Hardin Scholarly Communication News

Oxford Journals today released the first results from its optional open access model, Oxford Open, maintaining its commitment to sharing first hand open access evidence with the scholarly community. It has also confirmed a further 19 journals to join the initiative from January 2006.

The initiative, launched on July 1, 2005, gives authors the option of paying for their research to be made freely available online immediately on publication. Results from the first quarter of operation show an average of 9% open access take-up by authors across the 21 participating journals, with take-up limited to the Life Sciences and Medicine. There has been no take-up by authors publishing in participating Humanities and Social Sciences titles.

Read the full article at: http://www.openrfi.com/NASIG/si_pd.cfm?ac=8612&pid=22&zid=2186&issueno=106

[Serials e-News, 3 Nov 2005]

This article by Peter Suber and Subbiah Arunachalam appeared in World-Information City, October 17, 2005. (World-Information City is the print newspaper distributed to delegates at the November 2005 meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis.)

An excerpt:

For researchers in developing countries, OA solves two problems at once: making their own research more visible to researchers elsewhere, and making research elsewhere more accessible to them. OA, if adopted widely, can raise the profile of an entire nation’s research output. When Indian research, for example, is published in expensive journals, then all too often it goes unnoticed by other researchers in India. OA journals and archives help to integrate the work of scientists everywhere into the global knowledge base, reduce the isolation of researchers, and improve opportunities for funding and international collaboration.

Although developed countries were the first to encourage OA to publicly-funded research, the model is very appealing in developing countries and likely to spread. One direct way is simply to put an OA condition on publicly-funded research grants. Another is to have universities and research laboratories set up institutional archives and adopt policies encouraging or requiring researchers to deposit their research output even if they also publish it in conventional journals.

Read the full article at: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/wsis2.htm

SPARC executive Heather Joseph this week praised a linking plan by 57 nonprofit publishers, signatories of the DC principles for free access to research, saying it was an excellent plan on its merits–but not necessarily an alternative to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) public access policy. “This is the same proposal they made a year-and-half ago,” Joseph told the LJ Academic Newswire. “It’s a good plan, but it doesn’t go the extra step we need it to go.” That step, Joseph explained, is “access now and in perpetuity” for all publicly funded research.

“The problem with linking out from the PubMed site to publishers’ sites is that is does not create a dependable repository. It depends on the largesse of publishers and, as well-intentioned as they are, there is no guarantee they will be there tomorrow,” Joseph said. In a conversation with the LJ Academic Newswire, American Physiological Association executive director Martin Frank said publishers suggested that the National Library of Medicine (NLM) serve as the repository for research. Frank said that publishers would gladly assist NLM in collecting, preserving and making accessible research output in a library setting, as opposed to the NIH’s free dissemination of journal articles via PubMed Central, the NIH’s repository. The NIH plan enacted in May “requests” NIH-funded authors submit their final manuscript (as opposed to the final, edited article) in PubMed Central within a year. That plan has been heavily criticized by both opponents and proponents of the initial NIH policy proposal, which would have “required” deposit of the final manuscript within six months of publication.

[Library Journal Academic Newswire (TM), The Publishing Report, November 3, 2005]

Six months after the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented its weakened public access policy for the research it funds, the signatories of the DC Principles, a group of 57 medical and scientific nonprofit publishers, have offered a counter-proposal. The plan, delivered in a letter last week to NIH director Elias Zerhouni, would have the NIH offer online access to articles by linking directly to journal web sites indexed by the NIH’s Medline abstracting service.

Currently, the NIH plan enacted in May merely “requests” NIH-funded authors deposit their final manuscript (as opposed to the final, edited article) in PubMed Central, the NIH’s repository, within a year. That plan has satisfied virtually no one and has been heavily criticized by both opponents and proponents of the initially proposed NIH policy proposal which would have “required” deposit of the final manuscript within six months of publication. The publishers, who support increased free access to research, if not full open access, said the plan would better serve the public in gaining access to medical literature while also ensuring the important role of scientific journals. Although submissions to PubMed Central have reportedly picked up in recent months, they have lagged far beyond what supporters of the MIH policy had hoped for. To view the proposal, visit: www.dcprinciples.org/linkingproposal.pdf.

[Library Journal Academic Newswire (TM), November 1, 2005]

Four more journals in the BMC-series have (finally) been accepted for tracking by The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). BMC Developmental Biology, BMC Immunology, BMC Neurology, and BMC Structural Biology are now included in the Science Citation Index Expanded, available through the Web of Science, and are on track to receive an impact factor in 2008.

BMC Developmental Biology
Fulltext v1 (2001+)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcdevbiol/
http://pubmedcentral.gov/tocrender.fcgi?journal=23&action=archive
ISSN: 1471-213X

BMC Immunology
Fulltext v1+ (2000+)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcimmunol/
http://pubmedcentral.gov/tocrender.fcgi?journal=35&action=archive
ISSN: 1471-2172

BMC Neurology
Fulltext v1+ (2001+)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcneurol/
http://pubmedcentral.gov/tocrender.fcgi?journal=48&action=archive
ISSN 1471-2377

BMC Structural Biology
Fulltext v1+ (2001+)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcstructbiol/
http://pubmedcentral.gov/tocrender.fcgi?journal=65&action=archive
ISSN: 1472-6807

BioMed Central maintains an ongoing list (http://biomedcentral.com/info/libraries/indexing) of the abstracting and indexing services reviewing their various titles.

Five library groups have issued a press release applauding the CURES Act. Excerpt:

A coalition of national library associations, representing more than 80,000 information specialists, praised the introduction last week of legislation to establish the American Center for Cures within the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The bill includes a provision that would help to make taxpayer-funded biomedical research available to all potential users – an important goal for the library groups….Among the requirements of the bill is the establishment of free public access to articles stemming from research funded by agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), including NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Under the proposed legislation, articles published in a peer-reviewed journal would be required to be made publicly available within months via NIH’s popular PubMed Central online digital archive. The groups note that although some final electronic manuscripts are made available now on PubMed, many are not—and delays in posting research on PubMed sometimes stall public access to important articles for up to a year. “Depriving researchers and members of the public of the findings of research funded by taxpayers is not only wrong, it can also slow down the discovery of new and improved treatment for diseases,” said Miriam Nisbet, a spokesperson for the library coalition.

The coalition members are American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), American Library Association (ALA), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Medical Library Association (MLA), and the Special Libraries Association (SLA).

[Open Access News, Posted by Peter Suber at 12/21/2005

Evolutionary Bioinformatics Online
Fulltext v1+ (2005+)
http://www.la-press.com/evolbio.htm
ISSN: 1176-9343

Cancer Informatics
Fulltext v1+ (2005+)
http://www.la-press.com/caninfo.htm
ISSN: 1176-9351

Journal of International Medical Research
Fulltext v28+ (2000+)
http://www.jimronline.net/
Print ISSN: 0300-0605 | Online ISSN: 1473-2300