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.
Directors of ten university presses issued a statement supporting “the dissemination of scholarly research as broadly as possible.” Represented were University Press of Florida, University of Akron Press, University Press of New England, Athabasca University Press, Wayne State University Press, University of Calgary Press, University of Michigan Press, Rockefeller University Press, Penn State University Press, and University of Massachusetts Press.
Further details are available in Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Salvatore Engel-DiMauro, professor of geography at the State University of New York at New Paltz, urged attendees at the recent annual meeting of the American Association of University Professors to seek out non-profit publishing options for their work, rather than those owned by corporations and run as for-profit businesses.
His argument was that academics and universities shouldn’t provide a “product” for these corporations for free, which university libraries are then forced to buy back via subscriptions or licenses to often high-priced journals. Furthermore, open-access, non-profit options often broaden access to and use of their research. The full article appeared in Inside Higher Ed.
More than nine thousand reports issued between 1863 and 1997 by the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council have been digitized and are now available online free of charge through Google Book Search. This is the first phase of a two-part project; the full collection of some eleven thousand reports should be available online by 2011.
These reports join more than four thousand digitized books accessible through the National Academies Press.
A recent study released by the Publishing Research Consortium shows that publishers allow authors to do more than authors think with their own articles. The paper examines the results of two major surveys to provide an analysis of what authors say they want, what they think their agreements allow, and what publishers’ agreements actually allow.
UC’s California Digital Library has completed successful negotiations with Springer to launch a pilot open access arrangement as part of its 2008 Springer journals license. This will allow all articles by UC-affiliated authors to be issued under Springer’s “Open Choice” model without additional author fees. The articles will be accessible via SpringerLink and will be published under the terms of a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial license. Planning is also underway for automatic deposit of these articles into the UC eScholarship Repository.
Faculty members are encouraged to continue to negotiate the terms of all author agreements to enable them to retain educational use rights so that they can use their own scholarship on course Web sites, in course reserves, and in course packs. The UCLA Library will present a lunchtime workshop for faculty on negotiating to keep their copyright on Wednesday, February 25; admission is free, but advance registration is required.
The journal RNA Biology has begun requiring authors whose work will appear in a new section of the journal to also submit an accompanying abstract that will be published on Wikipedia. The goal is to encourage creating and updating public data on RNA families. Further information is available on NatureNews.
Open Humanities Press recently announced three new journals are now a part of their open-access offerings. The new titles include Fast Capitalism (published since 2004), Postcolonial Text (published since 2000), and Image [&] Narrative (published since 2005).
Open Humanities Press is “an international open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide.”
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) maintains a list of journal titles whose publishers will submit final published articles to PubMed Central (PMC) for authors in accordance with the NIH Public Access Policy. This will make complying with the new policy easier for NIH-funded researchers who publish in these journals.
Last week, six journals were added to the growing list of more than 350. The new titles are Biotechnology for Biofuels, HPB Surgery, International Archives of Medicine, Journal of Chiropractic Education, Marine Drugs, and Molecular Cytogenetics.
Thanks to Open Access News for the update.
The Chronicle of Higher Education announced the debut of the Open Humanities Press, an international open-access press for the humanities. The press is beginning with seven established journals:
Open Humanities Press describes itself as “A grassroots response to the crisis in scholarly publishing in the humanities … an international open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide.”
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