open access – Sciences Library News

May 21 2021

Transformative Agreement with ACS for Open Access Publishing

Posted on May 21, 2021 by Laurie Neuerburg

UI corresponding authors can now publish their journal articles Open Access and free of cost to them in any American Chemical Society (ACS) journal. The University of Iowa Libraries has entered into an agreement with ACS to bundle the cost of journal subscriptions and Open Access (OA) publishing. Under this three-year contract, UI authors can publish a significant number of articles OA with ACS. These articles can then be immediately read by anyone, anywhere, without the paywalls that traditionally accompany academic journals. For more information, contact Conrad Bendixen, or Leo Clougherty from the Sciences Library.

This arrangement is part of a larger effort by UI Libraries to reduce the cost of OA for individual researchers. Unfortunately, publishers often charge authors directly to pay for the cost of publishing OA journal articles. (For instance, ACS normally charges authors $4,500 per article for OA.) For faculty who don’t have grant or departmental funding, this can be prohibitively expensive. These costs have soared in recent years and are a significant barrier to making research open and freely accessible.

Jul 12 2018

Sunsetting of the Open Access Fund

Posted on July 12, 2018July 12, 2018 by Laurie Neuerburg

For several years, UI Libraries has maintained an Open Access (OA) Fund to help researchers pay for the article processing charges (APCs) on open access publications. This fund supports authors choosing to make their publications open for anyone to read, broadening their audience and providing wide access to important research. We have decided to sunset the OA Fund for APCs within two years due to budget constraints. We found that the fund did nothing to offset our rapidly increasing journal subscription costs. In fact, the fund largely supports the same publishers to which we pay our pricey subscriptions. Given this reality, the final year that funding will be available is 2020, and the amount of funding for 2019 has been reduced from $3,000 per article to $2,000 per article. Additionally, each author will only be eligible to receive funding from the OA fund one time per fiscal year in 2019. Articles must have been accepted into a high quality, peer-reviewed, open access journal with ethical standards.

Though the OA Fund will be sunsetted, there are other options to support open access publishing. Authors can take advantage of green OA through the Iowa Repository Online (IRO) or pre-print and post-print repositories. Additionally, authors might be able to find grants or ask their departments to fund APCs. In the meantime, the UI Libraries will be exploring sustainable models to fund open access publishing in the future. If you have specific questions, feel free to reach out to Mahrya Burnett, Scholarly Communications Librarian, mahrya-burnett@uiowa.edu or 319-335-5937.

Aug 26 2016

Public access to NASA-funded research

Posted on August 26, 2016 by Sara Scheib

NASA made an exciting announcement this week. It’s launching a new research portal to provide free public access to the data and publications resulting from NASA-funded research. The portal points to two new services.

The first, called “NASA’s Data Portal” is a catalog of publicly available datasets, APIs, and visualizations. You can use it to explore by category, or search to find a specific dataset.

The second service, called “PubSpace“, will provide free public access to peer-reviewed journal articles and other publications resulting from NASA-funded research. It is an extension of PubMed Central (PMC), which is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and operated by the National Library of Medicine (NLM). PubSpace will be fully functional in Fall 2016.

If you have question or would like to learn more about accessing federally-funded research data or publications, please contact the Sciences Library.

Mar 02 2015

New Life Sciences Preprint Server: BioRxiv

Posted on March 2, 2015January 21, 2016 by Sara Scheib

From Science 14 November 2014:
Vol. 346 no. 6211 pp. 792-793
DOI: 10.1126/science.346.6211.792

BioRxiv at 1 year

“A year after its launch, a new preprint server for life sciences is off to a healthy start, its creators say. BioRxiv, a free site sponsored by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), has attracted more than 800 papers (see graph). Submissions span many disciplines—such as cell biology and cancer research—in which preprint sharing hadn’t been routine. About 28% of authors, who come from 44 countries, have revised their papers, presumably after getting feedback from readers, says John Inglis, executive director of CSHL Press. For scientists who might worry that posting a preprint will jeopardize its chances at a journal, Inglis points out that one-fourth of bioRxiv’s papers have later appeared in journals including Science, Nature, and Cell. http://scim.ag/bioRxiv1yr“

BioRxiv is indexed in SciFinder, but not Web of Science, Scopus or PubMed. If you have any questions or if you’d like a demonstration of this database, please contact the Sciences Library.

Dec 09 2013

SCOAP3 Open Access initiative to start 1/1/14

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Sara Scheib

From CERN Press Release:

“After intense preparations and consensus building, CERN¹ has today confirmed that the SCOAP³ Open Access publishing initiative will start on 1 January 2014. With the support of partners in 24 countries², a vast fraction of scientific articles in the field of High-Energy Physics will become Open Access at no cost for any author: everyone will be able to read them; authors will retain copyright; and generous licenses will enable wide re-use of this information.”

For more information, please see the CERN Press Release.

Nov 05 2013

ACS Open Access Program

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Sara Scheib

The American Chemical Society announced an expansion of its open access publishing options, designed to assist authors. The expansion includes a new open access, peer-reviewed journal, ACS Central Science, to be launched in 2014, plus more licensing choices for authors and a stimulus program to support authors who select ACS journals when seeking to publish their work open access.

For more information, please visit http://acsopenaccess.org/. If you have any questions about scholarly publishing or open access, please contact the Sciences Library at 335-3083 or lib-sciences@uiowa.edu.

Oct 31 2013

RSC launches Chemical Sciences Article Repository

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Sara Scheib

The Royal Society of Chemistry recently launched the Chemical Sciences Article Repository, “a non-commercial subject specific open access repository for chemistry papers, hosting Green and Gold Open Access(OA) papers and linking back to the publisher’s Article of Record.” This repository can be used to deposit and search for open access papers in the chemical sciences. For more information: http://www.rsc.org/chemical-sciences-repository/articles/faqs.

If you have questions about the Chemical Sciences Article Repository, open access, or the UI’s institutional repository, please contact the Sciences Library at 335-3083 or lib-sciences@uiowa.edu.

Oct 16 2013

Support for PeerJ Memberships

Posted on October 16, 2013January 12, 2015 by Sara Scheib

Calling all Biological and Medical scientists! The University Libraries is pleased to begin supporting PeerJ memberships for all interested University of Iowa faculty and researchers through the Open Access Fund. The University Libraries and the Office of the Provost established the Open Access Fund to pay the processing fees related to open access publishing.

Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. – Peter Suber

PeerJ is an Open Access publisher of scholarly articles in the biological and medical sciences [full list of subject areas]. Rather than charging a per-article fee for making an article Open Access, PeerJ charges a one-time membership fee for authors [Breakdown of membership types]. All interested UI faculty, graduate students, and research should contact Chris Diaz for more information about setting up a PeerJ membership.

Originally posted on October 3, 2013 at http://blog.lib.uiowa.edu/transitions/?p=1084 by Chris Diaz.

Apr 17 2013

Open Access Fund

Posted on April 17, 2013November 8, 2017 by Sara Scheib

Erratum: This post is out-of-date. For up-to-date information, please visit http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/OAfund.

Open access is an electronic publishing model that allows free and immediate access to research, and also allows authors to retain intellectual property rights to their research. Many open access journals charge authors publication fees, which can be a barrier to publishing in such venues.

To help offset the cost of publishing in open access journals the Office of the Provost and University Libraries have established a small fund to assist with authors’ fees.

Researchers may apply for funding to be applied toward publication fees up to:

$3,000.00 for publication in full open access journals that allow immediate, free access to all their articles upon publication (check the Directory of Open Access Journals: http://www.doaj.org/ for titles that qualify).
$1,500.00 for publication in “hybrid” open access journals. These are subscription-based journals that allow open access only to articles for which author open access fees have been paid (check Sherpa/RoMEO’s list of Publishers with Paid Open Access Options: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/PaidOA.html).

Funding is not available to researchers with grant funding that could be used to pay open access fees.

For more information and an application form, go to: http://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/OAfund

Questions about the process may be directed to Mike Wright, Interim Associate University Librarian, Collections and Scholarly Communication (michael-wright@uiowa.edu).