“Article-level metrics” — figures documenting how many times an online article in a scholarly journal has been viewed, downloaded, cited in other articles, mentioned in blogs, or bookmarked — give a more accurate view of the impact and influence of an article than the journal impact factor, according to Richard Smith, a board member of Public Library of Science.
The Science and Technology Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives, which has oversight of non-defense federal civilian research and development, has convened a scholarly publishing roundtable charged with developing recommendations for government policies that promote public access to the results of federally funded research. The roundtable, which consists of representatives from university, publisher, librarian, and research communities, released an initial status report this week.
The first international Open Access Week, meant to raise awareness of issues and benefits surrounding open access, begins today.
The UCLA Library is sponsoring a week of events for faculty, students, administrators, and librarians.
An open letter was released today, signed by presidents of fifty-seven liberal arts colleges, supporting the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2009. Further details are available in an article in Inside Higher Ed.
Open Book Alliance, a coalition of legal scholars, authors, publishers, librarians and technology companies has formed to ensure that, “any mass book digitization and publishing effort be open and competitive” and to oppose the Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement in its current form.
The Open Book Alliance, which includes Amazon.com, Yahoo!, Special Libraries Association, Microsoft, American Society of Journalists and Authors, and Internet Archive, see the settlement as a “scheme to monopolize the access, distribution and pricing of the largest digital database of books in the world.”
Flat World Knowledge, a company which provides alternatives to high cost textbooks stated in their press release they are providing textbooks to over 38,000 students on 350 college campuses this fall, up from 1,000 students at 30 campuses this time last year.
CALPIRG and students groups across the country are campaigning to make faculty aware of the need to reduce the costs of course materials.
Open Humanities Press, in conjunction with the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office, has announced the forthcoming open-access series in critical and cultural theory: New Metaphysics, Critical Climate Change, Global Conversations, Unidentified Theoretical Objects, and Liquid Books. Edited by senior members of the press’s editorial board, all will be available in full-text digital editions as well as reasonably priced paperbacks.
The Web Archiving Service provides tools to easily capture, analyze, and preserve Web content. It enables users to define sites to be captured, choose capture settings for each site, and capture the content; provides basic statistics about capture results; contains comparison tools that allow users to analyze changes on a site over time; and allows users to publish archives of Web sites that can be searched together.
The University of California’s California Digital Library (CDL) hosts the service’s tools and storage and provides information about rights management practices and collection development in web archiving, as well as web archiving training sessions. The service was developed as part of the Web-at-Risk grant, funded by the National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program and led by the CDL.
The UC Libraries have licensed a substantial collection of e-textbooks, which are available for use by faculty and students free of charge. The full list, divided into broad subject areas, is available online, as are lists of e-book titles not classified as textbooks.
Each chapter is available as a PDF file, which can be downloaded, printed, or transferred to a PDA or Kindle. Whether in the textbook category or not, all of the titles can be used in electronic course reserves, on course Web sites, in course management systems, and for many other educational purposes.
PhD Comics examines the process of publishing articles in scientific journals in an amusing but accurate series of strips. Check out the one on the rivalry between the journals Nature and Science.
