Scholarly Communication

On June 10 at noon Eastern time, the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) will cosponsor a free Webcast entitled “SCOAP³—An Opportunity to Create Change.” Dr. Salvatore Mele of CERN will lead a 90-minute presentation of the SCOAP³ initiative, which is poised to introduce significant changes to the accessibility and affordability of scholarly journals in high energy physics. The SCOAP³ initiative has already been endorsed by dozens of institutions, including the Purdue University Libraries. Faculty and students of the Purdue University community with an interest in learning more about this library initiative to manage journal expenditures and maximize access to scholarship are invited to register by June 9 (http://www.arl.org/sparc/meetings/event_registration.shtml).

Additional Information:

• Original Webcast announcement at the SPARC site
• Original Purdue Scholarly Communication News Entry on SCOAP³

Conceived and provided by the University of Colorado libraries, Publish, Not Perish is a free online tutorial that provides an engaging overview of the fundamentals of the scholarly publishing process. Targeted to untenured faculty and graduate students alike, the five module tutorial begins with a broad overview of the players and processes involved in scholarly publishing before moving into such specifics as performing a literature review, developing research topics, and tracking the stages of article publication. In addition, the tutorial covers the relevant scholarly communication topic of open access publishing. Jennifer E. Knievel provides additional background on the impetus for creating the tutorial and details on its reception in an article entitled “Instruction to Faculty and Graduate Students: A Tutorial to Teach Publication Strategies,” which appeared in portal: Libraries and the Academy. 

An article entitled “The citation advantage of open access articles” has received recognition as Highly Commended in the Information Science category of the 2008 Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Awards. The article, coauthored by recent Loughborough University doctoral degree recipient Michael Norris, examines the citation of articles from high-impact subscription journals in four subjects. Addressing several well-known caveats in assessing citation advantage (such as self-citation), Norris et al conclude that articles from these journals that have been made freely available on the Web (such as through open access archives) are more likely overall to be cited elsewhere.

Purdue e-Pubs (http://docs.lib.purdue.edu) is the open access archive of Purdue University, and members of the Purdue University faculty who would like to bring the value of open access to their journal publications and other scholarly material should contact either the subject-specialist librarian for their department or Mark Newton, the digital collections librarian (newton@purdue.edu), for additional information on getting started with the e-Pubs service.

“The citation advantage of open access articles” was published in the October 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. An open access version of this article is available through the open access archive of Loughborough University.

As many of you might be aware, Google is currently scanning as many books as they can for their Google book project. Publishers and authors of the books still protected by copyright filed a law suit against Google for copyright infringement.  Recently, all parties to the law suit entered into a tentative settlement agreement. The agreement has to be approved by the United State District Court for the Southern District of New York and the Court has scheduled a hearing in June, 2009.

If you are an author who retained the copyright in your book(s), then you are potentially a member of the settlement class in this law suit. Between January 5, 2009 and February 27, 2009, you might receive a notice from legal counsel in the case that explains your rights and options under the settlement agreement.

Please read the notice carefully since there are time sensitive issues specified in the document. The settlement agreement can be viewed here. For general information about the agreement, members of the Purdue University community may contact Donna L. Ferullo, Director, Purdue University Copyright Office. For legal advice, please consult with your own personal attorney. For information about the Google book project, you may contact James L. Mullins, Dean of Libraries, or Beth McNeil, Associate Dean for Information Resources and Scholarly Communication.

On October 14, Purdue University Libraries will host a gathering as a part of the first Open Access Day, a special event prepared by SPARC, PLoS, and Students for Free Culture to highlight the importance and impact of open access to research publications.

Purdue’s event begins at 6:45 p.m. on October 14 in the iLab (room G-959) in the Hicks Undergraduate Library, and all Purdue University faculty, staff, and students are invited to attend. At 7:00 p.m., the event moderators will broadcast a live video stream presentation by Richard Roberts, a Nobel Prize winner and notable advocate for open access to scientific research. The presentation will discuss the significance of Open Access to scholarly research, and it will be followed by a question and answer session with attendees at more than 50 sites nationwide by teleconference. After the presentation, the Libraries will showcase work that has been done at Purdue to support open access research, and attendees will have the opportunity to engage the session moderators in additional discussion.

Open Access Day sponsors at Purdue University include the Purdue University Libraries; the Purdue University Press; and PUGWASH, the Purdue University student organization for Social Responsibility in Science and Technology.

Refreshments will be served. For more information, please check the Open Access Day Web page.

ARL Releases New Analysis

Washington DC–The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has released "PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights: Agreements between 12 Publishers and the Authors Subject to the NIH Public Access Policy," by Ben Grillot, MLS (Maryland 2002), second-year student at the George Washington University Law School, and legal intern for ARL.

To help authors make informed choices about their rights, Grillot compares how the agreements of 12 publishers permit authors to meet the requirements of the recently revised National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy and share their works while they are under embargo. The NIH Public Access Policy requires authors of NIH-funded research to deposit their works in PubMed Central and make them publicly available within 12 months of publication.

Grillot focuses his analysis on how the agreements differ in: the terms and procedures of deposit of the work, the length of any embargo period, and the rights of the author to use and share the work during the embargo period. Grillot presents summary tables that clearly show the similarities and differences across agreements. He also analyzes the implications of these agreements.

Grillot concludes that the significant variability in publisher agreements requires authors with NIH funding to closely examine publisher agreements and the rights granted and retained when deciding where to publish their research. His analysis of these 12 agreements will help authors determine what to look for in an agreement and what questions to ask before signing.

"PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights" is available for free download from the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/grillot-pubmed.pdf. It will also be included in a forthcoming issue of ARL: A Bimonthly Report.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 123 research libraries in North America. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/.

For more information, contact:
Karla Hahn
Association of Research Libraries
202-296-2296
karla@arl.org

This year, the University Senate has devoted a considerable amount of time to the topic of intellectual property rights. We started by broaching this topic within the context of inventions, copyrightable works with potential commercial value, tangible research property and research data, and income derived from intellectual property. At the most recent meeting, we returned to the topic within the context of intellectual property rights associated with something that has been called the “lifeblood of a research university,” publications.

The nature of the problem has been defined by a variety of organizations, including the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC).

SPARC notes the author or authors of a publication, book, or other work holds the copyright “unless and until” they transfer the copyright to someone else. SPARC notes that the copyright agreement received from most journals and publishers asks for “exclusive rights of reproduction, distribution, public performance, public display, and modification of the original work.” They note that “Authors who have transferred their copyright without retaining any rights may not be able to place the work on course Web sites, copy it for students or colleagues, … or reuse portions in a subsequent work.” Finally, SPARC notes “The law allows you to transfer copyright while holding back rights for yourself and others.”

Last year, the leadership of the Senate attended a CIC Conference on Faculty Governance at which the CIC Statement on Publishing Agreements was discussed. As of June, 2007, faculty governance from six of the CIC campuses formally endorsed this statement and Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors. This fall, we asked the Faculty Affairs Committee to consider endorsing this agreement for use at Purdue University. As can be seen in Senate Document 07-9, the Faculty Affairs Committee has recommended that the Senate endorse this agreement.

The CIC Statement on Publishing Agreements has also been considered by the ad hoc Task Force on Scholarly Communication at Purdue that was created by the Provost and chaired by Jim Mullins, dean of Libraries.

By passing Senate Document 07-9, Purdue joined other CIC institutions such as the University of Illinois (both the UI-C and UIUC campuses), Indiana University, the University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison as endorsing faculty rights to retain use of their intellectual property. The Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors is now available for use by Purdue faculty, if they chose to do so.

Click here to read the Addendum to Publication Agreements for CIC Authors (pdf).

For more information about the CIC’s involvement in scholarly communication and author’s rights, please visit their website: http://www.cic.net/Home/Projects/Library/ScholarlyComm/Introduction.aspx.

-George Bodner

Edit 09/26/08 — links updated

Late yesterday, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted on a measure to permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online.  This will likely have major implications for the open access movement.  

Links to articles about this in the New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Harvard Crimson: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/books/12publ.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin

http://chronicle.com/news/article/?id=3943&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521835>

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=521861

–Beth McNeil 

An interesting development in alternative business models has been put forward by the high-energy physics community, through their SCOAP3 initiative (www.scoap3.org), Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing.  In short, they are attempting to turn the entire field of high-energy physics open access.  By creating a super-consortium, they would make a tender offer to the current publishers of HEP physics.  The publishers would be guaranteed operating money to cover the cost of editorial work, and in return, they offer up the content freely to the entire world.  National Labs, funding agencies, and libraries all might be part of this consortium, and one of the hopes is that the costs to the scholarly community overall would drop significantly, since we would be switching from the relatively inelastic subscription model, where libraries have to buy in or their community loses out, to an author/payer focused model where publishers will lose out if they don’t keep costs at a level that is supported by the consortium.  

With something this bold and ambitious, obviously there are a lot of details to be settled…but the idea is getting a lot of traction in Europe, and enthusiasm is building in the US, where HEPAP (the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel) “strongly supports this initiative”…contingent on the resolution of financial concerns (always a big if!).  

A good summary of the project was published in Symmetry:  http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/?pid=1000551

And the HEPAP presentations: one by a SCOAP3 representative, Salvatore Mele:  (http://www.science.doe.gov/hep/HEPAP/November2007/HEPAP-301107.pdf)

Another, cautionary one, by the Editor in Chief of the American Physical Society, Gene Sprouse: http://www.science.doe.gov/hep/HEPAP/November2007/hepap2-1.pdf)

–Michael Fosmire  

Published impact factors affect authors’ decisions about manuscript submission, funding awards, and promotion and tenure. While  critiques of the use of impact factors are common, this report by the editors of the Journal of Cell Biology and the Journal of Experimental Medicine is the first to raise serious questions about the underlying validity of the data used to calculate impact factors and therefore the accurracy of the metrics that are published

Mike Rossner, Heather Van Epps, and Emma Hill reported on their inability to verify published impact factors using data provided provided by ISI.    In their report, they note that they were unable to replicate published impact factors for their own and other journals,  found numerous and serious errors in several data sets provided by ISI, and call into question the validity of both ISI’s dataset and their published impact factors.  

The editorial by Mike Rossner, Heather Van Epps, and Emma Hill was published in the Journal of Cell Biology and is available at http://www.jcb.org/cgi/content/full/179/6/1091 

–Beth McNeil (with content from Karla Hahn, ARL)