July 2009
Issue 2.09

Welcome to the Summer issue of Transitions.

The purpose of this irregular electronic newsletter is to bring to readers’ attention some of the many new projects and developments affecting the current system of scholarly communication, with emphasis on new products and programs, the open access movement and other alternative publishing models. Scholarly communication refers to the full range of formal and informal means by which scholars and researchers communicate, from email discussion lists to peer-reviewed publication. In general authors are seeking to document and share new discoveries with their colleagues, while readers–researchers, students, librarians and others–want access to all the literature relevant to their work.

While the system of scholarly communication exists for the benefit of the world’s research and educational community and the public at large, it faces a multitude of challenges and is undergoing rapid change brought on by technology. To help interested members of the UI community keep up on these challenges and changes we plan to put out 4 issues per year of this newsletter.  Please visit our web site, Transforming Scholarly Communication, to find out more about this topic.

This newsletter aims to reflect the interests of its readers so please forward comments, suggestions and entries to include to karen-fischer@uiowa.edu.

Table of Contents:

University of Kansas Adopts Open Access Policy

10 University-Press Directors Back Free Access to Scholarly Articles

Taxpayer Alliance Applauds Bill to Broaden Access to Federal Research Results

Researchers Urged to Think Harder About Compiling and Sharing Data

Elsevier News: Published Fake Journals and Pays for Good Book Reviews?

Open Access and Global Participation in Science

Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research

Case Studies of Three No-fee OA Humanities Journals

Impact of Economic Downturn on Professional and Scholarly Societies

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” Rights Retention for Scholarly Articles

AAUP Report: Among Calls for Collaboration, a Plea to Reinvent University Presses

Open Access: The Sooner the Better

Medical Students, Other Student Groups Endorse Open Access

Stuart Shieber, professor of computer science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and director of the university’s Office for Scholarly Communications, has an interesting blog post about authors posting articles on the web with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” sort of policy.  It’s a long post, but worth reading it in full.

Excerpts:

A strange social contract has arisen in the scholarly publishing field, a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to online distribution of articles by authors.  Publishers officially forbid online distribution, authors do it anyway without telling the publishers, and publishers don’t ask them to stop even though it violates contractual obligations. What happens when you refuse to play that game? Read on.

Publishing of research, in the sense of providing for its widespread dissemination, is the means by which new discoveries join the collective knowledge of humanity.  The means by which the distribution is implemented has been subscription-based publication via a publisher.  Indeed, until recently, this was the only practical means by which research could be distributed, since the cost of the dissemination, which involved printing and shipping of paper, showed economies of scale that individual researchers could not take advantage of.  Publishers made revenue by limiting access to the papers to paying customers.

…This brings us to the strange social contract.  What has arisen, perhaps surprisingly, is a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to online distribution by authors.  Publishers officially forbid online distribution, authors do it anyway without telling the publishers, and publishers don’t ask them to stop even though it violates contractual obligations.

The standard system for scholarly communication is thus based on widespread contractual violation and fraud.

…Nonetheless, individual authors still breach contracts regularly as they act to maximize their career advancement possibilities.  To many, including myself, this state of affairs is untenable.  I am not willing to routinely violate contracts in this way.  Consequently, I and others have for some time reconciled the two distribution mechanisms explicitly, by amending the contractual conditions of copyright assignments.  For many years, I have as a matter of course refused to sign copyright assignment forms that do not give me the right of noncommercial online distribution of my work. Originally, I would use alternative copyright assignments that I wrote myself.  More recently, I have been attaching the SPARC addendum to publishers’ assignment forms, and then the Science Commons addenda that superseded it.

In the many years that I have been routinely replacing or modifying copyright assignments, I have never had a complaint (or even an acknowledgment) from a publisher.  In retrospect, this may make sense.  Since the contractual modification applies only to a single article by a single author, it is unlikely that anyone looking for copyright clearance would even know that all copyright hadn’t been assigned to the publisher.  And in any case publishers must realize that authors act as if they have a noncommercial distribution license whether they formally retain one or not.

I say that I’ve never had a complaint from a publisher, and that has been true with one exception.  This post describes that singular case.  It may serve to illuminate several points:

* How journal publishers think about rights.
* How the rights landscape might be changing.
* How authors can recoup positive progress.

I describe my experience in challenging an irrational and detrimental license clause, and how it spiraled into a battle that resulted in the publisher changing its policy for the journal as a whole.

Read on to find out what happened with Stuart’s experience with Blackwell.

March 2009
Issue 1.09

Welcome to the Spring issue of Transitions.

The purpose of this irregular electronic newsletter is to bring to readers’ attention some of the many new projects and developments affecting the current system of scholarly communication, with emphasis on new products and programs, the open access movement and other alternative publishing models. Scholarly communication refers to the full range of formal and informal means by which scholars and researchers communicate, from email discussion lists to peer-reviewed publication. In general authors are seeking to document and share new discoveries with their colleagues, while readers–researchers, students, librarians and others–want access to all the literature relevant to their work.

While the system of scholarly communication exists for the benefit of the world’s research and educational community and the public at large, it faces a multitude of challenges and is undergoing rapid change brought on by technology. To help interested members of the UI community keep up on these challenges and changes we plan to put out 4 issues per year of this newsletter.  Please visit our web site, Transforming Scholarly Communication, to find out more about this topic.

This newsletter aims to reflect the interests of its readers so please forward comments, suggestions and entries to include to karen-fischer@uiowa.edu. 

Table of Contents:

Google Books Settlement – updates

Publish in Wikipedia or Perish

Long-term Open Access Journal Ends Free Access

Study Suggests Library Dollars Spent Corrolate with Grant Income

Misunderestimating Open Science

Institutional Repositories: Thinking Beyond the Box

MacArthur Foundation Adopts a Research Access Policy

Negotiating a Creative Commons License

Framing the Open Access Debate

How the Media Frames “Open Access”

Publishing an E-journal on a Shoestring: Sustaining a low-buget OA journal

University Presses Find Strategies to Survive Economic Crisis

New Open Access Search Tool for Economics

An Open Access Resource for Women’s Health

Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab

By MOTOKO RICH, Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab, New York Times, January 27, 2009

Excerpt:

The point may soon come when there are more people who want to write books than there are people who want to read them.

At least, that is what the evidence suggests. Booksellers, hobbled by the economic crisis, are struggling to lure readers. Almost all of the New York publishing houses are laying off editors and pinching pennies. Small bookstores are closing. Big chains are laying people off or exploring bankruptcy.

A recently released study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that while more people are reading literary fiction, fewer of them are reading books.

Meanwhile, there is one segment of the industry that is actually flourishing: capitalizing on the dream of would-be authors to see their work between covers, companies that charge writers and photographers to publish are growing rapidly at a time when many mainstream publishers are losing ground.

November 2008
Issue 3.08

Welcome to the Fall issue of Transitions.

The purpose of this irregular electronic newsletter is to bring to readers’ attention some of the many new projects and developments affecting the current system of scholarly communication, with emphasis on new products and programs, the open access movement and other alternative publishing models. Scholarly communication refers to the full range of formal and informal means by which scholars and researchers communicate, from email discussion lists to peer-reviewed publication. In general authors are seeking to document and share new discoveries with their colleagues, while readers–researchers, students, librarians and others–want access to all the literature relevant to their work.

While the system of scholarly communication exists for the benefit of the world’s research and educational community and the public at large, it faces a multitude of challenges and is undergoing rapid change brought on by technology. To help interested members of the UI community keep up on these challenges and changes we plan to put out 4 issues per year of this newsletter.

This newsletter aims to reflect the interests of its readers so please forward comments, suggestions and entries to include to karen-fischer@uiowa.edu. Also, read the health sciences counterpart to Transitions: Hardin Scholarly Communication News.

Table of Contents:

“Field Study” Finds New Scholarly Models Are Embraced by Scholars

AAA Awarded Planning Grant to Examine Future of Scholarly Journals

In Boost for NIH Policy, Major Autism Research Organization Mandates Public Access

Publisher-Author Agreements and the NIH Public Access Policy

New Ratings of Humanities Journals Do More Than Rank — They Rankle

Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time

Google signs a deal to e-publish out-of-print books

Congress’s copyright fight puts open access science in peril

Read publisher policies on copyright, and more…

Citation controversy: does online access change citation practices?

The Collapse of Peer Review

Scientific publishing might create a winner’s curse

Author’s Rights, Tout de Suite

Christian Science Monitor to Publish Online Only

Excerpt:

It’s been a year of significant steps in how we think about scholarly communication, from passage of the NIH public access policy to Harvard’s open access mandate and, recently, the deal between publishers and Google to settle their book-scanning lawsuit. But are faculty members really embracing new models of scholarly communication? According to a report issued this week by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), carried out by Ithaka, the answer appears to be yes. “For those who believe scholars and researchers are unwilling to change their practices of sharing new knowledge,” wrote ARL scholarly communication director Karla Hahn, “this work offers significant evidence to the contrary.”

The report, “Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication,” was conceptual­ized as a “field study,” based on conversations, designed to “look squarely at new forms of scholarship and scholarly works and consider them in their own lights.”

In addition to better understanding researchers’ scholarly communication needs, the report also gathered a list of “exemplary” resources, released with the report, which offers a vivid example the changing landscape of scholarly com­munication. While ARL officials acknowledge the hundreds of faculty members who spoke with librarians for the study may not be “entirely representa­tive of their communities,” the study found that “established scholars and relative novices” were both using and contributing to new kinds of works in their field. Among the study’s findings:

• Evidence that innovative digital resources can be found across the humanities, social sciences, and scientific/technical/medical subject areas.
• Almost every resource cited by faculty operates under some form of peer review or editorial oversight.
• Some of the resources with greatest impact are those that have been around a long while.
• Many digital publications are capable of running on relatively small budgets and are tailored to small, niche audiences.
• Innovations relating to multimedia content and Web 2.0 functionality appear in some cases to blur the lines between resource types.
• Projects of all sizes, especially open access sites and publications, employ a range of support strategies in the search for financial sustainability.

by Andrew Albanese, LJ Academic Newswire, 11/11/08

May 2008
Issue 2.08

Welcome to the Spring issue of Transitions.

The purpose of this irregular electronic newsletter is to bring to readers’ attention some of the many new projects and developments affecting the current system of scholarly communication, with emphasis on new products and programs, the open access movement and other alternative publishing models. Scholarly communication refers to the full range of formal and informal means by which scholars and researchers communicate, from email discussion lists to peer-reviewed publication. In general authors are seeking to document and share new discoveries with their colleagues, while readers–researchers, students, librarians and others–want access to all the literature relevant to their work.

While the system of scholarly communication exists for the benefit of the world’s research and educational community and the public at large, it faces a multitude of challenges and is undergoing rapid change brought on by technology. To help interested members of the UI community keep up on these challenges and changes we plan to put out 4-6 issues per year of this newsletter.

This newsletter aims to reflect the interests of its readers so please forward comments, suggestions and entries to include to karen-fischer@uiowa.edu. Also, read the health sciences counterpart to Transitions: Hardin Scholarly Communication News.

Table of Contents:
Harvard FAS and Law School Pass Open Access Mandates
Rockefeller University Press Gives Away Copyright on Journal Articles
New Open Access Humanities Press Makes Its Debut
Prices and Ratings of Economic Textbooks
Comparison of SCImago Journal Rank Indicator with Journal Impact Factor
Progress Towards Public Access to Science – Harold Varmus on NIH Policy
Journals Find Fakery in Many Images Submitted to Support Research
Converting High Energy Physics Publishing from Subscription to Open Access
Access to Legal Scholarship
Online Company Tries an Unexpected Publishing Model: Free Textbooks
Positive Review of Library and Info Science Repository
The Importance of Open Access for Taxonomy Research