Posts from — April 2009

As growing appreciation of Open Access to research drives demand for new resources – on what Open Access is and how it benefits faculty, students and researchers worldwide – the popular Open Access Directory (OAD) marks its first anniversary today. 

The Open Access Directory, hosted by Simmons College, is  a wiki where community contributors create and maintain simple, factual lists about Open Access to science and scholarship. Launched just one year ago, and operated entirely by an international corps of volunteers, the OAD quickly blossomed from six to 40 lists and has served more than 250,000 unique users.

Designed by Robin Peek (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College) and Peter Suber (Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, and Senior Researcher at SPARC), the OAD has quickly become a “go-to” resource in the academic community. 

The Directory’s “signature” lists include:

•    Timeline of the Open Access movement, based on the work of Peter Suber
•    Bibliography of Open Access, based on the work of Charles W. Bailey Jr
•    Events celebrating Open Access Day 2008, which captured participation by 129 campuses worldwide
•    Conferences and workshops related to Open Access, which tracks events from 2002 to 2010

“The Open Access Directory has become a central and relied-upon resource that is also a gathering place for everyone looking to learn more about the benefits of Open Access,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “In planning last year’s Open Access Day, it became clear that OA champions in every corner of the world have valuable tools, key advancements, and breaking news to share. The OAD is the place they can meet and share these resources.  Congratulations to the editors of the Open Access Directory on their first birthday!”

The Open Access Directory will serve as a central component in the program for the upcoming Open Access Week (October 19 to 23, 2009), which will feature educational resources that local hosts can use to customize events to suit local audiences and time zones. Two sample program tracks, highlighting “Author’s rights and author addenda - For researchers,” and “Institutional Advantages from Open Access - For administrators,” have been released for participants to use to design or inspire their plans for the week.

Sample tracks point first to OASIS (the Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook), which delivers resources for multiple constituencies and awareness levels. Both OAD and OASIS resources are community-driven tools that invite registered users to expand and refine available content. The organizers of Open Access Week invite feedback on the sample tracks as well as contributions to OASIS and the OAD. Additional sample tracks will be developed with advice from registered Open Access Week participants.

Call for action from Mike Rosner, Executive Director, The Rockefeller University Press. Read his editorial entitled “A challenge to Goliath”. 

Here’s the opening line to tempt you to read further: “ Megapublishers obligate librarians to buy hundreds of journals they do not need in order to access the journals their constituents actually read. The time has come to challenge this business model, which is unsustainable for the libraries”. 

Feedback to Mike goes to rossner@rockefeller.edu.

Our friends at the University of Michigan would like to invite you to participate in a one hour SPARC webcast entitled “UMich’s March Open Access Week: Lessons and Ideas”, Thursday April 30, 2009, 12:00PM Pacific | 3:00PM Eastern.

This Webcast is being held to get folks inspired and prepare for Open Access Week 2009 and it will be recorded. Registration is free and open to all, please RSVP by April 28 2009 - 52 folks have already signed up since this morning but we have unlimited space.

Inspired by Open Access Day 2008, the University of Michigan Library held their own week-long series of events in celebration of a local “Open Access Week” in March. The week was planned by an ad hoc committee of librarians that included Molly Kleinman, Copyright Specialist and Special Projects Librarian.

Molly will join the Webcast to talk about why the library decided a comprehensive program on Open Access was important, how the team secured administrative support and funding, how they attracted faculty, students, and others to events across campus, what they learned and would do differently next time, what “Copyright Jeopardy” is, exactly, and share her thoughts in general. Participating in the Webcast is recommended for all who plan to or may celebrate Open Access Week in October.

A few of Molly’s views are featured on her blog including:

“Now that I’ve had a little time to catch my breath and look back, I’m realizing that OA Week gave me a much-needed opportunity to refine and reflect on my thinking about open access. Over the course of the week, I learned a few valuable lessons, and even changed my mind about a couple of things.”

“In the past, I have argued that Open Access outreach programs targeting students are misguided, because undergrads have nothing to do with any part of the publishing process… now I believe it’s worth a shot.”

“We in libraries often get bogged down in the numbers, the line graphs that show the skyrocketing prices of journals relative to inflation, the mundanities of our stagnant or shrinking budgets. We believe these fiscal arguments should resonate with faculty, and sometimes they do, but there is nothing terribly inspiring about a line graph. When we talk about the importance of Open Access, we should remember to speak not only about what is broken right now, but also the tantalizing possibilities for the Great Conversation that lies ahead.”

Please join in. Any questions, please email Jennifer McLennan, SPARC’s Director of Communications.

Last year, we ran a popular Synchroblogging competition for Open Access Day and we asked the community to blog about why Open Access mattered to them (we’ll be running a different competition this year). It was nice to see this short post from Dorothea Salo, one of the winners, who seemed pretty pleased with her freebies. It took us a little while to send these items to her because we were waiting on the delivery of the new travel mug. Here’s what she said:

“I believe I promised a rundown of the PLoS swag kindly sent me as commemoration of adventures in Open Access synchroblogging. The swag arrived today! It contains:

* one “Hamsters love PLoS” t-shirt, with a cute hamster in a hamster ball
* one PLoS One t-shirt, in stylin’ dark green
* one PLoS travel mug, which will come in very handy for this summer’s travels
* two PLoS window decals
* several PLoS stickers (which I appreciate, because I can use them as giveaways to faculty locally)
* an Open Access Day button

That’s a pretty epic swag haul for writing one blog post! Thanks, PLoS!

(Though it really shoulda been “Pikas love PLoS.” I’m just sayin’ here.)”

“The woods are full of misunderstandings about OA.  They thrive in almost every habitat, and the population soars whenever a major institution adopts an OA policy.  Contact between new developments and new observers who haven’t followed the annual migrations always results in a colorful boomlet of young misunderstandings.

Some of these misunderstandings are mistaken for one another, especially in the flurry of activity, because of their similar markings and habitat.  Some are mistaken for understanding by novices unfamiliar with the medley of variant plumage, adaptive camouflage, and deceptive vocalizations.  This field guide should help you identify 25 of the most common visitors to your neck of the woods.

Leave your binoculars at home.  All of these can be seen with the naked eye.  With no more than this guide, and some patient observation, every trip to a conference, and even an occasional faculty meeting, can be an enjoyable and educational outing”.

The above courtesy of Peter Suber’s blog, learn more about the misunderstandings here and help to correct them.

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) are pleased to announce that they will jointly host the 1st Conference for Open Access Scholarly Publishers in Lund, Sweden from the 14th-16th September 2009 at the Scandic Star Hotel.

The conference is directed towards the interests of independent open access journals and professional publishing organizations, as well as librarians, suppliers and other stakeholders. Also those who are interested in learning more about open access publishing and exploring opportunities are welcome.

Participants will have the opportunity to hear from many leading figures within the open access publishing movement, and to participate in workshops that will highlight a number of important issues related to open access publishing. A growing speakers list already includes: Lars Bjornshauge, Director Lund University Library Head Office/DOAJ, John Willinsky, Public Knowledge Project/OJS, Geoff Bilder, CrossRef, Kaitlin Thaney, Creative Commons and Jens Vigens, CERN/SCOAP3.

Additional information on the conference, registration and proposal submissions can found on the conference website. Early bird fees will be available.

Members of OASPA are also invited to participate in the first General Meeting of OASPA which will be held in the afternoon on September 16th at the end of the conference.

The organizing committee, the DOAJ and OASPA look forward to welcoming a broad and international spectrum of publishers and publishing suppliers to the first conference to specifically focus on open access and publishing.

As of today, the Directory of Open Access Journals contains 4000 open access journals, i.e. quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web.  Congratulations all round.

The usage of DOAJ is constantly increasing. Every month they have more than 8 million hits; hundreds of libraries all over the world have included the DOAJ titles in their catalogues and other services and commercial aggregators are also benefiting from this service.

The goal of the Directory of Open Access Journals is still to increase the visibility and accessibility of open access scholarly journals, and thereby promote their increased usage and impact. The directory aims to comprehensively cover all open access scholarly journals that use an appropriate quality control system. Journals in about 50 languages can be found and all subject areas are welcome. The DOAJ contains journals from 98 countries and to maintain the quality of the service they have also removed titles that no longer live up to the selection criteria. - 94 titles were removed during 2008.

DOAJ is sponsored by the National Library of Sweden, INASP, Swedish Library Association, Lund University.

In February 2007 a membership program was launched in order to create a sustainable financial foundation for the continuing operation and development of DOAJ.  Today DOAJ has 13 individuals, 80 libraries, universities and research centers, 10 library consortia and 2 aggregators as members. Thanks to all of them for their  support!