Transitions

The MacArthur Foundation adopted a research access policy, which took effect on September 18, 2008.  (Thanks to Open Access News). Excerpt:

…The Foundation’s policy is to ensure that the Grant Work Product furthers charitable purposes and benefits the public. To that end, the Foundation seeks prompt and broad dissemination of the Grant Work Product at minimal cost or, when justified, at a reasonable cost.

The Foundation encourages openness in research and freedom of access to underlying data by persons with a serious interest in the research. Grantees are also encouraged to explore opportunities to use existing and emerging internet distribution models and, when appropriate, open access journals, Creative Commons license or similar mechanisms that result in broad access for the interested field and public.

The Foundation recognizes there may be circumstances where limited or delayed dissemination of Grant Work Product or limited access to data may be appropriate to protect legitimate interests of the grantee, other funders, principal investigators or participants in research studies. Such circumstances will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Intellectual property rights (including copyright and patent rights) should not be used to limit or deny access to the Grant Work Product, to result in exclusive use of such Grant Work Product, or to create revenue that is not used for charitable purposes. While copyright to the Grant Work Product will ordinarily remain with the grantee, the Foundation will require that it be granted a no-cost assignable license to use or publish the Grant Work Product. The Foundation will exercise the license only if the grantee does not or cannot provide for broad and prompt dissemination consistent with this Policy. The Foundation may forego a license if the Foundation is reasonably satisfied that other appropriate arrangements will be implemented that will assure prompt public dissemination of the Grant Work Product.

View MacArthur’s entry in the SHERPA Juliet site, which outlines their publication policies regarding archiving.

SHERPA, a consortium of UK libraries, investigates issues in the future of scholarly communication. It is developing open-access institutional repositories in universities to facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research.

SHERPA has several resources for authors to use:

RoMEO: Use this site to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement.  Additionally, you will find many sample publication agreements on this site.

Publishers allowing the deposition of their published version/PDF in Institutional Repositories. There is often a question about the use of the publishers own PDF version of research articles and whether these can be archived. It is often believed that all publishers prohibit the use of their own PDF: in fact the situation is very different. Use this site to find out what you can do with your article post-publication.

Publishers’ paid open access options often allow authors to immediately deposit their articles in open access repositories upon payment of a fee. The same publishers may also allow authors to deposit after an embargo period without payment of a fee. Use this site to find out if a publisher has an OA option, and the cost.

John Markoff, Documents of Library in Boston to Go on Web, New York Times, December 27, 2007. Excerpt:

The historical record of the United States government will soon be more accessible.

A digital library partnership, including two nonprofit organizations and the Boston Public Library, is preparing to begin making digital copies of the library’s paper-based government documents collection, which will then be made available on the Internet.

The project, which will take two years and require the hand scanning of millions of pages of government hearings and related publications, will cost an estimated $6 million, according to the project’s sponsors.

Boston Public Library librarians said they planned to begin by digitizing the House Committee on Un-American Activities hearings from the 1950s, which is regularly sought after by its patrons.

The project is being undertaken by Public.Resource.Org, a nonprofit group seeking to open public access to government records, and the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based digital library.

The project is the brainchild of founders of the two organizations, Carl Malamud and Brewster Kahle, and it is initially being financed by a $250,000 grant from a foundation established by Mr. Kahle and his wife, Mary Austin, and a matching grant from the Omidyar Network, a support organization created by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay.

Mr. Malamud said his goal is to digitize the entire United States government documents collection, which has been estimated to include up to 100 million pages of publications ranging from the Congressional Record to the Federal Register….

Public.Resource.Org’s online collection [from other projects] includes 21 million copyright records, 5 million G.P.O. pages as well as information from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Patent Office and other federal agencies.

Fran Berman, director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and Brian Lavoie, a research scientist at OCLC, have been named co-chairs of a Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, which is being funded by the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Library of Congress, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and JISC will also be involved in the task force.

Here’s an excerpt from the press release:

Berman and co-chair Brian Lavoie . . . will convene an international group of prominent leaders to develop actionable recommendations on economic sustainability of digital information for the science and engineering, cultural heritage, academic, public, and private sectors. The Task Force is expected to meet over the next two years and gather testimony from a broad set of thought leaders in preparation for the Task Force’s Final Report. . . .

The Task Force will bring together a group of national and international leaders who will focus attention on this critical grand challenge of the Information Age. Task Force members will represent a cross-section of fields and disciplines including information and computer sciences, economics, entertainment, library and archival sciences, government, and business. Over the next two years, the Task Force will convene a broad set of international experts from the academic, public and private sectors who will participate in quarterly panels and discussions. . . .

In its final report, the Task Force is charged with developing a comprehensive analysis of current issues, and actionable recommendations for the future to catalyze the development of sustainable resource strategies for the reliable preservation of digital information. During its tenure, the Task Force also will produce a series of articles about the challenges and opportunities of digital information preservation, for both the scholarly community and the public.

from DigitalKoans, September 25, 2007

In late 2006, The University of Iowa Libraries became a charter member of Portico (http://www.portico.org/). Portico offers a service which provides a permanent archive of electronic scholarly journals.

Background:
The scale and complexity of the infrastructure and operation necessary to preserve core electronic scholarly literature exceeds that which can be supported by any individual library or institutional budget. After extensive, iterative discussion in the library and publisher communities, the Portico electronic archiving service has been shaped in response to this need. Initial support for Portico is provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Ithaka, The Library of Congress, and JSTOR.

Portico provides all libraries supporting the archive with campus-wide access to archived content when specific trigger events occur, and when titles are no longer available from the publisher or other source. Trigger events include:

* A publisher stops operations; or
* A publisher ceases to publish a title; or
* A publisher no longer offers back issues; or
* Upon catastrophic and sustained failure of a publisher’s delivery platform.

Portico also provides a reliable means to secure perpetual access, if participating publishers choose to designate Portico as a provider of post-cancellation access. In addition, select librarians at participating libraries are granted password-controlled access for verification and audit purposes only.

View current list of participating publishers (more join every month):
http://www.portico.org/about/part_publishers.html

View a list of committed journal titles:
http://www.portico.org/about/committed_titles_alpha.html

To help the scholarly community better understand and evaluate how open archiving might impact journal subscriptions, the Publishing Research Consortium has released the summary paper ‘Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition?’.

This paper is a condensed version of the earlier analysis released in November 2006. It looks at librarian purchasing preferences, and concludes that mandating self-archiving within six months or less of publication will undermine the subscription-based peer review journal. The summary paper, together with the original report, is freely available at http://www.publishingresearch.org.uk/.

American Mathematical Society journals to be preserved in Portico

[ed. note: University of Iowa Libraries has licensed Portico and is a participant]

Non-profit electronic archiving service provider Portico, US, has announced that all the electronic content from one of its publisher participants – the American Mathematical Society (AMS) – has now been preserved in the Portico archive. AMS has chosen Portico as the archive for the current e-content of 11 journals (including the entirety of its three e-only titles). With this inclusion, more than 375,000 articles have been preserved within Portico.

The archive has fully preserved all the bibliographic data, PDF page content and supplemental files of over 10,000 articles published between 1995 and the present. It will now preserve new content from each of these 11 journals as it is published. In addition, AMS has designated Portico as an official delivery platform for post-cancellation access claims. Also, it will make an annual financial contribution to support Portico’s ongoing operations.

AMS is focused on pure and applied mathematical research and scholarship. It publishes the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society and Mathematics of Computation among other titles. Since 1996, AMS has been archiving its four flagship print publications with JSTOR. By archiving its e-current content with Portico, it seeks to assure the future availability of the complete publication run of these four titles for future scholars, practitioners, researchers and students.

Click here to read the original press release.

KnowledgeSpeak, 26 Jan 2007, http://www.knowledgespeak.com/newsArchieveviewdtl.asp?pickUpID=3475&pickUpBatch=560#3475