MIT faculty voted unanimously to approve a resolution that allows MIT to freely and publicly distribute research articles they write. This makes MIT the first university to commit to making its faculty’s research papers available online to the public. Though the School of Education at Stanford and several departments at Harvard have already adopted these policies, MIT is the first entire university to make this pledge.

MIT plans to create a repository to make these open access articles available online.  For more details, read the full story on MIT’s The Tech.

This is great news for anyone who reads scholarly literature (and I’m guessing  you do since you are reading an academic library blog).  As publishers have raised subscription fees to databases over the years, library budgets have been stretched to the limit.  More support for open access takes the control of scholarship from the publishers and returns it to where it belongs - the scholars.

Read more posts about open access here.

A new open access journal of interest to the bioinformatics community, DATABASE - The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation, will be released in January, 2009 . The online-only journal is now accepting submissions for publication.

The journal seeks to provide a platform for novel ideas in database research surrounding biological information and will reportedly cover only open-access databases.

As described on the Oxford Journals web site:

Huge volumes of primary data are currently archived in numerous open-access databases, and with new generation technologies becoming more common in laboratories, large datasets will become even more prevalent than today. The archiving, curation, analysis and understanding of all of this data is a challenge.

[Read more →]

Cornell University Libraries recently announced that arXiv, the free online repository for articles in physics, math, computer science, quantitative biology and statistics, now contains over half a million articles.

arXiv was developed in 1991 and is the oldest online article repository in existence. Researchers upload their own articles to arXiv, and they are usually made available to the public the next day. A team of 113 volunteer moderators from around the world screen submissions and recommend whether they should be included in the repository.

arXiv has long stood at the forefront of the open-access movement and served as the model for many other initiatives, including the National Institute of Health’s PubMedCentral. It is currently ranked the No. 1 repository in the world by the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.

More information is available in the Press Release issued by Cornell University.

If you think textbooks are expensive, you might be shocked to find out how much scholarly journals cost.  For example, a subscription to the Journal of Fluid Mechanics costs the library $3,250 each year - and that’s just for one journal!

Fortunately, the internet allows alternative publishing options for scholars which can help research become more accessible by removing price barriers.  Open Access literature is available online to be read for free by anyone and is free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.  In addition, Open Access journals are peer reviewed in a manner as rigorous as in conventional journals.

The first ever Open Access Day is on October 14, 2008.  Founded by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for FreeCulture, and the Public Library of Science, it intends to build awareness and understanding of Open Access.

As a member of the higher education community, the success of the Open Access movement has direct implications on how you [Read more →]

If  you have ever published a paper or plan to publish one in this age of freely available web information and the attendant ownership controversies, you may be wondering what you are allowed to do with your paper after it has been published or approved for publication.  SHERPA/RoMEO is a database that lets you know what rights are normally give to author’s by journal publishers.

You can search the database by journal title or publisher name.  There is also a color coded system that allows you to browse all the publications that fall into a particular category:

• Green: can archive pre-print and post-print
• Blue: can archive post-print (ie final draft post-refereeing)
• Yellow: can archive pre-print (ie pre-refereeing)
• White: archiving not formally supported

Regulary using this tool instead of tracking down the individual publications can save you much time and energy.  For more time saving ideas, be sure to peruse the Tips and Tools section of PolyThinker’s Pad.

The movement towards Open Access (free, online access to scholarly works) received a big boost this week. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard voted unanimously to make their scholarly articles available online for free. The library will oversee a newly created Office of Scholarly Communication that will handle the project.

Visit Dibner Library’s links on delicious for more information on Open Access.

In accordance with a new spending bill signed by President Bush last month, all research funded by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) will now be required to be published online, free to the public, within 12 months after publication in any scientific journal. Seeing as NIH has a $29 billion research budget, this new directive should open up a world of new opportunities for online research.

Source: ReadWriteWeb

Open Access publishing continues to rise at an astronomical rate as researchers hope to maximize their impact by providing free access to their scholarly articles online. But all this newly available material does little good if you don’t know where to find it. Fortunately the good folks at Lund University in Sweden have created the Directory of Open Access Journals.

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a carefully vetted list of fully open access, peer-reviewed scholarly journals covering all subjects and languages. It currently lists a total of 2,870 journals, with a net growth rate of 1.2 titles per calendar day over the past year. The directory aims to be a “one stop shop for users to Open Access Journals.”

Subjects covered in the Directory include: [Read more →]

With the rise of Open Access and advances in cyberinfrastructure, scholarly communication is in the midst of upheaval. What will this mean for the academic world, the research community, and the advancement of science overall? These are some of the questions addressed by that the latest issue of CTWatch Quarterly: The Coming Revolution in Scholarly Communications & Cyberinfratructure

CTWatch Quarterly is an online journal that focuses on cyberinfrastructure related research critical to collaboration and information dissemination within the science community. Past issues are available online in the Issues Archive.