Open Access
aardvarchaeology | December 5, 2012Mads Dengsø Jessen of the National Museum of Denmark wrote me to say that he and his colleagues are re-launching the old Journal of Danish Archaeology (1982-2006) as Danish Journal of Archaeology at Taylor and Francis On-Line. Three papers will hopefully come on-line before Christmas, and further ones will see rolling electronic publication from then on, with an annual physical print volume appearing in ~May.
Subscribers get access to the full back-catalogue of the old JDA, as well as new papers. You can also buy PDFs of single papers without subscribing, but this is jævle expensive. Whether…
jdupuis | November 29, 2012Like the old saying goes, information wants to be free. In particular, the consumers of information would prefer for the most part not to have to directly pay for the information they are consuming. The information itself, if I may anthropomorphize for a moment, also wants to circulate as freely as possible, to be as consumed as widely as possible, to be as highly regarded as possible. That way it gets to be the information that "wins" the best-used-most-used information sweepstakes.
This seems to me to be a first principle for scholarly communications. Both the users of the information and…
jdupuis | October 1, 2012The most recent controversy to whip up the library and science blogospheres revolves around SUNY Potsdam cancelling their American Chemical Society journal package because the subscription packages on offer sucked up too high a percentage of their total budget. SUNY Potsdam Library Director Jenica Rogers wrote about the decision on her blog, garnering quite a bit of attention, including a feature in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The feature included some rather rude and derailing comments from a representative of the ACS, who later threw some gasoline on the PR fire on a chemistry…
jdupuis | September 27, 2012Why do people go into science? Why do people go to work at scholarly societies? Why do people choose scholarly publishing as a career? Why do people choose a career at the intersection of those three vocations?
There are cynical answers to those questions, for sure, and even the non-cynical need to put food on the table. But I truly don't believe people start out their path in life based on cynicism. Rather I believe most people start their careers based on hope.
I can only hope that for a person to pursue a career in scholarly publishing at a scientific society, their goal in life is to try…
jdupuis | September 26, 2012Scholars who grew up with the internet are steadily replacing those that grew up without it. Scholars who expect to put everything they write online, who expect to find everything they need online, and who expect unlocked content that they may read, search, link, copy, cut/paste, crawl, print, and redistribute, are replacing those who never expected these boons and got used to them, if at all, looking over their shoulder for the copyright police. Scholars who expect to find the very best literature online, harmlessly cohabitating with crap are, inexorably replacing scholars who, despite…
jdupuis | September 13, 2012Jenica Rogers is Director of Libraries at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Like so many institutions SUNY Potsdam subscribes to the suite of journals published by the American Chemical Society. Now, that's always a challenge since the ACS prices their products very aggressively as well as pushing the envelope with annual price increases.
Well, push finally came to show and SUNY Potsdam is Walking away from the American Chemical Society.
The problem:
In May 2012, after much internal discussion and debate, three SUNY library directors from the comprehensive colleges (myself…
jdupuis | September 5, 2012About a month ago The Scientist published an interesting set of interviews with a set of scientists, publishers and LIS faculty on the future of scholarly publishing.
They called it Whither Science Publishing? with the subtitle "As we stand on the brink of a new scientific age, how researchers should best communicate their findings and innovations is hotly debated in the publishing trenches."
It's a pretty good set of questions and answers, provocative and thought provoking, with a few good shots especially from the scientist side of things. Unfortunately, I think it lacks a bit in terms of…
jdupuis | August 28, 2012Imagine a scenario where suddenly over night all toll access publishing suddenly converts to Open Access. You go to bed and your average academic library spends millions of dollars on serials. You wake up, and the subscription bill is zero.
Now, that doesn't mean that suddenly scholarly publishing doesn't cost anything to support. It just means that the money to support that publishing is coming from somewhere other than library budgets. I would generally assume that an entirely open access publishing ecosystem would be significantly less expensive overall than the current mixed publishing…
jdupuis | August 20, 2012My colleagues and I are taking our Creative Commons/Panton Principles presentation on the road to another library conference this winter. As a result, I'm still compiling more references on the topic so I thought I share what I've found recently with all of you.
Of course, suggestions for more resources are always welcome in the comments.
NLM APIs (library as data incubator)
Harvard Releases Big Data for Books
What does one do with millions of MARC records?
Harvard Library Bibliographic Dataset Now Available via EBSCO Discovery Service™ from EBSCO Publishing
Harvard Publicly Releases…
kbonham | August 9, 2012While going back through blog archives and reviewing incoming links, I stumbled on this post from about a year ago from Zen Faulkes at Neuro Dojo:
There are many reasons to argue for open access of scientific research. But this is not the best one:
It’s your taxes that fund the research, you should have access to the results without me or anyone else being a mediator.
That one is from Kevin at We, Beasties. When I protested that this argument omits indie science, Kevin replied that it’s such a small amount as to be not even worth considering.
I object to this characterization of my argument (…
jdupuis | June 22, 2012The title of this post might be a bit misleading. I don't really think it's much of a question.
Of course it's ok to get paid to promote open access.
My university pays me to be a librarian. I have faculty status. I can decide what I think are the most important issues in my field. I can advocate for solutions to those issues. I have decided that one of the most important issues in my field of science librarianship is the broken scholarly communications system. I have come to the conclusion that a system of open access to the scholarly literature is much fairer and probably ultimately much…
jdupuis | June 12, 2012Welcome to the most recent installment in my very occasional series of interviews with people in the publishing/science blogging/computing communities. The latest is with Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ. PeerJ is a new startup in the scientific publishing industry, using a rather unique business model whereby authors will be able to pay one fee and they get a lifetime of publishing their articles in PeerJ.
Please see my post with the PeerJ press release for more details.
I recently had an opportunity to ask Peter and Jason some pre-announcement questions about PeerJ and I've included…
jdupuis | June 12, 2012I'm not one for posting publisher press releases on this blog (and embargoed ones at that!) but sometimes you just have to try something a little different. And this is such an occasion.
Below is the press release for a new science publishing startup called PeerJ. It is founded by Peter Binfield, formerly of Public Library of Science, and Jason Hoyt, formerly of Mendeley. The core idea is that scholars will be able to pay one fee (starting at $99) and be able to publish on the PeerJ platform for life. The truly interesting aspect of this is that PeerJ is peer reviewed. It's kind of like a…
jdupuis | May 21, 2012Today is #OAMonday.
It marks the launch of a petition on the Whitehouse web site to "Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research."
Here is the text of the petition:
We petition the obama administration to:
Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.
We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would…
jdupuis | April 25, 2012
Harvard Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing: Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained
"No, we can't"
A proposal for the library of the future
Harvard: we have a problem
Harvard Library: subscriptions too costly, faculty should go open access
Could Harvard Library's "untenable situation" regarding journal costs help move scholars toward open access?
Saying Costly Subscriptions 'Cannot Be Sustained,' Harvard Library Committee Urges Open Access
Harvard's library can't afford journal subscriptions
Harvard Library to faculty: we're going broke unless you go open…
jdupuis | April 23, 2012As I mentioned last week, on Tuesday, April 17 I was part of a workshop on Creative Commons our Scholarly Communications Committee put on for York library staff. My section was on open data and the Panton Principles. While not directly related to Creative Commons, we thought talking a bit about an application area for licensing in general and a specific case where CC is applied would be interesting for staff. We figured it would be the least engaging part of the workshop so I agreed to go last and use any time that was left.
Rather unexpectedly, the idea of data licensing and in particular…
aardvarchaeology | April 12, 2012Perennial Aard favourites N-A. Mörner and B.G. Lind have published another note in a thematically unrelated journal. It's much like the one they snuck past peer review into Geografiska Annaler in 2009 and which Alun Salt and I challenged in 2011. The new paper is as usual completely out of touch with real archaeology, misdating Ales stenar by over 1000 years and comparing it to Stonehenge using the megalithic yard. No mention is made of the fact that this unit of measurement was dreamed up by professor of engineering cum crank archaeoastronomer Alexander Thom and has never had any standing in…
jdupuis | April 1, 2012Hi everybody,
It is with great pride and excitement that I'm finally able to announce something that's been in the works for a few months now. I will be accepting the role of inaugural editor-in-chief of an exciting new journal to be published by Elsevier: The Journal of Applied Publishing Experiments.
This amazing opportunity arose a few months ago, initiated by a blog post of mine that congratulated Elsevier on their wise marketing and publishing moves and this one a bit later, where I declare my undying loyalty to the Elsevier brand. The publisher of Elsevier immediately contacted me…
jdupuis | March 27, 2012This post has superseded my two previous link collection posts here and here.
The first focused solely on the Research Works Act, the second added posts on the Elsevier boycott and this one also incorporates posts on the reintroduction of The Federal Research Public Access Act. These three stories are all intertwined to the extent that it is difficult to separate them out completely. That being said, I'm not attempting to be as comprehensive in coverage for the boycott or for FRPAA as for the RWA.
Some relevant general resources:
The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against…
aardvarchaeology | February 23, 2012The Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities is over 250 years old and consists almost entirely of professors of the humanities and social sciences. But don't let that fool you into thinking that it's a sleepy organisation. For one thing, the Academy is a signatory of the 2003 Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. And so the venerable paper journal I edit, Fornvännen, is one of the first and most successful Open Access journals in the Swedish humanities. Increasingly, the Academy is also putting out the paper books it publishes as Open…