content of published papers both manually and
using automated tools (such as those for text and data mining) provided that
any such reuse is subject to proper attribution.

What would be different?
The existing policy will be clarified by specifically stating that Open
Access includes unrestricted use of manual and automated text and data
mining tools. Also, that it allows unrestricted re-use of content with
proper attribution ? as defined by the Creative Commons CC-BY licence.
The Research Councils acknowledge that some publications may need to amend
their copyright conditions if they are to meet this definition of Open
Access. ?

Alma Swan



On 13/03/2012 11:10, Peter Murray-Rust pm286 at cam.ac.uk wrote:

 
 
 On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Richard Poynder ricky at 
 richardpoynder.co.uk
 wrote:
 ?
 
 The UK's Research Councils have proposed a revised policy on Open Access
 which further clarifies RCUK's definition of OA and strengthens some of the
 criteria that must be satisfied. In particular, the policy commits to libre
 Open Access as the agreed RCUK definition, ...
 
 Please can you clarify what is the RCUK's definition of OA and libre.? I
 hope that libre means consistent with BOAI/BBB or else it is operationally
 useless for anything other than human eyeballs. (See Wiley's definition of
 fully open access - I review this in
 http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/03/04/wiley%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cfully-open-a
 ccess%E2%80%9D-chemistry-open-my-review-if-this-is-%E2%80%9Cgold-oa%E2%80%9D-i
 -don%E2%80%99t-want-it/ )? For example do the members of this list really
 believe that this is libre?
 

-- next part --
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: 
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120313/a7bbff05/attachment-0001.html
 

[GOAL] Re: UK Research Councils plan to strengthen OA policy

[Alma Swan]

The use of the term ‘libre’ was mine, not RCUK’s, Peter. If you want to 
decide
whether their definition counts as libre, this is what the document says:

“The Research Councils define Open Access to mean unrestricted, on-line access
to peer reviewed and published scholarly research papers. Specifically a user
must be able to do the following free of any publisher-imposed access charge:
- Read published papers in an electronic format.
- Search for and re-use the content of published papers both manually and using
automated tools (such as those for text and data mining) provided that any such
reuse is subject to proper attribution.

What would be different?
The existing policy will be clarified by specifically stating that Open Access
includes unrestricted use of manual and automated text and data mining tools.
Also, that it allows unrestricted re-use of content with proper attribution – 
as
defined by the Creative Commons CC-BY licence.
The Research Councils acknowledge that some publications may need to amend their
copyright conditions if they are to meet this definition of Open Access. “

Alma Swan



On 13/03/2012 11:10, Peter Murray-Rust pm...@cam.ac.uk wrote:



  On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 10:09 AM, Richard Poynder
  ri...@richardpoynder.co.uk wrote:
 

The UK's Research Councils have proposed a revised
policy on Open Access which further clarifies RCUK's
definition of OA and strengthens some of the criteria
that must be satisfied. In particular, the policy
commits to libre Open Access as the agreed RCUK
definition, ...


  Please can you clarify what is the RCUK's definition of OA and
  libre.  I hope that libre means consistent with BOAI/BBB or else
  it is operationally useless for anything other than human eyeballs.
  (See Wiley's definition of fully open access - I review this 
inhttp://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2012/03/04/wiley%E2%80%99s-%E2%80%9Cfully-open-ac
cess%E2%80%9D-chemistry-open-my-review-if-this-is-%E2%80%9Cgold-oa%E2%80%9D-i-d
  on%E2%80%99t-want-it/ )  For example do the members of this list
  really believe that this is libre?





[ Part 2: Attached Text ]

___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

[GOAL] Open Access event in Oxford, 29 February 2012

[Alma Swan]

Forwarding from Simon Benjamin
The Senior Fellow in Quantum Materials,
Dept Materials, Oxford.
www.qunat.org
-

On leap-Wednesday the 29th Feb, a rare chance to meet an eminent panel of
speakers and debate:

The Scientific Evolution: Open Science and the Future of Publishing

The panel includes speakers from Nature, Elsevier, and the Wellcome trust,
together with Lord Robert Winston, Cameron Neylon and Victor Henning, CEO of
Mendeley.

We'll address question like,
Do we still need science journals in the internet age?
Is there something better than peer review?
How will scientific papers evolve?
Is the Elsevier boycott (thecostofknowledge.com) the start of something big?

The change has already begun: SOPA and the RWA, the boycott of Elsevier.
Science is evolving to become more open. How will you make the most of the
change? Come to discover, to debate, and come to take action.

From 3:30pm on 29th Feb, Wednesday of 7th Week: be at Rhodes House in Oxford
to take part in shaping the future of publishing.

The event is free, and you can optionally email
reserve at EvolutionOfScience.org  to reserve a seat.

www.EvolutionOfScience.org

[GOAL] First announcement - Berlin 10 conference, Stellenbosch, November 2012

[Alma Swan]

From Ina Smith:

  First Announcement  
Berlin 10 Open Access Conference to be held in Stellenbosch, South Africa

Stellenbosch University, in partnership with the Max Planck Society and the
Academy of Science for South Africa, has the pleasure of announcing that the
prestigious Berlin 10 Open Access Conference will be held in Stellenbosch,
South Africa. This will be the first time that the Berlin Open Access
Conference will be held in Africa. As is tradition with the conference, it
will explore the transformative impact that open, online access to research
can have on scholarship, scientific discovery, and the translation of
results to the benefit of the public.
The Conference will be held at the Wallenberg Research Centre, Stellenbosch
Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS). STIAS is situated on the historic
Mostertsdrift farm in the heart of Stellenbosch.

Conference date:   7-8 November 2012

Pre-conference date:6 November 2012

The theme, programme, speakers and other relevant information will become
available in forthcoming announcements which will also be available on the
conference website (www.berlin10.org).
*

Ina Smith

E-Research Repository Manager (SUNScholar) | Library and Information Service
| University of Stellenbosch | Private Bag X5036, 7599 | South Africa
http://scholar.sun.ac.za | http://oa.sun.ac.za | E-mail: ism...@sun.ac.za |
Tel:  +27 21 808 9139 | Skype: smith.ina | Office hours: Mo-Fr: 08h00-16h30


E-pos vrywaringsklousule

Hierdie e-pos mag vertroulike inligting bevat en mag regtens geprivilegeerd
wees en is slegs bedoel vir die persoon aan wie dit geadresseer is. Indien u
nie die bedoelde ontvanger is nie, word u hiermee in kennis gestel dat u
hierdie dokument geensins mag gebruik, versprei of kopieer nie. Stel ook
asseblief die sender onmiddellik per telefoon in kennis en vee die e-pos
uit. Die Universiteit aanvaar nie aanspreeklikheid vir enige skade, verlies
of uitgawe wat voortspruit uit hierdie e-pos en/of die oopmaak van enige
lêers aangeheg by hierdie e-pos nie.

E-mail disclaimer

This e-mail may contain confidential information and may be legally
privileged and is intended only for the person to whom it is addressed. If
you are not the intended recipient, you are notified that you may not use,
distribute or copy this document in any manner whatsoever. Kindly also
notify the sender immediately by telephone, and delete the e-mail. The
University does not accept liability for any damage, loss or expense arising
from this e-mail and/or accessing any files attached to this e-mail.



___
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal

EPrints REF2014 plugin

[Alma Swan]

*Apologies for cross-posting*
  
The  newly-developed REF2014 plugin for the widely-used EPrints repository
software is entering its live testing phase.  Five universities that
currently have their repositories hosted by EPrints Services will be
participating in the testing process.  The goal is to release the REF2014
plugin next February and it will be available free of charge.  

On behalf of EPrints Services, Sheridan Brown said The development of this
new plugin demonstrates the team's continuing desire to add value to the
core EPrints software in response to the needs of the user community. 

The plugin provides the functionality that repositories need to comply with
requirements of the UK's Research Excellence Framework exercise. It has
been developed for a UK-specific purpose, but it reflects the flexibility of
the EPrints software and the readiness of the development team to continue
to strive to make repositories a valuable strategic tool for institutions,
says Sheridan.  

Further information about the REF2014 plugin can be found
here: http://www.eprints.org/ref2014/

Access to scientific and technical information for innovating SMEs in Denmark

[Alma Swan]

The Danish Ministry for Research  Innovation has just published the report of a
study carried out by John Houghton and Key Perspectives Ltd on access to
scientific  technical information by innovating SMEs in Denmark.

The report (in English) is 
here:http://www.fi.dk/publikationer/2011/adgang-til-forskningsresultater-og-teknisk-
information-i-danmark

The press release (Google's translation from Danish) is:
Small and medium enterprises constitute a substantial part of the national
economy and the importance of innovation and growth. It is therefore important
that they have access to and use of research findings. This report examines the
needs and use of scientific and technical information among knowledge-based SMEs
in Denmark.

 It turns out however that it is difficult to access research articles, patent
information, scientific and technical standards, technical information and
market intelligence.

 Entry barriers and delays cost money. It takes the report says on average 2.2
years longer to develop or introduce new products without the use of academic
research. For new products will be a delay of 2.2 years mean that an average
company loses about 36 million DKK in revenue.

 The report concludes that there is a need for easier and cheaper access to
research articles, patents, laws and regulations and market information.

 The report is in English with Danish summary.
 Background:

 The survey was done by John Houghton of the Centre for Strategic Economic
Studies, Victoria University, Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown from Key Perspectives
Limited for Research and Innovation and Denmark's Electronic Research Library.

 The study is based on 98 responses of a quantitative questionnaire and 23
qualitative interviews

Re: Rights Reductio Ad Absurdum

[Alma Swan]

Charles Openheim wrote:

  I negotiated with Elsevier when my article was
accepted by one of their jo=
 urnals.  My refusal to assign copyright was at the
time a matter of princip=
 le rather than any anticipation of the OA movement.
 So issues of having to=

                     later negotiate permission to 
self-archive never arose.

Elsevier has a Licence To Publish which it will provide if an author declines to
click through its Copyright Transfer Agreement online.

I offered Elsevier the SPARC/Science Commons Author Addendum instead of signing
the CTA and in response was sent the LTP. It allows the author to keep all the
rights needed for personal dissemination, re-use, etc while obtaining, for
Elsevier, sole rights to publish it in a journal. Since most articles are not
ever destined to be published in more than one journal, this seems a very
satisfactory solution for the majority of cases.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Open Access mandates growth

[Alma Swan]

The final picture for the adoption of mandatory OA policies for 2010 is now
available. The graph showing the cumulative growth of mandates over the last
9 years can be found on the EOS (Enabling Open Scholarship) site here:
http://bit.ly/dyWWaA  and on the OASIS site here: http://bit.ly/bgy1Ob.

From early 2011 the graph will be generated automatically by
EPrints' ROARMAP service: http://roarmap.eprints.org

It will be announced shortly when that site replaces
 http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/ as the place to register
new mandates by institutions, funders and departments as well as the place
to find the up-to-date version of the graph for advocacy work.

Finally, the growth of policies during open Access Week 2010 was monitored
and is recorded here: http://bit.ly/anUWms and here: http://bit.ly/a4dynw.

Alma Swan
OASIS (www.openoasis.org)
EOS (www.openscholarship.org)
Key Perspectives Ltd, Truro, UK (www.keyperspectives.co.uk)

Re: An Overview of Open Access for Open Access Week 2010

[Alma Swan]

Dear Stevan,

Yes, I am to be there and had happily agreed to sub for Les. I have grabbed
some screen shots of ROARMAP and updated my overall mandates graph this
morning (which is now, due to U.Catalunya, out of date again!).

I was going to ask you if, apart from Arthur's original study on mandate
effectiveness, is there any other evidence you think should be presented.
Les is keen that we use the talk to promote mandates, so I need to
substantiate the case for them with good evidence that ony they work.

I have the graph from your own paper of last year (the four mandated
institutions),  but is there anything more you've done on the topic?

A.


On 22/10/2010 13:46, Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote:

 Dear Alma,
 
 It's not about invading your presentation but about subbing for Les, who had a
 passport problem and was going to present ROARMAP.
 
 But actually, if you are there, it may not be necessary! Les had thought you
 had declined. You could do ROARMAP! Especially with your new OAW results...
 
 Sinophilic (but not yet Senile) Stick
 
 On 2010-10-22, at 8:33 AM, Alma Swan wrote:
 
 They just said they wanted me there rather than by Skype. Stevan, I will
 check with the Beijing people when I get there to see if it's possible to
 bring you in via Skype during that presentation. It's only 20 minutes long,
 though, so we'd need to plan it very carefully.
 
 A.
 
 
 On 22/10/2010 13:07, Stevan Harnad har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk wrote:
 
 But did they refuse for a university videoconference presentation? Or a
 prefab
 video with voice discussion after? I could do either of thsoe on ROARMAP
 too.
 Chrs, S
 On 2010-10-22, at 2:28 AM, Leslie Carr wrote:
 
 Alma tells me that they refused point blank on Skype presentations. Luckily
 she has agreed to do the ROARMAP presentation, so that'll be great.
 --
 Les
 
 
 On 21 Oct 2010, at 14:37, Stevan Harnad wrote:
 
 What I meant was that you hadn't sent the OA Week entry anywhere: OA Week
 software has tools for transmitting the event to lists, individuals or
 social sites.
 
 Chrs, S
 PS and Beijing?
 
 On 2010-10-21, at 7:15 AM, Leslie Carr wrote:
 
 Send it where?
 It's gone to AMSCI, JISC-REPOSITORIES, the UKCoRR
 and I'm about to send it to the SPARC list.
 I've also twittered.
 --
 Les
 
 On 21 Oct 2010, at 12:05, Stevan Harnad wrote:
 
 Hi Les,
 
 It's there, but you haven't sent it anywhere yet.
 
 Before sending it to twitter, etc., I suggest you
 
 (1) put in links to roar, eprints, etc. where they are mentioned in the
 text and
 (2) put the URL itself explcitly in the text as well (it's in the top
 metadata, but that isn't enough, and
 (3) elaborate the title to make it more self-explanatory as an advert
 
 Here's my version:
 http://www.openaccessweek.org/events/dynamic-map-of-open-access
 which I can delete once yours is ready (or leave to reinforce yours).
 
 S
 
 PS What about the ROARMAP Beijing teletalk?
 
 On 2010-10-21, at 2:37 AM, Leslie Carr wrote:
 
 I've added it, but it doesn't appear anywhere!
 --
 Les
 
 
 On 21 Oct 2010, at 01:52, Stevan Harnad wrote:
 
 Mine's just a place-holder -- do one and I'll delete mine. -- S
 
 On 2010-10-20, at 6:49 PM, Leslie Carr wrote:
 
 But you've signed it up  - I saw on the site!
 --
 les
 
 On 20 Oct 2010, at 23:12, Stevan Harnad wrote:
 
 Whoops, missed the last part and already spammed the other lists...
 
 But the week is half gone, so no need to wait.
 
 Please do sign it up too.
 
 Chrs, S
 
 On Wed, 20 Oct 2010, Leslie Carr wrote:
 
 So we're a bit late, but we thought there'd be a lull in OA week
 announcements by now :-)
 
 I have just sent the following message to stevan's list: tim has
 agreed to monitor the site tonight from home. When we all return to
 work tomorrow, I will send out the message to JISC-REPOSITORIES and
 the SPARC mailing list.
 --
 Les
 
 
 Begin forwarded message:
 
 From: Leslie Carr l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk
 Date: 20 October 2010 17:57:47 GMT+01:00
 To: American Scientist Open Access Forum
 american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
 Subject: An Overview of Open Access for Open Access Week 2010
 
 ROAR, the Registry of Open Access Repositories, is launching an
 Overview of Open Access (pictured below) that showcases open access
 material from repositories around the world. Picking one recent
 deposit at a time, the animated map cycles around the world's
 repositories showing a description of the deposit itself, together
 with a description and thumbnail of the repository's home page.
 Every few seconds another deposit is chosen from another
 repository,
 making what we hope is an interesting trip around the World of Open
 Access! The title of each repository and each deposit is linked
 from
 the display, allowing viewers to explore repositories and open
 access research from around the globe.
 
 To view the Overview of Open Access, go to
 http://roar.eprints.org/oaweek.html
 
 
 
 
 The Small Print!
 This is an unfunded, temporary, experimental service

Teesside University announces the first institutional mandate of Open Access Week 2010

[Alma Swan]

Teesside University in the UK has launched its institutional repository and
announced a mandatory policy on depositing the University's research
outputs.

The repository, TeesRep, was officially opened by the Vice Chancellor,
Professor Graham Henderson, who welcomed the new development, saying: 'It
plays a significant role in emphasising the importance of the research being
undertaken by our staff and makes the findings of our publicly funded
research available to the wider community.'

'The institutional repository holds journal articles, books, PhD theses and
multimedia work going back to 2000. It increases the visibility and impact
of the University¹s research activities.' said Professor Cliff Hardcastle,
Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Enterprise.

Liz Jolly, Director of the University¹s Library and Information Services -
responsible for managing the archive - said: 'TeesRep is a valuable source
of information for academics, and disseminates the University¹s research
outputs to the public at large.'

TeesRep can be accessed from www.tees.ac.uk/teesrep
http://tees.openrepository.com/tees/ .

UK's 18th green mandate; planet's 100th: University of Salford

[Alma Swan]

(Forwarding from Caroline Boyd, University of Salford, dated Friday 16
October 2009):

The University has announced its intention to implement plans that will make
free, easily accessible research knowledge available to a world wide
audience via the University of Salford Institutional Repository (USIR)
portal.

In a recent keynote speech, Vice-Chancellor Professor Martin Hall said:
Openly disseminated knowledge is good knowledge.

For the last two years the University has been implementing systems to
enable the University's research active staff to deposit their findings and
research into the repository.

The University of Salford is pleased to now declare that from the 1st
January 2010, it will be implementing a mandatory policy for all research
active staff to deposit research information into the repository. This means
that as of January 2010, the University of Salford will officially be an
Open Access University.

Many thanks,

Caroline
Caroline Boyd
Internal Communications Officer
Corporate Communications
The University of Salford
The Old Fire Station
The Crescent
Salford, Greater Manchester
M5 4WT, UK
T + 44 (0) 161 295 5235
F + 44 (0) 161 295 4705
Email: c.m.b...@salford.ac.uk mailto:c.m.b...@salford.ac.uk

Denmark's 1st Green OA Mandate; Planet's 98th: Copenhagen Business School

[Alma Swan]

ROARMAP Full list of institutions
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/

[Forwarding from Leif Hansen, Senior Advisor, Copenhagen Business School]

Greater access to scholarly publications from CBS

The CBS Open Access Policy - 2009.

Background.  Universities find themselves in a situation in which research
becomes more and more international through increased cooperation with other
universities inside and outside of Europe. This has been the case for CBS
for several years, where internationalization has been one of the key
strategic goals.

Scientific information is increasingly digitized, journals appear more and
more in e-format only and references to e-science and e-research gains
ground. More and more researchers expect rapid access to research material
and information and prefer search tools for information that provides easy
access to content via the internet.

Many funders have recognised that the job of research is only half-done if
the results of that research cannot reach the widest audience. Some are
formulating policies to require Open Access to their funded research, and
the European Re-search Council has recommended an open access policy for all
EU funded re-search.

CBS as other universities find themselves in a transitional process in which
access to the results of their research is an important prerequisite to
participating in the international research community and research
competition. 

And as a publicly funded university CBS has a duty to inform the general
public about its research activities and results and to provide access to
published results of the research to industry and business to stimulate
knowledge exchange and further innovation.

In line with these considerations CBS last year signed the Berlin
Declaration, which calls for unrestricted Open Access to Knowledge in the
Sciences and Humanities. In order to implement the Berlin Declaration
institutions should:

a)   implement a policy to require their researchers to deposit a copy of
all their pub-lished articles in an open access repository and

b)   encourage their researchers to publish their research articles in open
access journals where a suitable journal exists and provide the support to
enable that to happen.

To clarify the concept open access the following quotation from the
British organisation Sherpa (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research
Preservation and Access) can be of help:

What Open Access is
If an article is Open Access it means that it can be freely accessed by
anyone in the world using an internet connection. This means that the
potential readership of Open Access articles is far, far greater than that
for articles where the full-text is restricted to subscribers. Evidence
shows that making research material Open Access increases the number of
readers and significantly increases citations to the article.
 
What Open Access is not
It is important to point out that Open Access does not affect peer-review;
articles are peer-reviewed and published in journals in the normal way.
There is no suggestion that authors should use repositories instead of
journals. Open Access repositories supplement and do not replace journals.

Open Access Solutions
Open Access is taking the results of research that has already been paid for
and making it freely available on-line, through repositories and websites.
This process can have significant advantages for individual authors, for
researchers, for institutions and for the process of research generally by
freeing up the process of dissemination.

This policy document describes the principles and procedures in this
implementation at CBS.

Policy principles

CBS and the faculty at CBS are committed to disseminating the results of its
re-search and scholarship as widely as possible.

To fulfill that commitment CBS is adopting an Open access policy that
provide open access to full-text versions of all scholarly papers and
articles written by its faculty.

The aim is to allow these publications to be read, searched, printed,
distributed or utilized in any other conceivable legitimate manner without
any financial, technical or legal restrictions.

This does not affect the author's legal right to be identified as the
copyright holder of such works.

This open access policy furthermore seeks to increase authors' influence in
scholarly publishing by establishing a collective practice of retaining a
right to open access dissemination of certain scholarly works.

As a consequence of this policy CBS faculty shall routinely grant to CBS a
license to place in a non-commercial open-access online repository
(OpenAr-chive@CBS) the faculty member's scholarly work published in a
scholarly journal or conference proceedings.[*])

[*] A license means that the copyright owner gives to another the right to
use a copyrighted work in specified ways. This license shall be limited,
irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, and
non-exclusive. Such a license does 

Re: OA in High Energy Physics Arxiv Yields Five-Fold Citation Advantage

[Alma Swan]

On 21/07/2009 21:40, Sally Morris sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk wrote:

 I merely reported what I was told by my IOPP contacts;  clearly, however,
 not everyone there agreed with that view.   I can't cite it because I can't
 now find it (I no longer have access to all the documents I had as ALPSP
 CEO);  I don't see the point in retracting it because I believe that I
 accurately reported what I was told.  Clearly Alma feels she did the same.

No, Alma doesn't feel she did the same at all.

Alma reported faithfully what she was told, obtained the written agreement
of the people being quoted to use their words and to attribute them to their
organisations, retains all the documentation and has been able to return to
that to retrieve original material to support her statements, as provided in
her previous message to this list.

And she has not accused anyone, erroneously and in public, of misquoting.

Alma feels that all makes her very different to Sally.

 We can speculate until we're blue in the face, but whether or not green OA
 does, in the end, damage subscription journals, of course, only time will
 tell.

Indeed, and the point of the exercise at the time was to look
retrospectively at what had happened in the first 15 years of
self-archiving. What speculators wish to make of that evidence is up to
them.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

EPrints repository training course

[Alma Swan]

The next training course offered by EPrints will take place at the
University of Southampton on 1-2 September 2009. As well as the
standard EPrints two-day course, from which delegates emerge not only
equipped to set up and run a repository for their institution but
also with one on their laptop, there is an additional day offered
free of charge.

This is on Thursday 3 September, provided by the JISC-funded dotAC
project, and will be on the application of linked data principles in
an institutional environment. Details of the courses can be found on
the EPrints website: http://www.eprints.org/services/training/

Because our training courses are run by senior members of the EPrints
software development and support team, you are sure to get up-to-date
and relevant insights into EPrints and its uses.  The cost of the
two-day course is 750 GBP (plus VAT where applicable). Included in
the cost is lunch and refreshments and full course materials.

The EPrints software is free for anyone to download and use.  The
money we receive from training courses contributes to the costs of
the continuing development of EPrints, providing a degree of
stability that is appreciated by users.    

To book a place on the course, please email i...@services.eprints.org
with a purchase order number, indicating whether you are booking a
place on the two-day or three-day course.  We do not invoice until
after the course.  Once we have received a purchase order number from
you we will send you a list of accommodation options and directions
to the course venue.  

There is a limit to the number of people the training facilities can
accommodate so if you think you would like to attend please do let us
know as soon as possible since these courses are very popular. If we
find the September course is full then we will offer another one as
soon as possible.

EPrints is the repository software of first choice for many
institutions in the UK and beyond.  We hope you will join the team in
Southampton to learn more about building and managing a repository
and about the many benefits the latest version of EPrints can offer.

Re: OA in High Energy Physics Arxiv Yields Five-Fold Citation Advantage

[Alma Swan]

 Since my informants are no longer at IOP, I can't give you chapter and
 verse, but assure you I'm not making it up (and it was about subscriptions).
 I recall a speaker at an ALPSP seminar telling us much the same story for
 London Mathematical Society journals.

My concern is not about whether *you* make things up but about the fact that
yesterday on this list you told everyone that *I* do.

What my informant (undoubtedly the same individual as your informant) at
IOPP also volunteered, and which I also reported at the time, was that the
rate of subscription attrition had remained the same for *all* IOPP journals
over the time arXiv had been in existence, hence no arXiv-specific effect
was apparent. That is, IOPP publishes many journals outside the fields
covered by arXiv and they, too, were experiencing subscription attrition (at
the same rate as those in fields covered by arXiv.

I append below some other quotes provided to me and approved for publication
by the two physics society publishers at the time. Readers can then decide
for themselves whether those two societies were saying that self-archiving
was threatening their business [by undermining subscriptions], or not:

Institute of Physics Publishing:
IOPP's experience as a learned society publisher illustrates the strong
synergies and mutual benefits that currently exist between major
peer-reviewed journals, such as our Classical and Quantum Gravity, and the
arXiv e-print server. Both systems continue to serve the scientific
community very effectively. Journals act as the brand, setting standards
for scientific quality. Our authors and editors tell us that they value
publishing in a peer-reviewed journal because this continues as an essential
requirement for establishing reputation and authority of the research they
publish. Whilst posting an pre-print or post-print is becoming more of an
essential in some areas of the physics community for immediate and wide
dissemination. We do not see the arXiv or repositories threatening our
business.

N.B. Since then, the IOPP has established, and manages, the UK's mirror site
for arXiv.

The APS (American Physical Society):
³We don't consider it [arXiv] a threat. We expect to continue to have a
symbiotic relationship with arXiv. As long as peer review is valued by the
community (and it seems to be), we will be doing peer review.²
 
³ [We have] tried to cooperate closely with arXiv including establishing a
mirror (jointly with Brookhaven National Laboratory)... We also revised our
copyright statement to be explicitly in favor of author self-archiving.
These efforts strengthened (rather than weakened) Physical Review D [an APS
journal that covers high-energy physics] ~J..I would say it is likely we
maintained subscriptions to Physical Review D that we may otherwise have
lost if we hadn't been so pro-arXiv ~J.²

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK
  

Re: OA in High Energy Physics Arxiv Yields Five-Fold Citation Advantage

[Alma Swan]

Sally Morris said:

 Stevan is, I'm sure, well aware that IOP at least has claimed that point (2)
 is erroneous and that it was misquoted by Swan

Eh? Swan stands by her original report.

All the quotes were written down verbatim during telephone conversations or
came to me by email, and all were cleared with the individuals that gave
them before I put them in the public arena.

I still have the emails if anyone needs to see them for verification.

Accusing someone without foundation, especially on a public list, of
misquoting is a rather disappointing lapse in standards of behaviour,
especially when that someone takes great care not to misrepresent people who
have agreed to give evidence.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Interoperable Repositories Infrastructure Project - community review sought

[Alma Swan]

An international workshop in Amsterdam in March, funded by JISC, SURF and
DRIVER, discussed work needed to improve interoperability between
repositories. Four areas of work were focused upon:
- citation services
- interoperable identification systems
- repository handshaking (interoperable deposit systems), and
- repository organisation (supporting repositories around the world)

Since the workshop, teams have taken the discussions forward and are
developing action plans and project proposals for each topic. Here is an
update:

1. The CITATION SERVICES team now have a draft project proposal available
for community review. Please take a look at it give your comments. It is on
the project wiki here:
http://repinf.pbworks.com/Citation-Services-draft-project-proposal

2. The wiki also provides an update on all four plans: the team leaders made
short presentations on developments at the OAI6 conference last week and
their Powerpoint files are on the wiki, along with an Update document
summarising the progress and future timelines. Here are the links:

Update: http://repinf.pbworks.com/Update-June-09
Powerpoints: links from the front page: http://repinf.pbworks.com/

3. Finally, the wiki provides extensive background information on
repositories in the form of Briefing Materials under a number of headings.
These are presented in both text and map form on the wiki, accessible from
the links on the wiki front page here: http://repinf.pbworks.com/. The
original purpose of this background information was to inform the
Repositories Infrastructure Project discussions, but it may be useful to
anyone working on repository-related matters. I am keeping the Briefing
Materials up-to-date as far as I am able, but this is a reminder to you all
to let me know of any new developments you undertake, or things you hear
about that might usefully be brought to the attention of this community, and
I will add them to the Briefing Materials.

Thank you, all.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Re: The Beginning of Institutional Repositories

[Alma Swan]

On 25/06/2009 11:42, Sally Morris sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk wrote:

 Isn't it the case that it's only in the case of articles published Open
 Access, and where the fee is paid by Wellcome, that there is any requirement
 on the publisher to do the depositing?

Yes, though I understand that other publishers are voluntarily depositing in
archives like PMC as a service to authors. Some are also looking at
SWORD-like mechanisms for depositing into multiple archives through one
action.

 Many other journals/publishers have a Wellcome-compliant policy for
 self-archiving of the accepted version, but they are not paid anything nor
 are they required to do anything, as far as I am aware

Quite so. I was talking about UKPMC and the poor deposit rate. In answer to
your point - which suggested that researchers were not immediately
responding 100% to mandatory requirements - I just pointed out that neither
were some publishers responding to requirements to which they had signed up.

So, the overall point is that changing very longstanding behavioural norms
and practices takes time and we shouldn't expect instant results in the form
of 95% OA, whichever players are meant to be responsible.

In the case of authors and self-archiving, those institutions that have had
a mandatory policy for some years are now seeing high levels of deposit, as
a forthcoming paper will show. And now that we can start to examine the
effects, some rather spectacular stories are beginning to emerge that
demonstrate the benefit to individual authors.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

 -Original Message-
 From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
 [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On
 Behalf Of Alma Swan
 Sent: 25 June 2009 07:04
 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
 Subject: Re: The Beginning of Institutional Repositories

 A little bird-in-the-know also told Alma that although 91% of
 Wellcome-funded research is published in journals compliant with the
 Wellcome policy, a major reason for disappointing deposit levels in UKPMC in
 the first year of the Wellcome policy (at least) was that the *publishers*
 were not depositing as agreed (and as they were being paid to do).

 I daresay they're shaping up by now.

 Alma Swan
 Key Perspectives Ltd
 Truro, UK


 On 24/06/2009 11:01, Sally Morris (Morris Associates)
 sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk wrote:

 That's what they told Alma.  It is not, however, what they are doing so
 far

 Sally


 Sally Morris
 Partner, Morris Associates - Publishing Consultancy

 South House, The Street
 Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK

 Tel: +44(0)1903 871286
 Fax: +44(0)8701 202806
 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
 -Original Message-
 From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
 [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On
 Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
 Sent: 23 June 2009 14:13
 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
 Subject: Re: The Beginning of Institutional Repositories

 On Tue, 23 Jun 2009, Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote:

 The perceived necessity for institutional and other mandates does, in a
 sense, reflect a failing - that researchers simply do not see 'what is in
 it
 for them' and therefore do not, by and large, deposit voluntarily.  What
 this tells us is an interesting question

 It is indeed an interesting question. I think a partial answer is given
 by Alma Swan's surveys, which showed not only that 95% of researchers
 would comply with a deposit mandate, but that 81% would do so
 *willingly*, and only 14% reluctantly.

 To me, that suggests that researchers are inclined to deposit, but not
 inclined enough to do so without a mandate from their institutions or
 funders.

 The reasons most are *inclined* to do so, yet only a few actually do it
 without a mandate are multiple. I have identified at least 34 of them:

  Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in
  Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic
  Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos.   http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12094/

 The three chief worries are about doing so are that (1) it might be
 illegal, (2) it might put their paper's acceptance for publication by
 their preferred journals at risk, and (3) it might be time-consuming.

 These -- and the 31 other worries -- are all groundless, and individual
 researchers can be successfully informed about this, one by one; but
 that is not a very practical route to reaching a deposit rate of 100%
 worldwide. Official institutional and funder mandates reassure researchers
 that there is nothing to worry about, their institutions and funders
 back them, everyone is doing it, and, as they quickly learn, the time
 it takes to deposit it is minuscule.

  Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A
  Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.
  http

Re: The Beginning of Institutional Repositories

[Alma Swan]

A little bird-in-the-know also told Alma that although 91% of
Wellcome-funded research is published in journals compliant with the
Wellcome policy, a major reason for disappointing deposit levels in UKPMC in
the first year of the Wellcome policy (at least) was that the *publishers*
were not depositing as agreed (and as they were being paid to do).

I daresay they're shaping up by now.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK


On 24/06/2009 11:01, Sally Morris (Morris Associates)
sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk wrote:

 That's what they told Alma.  It is not, however, what they are doing so far

 Sally


 Sally Morris
 Partner, Morris Associates - Publishing Consultancy

 South House, The Street
 Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK

 Tel: +44(0)1903 871286
 Fax: +44(0)8701 202806
 Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
 -Original Message-
 From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
 [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On
 Behalf Of Stevan Harnad
 Sent: 23 June 2009 14:13
 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
 Subject: Re: The Beginning of Institutional Repositories

 On Tue, 23 Jun 2009, Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote:

 The perceived necessity for institutional and other mandates does, in a
 sense, reflect a failing - that researchers simply do not see 'what is in
 it
 for them' and therefore do not, by and large, deposit voluntarily.  What
 this tells us is an interesting question

 It is indeed an interesting question. I think a partial answer is given
 by Alma Swan's surveys, which showed not only that 95% of researchers
 would comply with a deposit mandate, but that 81% would do so
 *willingly*, and only 14% reluctantly.

 To me, that suggests that researchers are inclined to deposit, but not
 inclined enough to do so without a mandate from their institutions or
 funders.

 The reasons most are *inclined* to do so, yet only a few actually do it
 without a mandate are multiple. I have identified at least 34 of them:

  Harnad, S. (2006) Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis, in
  Jacobs, N., Eds. Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic
  Aspects, chapter 8. Chandos.   http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/12094/

 The three chief worries are about doing so are that (1) it might be
 illegal, (2) it might put their paper's acceptance for publication by
 their preferred journals at risk, and (3) it might be time-consuming.

 These -- and the 31 other worries -- are all groundless, and individual
 researchers can be successfully informed about this, one by one; but
 that is not a very practical route to reaching a deposit rate of 100%
 worldwide. Official institutional and funder mandates reassure researchers
 that there is nothing to worry about, their institutions and funders
 back them, everyone is doing it, and, as they quickly learn, the time
 it takes to deposit it is minuscule.

  Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2005) Keystroke Economy: A
  Study of the Time and Effort Involved in Self-Archiving.
  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/10688/

 I am not saying that this fully resolves the puzzle of why it is taking so
 long to reach the outcome that is so obviously and demonstrably optimal
 for research and researchers, and fully within reach. We will have to
 leave that to future historians and sociologists. What is urgent now
 -- for the sake of research itself, as well as for researchers, their
 institutions and funders, and the tax-payers that fund the research --
 is that this optimal and inevitable outcome should be facilitated and
 accelerated by mandates, so we reach it at long last. For the longer we
 delay, the more research impact and progress keeps being lost, needlessly.

 So full speed ahead with deposit mandates now, and then we can study
 why it took so long -- and why it needed to be mandated at all -- at
 our leisure, after we have universal OA.

 Stevan Harnad

Launch of OASIS

[Alma Swan]

The Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS) is being
launched at the 13th International Conference on Electronic
Publishing (ELPUB2009), taking place in Milan, Italy from June 10-12.

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.

For details about the site, please visit: http://www.openoasis.org

A brief introduction to OASIS is available here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kbZ-BJpros

Contact: Leslie Chan c...@utsc.utoronto.ca or Alma Swan
a.s...@talk21.com

The ROARMAP database of Open Access policies

[Alma Swan]

UCL's Open Access mandate was adopted in October 2008, but only
announced in June 2009. It would be helpful if all universities that
adopt mandatory policies on Open Access would register them
immediately upon adoption in the ROARMAP database
(http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/).

Being able to see the details of existing policies helps other
institutions that are developing their own and means that new
policies are included in summary data like this chart
(http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090603/full/news.2009.538/box/1.html
) at the soonest possible moment.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK


On 03/06/2009 13:28, Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com wrote:

  The United Kingdom continues to lead the world in Open
  Access:

  University College London (UCL) http://www.ucl.ac.uk/
   has just adopted the UK's 22nd (and the 
world's 84thhttp://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=University
  %20College%20London%20%28UCL%29 ) mandate to make all of
  its research output Open Access (by depositing it in
  UCL's Institutional Repository, UCL Eprints
  http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/ ). 

  With its 13 funder mandates and 9
  institutional/departmental mandates
  http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/  so
  far, the UK still has the planet's highest proportion of
  Open Access Mandates. 

  But the world is catching up (see Figure
  http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/alma-mand1.png
  )!

  Dr. Alma Swan of Key Perspectives
  http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/  and University of
  Southampton, has just documented how mandates
  http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/  to
  provide Open Access to research output have almost
  doubled globally in the year that has elapsed since
  Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted
  the world's 44th Open Access 
mandatehttp://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Harvard%20
  University%3A%20Faculty%20of%20Arts%20and%20Sciences  in
  May 2008.

  The world's first Open Access 
mandatehttp://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=University
%20of%20Southampton%3A%20School%20of%20Electronics%20and%20Computer%20Scienc
  e  was adopted in 2002 by the University of
  Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science
  (ECS). Southampton had previously designed, in 2000
  http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD
  , the first free, Open Source software for creating Open
  Access Institutional Repositories, Eprints
  http://www.eprints.org/ , now used the world 
overhttp://roar.eprints.org/?action=homeq=country=version=eprints2type=ord
  er=namesubmit=Filter .

  In 2004 the UK Parliamentary Select Committee on Science
  and Technology (as urged by evidence
  http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm
   provided by Southampton University and Loughborough
  
University) recommendedhttp://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399
  03.htm  that all UK higher education institutions
  establish institutional repositories on which their
  published output can be stored and from which it can be
  read, free of charge, online [and] that Research Councils
  and other Government funders mandate their funded
  researchers to deposit a copy of all of their articles in
  this way. Research Councils UK
  http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/outputs/access/default.htm
   went on in 2006-2008  to make a clean sweep, with all
  seven councils mandating Open Access in 2006-2008.

  But Alma Swan's analysis shows that the UK is at last
  going to lose its lead, as the global growth spurt of
  mandates we had all been awaiting appears to have begun.

  The globalization of Open Access mandates is of course
  something that all UK universities heartily welcome as a
  win/win outcome, optimal and inevitable for research and
  researchers worldwide. Open access is essentially
  reciprocal. The only way every university on the planet
  can gain open access to the research output of every
  other university on the planet is by each providing open
  access to its own research output: Self-archive unto
  others as you would have them self-archive unto 
youhttp://www.google.com/search?hl=ensafe=offnum=100q=%28%22self-archive+un
to+others%22++OR++%22golden+rule%22%29+%22open+access%22+harnadbtnG=Search
  aq=foq=aqi= .

Re: The ROARMAP database of Open Access policies

[Alma Swan]

I wish to make clear that my message below is merely to encourage the
registration of policies in ROARMAP, giving an adoption date if
possible if this differs from the announcement date. When I used the
ROARMAP data to draw up the graphs that were published last week I
used the adoption date wherever it was available rather than the
announcement date, because the former indicates the time when the
decision was made even if implementation came later.

There was not the slightest, tiniest, minutest whiff of criticism
intended in the words I used, but it has been pointed out that that
they can be read that way. UCL's mandate is a big, big prize and
congratulations to all involved.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK


On 04/06/2009 12:25, Alma Swan a.s...@talk21.com wrote:

  UCL's Open Access mandate was adopted in October 2008,
  but only announced in June 2009. It would be helpful if
  all universities that adopt mandatory policies on Open
  Access would register them immediately upon adoption in
  the ROARMAP database
  (http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/).

  Being able to see the details of existing policies helps
  other institutions that are developing their own and
  means that new policies are included in summary data like
  this chart
  (http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090603/full/news.2009.538/box/1.html
  ) at the soonest possible moment.

  Alma Swan
  Key Perspectives Ltd
  Truro, UK


  On 03/06/2009 13:28, Stevan Harnad
  amscifo...@gmail.com wrote:

The United Kingdom continues to lead the
world in Open Access:

University College London (UCL)
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/  has just adopted the
UK's 22nd (and the 
world's 84thhttp://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=University
%20College%20London%20%28UCL%29 ) mandate to
make all of its research output Open Access
(by depositing it in UCL's Institutional
Repository, UCL Eprints
http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/ ). 

With its 13 funder mandates and 9
institutional/departmental mandates
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
 so far, the UK still has the planet's
highest proportion of Open Access Mandates. 

But the world is catching up (see Figure
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/alma-mand1.png
)!

Dr. Alma Swan of Key Perspectives
http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/  and
University of Southampton, has just
documented how mandates
http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
 to provide Open Access to research output
have almost doubled globally in the year that
has elapsed since Harvard University's
Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted
the world's 44th Open Access 
mandatehttp://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=Harvard%20
University%3A%20Faculty%20of%20Arts%20and%20Sciences
 in May 2008.

The world's first Open Access 
mandatehttp://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/fullinfo.php?inst=University
%20of%20Southampton%3A%20School%20of%20Electronics%20and%20Computer%20Scienc
e  was adopted in 2002 by the University of
Southampton's School of Electronics and
Computer Science (ECS). Southampton had
previously designed, in 2000
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october00/10inbrief.html#HARNAD
, the first free, Open Source software for
creating Open Access Institutional
Repositories, Eprints
http://www.eprints.org/ , now used
the world 
overhttp://roar.eprints.org/?action=homeq=country=version=eprints2type=ord
er=namesubmit=Filter .

In 2004 the UK Parliamentary Select Committee
on Science and Technology (as urged
by evidence
http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Temp/UKSTC.htm
 provided by Southampton University and
Loughborough 
University) recommendedhttp://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399
03.htm  that all UK higher education
institutions establish institutional
repositories on which their published output
can be stored and from which it can be read,
free of charge, online [and] that Research
Councils and other Government funders mandate
their funded researchers to deposit a copy of
all of their articles in this way. Research
Councils UK
http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/research/outputs/access/default.htm
 went on in 2006-2008  to make a clean sweep,
with all seven councils mandating

Repositories infrastructure

[Alma Swan]

An ongoing project has been looking at the global repositories
infrastructure with the aim of determining where work needs to be
done to `fill in the gaps' and produce a truly interoperable system
of repositories for research outputs. With respect to those outputs,
we have focused for the time being on journal articles but are
mindful of the other types of research output and hope that these
will be encompassed at a later date.

An international workshop was held in Amsterdam last month, attended
by a hundred or so repository experts who spent two days in
discussion in small groups to develop draft action plans around four
themes. These four themes had been identified as areas of high
priority during online discussions in this community of experts over
several months prior to the workshop.

The themes are: citation services, repository handshake (deposit
systems), interoperable identification infrastructure (unambiguous
identification on the web of named entities) and international
repositories organisation (how the repository community organises to
work together optimally).

The draft action plans are now available on a wiki and you are all
invited to provide your comments and feedback on these plans. The
wiki is at
http://repinf.pbwiki.com/ . To add comments you will need to request
access, which you can do by clicking on the link in the top right
corner of the front page.  

The front page of the wiki provides links to the supporting briefing
materials developed for the online discussions and workshop, and to
the action plans themselves.

We look forward to getting your views.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Re: Repositories: Institutional or Central ? emergent properties and the compulsory open society

[Alma Swan]

On 11/02/2009 21:37, Klaus Graf klausg...@googlemail.com wrote:

 The short email conversation says nothing on CREAM OF SCIENCE. Don't
 confuse DARE and Cream of Science which is a subset of DARE.

 Cream of Science showcases prominent research from the Netherlands.
 The website lists the names of 217 top Dutch academics, providing
 worldwide access to their 48,559 publications. About 60% of these can
 be accessed full text. These full-text publications are a subset of
 NARCIS and DAREnet.

 60 % is a very high rate. It was a project which has shown that the
 leading scholars of a small European countries support OA. That's the
 fact. If DARE is unable to learn from the CoS experience then this
 isn't an argument against CoS.

The discussion at the time, regarding the content of both DAREnet and that
of Cream of Science, was not about the proportion that is full-text, but
about the fact that it is mostly legacy material. Indeed, CoS set out to
capture the life's work of those 200 top Dutch scientists, and did it
magnificently well. Leo acknowledged then that it was not possible to
produce a figure for the proportion of NEW publications that appear in
either CoS or the DAREnet collection, whether full-text or not, and we still
don't have that figure today.

Whilst older material is nice to have, the focus for Open Access is to make
CURRENT research results freely available. The aim of Open Access, which
seems to have escaped in the excitement of this debate, is to help science
progress optimally by ensuring the unimpeded movement of scientific
information around research community. CoS is a great collection, but even
if 100% of the CoS documents are full-text, if most those texts are 5-, 10-,
20-, 30-years old they are probably not going to make much of a difference
to scientific progress this week.

In this digital age, scientists should be able to see their peers' results
as soon as they are ready for publication, in order to build upon them at
once. Artificial delay built into the system is an anachronism.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Re: Repositories: Institutional or Central?

[Alma Swan]

On 10/02/2009 15:46, Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com wrote:


  Tomasz, now that you have voiced your own opinion, it
  would be a good idea for you to read the background
  literature on this topic. There you will find the large,
  multidisciplinary and multinational author surveys
  http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11006/  that were
  conducted several years ago by Alma Swan and Sheridan
  Brown, in which researchers did indeed voice their
  opinion, and their opinion was that they would not
  deposit until and unless it was mandated by their
  institutions and/or funders, but that if and when deposit
  was indeed mandated, 95% would deposit, and over 80%
  would deposit willingly. This finding has since been
  confirmed by others; and Arthur Sale has gone on to do
  studies
  http://fcms.its.utas.edu.au/scieng/comp/project.asp?lProjectId=1830
   on authors' actual behavior, with and without a mandate,
  to find that authors do indeed behave in accordance with
  the opinion they voiced in the Swan/Brown surveys, with
  their actual deposit rate approaching 100% within two
  years of the adoption of a deposit mandate (but
  languishing at the baseline 15% -- or 30% if incentives
  and assistance are provided -- if deposit is not
  mandated).

At the risk of seeming shamelessly to promote my own work, the other
formal studies that might be helpful to read are these:

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien,
A., Hardy, R. and Rowland, F. (2005) Delivery, Management and Access
Model for E-prints and Open Access Journals within Further and Higher
Education. A study funded by JISC and HEFCE.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/11001/

Swan, A. and Awre, C. (2006) LINKING UK REPOSITORIES:
Technical and organisational models to support user-oriented services
across institutional and other digital repositories. SCOPING STUDY
REPORT.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14000/

And the rationale for local deposit plus central harvesting is laid
out here:
http://optimalscholarship.blogspot.com/2008/07/here-there-or-even-everywhere
-where.html

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Costs and benefits of scholarly publishing models

[Alma Swan]

Forwarding from the JISC-ANNOUNCE mailing list:

Press Release

January 27th, 2009: Sharing research information via a more open access
publishing model would bring millions of pounds worth of savings to the
higher education sector as well as benefiting UK plc. This is one of the key
findings from a new research project commissioned by JISC.

Professor John Houghton from the Centre of Strategic Economic Studies at
Melbourne¹s Victoria University and Professor Charles Oppenheim at
Loughborough University were asked to lead research that would throw light
on the economic and social implications of new models for scholarly
publishing.

The research centred on three models which include:

~@Subscription or toll access publishing which involves reader charges
and   
use restrictions;
~@Open access publishing where access is free and publication is funded
from 
the authors¹ side; and
~@Open access self-archiving where academic authors post their work in
online repositories, making it freely available to all Internet
users.

In their report, Houghton et al. looked beyond the actual costs and savings
of different models and examined the additional cost-benefits that might
arise from enhanced access to research findings.

The research and findings reveal that core scholarly publishing system
activities cost the UK higher education sector around £5 billion in 2007.
Using the different models, the report shows, what the estimated cost would
have been:

~@£230 million to publish using the subscription model,
~@£150 million to publish under the open access model and
~@£110 million to publish with the self-archiving with peer review
services
plus some £20 million in operating costs if using the different
models.

When considering costs per journal article, Houghton et al. believe that the
UK higher education sector could have saved around £80 million a year by
shifting from toll access to open access publishing. They also claim that
£115 million could be saved by moving from toll access to open access
self-archiving.

In addition to that, the financial return to UK plc from greater
accessibility to research might result in an additional £172 million per
annum worth of benefits from government and higher education sector research
alone.

JISC¹s Chair Professor Sir Tim O¹Shea said, ³The argument for moving from
more traditional subscription or toll-based publishing to a model that
allows for greater accessibility and makes full use of the advances in
technology cannot be ignored. This report shows there are significant
savings to be made and benefits to be had.

³JISC will work with publishers, authors and the science community to
identify and help to remove the barriers to moving to these more
cost-effective models,² he added.

Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, commended the report and
added that, as a research funder that provides additional funds to its
grantholders to meet the cost of open access publishing, I am delighted that
this report vindicates this approach and shows that the benefits of enhanced
accessibility outweigh the costs of supplementing research funds with
'author-pays' open access publishing fees.

Professor Ian Diamond, speaking on behalf of Research Councils UK said,RCUK
welcomes this substantial and interesting report. It will be of great use to
the Research Councils as we develop our future policies in relation to
publishing and in particular open access.

The full report is available online at
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/economicpublishingmodelsfina
lreport.aspx

Re: JISC/SIRIS Subject and Institutional Repositories Interactions Study

[Alma Swan]

 Ian is correct, especdially in the humanities.  Also,
 there is a large amount of STM scholarly output that
  comes from industry, especially the pharmaceutical
 industry

That doesn't change the argument at all:
1. Pharmaceutical research carried out in the industry and not intended for
publication never has been nor will be a focus for OA.
2. Pharmaceutical contract research carried out in universities, paid for
directly and solely by the industry and not intended for publication, never
has been nor will be a focus for OA.
3. Pharmaceutical research sponsored by industry, carried out in
universities and deemed publishable IS a focus for an institutional mandate,
since it is published work from that institution.

Mandates cannot, of course, be applied to the pharmaceutical industry, even
for research it permits to be published. Happily, however, some pharma
companies are now providing OA to their published (and some unpublished)
research findings, notably Novartis, which has made its diabetes research
results OA for some time now and is currently building an OA repository to
house the publishable output of more of its research programmes.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK 

Re: New ways of measuring research

[Alma Swan]

[ The following text is in the utf-8 character set. ]
[ Your display is set for the iso-8859-1 character set.  ]
[ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

Further to my previous message on this topic, I've already had some offline 
responses. So, some things I had already noted, plus some sent offline after my 
first request to this list (including some tongue-in-cheek ones) are:

Individualsÿÿ efforts can result in:
- Medals and prizes awarded to you
- Having a prize named after you (Nobelÿÿ)
- Having a building named after you (not uncommon)
- Having an institution named after you (Salkÿÿ)
- Having a 5 billion euro international project built on your work (Higgs)

But on a more mundane note, other methodologies I know of that are being 
developed for measuring research outcomes are:
- Ways to measure long-term outcomes of research in the area of health sciences 
(for example, leading to or incorporated into treatments or techniques in use 
20 years down the line) 
- Something akin to this for looking at long-term impact of research in the 
social sciences

Specific examples would be useful if anyone can point me towards any.

I am also appealing to provosts/rectors/VCs or those involved in the 
administration of research-based institutions/programmes to tell us what sort 
of measures you would like to have (offline if you wish). These need not only 
be for the rather specific purpose of research evaluation, but for any 
institutional purpose (such as new measures of ROI).

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

--- On Wed, 8/10/08, Subbiah Arunachalam subbia...@yahoo.com wrote:

 From: Subbiah Arunachalam subbia...@yahoo.com
 Subject: New ways of measuring research
 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
 Date: Wednesday, 8 October, 2008, 1:01 AM
 Dear Members of the List:
 
 One of the key concerns of the Open Access movement is how
 will the transition from traditional toll-access publishing
 to scientific papers becoming freely accessible through open
 access channels (both OA repositories and OA journals)
 affect the way we evaluate science.. 
 
 In the days of print-only journals, ISI (now Thomson
 Reuters) came up with impact factors and other
 citation-based indicators. People like Gene Garfield and
 Henry Small of ISI and colleagues in neighbouring Drexel
 University in Philadelphia, Derek de Solla Price at Yale,
 Mike Moravcsik in Oregon, Fran Narin and Colleagues at CHI,
 Tibor Braun and the team in Hungary, Ton van Raan and his
 colleagues at CWTS, Loet Leydesdorff in Amsterdam, Ben
 Martin and John Irvine of Sussex, Leo Egghe in Belgium and a
 large number of others  too numerous to list here took
 advantage of the voluminous data put together by ISI to
 develop bibliometric indicators. Respected organizations
 such as the NSF in USA and the European Union's
 Directorate of Research (which brought out the European
 Report on ST INdicators similar to the NSF ST
 Indicators) recognised bibliometrics as a legitimate tool. A
 number of scientomtrics researchers built citation networks;
 David pendlebury at
  ISI started trying to predict Nobel Prize winners using
 ISI citation data. 
 
 When the transition from print to electronics started
 taking palce the scientometrics community came up with
 webometrics. When the transition from toll-access to open
 access started taking place we adopted webometrics to
 examine if open access improves visibility and citations.
 But we are basically using bibliometrics. 
 
 Now I hear from the Washington Research Evaluation Network
 that 
 
 ÿÿThe traditional tools of RD evaluation
 (bibliometrics, innovation indices, patent analysis,
 econometric modeling,
 etc.) are seriously flawed and promote seriously flawed
 analysesÿÿ and ÿÿBecause
 of the above, reports like the ÿÿGathering
 Stormÿÿ  provide seriously flawed analyses and misguided
 advice to
 science policy decision makers.ÿÿ
 Should we rethink our approach to evaluation of science?
 Arun
 [Subbiah Arunachalam]
 
 
 
 
 
 - Original Message 
 From: Alma Swan a.s...@talk21.com
 To:
 american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
 Sent: Wednesday, 8 October, 2008 2:36:44
 Subject: New ways of measuring research
 
 Barbara Kirsop said:
  'This exchange of messages is damaging to the List
 and
  to OA itself. I would like to suggest that those
 unhappy
  with any aspect of its operation 
  merely remove themselves from the List. This is the
 normal
  practice.' 
  
  A 'vote' is unnecessary and totally
 inappropriate.
 
 Exactly, Barabara. These attempts to undermine Stevan are
 entirely misplaced and exceedingly annoying. The nonsense
 about Stevan resigning, or changing his moderating style,
 should not continue any further. It's taking up
 bandwidth, boring everyone to blazes, and getting us
 precisely nowhere except generating bad blood. 
 
 Let those who don't like the way Stevan moderates this
 list resign as is the norm

Re: Call for a vote of nonconfidence in the moderator of the AmSci Forum

[Alma Swan]

I agree. Stevan should remain, doing his own inimitable thing, which has been 
invaluable for OA. He keeps things focused and provides an input that is 
uniquely useful. Count me in on the 'aye' side, please.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK


--- On Tue, 7/10/08, Tony Hey tony@microsoft.com wrote:

 From: Tony Hey tony@microsoft.com
 Subject: Re: Call for a vote of nonconfidence in the moderator of the 
  AmSci Forum
 To: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
 Date: Tuesday, 7 October, 2008, 3:40 PM
 I absolutely agree with Michael - the list would die without
 Stevan
 
 Tony
 
 -Original Message-
 From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
 [mailto:american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org]
 On Behalf Of Michael Eisen
 Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2008 7:26 AM
 To:
 american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
 Subject: Re: Call for a vote of nonconfidence in the
 moderator of the AmSci Forum
 
 I disagree with Stevan often. He can be infuriating. He has
 a tendency
 to bloviate.
 
 Nonetheless - he has been a FANTASTIC moderator of this
 list. I have
 sent off many posts that have criticized Stevan directly,
 and he has
 never failed to send them to the group. I can think of no
 other list
 that has not just lasted for 10 years, but kept up a high
 level of
 discourse and relevance.
 
 Stevan has my complete confidence. The list would die
 without him.
 
 On Oct 7, 2008, at 5:37 AM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
 
  On Tue, Oct 7, 2008 at 3:37 AM,
 c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk
  c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk wrote:
 
  I totally support Jean-Claude's view.
 
  I can only repeat what I said before:
 
  (1) I am happy to put an end to my 10-year
 moderatorship of the
  American Scientist Open Access Forum and hand it over
 to someone else
  who is willing to do it, but only if it is requested
 by a plurality of
  the membership, not if it is merely requested by a few
 dissatisfied
  members.
 
  (2) The moderator's role is to filter postings,
 approving the relevant
  ones, and rejecting the off-topic or ad-hominem ones.
 
  (3) Apart from that, the moderator has no special
 status or authority
  (other than what may accrue from the substance of his
 postings), and
  may post *exactly* as any other poster may post,
 including the posting
  of quotes, comments, critiques, elaborations,
 rebuttals *and
  summaries*.
 
  By my count, there have not been many votes one way or
 the other, but
  of the few votes there have been, more seem to be
 expressing
  confidence in my moderatorship than those that are
 calling for me to
  be replaced.
 
  I have also been accused of of censorship, by both
 Jean-Claude and
  Sally, the charge being subsequently rescinded. If
 there are doubts
  about whether I can be trusted to post or tally the
 votes -- or, more
  important, if we are to spare the Forum the bandwidth
 of votes
  appearing instead of OA substance -- I am also quite
 happy to direct
  the votes to be sent to a trusted 3rd party for
 tallying, if that is
  the wish of the Forum.
 
  Stevan Harnad
 
 
  Charles
 
 
  Professor Charles Oppenheim
  Head
  Department of Information Science
  Loughborough University
  Loughborough
  Leics LE11 3TU
 
  Tel 01509-223065
  Fax 01509 223053
  e mail c.oppenh...@lboro.ac.uk
 
 
  
  From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
  [mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-
  fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org] On
  Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guédon
  Sent: 06 October 2008 19:00
  To:
 american-scientist-open-access-fo...@listserver.sigmaxi.org
  Subject: Re: American Scientist Open Access Forum
 settings
 
  What I note is that my messages sometimes appear
 back very late and
  I wonder
  why. It is this detail which caused my recent
 angry  reaction.
 
  While we are on technical matters, I would
 appreciate two things
  from this
  moderator/actor:
 
  1. That he should refrain from ever summarizing
 somebody's words.
  We are all
  versed enough in the art of reading to be able to
 survive without
  this
  doubtful form of help. Besides, list moderators
 are not mentors or
  paternal
  figures. When the summary ends up distorting the
 original message, it
  becomes reprehensible;
 
  2. Since the moderator also intervenes as member
 in this list, he
  should
  make clear which of his interventions are
 moderating interventions
  and which
  ones are participations in discussions. In the
 latter case,
  summaries should
  be avoided.
 
  I realize that Peter Suber manages a blog and not
 a list, but I
  really like
  the way in which he carefully delineates the
 pieces of news he
  wants to
  convey, and how he announces his own comments.
 This is a very good
  model to
  follow. I would also add that Peter Suber refrains
 from using
  judgements and
  terms that occasionally raise the ire of readers
 such as me. When I
  read a
  sentence such as Many silly, mindless things
 have

New ways of measuring research

[Alma Swan]

[ The following text is in the utf-8 character set. ]
[ Your display is set for the iso-8859-1 character set.  ]
[ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

Barbara Kirsop said:
 'This exchange of messages is damaging to the List and
 to OA itself. I would like to suggest that those unhappy
 with any aspect of its operation 
 merely remove themselves from the List. This is the normal
 practice.' 
 
 A 'vote' is unnecessary and totally inappropriate.

Exactly, Barabara. These attempts to undermine Stevan are entirely misplaced 
and exceedingly annoying. The nonsense about Stevan resigning, or changing his 
moderating style, should not continue any further. It's taking up bandwidth, 
boring everyone to blazes, and getting us precisely nowhere except generating 
bad blood. 

Let those who don't like the way Stevan moderates this list resign as is the 
norm and, if they wish, start their own list where they can moderate (or not) 
and discuss exactly as they think fit, if they believe they can handle things 
better. Now that they all know who they are (and so do we), let them band 
together, and get on with it together.

Those who do like the way Stevan moderates this list (his list), can stay and 
continue discussing the things we, and he, think are important in the way the 
list has always been handled. Goodbye, all those who wish things differently. 
It's a shame that you're going but we wish you well and we will be relieved 
when you cease despoiling this list with your carping.

Can I now appeal to those who opt to stay to start a new thread on something 
important - and I suggest that the issue of research metrics is a prime 
candidate.  I particularly don't want to be too precise about that term 
'metrics'. Arun (Subbiah Arunachalam) has just sent out to various people the 
summary that the Washington Research Evaluation Network has published about - 
er - research evaluation. One of the conclusions is that bibliometrics are 
'flawed'. Many people would agree with that, but with conditions. 

It is important to me in the context of a current project I am doing that I 
understand what possibilities there are for measuring (not assessing or 
evaluating, necessarily, but measuring) THINGS related to research. 
Measurements may be such a thing as immediate impact, perhaps measured as usual 
by citations, but I am also interested in other approaches, including long-term 
ones, for measuring research activities and outcomes. We need not think only in 
terms of impact but also in terms of outputs, effects, benefits, costs, 
payoffs, ROI. I would like to hear about things that could be considered as 
measures of research activity in one form or another. They may be quite 
'wacky', and they may be things that are currently not open to empirical 
analysis yet would seem to be the basis of sensible measures of research 
outcomes. Any ideas you have, bring 'em on. Then the challenge is whether, in 
an OA world, people will be able to develop the tools to make the
 measures measurable. That's the next conversation.

Stevan, your incisive input is very welcome as always. And you may 
quote/comment as much as you want. That is the unique value that you bring to 
this list and why the vast majority of us are still here, right behind you. 

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Re: Jean-Claude Gu�don is wrong, and so is Zinath Rehana

[Alma Swan]

I've changed the subject line for this message and I hope the moderator of
this forum will let it stand even though it breaks the thread. I do not wish
to be associated in any way with the sentiments of those previous comments
about the management of this list. No doubt Jean-Claude will also wish to
dissociate himself from the new bedfellow he has unwittingly acquired.

All people respectful of the professional endeavours of Richard Poynder must
surely have shared my disgust at the tone and the content of SJI co-founder
Zinath Rehana's original post (linked to below). To level public accusations
of libel, harassment, intimidation and arrogance at a journalist whom many
of us know from personal experience to pursue his practice with skill,
balance, courtesy, respect and complete professionalism is rotten enough. To
resort to a smear of racism is well beyond the pale.

It would be even if there had been the slightest hint that any racism were
in play in Poynder's investigations. That there wasn't, and that he was
going about his business employing his usual rigorous, professional
standards, makes it all the more disgraceful.

This list is no place for such histrionics and dirty play and I register my
full support for the moderator for making a judgment not to post a message
that was way past the point of decency and respectful argument and which
appears (to my non-legal eye) to have strayed into libellous territory.
Posting such a message would have been a bad decision.

Alma Swan
Key perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK



On 03/10/2008 01:18, Stevan Harnad amscifo...@gmail.com wrote:

 Rehana is absolutely right. I did not approve for posting on the
 American Scientist Open Access Forum Rehana's posting entitled Lies,
 fear and smear campaigns against SJI and other OA journals because it
 was my judgment as moderator that the posting was libelous and
 defamatory. I stand by that judgment. The curious may see the posting
 in question at:
 
 https://arl.org/lists/sparc-oaforum/Message/4526.html
 
 See also:
 
 OA Needs Open Evidence, Not Anonymous Innuendo
 http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/455-guid.html
 
 I invite the Forum to let me know whether they would prefer a
 moderator who allows such postings. If so, I will obligingly end my
 10-year tenure as moderator of the American Scientist Open Access
 Forum, as I would under no circumstance moderate a Forum that allowed
 such postings.
 
 Be advised, though, that this Forum has about 1000 members, and to be
 voted down as moderator, I would expect to hear from a plurality of
 the members, not just from the inevitable disgruntled few.
 
 I am, however, quite ready to step down, if that is the prevailing wish.
 
 Stevan Harnad
 
 On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Rehana i...@scientificjournals.org wrote:
 Jean-Claude Guédon is absolutely right! This is not the first time the
 moderator of AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM has resorted to
 censorship. He has censored our response to misinformation posted by someone
 on the forum.
 
 It is really sad that a forum that is set up to promote open access, is
 resorting to censorship. I am copying this message to Jean-Claude Guédon so
 that this message is not censored by the moderator. Jean-Claude Guédon has
 my permission to include this message in his post as another example of
 censorship.  I would not be surprised if my account is closed by the
 moderator so that I would not be able to receive any more updates and
 challenge such censorship.
 

Re: Publishers with Paid Options for Open Access

[Alma Swan]

On 03/09/2008 17:03, Peter Millington
peter.milling...@nottingham.ac.uk wrote:

While author's final post-refereed draft is sufficient and acceptable
for open access and research purposes, it is not the best. The best
is the published version (publisher's PDF if you will).

But it definitely isn't the best for text-mining purposes, which is
where we're aiming for, isn't it? The technology and the knowledge of
the future and all that. Step aside from the world of publishing and
citing, remember what science is all about and take the big view.

The quotes (given in 2006) from three leading experts on the
technicalities of text-mining, when I asked them whether PDF is an
acceptable (and usable) option, or whether we should be continuing to
encourage authors to deposit their own, final version in some other
format (Word, LaTeX, etc):

John Wilbanks, Science Commons (when asked about the possibility of
`scraping' PDFs for text-mining: Scraping is the right word, because
having to work with PDF is really scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Peter Murray-Rust, Cambridge: Getting to XML from PDF is like
starting with the burger and trying to get back to the cow.

Cliff Lynch, CNI: PDF is evil.

If an article has been published by the time someone wishes to cite
it, then they cite the published article with all its page numbers
etc (plus the URL of the repository version so that everyone can read
the thing). If people wish to cite an article where there is not yet
a definitively published version, but they have miraculously found an
open access postprint, they can always adhere to age-old practice and
say `Journal of XXX, in press'. When people did that in the `old
days' (my era) it was a pain, because locating the article really
meant waiting for BIOSIS or Index Medicus to come out in print, or
trekking off to another university's library, if your own library
didn't subscribe to the journal. Nowadays, locating it online from an
`in press' citation is a doddle.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates

[Alma Swan]

 encourage anyone interested in this topic to read the very
informative and insightful paper on the topic by Les Carr and Tim Brody,
'Size isn't everything: sustainable repositories as evidenced by sustainable
deposit profiles' here: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13872/

AS:
  I think the 'berating' is actually a style thing. Think of it as
  'putting the case for a better model'.

J-CG:
 I would respond to this by quoting Buffon: Le style, c'est
 l'homme... There are styles of behaviour that become downright
 counter-productive. Hint. Hint.

Indeed. But we are all of us subject to the frailties of human nature. Heirs
of Descartes should be able to stay focused on the substance of an argument
without being distracted by the style.

J-CG:
 The presence of more
 than one model complicates the picture and presumably slows down the
 process but, regrettable as it may seem, this is what humanity is all
 about. It is called politics by the way and it is always messy and
 impure. However, impurity is not a reason to start working for OA so
 long as we do not confuse the quest for purity with the quest for OA.

Messy and impure for sure, but I would suggest that the history of political
thought shows a pattern of twisting, turning, reversion, reneging and
modifying all driven by expediency (viz the NIH developments, which started
in one form and ended up as a better one). Nothing in politics is set in
stone except the will to tax the people. We can always work to change and
improve politically-driven agendas.

J-CG:
 I never advocated making thins muddle along. My cultural background,
 for better of for worse, is far too Cartesian...
 :-) But between muddling through in a sleepwalkin way and seeking the
 pure path to OA there exists a wide margin. I do not want to
 compromise the objectives of OA in any way (including, incidentally,
 the computational openness of digital documents that Cliff Lynch
 wisely calls for) but I will accept travelling on any road that brings
 me closer to the goal.

And that reminds us that we should all reflect carefully upon the
implications of embargoed deposit by publishers of their own PDFs. Clue:
Cliff Lynch, talking about the mechanics of text-mining (pers comm, 2006),
PDF is evil.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates

[Alma Swan]

Heather Morrison wrote:

 Are the 5 institutions that have OA policies (and hence
 relative ease in collecting content), the same as the 5
 institutions that require researchers to deposit items
 themselves?  I am wondering whether the effectiveness of OA
 mandating obscures the impact of who actually does the depositing.

In every case of a mandatory policy, it is the authors who do the
depositing.

I will be analysing the questionnaire more fully later, but I have a
deadline of Thursday for a report and I cannot stop any more times for other
things, sorry. I'm happy to take questions and store them for later action.
I will also put out a further call for responses so that we have a bigger
database for analysis.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates

[Alma Swan]

 I can readily see that bringing back the local output from a
 central depository creates a bit of work for a library, but
 given that in many institutions, self-archiving is a myth,
 and archiving is done by librarians anyway, I would like to
 know which is the most demanding route: checking with every
 member of the faculty if they have self-archived (or archive
 for them) or simply write a suitable script that would
 harvest things back to the library? And is the differentce so
 great as to warrant the intense discussions of the last few
 days? I ask for a bit of sensible common sense here.

Good point, except that in the institutions with most self-archiving going
on, the library is not doing it, the authors are. Deduction: if you want to
have a sustainable, filling IR, the responsibility for deposit lies with the
authors.

 Yes, yes, yes and again yes, but the world is not ideal and
 history is not rational (pace Hegel and Marx). It would have
 been nice; it did not happen. So, let us move on and deal
 with the real situation rather than regret what might have
 been, and then, as Harnad does, berate the funders because
 they did not end up behaving as they might have done in
 somebody's ideal vision of the ideal world.

I think the 'berating' is actually a style thing. Think of it as 'putting
the case for a better model'.

 I thought that RePEc was an example of how things should
 work. Contributors of articles put them in their
 institutional collection and RePEc harvests them - actually,
 harvests the metadata - and presents to the economics
 research community a collection of free-to-access economic
 literature. I am at a loss to understand, then, why Thomas
 keeps apparently arguing against this model, since he himself
 has been instrumental in establishing it and showing it to be
 a success, and why others consistently hold it up as an
 example of good practice (which it is) while arguing the case
 for centralised deposit (which RePEc doesn't have). Or have I
 got the wrong end of the stick there?

 Yes, perhaps things should work this way, but they do not in
 reality. How long are we going to hit our heads agains walls,
 acting as if thy were not there... Better go on with what we
 have and build together from there.

But the point above was that RePEc *is* working, even in reality.

The more general point of my initial comment was that for a long time it did
feel as though we were beating our heads on a brick wall but now a
noticeable change is happening - universities are beginning to understand
what it's all about. They ARE receptive now and eager to find out what to do
and how to do it. Now they want to make their policies, and what should be
ultra-simple for a university policy can become far more complex because of
having to take existing funder-mandates-into-central-repositories into
account. As Stevan would say (sort of) divergence, rather than convergence,
reigns. Or, where we could have had one single, sparkling, clear flowing
stream, we now have a couple of muddy ponds. The right sort of
hydroengineering can sort that out, one hopes.

 Let me repeat my (borrowed) mantra: rough consensus and
 working code. That is how the Internet beat X.25 and all the
 telcos of the world.

True, and I have no doubt we are getting there, but there's no harm in
putting a bit of effort into striving for the best possible outcome, rather
than relaxing and leaving things to muddle along.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates

[Alma Swan]

Oh, Fred, I'm sorry to have unwittingly goaded you into responding. But...

Fred Friend wrote:
 Oh dear! I have avoided contributing to this discussion
 because it has saddened me to see so much disagreement about
 the various ways to achieve OA when we are all working so
 hard to achieve OA by any means possible, but I cannot leave
 Alma's comments on UKPMC unanswered. My understanding is that
 much of the content coming into UKPMC will be coming through
 publisher deposit,

But we were told in February that one of the main reasons the UKPMC deposit
rate was not as it should have been was that publishers who had agreed to
deposit, hadn't. Perhaps that is remedied by now.

Publisher deposit also firmly builds in embargoes when we want research
progress to be maximally speedy.

I do hope we are not going to agree to shift into the new scholcomm world by
replacing dependence on publishers for one thing with dependence on
publishers for another. Or, at least, not for something that  means a
sub-optimal outcome for science. Embargoes are such. The research community
itself should recognise the responsibilities (and opportunities) it has and
shoulder them properly.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro

P.S. If the depositing publishers deposit at publication and UKPMC makes the
metadata Open Access then I retract any expressions of fear expressed above.
But I don't know if this is the model adopted by UKPMC.

Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates

[Alma Swan]

Can I reply to Jean-Claude and others from a slightly different perspective,
that of an institution now wanting to make its outputs OA?

I spent yesterday at a large London medical school to which I was invited to
talk with the people involved in research policy about establishing a
repository and making their research Open Access. The invitation included
the phrase: because it is time we organised our research better and allowed
access to it. In our discussions yesterday we had to deal with the fact
that while over 90% of UK biomedical research is now covered by funder OA
mandates (good), many of those mandates stipulate UKPMC as the deposit locus
(not so good for the employers of the fundees - the universities). It's not
so good because although this medical school can harvest a considerable
amount of the material published by its employees from UKPMC, thus finding
an easy way to start filling its own repository, this does mean it has an
extra job to do. It's not a disaster, and CERN has been doing the same thing
with arXiv for years, but it's another task for the repository staff.

It also means that the medical school has to add a complication to a nice
simple wording for its own policy, explicitly allowing those who are already
under a funder mandate exemption from the medical school's policy of
requiring researchers to deposit their work in that repository. For sure, it
would be asking too much to demand that these people deposit BOTH in the
institutional repository and in UKPMC. And the funders got there first. (And
yes, researchers would balk at double - or more - depositing being required:
I hear this complaint already and we've barely started with institutional
mandates).

True, we shouldn't get too wound up about this. Interoperability means that
back-harvesting, forward-harvesting and upside-down-harvesting can go on
wherever appropriate but it is a shame that we have arrived at a point where
universities, the mainstays of our societies' research endeavours, have to
develop more complex policies than would otherwise have been the case had
funders simply directed their grantees to deposit their work in their
institutional collections and harvested from there. The funders know where
their grantees are, the repository software has a metadata field for funder,
so the mechanics are simple. The benefit of such a move would have been to
help the universities see the overall plan (earlier than they have done),
ensure they put the right infrastructure in place and encouraged them to
apply polices to cover *all* the research their employees do. The whole
research community would thus be included and benefitting by this time, not
just the biomedical community or other communities covered by big funder
mandates. I would say that the research funders have rather let down their
partners, the universities, in this sense.

The other strand of discussion on this topic is always about where users
find the Open Access information they want. The argument goes that they want
to find it in subject-specific collections. Of course they do. It was never
expected that searching specific institutional repositories would be a
common practice - the whole point of OAI-PMH was to build what is
effectively a worldwide research database, free to use, and that services
would harvest and offer the packaged content of that worldwide database in
myriad ways. So subject-specific collections, which are lovely, should be
harvesting from the university repositories all the material that is
relevant to that subject. They can provide all manner of nice services on
that collection, tailored to the needs of that particular subject community.


I thought that RePEc was an example of how things should work. Contributors
of articles put them in their institutional collection and RePEc harvests
them - actually, harvests the metadata - and presents to the economics
research community a collection of free-to-access economic literature. I am
at a loss to understand, then, why Thomas keeps apparently arguing against
this model, since he himself has been instrumental in establishing it and
showing it to be a success, and why others consistently hold it up as an
example of good practice (which it is) while arguing the case for
centralised deposit (which RePEc doesn't have). Or have I got the wrong end
of the stick there?

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

P.S. The French, as always, will do things their own way.

Re: It's Keystrokes All the Way Down

[Alma Swan]

Dear everyone,
 
 Here's one with, hardly any, contents for my faculty:
 http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/view/iau/Leeds.FA-FVPA.html
 
 There is no perceived obstacle to deposit by my colleagues, 
 cultural, practical or whatever. The concept of eprint 
 deposit is simply not known to or envisaged by them. Every 
 year or two I ask them about eprint deposit. They remain 
 unaware of its existence or meaning. 

Researcher unawareness of the utility and benefits of self-archiving in a
repository is indeed a major factor, as I keep reporting. But there is more
to it than that. It is all said in the short quote on page 3 of this article
(http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14965/) from a senior academic, obliged by a
mandate to deposit his work. He witnesses all the benefits, yet still admits
that, in the midst of a busy life, to get him to do things that are even of
proven benefit to himself, he needs to be *required* to do so. Just as it
took a law to get the majority to use seatbelts, even though we all
acknowledged what a good idea they were.
 
Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Second European Conference on Science Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine - second notice

[Alma Swan]

Reminder: early-bird registration is open until the end of June for the
Second European Conference on Science Publishing in Biomedicine and
Medicine, Oslo, 4-6 September.

The principal aim of the European Conference on Scientific Publishing in
Biomedicine and Medicine series is to broaden researchers' understanding and
knowledge of the rapid changes in the scientific communication and
publishing environment and its direct impact on the research community.

The second conference in this series has a strong focus on Open Access and
also includes workshops on peer review, metrics and assessment, databases in
biomedicine, Nature Precedings and repositories as places for early
dissemination of findings, society publishing and writing a scientific
paper.

The full programme and registration details are at:
http://www.ub.uio.no/umh/ecspbiomed/


Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Second European Conference on Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine and Medicine, Oslo, 4-6 September

[Alma Swan]

The Second European Conference on Scientific Publishing in Biomedicine and
Medicine will be held in Oslo, 4-6 September 2008. Registration is now open,
with early bird discounted bookings available until 30 June.

The conference aims to broaden researchers' understanding and knowledge of
the rapid changes in the scientific communication and publishing environment
and its direct impact on the research community. The main sessions are
centred on two themes - open access and metrics for assessing research.

There will also be a series of workshops on:
- Open access and evaluating research
- Writing a Science Paper, Ethics  Plagiarism
- Web of Science, Journal Citation Reports, Scopus and the Faculty of 1000
- Entrez databases - hands-on training
- Peer review: what peer reviewers need to know
- Nature Precedings and HeRA (Helsebibliotekets Research Archive)

Further details of the programme, speakers and registration can be found at:
http://www.ub.uio.no/umh/ecspbiomed/

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro

Re: Cost of running an OA repository

[Alma Swan]

 Does anyone have a good estimate of the real financial cost
 of running an OA repository?

Our own small sample of European repositories revealed that the average
amount spent on setting up the repository was about 10,000 euros, with a
labour investment of some one or two FTEs to keep the repository running
once established. The study conducted by the Association of Research
Libraries (on US repositories) reported an average start-up cost for a
repository of 183,000 USD (125,000 euros); the PRG study (on repositories
worldwide) found that the average cost of setting up a repository was 79,000
USD (54,000 euros).

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

An open access calendar, and a calendar for open access, 2008

[Alma Swan]

[ The following text is in the UTF-8 character set. ]
[ Your display is set for the iso-8859-1 character set.  ]
[ Some characters may be displayed incorrectly. ]

Creative Commons (CC) is celebrating its 5th birthday. Lawrence Lessig has 
written to all supporters describing its 'dramatic' growth during the last 
quinquennium and yet acknowledging that as CC works to strengthen the 
underpinnings of participatory culture 'others are working equally hard to make 
sure culture remains proprietary'. Although this way of putting it is rather 
starkly black and white, and there remains a need for proper protection of 
creative rights in a number of circumstances, there is no doubt that CC has 
tapped into the new world view of many people, including creators of works of 
all kinds, that there is great worth (and satisfaction) in opening up and 
sharing what they produce, at a personal level as well as for humanity as a 
whole.

Lawrence asks that people help CC celebrate the past 5 years, and plant the 
seeds for the next five, by helping to grow the commons in 5 ways:
- use 5 CC-licensed works
- license 5 new works
- spread the word and send CC your story of why you support it
- introduce 5 new people to Creative Commons
- increase your previous gift to CC by 50% to help sustain its operations for 
2008

The Calendar-for-Open-Access that I have just produced carries a Creative 
Commons BY-NC-SA licence (attribution-noncommercial-sharealike). I want as many 
people as possible to print it out and enjoy it next year. You can find it by 
following the link on our website. 

There has been some demand for professionally printed copies, so I am about to 
place an order with the printer but I need to know the final numbers. If you 
would like one, I will mail it to you in a card envelope by airmail. Please let 
me know by email (aswan AT keyperspectives.co.uk) and I will tell you the final 
price. The cost will be about US$15, ÿÿ11 or £7, and it could be less if the 
print run is big enough. These prices are selling at cost - I've built no 
profit into them - but I've rounded up to the nearest dollar/euro/pound for 
simplicity. The extra cents and pennies will be sent to Creative Commons along 
with my donation for 2008.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd,
Truro, UK

RE: US University OA Resolutions Omit Most Important Component

[Alma Swan]

In response to a comment by David Prosser, Jan Szczepanski said:
 
 I would say that You are absolutely wrong. We don't do the things you
 say we do. I don't think you, a director at SPARC or I, a librarian from
 Sweden has that power. NIH could be included in we, that's power,
 bureaucratic power. As You know bureaucrats are not liked by anyone.
 
 If it is not we that force the researcher, who is?

It is certainly not up to librarians to issue edicts to researchers on
this matter, but employers and funders do have the right to insist on
researchers carrying out a course of action. If we replace the rather
emotive word 'force' with 'require' then we already know what the outcome
would be. Of the almost 1300 researchers recently polled on this issue,
the results are as follows:

* 81% would WILLINGLY comply with a requirement from their employer or 
  funder to self-archive their articles
* 13% would comply reluctantly
* 5% would refuse to comply
 
 Researchers are part of a research community with a very special and
 nobel agenda and they act civilized.

They do, and they have two other characteristics worth mentioning in this
context. Many are still ignorant of open access and its benefits (over
30%, for example, are unaware of self-archiving as a means to provide open
access) and they are busy people, for whom the few minutes it takes to
self-archive an article may seem a distraction from other work. Just as
funders require researchers to take the time to write an end-of-project
report, and employers levy an implicit requirement for researchers to
publish their results, they can also legitimately require them to spend a
few minutes depositing articles in an open access archive. And expect
little in the way of dissent, too.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Re: What Provosts Need to Mandate

[Alma Swan]

 (4) Author reports, from Swan  Brown's two international,
 cross-disciplinary surveys, that they are busy, overloaded, and
 will only self-archive if/when they are required to do so by the
 employers and/or funders, but if they are so required, 79% report
 they will do it WILLINGLY, 17% that they will do it reluctantly,
 and only 4% that they will not do it.

I can now report that I have completed the data analysis for the latest
survey on self-archiving and the results on this issue of mandating are as
follows:

Percentage of authors who would willingly self-archive if their employer or
funder required them to do so = 81%
Percentage who would do so reluctantly = 13%
Percentage who would not self-archive, even with a mandate = 5%

The 'most willing' country is the USA, where 88% of authors would
self-archive willingly under a mandate and a further 11% would self-archive
reluctantly. The 'least willing' is China, where 58% would self-archive
willingly and 32% would do so reluctantly.

The report is now written and out with reviewers. It will be published by
JISC shortly.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving

[Alma Swan]

Lee Miller wrote:

 I strongly disagree. Disciplines do share with their own
 researchers a common interest in maximising the visibility,
 usage and impact of their research output. Progress in any
 discipline stands to gain when research results are quickly
 shared with other researchers in that discipline.

But who (or what) are 'disciplines' exactly? Who is it that is sharing the
interest of researchers in maximising their research visibility, etc? Who is
it that can deliver a self-archived literature for that discipline?

The best stab at defining a discipline for this purpose is that it is
composed of a collection of learned societies, professional bodies and
research funders (which happily exist within some disciplines). In other
words, a 'discipline' is a NON-entity - just a collection of various parties
around a subject area. Whilst these may all have the furtherance of the
subject and the maximisation of research visibility at heart (may do; look
at the current evidence and decide for yourself) they are still unlikely to
be anywhere near as effective at implementing successful open access
archives as individual employing institutions, which cover all disciplines
and all researchers within those institutions - funded or not, society
members or not, professionally-affiliated or not.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

RE: Surveys, self-archiving, and what authors want to do

[Alma Swan]

Cliff Morgan wrote:

 Alma Swan may claim that the survey is rigorous and meaningful, but its
 objectivity is rather undermined by the following introductory sentence:
 
 Studies show that open access increases the impact of - and number of
 citations to - work made accessible in this way.
 
 Even if we set aside the contentiousness of the statement, it surely has
 no place in an introduction to an objective survey of authors' attitudes
 since it is leading the witness.
 
 If you are asking for someone's opinion about something, surely you
 don't start off by making any claims as to the positive (or negative)
 aspects of the issue that you are surveying?

The survey did not ask for opinions. It asked for facts about author
experiences. Surveys of that type don't 'lead' respondents.

Alma Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK

Re: Who Needs Open Access, and Why?

[Alma Swan]

At a meeting last week it was stated that there is no evidence that
researchers WANT open access. I'm not sure anyone has actually asked them
this, formally, so I am about to carry out an exercise to gather data on the
topic. I would like to hear from librarians, open archive administrators and
researchers themselves on this issue.

In her recent posting to this forum, Paula Callan produced an example of the
reactions of a researcher in her institution, including some specific
statistics on the usage of his work. This is the sort of information I need
- attributable evidence (with empirical data included if it exists) for or
against the notion that researchers WANT open access. Does anyone else have
similar evidence one way or the other, please?

Please - no humble opinions, no unsubstantiated impressions, no speculative
thoughts. I need data that will stand up to scrutiny. I am happy to receive
responses offline, though this community would probably benefit from hearing
them.

Final word: I have plenty of statistics about researchers not being AWARE of
open access. That is not the same as not WANTING it and I am not interested
in uninformed researchers' opinions. What I am after are data that indicate
whether, once aware of the issues, researchers do or do not want open access
- as authors AND readers.

Alma P Swan
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro, UK
as...@keyperspectives.co.uk

--
Added by Moderator:

Prior Amsci Topic Thread:
Who Needs Open Access, and Why?
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3613.html

Internet Librarian International 2004. London. 11 October, 2004.
http://www.internet-librarian.com/Monday.shtml#OpenAccess

Discussion Dialup Video:
http://www.streamingmedia.com/internetlibrarian/inetlib3_56.asx
Discussion Broadband Video:
http://www.streamingmedia.com/internetlibrarian/inetlib3_300.asx

Re: Central versus institutional self-archiving

[Alma Swan]

 authors? Funders can
only tell their grantees, but have the choice of telling them to deposit
their articles in the funder's own archive if there is one, in some other
centralised archive, or in the researcher's own institutional archive, or
all of these.

Employers can do all these too, but since they not only have shared goals
with their researchers in respect of dissemination of research findings, but
also see additional value in, and uses for, the content of an institutional
archive, they are very likely to be eager to see it maximally populated and
will insist on authors depositing there, at the very least. Moreover, they
can mandate self-archiving across the board, including researchers who are
not supported by external funding (a large number in many subject areas),
and in EVERY scholarly discipline. This is a far more effective a route to
comprehensive eprint provision than relying on funder mandates alone, and is
much more likely to provide eprints in ALL disciplines relatively quickly
than relying on the eventual establishment of centralised archives in all
subject areas.

Our conclusion was, then, that this scenario is the one most likely to
provide the maximum level of archived content, a major plank of any model
for the provision of eprints nationwide in the UK. Our model was devised
accordingly and would be equally appropriate anywhere else in the world.

Alma Swan
_
Alma P Swan, BSc, PhD, MBA
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1392 879702

Re: How To Support Institutional OA Archive Start-Up and OA Content Provision

[Alma Swan]

David Goodman wrote:

 I think it would be very useful to everyone if you could post the cost
 figures you refer to here, giving the detail upon which it is based so
 that other places could adapt it to their size and needs.

   (I) First, determine the start-up cost of creating an institutional
   OA Archive (including any requisite departmental/disciplinary
   modularization and customisation). (Southampton can help provide
   you with the actual figures; they have the most extensive experience
   with this.)...  Stevan Harnad

For a recent study we undertook for JISC
(www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OpenAccessArchive/E-prints_delivery_model.pdf)
we obtained actual institutional archive set-up and running cost figures
from four different institutions. And as we wrote in the report (which
will be published very shortly) asking how much it costs to set up an
archive is like asking how long is a piece of string. There are so many
variables and it depends too on how much of the infrastructure and staff
costs can be absorbed by existing provision. However, for information,
here are the actual costs from four different universities, converted
into USD:

MIT:
Set-up costs: $2.4-2.5 million (most in the form of a grant)
Annual running costs: $285,000

Queens Qspace:
Set-up costs: $41,130
Annual running costs: $39,500

National University of Ireland, Maynooth:
Set-up costs: $31,400
Annual running costs: $47,100

Nottingham University:
Set-up costs: $6980
Annual running costs: $56,385
(includes provision for a triennial update of hardware and software)

Despite the wild variations here, the salient point is that institutions
need to budget for fairly high on-costs, and at least initially these are
mostly for staff requirements to do with the actual soliciting and
deposition of articles. As authors become familiar with the mechanics of
this and deposit their articles themselves, this particular element of the
on-cost may reduce considerably over time.

Alma P Swan, BSc, PhD, MBA
Director
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)1392 879702

Open access questionnaire: Call for respondents

[Alma Swan]

Dear Colleague,

Open access to scholarly journal articles is a topic of growing importance.
Open access enables free and immediate electronic access to a scholar's
work. Studies show that open access increases the impact of - and number of
citations to - work made accessible in this way.

We are interested in understanding scholars' views on open access publishing
and self-archiving and would very much like to hear your opinions. Please
would you help by completing the questionnaire at
http://www.keyperspectives.co.uk/OA/sarchiv.htm.  It will be used to inform
universities, research funders and scholars themselves of the state of play
and how open access is progressing.

Naturally, all responses will be treated as confidential and you may opt to
remain anonymous if you wish.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation. We do value your input and
advice.

Yours sincerely,

Alma Swan, PhD
Key Perspectives Ltd
Truro
United Kingdom