Repositories Category

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Harvard Business School approves open access policy

Two years to the day after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences became the first school at Harvard to vote an open-access policy, the Harvard Business School enacted their own policy on February 12, 2010, becoming the fifth Harvard school with a similar policy. Under the HBS policy (see below), like the previous policies, faculty agree to provide copies of their scholarly articles for distribution from the university’s DASH repository and grant the university a waivable license to distribute the articles.   [posted on the Occasional Pamphlet, Feb 28, 2010]

Harvard Business School Open-Access Policy

The Faculty of the Harvard Business School is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available articles that he or she has prepared for journal peer review and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of these articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all such articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy.

Since the policy will apply only to articles prepared for peer review, it thus does not apply to Harvard Business School Cases and Notes, or to articles written for the Harvard Business Review or other publications that are not peer-reviewed. The Dean or the Dean’s designate will waive application of the license for a particular article upon express direction by a Faculty member.

Each Faculty member will provide an electronic copy of the author’s final version of each article to the Division of Research and Faculty Development (DRFD) no later than the date of its publication. DRFD will submit the article to the Harvard University open access repository; the Provost’s Office may make it available to the public.

The Office of the Dean will be responsible for interpreting this policy, resolving disputes concerning its interpretation and application, and recommending changes to the Faculty from time to time. Effects of the policy will be continuously monitored, and after three years it will be reviewed and a report presented to the Faculty.

To view all of Harvard’s OA policies, go to: http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/OpenAccess/policytexts.php

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Who will pay for Arxiv?

Excerpt:

The e-print arXiv (pronounced “archive”) is a central repository of research articles in physics, mathematics, computer science, and quantitative biology. Since its inception in 1991 by theoretical physicist Paul Ginsparg, it has had a huge impact on the way science is done by providing free access to “pre-prints” of research papers. This meant that scientists from anywhere in the world with any background could access the latest research even if their university libraries didn’t have a copy of the particular journal in which it was published. This is a big deal since the cost of many of these journals created a gap between those institutions which could afford to pay for many journals and those which could not. In many ways arXiv “brought science into the 21st century” by allowing scientists to draw upon the collective scientific community more efficiently. Many credit it for pioneering the open access movement in scientific publishing.

But with increasing costs and the state of university budgets, the Cornell University Library (which operates the arXiv) is looking to find more cost-effective ways to support the arXiv and the much-needed overhauls in the software architecture (”arXiteXture”?). [Earlier this year Cornell closed its Physical Sciences library to help trim operational costs.]  Currently the Cornell library pays the $400,000/year operating cost to make the arXiv available free-of-charge to the rest of the world.

Read the entire blog post at US/LHC’s website: http://blogs.uslhc.us/?p=3468

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University of Kansas Adopts Open Access Policy

KU News Release:

June 26, 2009
Contact: Rebecca Smith, KU Libraries, (785) 864-1761.

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas has become the nation’s first public university to adopt an “open access” policy that makes its faculty’s scholarly journal articles available for free online.

The move aligns KU with Harvard and Stanford universities and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which have similar policies in place.

Scholarly articles — the method by which a professor presents original research results — normally are published in peer-reviewed journals and available only through paid subscriptions.

Under the new faculty-initiated policy approved by Chancellor Robert Hemenway, digital copies of all articles produced by the university’s professors will be housed in KU ScholarWorks, an existing digital repository for scholarly work created by KU faculty and staff in 2005. KU ScholarWorks houses more than 4,400 articles submitted in digital formats that assure their long-term preservation.

Professors will be allowed to seek a waiver but otherwise will be asked to provide electronic forms of all articles to the repository. KU’s Faculty Senate overwhelmingly endorsed the policy at a meeting earlier this year, but additional policy details, including the waiver process, will be developed by a senate task force in the coming academic year, said Faculty Senate President Lisa Wolf-Wendel, professor of education leadership and policy studies. The task force will be led by Ada Emmett, associate librarian for scholarly communications.

“Academic publishing has become increasingly commercial and unavailable to other scholars, or to the general public, in recent years,” said A. Townsend Peterson, distinguished professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and curator at the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at KU. “This new policy offers a voluntary means of opening doors to much of KU’s journal-based scholarship. This policy represents a first step towards a new means of scholarly communication, in which the entire global academic community has access to the totality of scholarship. We all can participate in the scholarly exchange that leads to new knowledge creation.”

Peterson said open access policies such as KU’s will bring greater visibility to the authors’ work and will showcase the breadth and depth of the faculty’s contributions to academic research and to the university’s mission.

“Granting the university the right to deposit a copy of scholarly journal articles in an open digital repository extends the reach of the scholarship, providing the widest possible audience and increasing its possible impact,” said Lorraine J. Haricombe, dean of libraries.

Read more about this on Peter Suber’s Open Access Blog.

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Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box

Library Journal has published “Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box” by Andrew Richard Albanese.

Excerpts:

In February 2008, the faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University made history, unanimously passing a revolutionary open access mandate that, for the first time, would require faculty to give the university copies of their research, along with a nonexclusive license to distribute them electronically. In the press, Harvard University librarian Robert Darnton proudly spoke of reshaping “the landscape of learning” and fixing a damaged, overly expensive system of scholarly communication. And the very fulcrum of Harvard’s vision is a library-administered institutional repository (IR).

If Harvard’s vision portended a major role for IRs in the future, the reality today is that IRs remain largely empty, ineffective, and hobbled by everything from questions over their mission to lagging technology to the lack of meaningful institutional engagement. If they are to succeed as Harvard envisions, the next generation of IRs will require something of a reinvention—and a significantly higher level of institutional commitment.

. . . 

IRs have failed to catch on for a multitude of reasons, Salo explains, not the least of which is that the first generation was hopelessly passive about their collection activities. Essentially, IRs were created as large, digital “cardboard boxes,” without any specific mission, which faculty, unrealistically, were expected simply to fill. “When that didn’t happen, when it turned out faculty wouldn’t just voluntarily deposit things, most IRs didn’t know what to do next,” Salo says.

If librarians have learned anything from the failure of IRs thus far, it is that “build it and they will come” is not a viable collection strategy, nor any way to foster the digital library of the future. The next wave of IRs, she stresses, must be reimagined around specific services that have value to faculty and can be marketed to them—and supported by an administrative mandate.

“Revisiting IRs, the question librarians will need to ask is what digital objects are important for us to collect,” Salo explains, “and then how do we go about going out and getting them.” Already, she notes, that has begun—and the trend augurs well for the future. “Some IRs opened in the last year to 18 months are avoiding their predecessors’ mistakes,” Salo says, “and in that I see the stirrings of hope.”

. . . .

Moving the next generation of IRs toward Harvard’s vision of a “digital commonwealth” will not be easy. In his SPARC closing keynote address, David Shulenberger, VP of academic affairs at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, spoke of the dysfunction in the academy and the institutional barriers to change—from organized resistance to open access policies by publishers and scholarly societies to a lawsuit filed by two university presses against a library over e-reserves.

“We can’t afford to have those who benefit from the university environment working in ways so detrimental to it,” Shulenberger stressed. The “most effective” way forward, he suggested, are digital repositories—and he urged universities to “emulate Harvard.”

Library advocacy will play a key role in the future of IRs—but, as Salo notes, the heavy lifting is indeed an institutional burden. “The Harvard mandate is not something that can be accomplished in the library,” she notes. “That was carried out by faculty. But once you have your fire-breathing faculty, that’s where the library has to step up and say we can be the solution for this.”

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The Collapse of Peer Review

Posted by Philip Davis, The Scholarly Kitchen, October 6, 2008

excerpt:

Is peer review in decline?  Glenn Ellison, an economist at MIT, is beginning to question the added value of being published in top journals, at least for high-ranking authors.

Ellison has painstakingly documented the decline of articles published in top economics journals by authors working in the highest-ranked schools.  These authors are continuing to publish, but are seeking other outlets, including unrefereed preprint and working paper servers.

There are several explanations for this trend, and Ellison is careful about not attributing what he has observed to a single theory.  Still, there are two explanations that make empirical and theoretical sense:

  1. The Internet has allowed the certification and dissemination functions of journals to be disaggregated, permitting other services (like preprint and working paper servers), and networked search tools (like Google Scholar), to perform the function of disseminating research findings.
  2. Any economist will tell you that it is taking more time to get your work published in a top-economics journal.  Submission to publication may take years in many cases, and reviewers are more eager to require multiple revisions from the authors. For those economists who have already built a reputation, the benefits of going through the certification process may not be worth the effort, at least not for all of their work.

Since the prestige of a journal is heavily influenced by a small number of influential papers, losing these contributions can be significant in a publishing environment where authors want their work associated with other high-profile authors.

Read the entire post at: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2008/10/06/the-end-of-peer-review/

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Positive Review of Library and Info Science Repository

Péter Jacsó, BOSS, E-LIS, and Haworth Press, Online Magazine (Information Today Inc), May/June 2008 (accessible only to subscribers). An OA copy of the part on E-LIS has been posted to the AmSci OA Forum. Excerpt:

The E-LIS database is close to my heart because it delivers for free what the publisher I pan later often does not deliver even for a fee –timely information about research in library and information science and technology. As of early 2008 it had 7,200 papers from about 700 journals.

As an open archive, it covers all fields of LIS from the theoretical to the highly practical, from school libraries to national libraries, from rare books to ebooks, all reflected in the excellent classified subject index. Sure, you can argue if there is a need for separate classes for use studies and for user studies, but the display of the number of postings for each class -to my delight- offers a rather convincing argument without saying a word.

Its coverage is highly international both in terms of the language and country of residence of the authors….

The strongest part of the software is its browsing feature, and E-LIS stands out with the number of indexes that can not only be searched but also browsed by subject, country, journal name, book name, author/editor name, and publication year. The only significant limitation is that there is no option to do exact phrase searching and differentiate between, say, information industry and industry information. For full-text databases this is important….

E-LIS is one of the many repositories that use the free and intuitive EPrint software, which is the brainchild of Stevan Harnad, the key figure of the open access movement. Harnad possesses an admirable combination of mental prowess and hyperactivity as the “archivengalist” of self-archiving who talks the talk and walks the walk tirelessly….

E-LIS is small, but it is growing. Its size doubled in the past 2 years; it could have tripled if we, the authors, would not just feel good after getting our papers published but would go that extra inch and legally deposit them in E-LIS, DLIST, and the slowly emerging institutional repositories, a process that takes just a few minutes.

Open Access News, May 27, 2008

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So Close, Yet Still so Far? Bill Containing NIH Public Access Provision Is Vetoed

President Bush this week vetoed the recently passed Labor, Health and Human Services (LSSA) domestic spending bill. It contained a mandatory public access policy for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). While an override vote has yet to be scheduled, the bill passed in both chambers just shy of the two-thirds majorities needed, making an override highly unlikely.

The veto means publishers opposed to the public access policy are likely to get one more shot to try to remove or amend the policy during negotiations. Although the bill was vetoed for its overall spending, the White House’s “Statement of Administration Policy” (SAP) memo “noted” that any NIH policy “should balance the benefit of public access to taxpayer supported research against the possible impact that grant conditions could have on scientific research publishing, scientific peer review and on the United States’ longstanding leadership in upholding strong standards of protection for intellectual property.” That mention suggests those opposed to the policy could have another, albeit remote, opportunity to revise or slash the policy. Supporters say that heavy bipartisan support for the policy suggest it will survive intact, though advocates for the policy are urging supporters to contact their representatives.

The NIH public access policy, strongly supported by libraries for years, would require researchers to deposit their final articles in the NIH’s PubMed Central database to be made freely available within a year as a condition of grant funding.

Library Journal Academic Newswire, Nov. 15, 2007

Related article:
Bush Vetos Bill that Contains NIH Open Access Mandate – but there is hope it will eventually pass!

President Bush has vetoed the FY 2008 Labor, Health and Human Services and Education Appropriations bill, which contained the NIH open access mandate.

Here’s the open access mandate in the bill:

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

However, there is still hope for the Bill to pass. Read Peter Suber’s analysis of the President’s veto:

* First, don’t panic. This has been expected for months and the fight is not over. Here’s a reminder from my November newsletter: “There are two reasons not to despair if President Bush vetoes the LHHS appropriations bill later this month. If Congress overrides the veto, then the OA mandate language will become law. Just like that. If Congress fails to override the veto, and modifies the LHHS appropriation instead, then the OA mandate is likely to survive intact.” (See the rest of the newsletter for details on both possibilities.)
* Also expected: Bush vetoed the bill for spending more than he wants to spend, not for its OA provision.
* Second, it’s time for US citizens to contact their Congressional delegations again. This time around, contact your Representative in the House as well as your two Senators. The message is: vote yes on an override of the President’s veto of the LHHS appropriations bill. (Note that the LHHS appropriations bill contains much more than the provision mandating OA at the NIH.)
* The override votes—one in each chamber—haven’t yet been scheduled. They may come this week or they may be delayed until after Thanksgiving. But they will come and it’s not too early to contact your Congressional delegation. For the contact info for your representatives (phone, email, fax, local offices), see CongressMerge.
* Please spread the word!

From:DigitalKoans, Nov. 13, 2007

News Release from October 24th, when the US Senate Approved the Bill

Full U.S. Senate Approves Bill Containing Support for Access To Taxpayer-Funded Research

Washington, D.C. – October 24, 2007 – The U.S. Senate last night approved the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Bill (S.1710), including a provision that directs the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to strengthen its Public Access Policy by requiring rather than requesting participation by researchers. The bill will now be reconciled with the House Appropriations Bill, which contains a similar provision, in another step toward support for public access to publicly funded research becoming United States law.

“Last night’s Senate action is a milestonetemp victory for public access to taxpayer-funded research,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, a founding member of the ATA). “This policy sets the stage for researchers, patients, and the general public to benefit in new and important ways from our collective investment in the critical biomedical research conducted by the NIH.”

Under a mandatory policy, NIH-funded researchers will be required to deposit copies of eligible manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online database, PubMed Central. Articles will be made publicly available no later than 12 months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

The current NIH Public Access Policy, first implemented in 2005, is a voluntary measure and has resulted in a deposit rate of less than 5% by individual investigators. The advance to a mandatory policy is the result of more than two years of monitoring and evaluation by the NIH, Congress, and the community.

“We thank our Senators for taking action on this important issue,” said Pat Furlong, Founding President and CEO of Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy. “This level of access to NIH-funded research will impact the disease process in novel ways, improving the ability of scientists to advance therapies and enabling patients and their advocates to participate more effectively. The advance is timely, much-needed, and – we anticipate – an indication of increasingly enhanced access in future.”

“American businesses will benefit tremendously from improved access to NIH research,” said William Kovacs, U.S. Chamber of Commerce vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. “The Chamber encourages the free and timely dissemination of scientific knowledge produced by the NIH as it will improve both the public and industry’s ability to become better informed on developments that impact them – and on opportunities for innovation.” The Chamber is the world’s largest business federation, representing more than three million businesses of every size, sector, and region.

“We welcome the NIH policy being made mandatory and thank Congress for backing this important step,” said Gary Ward, Treasurer of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). “Free and timely public access to scientific literature is necessary to ensure that new discoveries are made as quickly as feasible. It’s the right thing to do, given that taxpayers fund this research.” The ASCB represents 11,000 members and publishes the highly ranked peer-reviewed journal, Molecular Biology of the Cell.

Joseph added, “On behalf of the taxpayers, patients, researchers, students, libraries, universities, and businesses that pressed this bill forward with their support over the past two years, the ATA thanks Congress for throwing its weight behind the success of taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded research.”

Negotiators from the House and Senate are expected to meet to reconcile their respective bills this fall. The final, consolidated bill will have to pass the House and the Senate before being delivered to the President at the end of the year.

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/media/release07-1024.html

###

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is a coalition of patient, academic, research, and publishing organizations that supports open public access to the results of federally funded research. The Alliance was formed in 2004 to urge that peer-reviewed articles stemming from taxpayer-funded research become fully accessible and available online at no extra cost to the American public. Details on the ATA may be found at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

1

Nature: Agencies Join Forces to Share Data

From the March 22 issue of Nature. For the full text, see http://ealerts.nature.com/cgi-bin24/DM/y/hc530SpivX0HjB0BOpY0EA

Excerpt:

The US government is considering a massive plan to store almost all scientific data generated by federal agencies in publicly accessible digital repositories. The aim is for the kind of data access and sharing currently enjoyed by genome researchers via GenBank, or astronomers via the National Virtual Observatory, but for the whole of US science.

Scientists would then be able to access data from any federal agency and integrate it into their studies. For example, a researcher browsing an online journal article on the spread of a disease could not only pull up the underlying data, but mesh them with information from databases on agricultural land use, weather and genetic sequences.

Nature has learned that a draft strategic plan will be drawn up by next autumn by a new Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (IWGDD). It represents 22 agencies, including the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, and Health and Human Services, and other government branches including the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The group’s first step is to set up a robust public infrastructure so all researchers have a permanent home for their data. One option is to create a national network of online data repositories, funded by the government and staffed by dedicated computing and archiving professionals. It would extend to all communities a model similar to the Arabidopsis Information Resource, in which 20 staff serve 13,000 registered users and 5,000 labs.

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Institutional Repositories: Evaluating the Reasons for Non-use of Cornell University’s Installation of DSpace

Philip M. Davis
Cornell University
<pmd8@cornell.edu> (corresponding author)

Matthew J. L. Connolly
Cornell University
<mjc12@cornell.edu>

D-Lib Magazine March/April 2007 Volume 13 Number 3/4

Abstract

Problem: While there has been considerable attention dedicated to the development and implementation of institutional repositories, there has been little done to evaluate them, especially with regards to faculty participation.

Purpose: This article reports on a three-part evaluative study of institutional repositories. We describe the contents and participation in Cornell’s DSpace and compare these results with seven university DSpace installations. Through in-depth interviews with eleven faculty members in the sciences, social sciences and humanities, we explore their attitudes, motivations, and behaviors for non-participation in institutional repositories.

Results: Cornell’s DSpace is largely underpopulated and underused by its faculty. Many of its collections are empty, and most collections contain few items. Those collections that experience steady growth are collections in which the university has made an administrative investment, such are requiring deposits of theses and dissertations into DSpace. Cornell faculty have little knowledge of and little motivation to use DSpace. Many faculty use alternatives to institutional repositories, such as their personal Web pages and disciplinary repositories, which are perceived to have higher community salience than one’s affiliate institution. Faculty gave many reasons for not using repositories: redundancy with other modes of disseminating information, the learning curve, confusion with copyright, fear of plagiarism and having one’s work scooped, associating one’s work with inconsistent quality, and concerns about whether posting a manuscript constitutes “publishing”.

Conclusion: While some librarians perceive a crisis in scholarly communication as a crisis in access to the literature, Cornell faculty perceive this essentially as a non-issue. Each discipline has a normative culture, largely defined by their reward system and traditions. If the goal of institutional repositories is to capture and preserve the scholarship of one’s faculty, institutional repositories will need to address this cultural diversity.

Read the article at: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march07/davis/03davis.html

Related article:
Harnad: Mandates Would Empower Institutional Repositories

It was probably not much of a surprise to librarians to learn in a recent D-Lib article that Cornell’s DSpace institutional repository (IR) is not filling up very quickly or catching on with faculty; nor was it a surprise that self-archiving and open access champion Stevan Harnad quickly offered a point-by-point response to D-Lib authors Phil Davis and Matthew Connolly. However, the problem of filling IRs with content, Harnad maintains, has a surprisingly easy solution. “The finding is that faculty don’t self-archive spontaneously,” Harnad posited. “The remedy, which [Davis & Connolly] do not mention at all, is to mandate that they self-archive.”

Previous studies show that when mandated to do so, faculty will populate IRs, Harnad argues. “The Swan surveys had already reported that faculty say they will not self-archive on their own,” Harnad told the LJ Academic Newswire, “but 95 percent will self-archive if mandated, over 80 percent of them willingly.” Harnad also cited Arthur Sale’s April 2006 D-Lib article that found that, while “voluntary” policies resulted in repositories collecting less than 12 percent of the available theses, “mandatory policies were well accepted and cause deposit rates to rise towards 100 percent.” There are currently 12 university or departmental mandates adopted worldwide and 11 funder mandates, plus one multi-institutional mandate and six funder mandates proposed, Harnad noted, adding that “the remedy has been tried, a number of times, and it works each time.”

“It sounds simple enough,” responded Davis on Yale University’s Liblicense-L discussion list. “Make one’s faculty do what they don’t see as necessary themselves.” Davis says his and Connolly’s study aimed not to “demonstrate that IRs are a failure,” but by focusing on “non-use” aimed to find out why they are not growing more quickly. “If we are to work at an institution where our researchers have the freedom to choose how they disseminate and archive their work, then it is important to understand the beliefs and motivations behind their behaviors,” Davis continued. “These results may lead to building better services around repositories.”

Library Journal Academic Newswire, March 20, 2007