A mandate for Open Access: The University of Liège (ULg) and ULg Library

29/05/2013 – 11:57 am
Tony McCall

The University of Liège has an exemplary Open Access mandate. It inspired a unique collaboration among researchers, university management and library. In this guest post, François Renaville, systems librarian at the ULg Library, explains how. ULg’s institutional repository ORBi is indexed in Primo Central. For more information about institutional repositories in Primo Central click here.

Open access to academic output has been for some years now in the center of scholarly communication at the University of Liège (ULg). In 2007, our Administrative Board adopted the Immediate-Deposit & Optional-Access (IDOA) mandate and took the radical step of making it compulsory for our researchers to add references for all their publications and academic conferences to the institutional repository, backdated to 2002, and to deposit the full electronic version of all the articles that they have published since 2002.

A reference to a scholarly publication has to be placed in the repository as soon as the publication has been accepted by the publisher or as soon as the document is considered to be complete. The obligation to deposit the full text of documents in the repository is relevant only for articles published in journals, but it is in no way exclusive: any other type of publication (book chapters, dissertations, reports, conference presentations, lectures for the general public, posters, course notes…) can be deposited as well. Authors grant open access to the full text of the documents if the publishers’ terms allow them to do so. In cases where embargoes or other restrictions are imposed by a publisher, readers can still request as a print copy from the author directly from the repository.

More at:
http://initiatives.exlibrisgroup.com/2013/05/a-mandate-for-open-access-university-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BxBlog+%28Ex+Libris+Initiatives+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+International

author: Christine Stohn
source: Ex Libris Initiatives Blog (8/5/13)

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ACU now subscribes to Book Citation Index in Web of Knowledge

27/05/2013 – 2:47 pm
Barbara Adamson

Books traditionally have not been covered in database citation-tracking tools such as Web of Science and Scopus but that is starting to change.  In the last two years Thomson Reuters, producers of Web of Science, have added two Book Citation Indexes to their journal citation-tracking databases.  ACU now subscribes to the  Book Citation Index — Social Sciences and Humanities and the  Book Citation Index — Science.

Below are examples of how our new subscriptions to the Annual Review of Sociology and the Annual Review of Psychology can be tracked using the Book Citation Index.

If you use the Book Citation Index and search on the Annual Review of Sociology (there is a drop-down option to select  Publication Title)  then sort by Times cited – Highest to Lowest – you will find that the DiPrete article below has been the most highly cited article to date with 126 citations.  The database then allows you to look up each of these 126 citations.

DiPrete, T. A., & Eirich, G. M. (2006). Cumulative advantage as a mechanism for inequality: A review of theoretical and empirical developments Annual Review of Sociology, 32,  271-297.

The most cited article in the Annual Review of Psychology, is this one, with 697  citation as at 27 May 2013:

MacKinnon, D. P., Fairchild, A. J., & Fritz, M. S. (2007). Mediation analysis Annual Review of Psychology ,  58, 593-614.

These are actually examples of book series but if you use the Topic field to search on the word psycholog* (note that the asterisk is a truncation symbol allowing retrieval of titles with the stem “psycholog”), you will find that this book has had 691 citations as at 27 May 2013:

Wegner, D. M. (2002). Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Book Series do seem to figure prominently but you can refine your results to just books.

There are some key limitations to the resource at present.  Firstly, it only goes back to 2005 (with some earlier citations) and this is not enough time to build up a huge body of citations.  Secondly, not all publishers are included at this stage.

There are more than 40 000 books in the database at present (including the Science sub-set) and 10 000 more are being added each year.  The Social and Behavioural Sciences and Arts and Humanities together account for over 60 % of the database.

You can add the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index to your search to cover journal citations as well.

Book citations can also be tracked via Google Scholar.  When searching for a book title in Google Scholar, put quotation marks around the book title to retrieve the book.  There are usually more citations retrieved when using Google Scholar.

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Citation Index

23/05/2013 – 7:44 am
Tony McCall

A citation index is an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily discern which later documents cite which earlier documents.

The first citation indices were legal citators such as Shepard’s Citations (1873). In 1960, Eugene Garfield’s Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for papers published in academic journals, starting with the Science Citation Index (SCI), and later expanding to produce the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). As of 2006, there are other sources of such data, such as Google Scholar.

Citations are used as a measure of importance or relative value of the information source, such as an individual journal article, book, and others. For example, if an article is frequently cited by other journal articles and books in the discipline, it may indicate the relative importance of a work. Citation impact analysis is called bibliometrics in library and information science and has a wide range of applications.

Citation analysis

A citation is the act of acknowledging or citing the author, year, title, and locus of publication (journal, book, or other) of a source used in a published work. Such citations can be counted as measures of the usage and impact of the cited work. This is called citation analysis or bibliometrics (see below). Among the measures that have emerged from citation analysis are the citation count for

An individual article (how often it was cited)
An author (total citations, or average citation count per article)
For a journal (journal impact factor, or the average citation count for the articles in the journal)

Citation counts are correlated with other measures of scholarly/scientific performance and impact and can in some cases be enhanced by making a work open access by self-archiving the complete article on the web, publishing it in an open access journal, or publishing it as an Open access article in one of the Hybrid open access journals.

There also exists an H-index measure of an individual scientist’s impact and citation record.

Major current citation indexing services

There are two publishers of general-purpose academic citation indexes, available to libraries by subscription:

ISI is now part of Thomson Scientific. Though the ISI citation indexes are still published in print and compact disc, they are now generally accessed through the Web under the name Web of Science, which is in turn part of the group of databases in WoK.
Elsevier publishes Scopus, available online only, which similarly combines subject searching with citation browsing and tracking in the sciences and social sciences.

There are a number of other indexes, more readily available. Some of the currently notable ones are:

The CiteSeer system provides citation and other searching of scientific literature, primarily in the fields of computer and information science.
RePec provides this in economics, and other discipline-specific indexes have also begun to include it in their indexes. Even journal publishers often supply the facility to link to late citations, at least from the journals they publish.
Google Scholar (GS) has citation functionality, limited to the recent articles that are included. There is already discussion about the possibility that GS may in the future have sufficient capabilities to make the commercial products unnecessary.

Each of these products offer an index of citations between publications and a mechanism to establish which documents cite which other documents. The different products offer different ways to access the citation list and also display their citation index differently. They differ widely in cost: WOK and Scopus are among the highest-cost subscription databases; the others mentioned are free.

More at:

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Citation_index

source: Citation index. (2013, May 22). New World Encyclopedia, . Retrieved 21:40, May 22, 2013 from http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Citation_index&oldid=969421.

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“Walking in quicksand ­ keeping up with copyright agreements”

23/05/2013 – 7:24 am
Tony McCall

As any repository manager will tell you, one of the biggest headaches for providing open access to research materials is complying with publisher agreements.

Most publishers will allow some form of an article published in their journals to be made open access. There is a very useful site that helps people work out what the conditions are for a given journal or publisher, called Sherpa RoMEO*.

In many institutions the responsibility for copyright checking is taken by the repository manager (rather than requiring the author to do it), and usually the workflow includes some or all of:

Checking Sherpa RoMEO and/or the OAKList for local journals
Consulting (and adding to) an internal database
Looking at the journal/conference/publisher webpages
Locating and consulting at the Copyright Transfer Agreement the author signed
Contacting the publisher directly for permission if the OA position is not able to be determined using any of these resources.

One problem repository managers face is that publishers sometimes change their position on open access. Often there is no public announcement from the publisher; especially when the change imposes more restrictions on ‘green’ open access. This is where the blogosphere and discussion lists (such as the CAIRSS List in Australia) are invaluable in keeping practitioners on top of new issues in the area.

Some recent cases where publishers set more restrictions on ‘green’ open access include Springer and IEEE.

[*SHERPA stands for Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access, and RoMEO stands for Rights Metadata for Open archiving.]

More at:
http://aoasg.org.au/2013/05/23/walking-in-quicksand-keeping-up-with-copyright-agreements

author: Danny Kingsley
source: AOASG (23/5/13)

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Invitation: Open Access and Research Conference 2013

09/05/2013 – 8:17 am
Tony McCall

Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is hosting the Open Access and Research Conference 2013, in Brisbane from 31 October to 1 November.

The adoption of national and institutional open access mandates in recent years is evidence of the global transition towards more broad-reaching, efficient and inclusive systems of scholarly communication.

The conference theme Discovery, Impact and Innovation examines this transition and looks ahead, to how these emerging systems can maximise research impact and help realise the full benefits of public research worldwide.

The event is an opportunity to take stock of recent developments in Open Access and to discuss the strategic advantages these bring to the research sector moving forward.

Conference website at:
http://www.oar2013.qut.edu.au/

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Free-for-all – Open-access scientific publishing is gaining ground

07/05/2013 – 11:47 am
Tony McCall

At the beginning of April, Research Councils UK, a conduit through which the government transmits taxpayers’ money to academic researchers, changed the rules on how the results of studies it pays for are made public. From now on they will have to be published in journals that make them available free—preferably immediately, but certainly within a year.

In February the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told federal agencies to make similar plans. A week before that, a bill which would require free access to government-financed research after six months had begun to wend its way through Congress. The European Union is moving in the same direction. So are charities. And SCOAP3, a consortium of particle-physics laboratories, libraries and funding agencies, is pressing all 12 of the field’s leading journals to make the 7,000 articles they publish each year free to read. For scientific publishers, it seems, the party may soon be over.

It has, they would have to admit, been a good bash. The current enterprise—selling the results of other people’s work, submitted free of charge and vetted for nothing by third parties in a process called peer review, has been immensely profitable. Elsevier, a Dutch firm that is the world’s biggest journal publisher, had a margin last year of 38% on revenues of £2.1 billion ($3.2 billion). Springer, a German firm that is the second-biggest journal publisher, made 36% on sales of €875m ($1.1 billion) in 2011 (the most recent year for which figures are available). Such firms are now, though, faced with competitors set up explicitly to cover only their costs. Some rely on charity, but many have a proper business model: academics pay a fee to be published. So, on the principle of “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”, commercial publishers, too, are setting up open-access subsidiaries.

More at:-
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21577035-open-access-scientific-publishing-gaining-ground-free-all

source: The Economist (4/5/13)

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Australasian Research Management Society Events 2013

06/05/2013 – 8:27 am
Tony McCall

ARC/NHMRC Research Administrators’ Seminar in association with ARMS

The ARC and NHMRC, in association with ARMS, will again be conducting a Research Administrators’ Seminar in November 2013.
The seminar is to be held in Canberra on 25 and 26 November 2013. The venue for both days is the National Convention Centre, 31 Constitution Avenue, Canberra.
If you have any questions in relation to the event, please do not hesitate to email communications@arc.gov.au

Reminder: ARMS/Elsevier SCOPUS Young Researcher of the Year Awards

The Australasian researchers are well known internationally for their achievements and dedicated contributions to various fields of research. To honour these achievements ARMS and Elsevier are proud to bring you the Scopus Young Researcher of the Year Awards for 2013.

The Awards for 2013 will be presented in the following categories:

1. Humanities and Social Sciences
2. Physical Sciences
3. Engineering and Technology
4. Life Sciences and Biological Sciences
5. Medicine and Medical Sciences

The closing date for nominations is 15 May 2013
The closing date for applications is 2 June 2013

The awards will be presented at the Australasian Research Management Society Conference in Adelaide, Australia on Friday, 13 September 2013.
For more information on the awards and for the nomination and application forms, please click HERE

Call for Abstracts – ARMS Adelaide 2013 Conference
Are you interested in presenting at this year’s conference? If so it’s time to submit your abstract. The conference theme is Stimulating Change and will focus on the evolving nature of our environment and our profession. The themes are:-
1. Innovation in Research Management
2. International Engagement
3. Inspiring Collaboration
4. Impacts & Opportunities in e-research.

The closing date for abstracts is 31 May 2013
Authors will be notified at start July 2013

If your organisation would like the opportunity to be a partner or to exhibit at the conference, the Partnering Prospectus is available at the conference web site http://www.arms2013.org.au/

Partnering and exhibiting offers excellent opportunities for research organisations and research service providers to communicate with members.

To keep updated on the conference, please register your interest at the web site

ARMS EARMA International Fellowship Program Call for Applications

ARMS is pleased to announce to its members the ARMS-EARMA International Fellowship. The Fellowship program builds on the successful joint Fellowship Program between the European Association of Research Managers & Administrators (EARMA) and the USA sister organisation National Council of University Research Administrators (NCURA).

The Fellowship program has three underlying objectives;

1. Transfer of Knowledge (ToK)
2. The training of research administrators;
3. Enhancing and building strong links between research administration systems.

The fellowship is intended to reduce barriers to international research administration and to assist individuals to interpret the multitude of sponsor requirements and administrative compliance – from submission of an application through to post-award and closeout.

The program will provide an opportunity for European and Australasian research administrators to travel to research organisations abroad and immerse themselves in a program of mutual learning and knowledge exchange. Fellows will be expected to pass on their experiences and knowledge of research administration management at their institution, identify best practices and local knowledge of the host institution, and also to respect all organisational rules and cultural practices.

For more information of the Fellowship and how to apply, please click HERE

The closing date for applications is 31 May 2013

Research Training Directors Special Interest Group Workshop

Members of the Research Training Directors SIG are invited to the Benchmarking Series Workshop to be held on Wednesday, 5 June 2013 from 10am to 4pm at Macquarie University.

The series is designed to give members the opportunity to discuss topics in depth with colleagues who are dealing with the same issues.

Workshop No. 1 will cover 2 topics:

• China Scholarship Council Scholarships, and
• United Nations and Autonomous Sanctions

All members of the Research Training Directors SIG are encouraged to attend.
Please RSVP to Helen and Kim at ARMS_hdr@researchmanagement.org.au by Friday 17 May 2013.

Science and Industry Endowment Fund (SIEF) 2014 Postdoctoral Fellowships Open

The Science and Industry Endowment Fund (SIEF) has funding available for up to 6 fellowships commencing in 2014.

The process of awarding fellowships will begin with an invitation to Australian universities and Publically Funded Research Agencies (PFRA) and Research Institutes to submit proposals. Preferentially, research projects will be collaborative projects between PRFAs and universities. There is also a strong preference for end-user/industry engagement in the project. The proposal, which must be submitted via the University Research Office (or equivalent), will identify the eligible Candidate, the proposed project, Lead supervisor and any other collaborating partners. Proposals will be assessed by a panel of experts drawn from universities, publicly funded research agencies and industry representatives.

SIEF is seeking applications that include a diverse range of Early Career Researchers in order to ensure that it has the strongest field of candidates and projects from which to select.

Further information about the 2014 program, including the application form are available on the SIEF website.

The closing date for applications is 5pm AEST, 12 August 2013

________________________________________
Upcoming Events

World Conference on Research Integrity, 5-8 May 2013 Montreal. For more information visit the conference website

CRCA Collaborate Innovate 2013: Impact through Collaboration, 15-17 May 2013 Melbourne. Visit the website for registration details.

ARMS 2013 Conference, 11-13 September 2013, Adelaide. More information will be made available on the website.

AEN Conference, 27-29 November 2013, Fremantle. Please email: human.ethics@murdoch.edu.au to join the conference mailing list or view the website for more detail

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Researching Into Open Access

30/04/2013 – 8:45 am
Tony McCall

As part of IT Services’ contribution to Open Access Oxford, we have been exploring the perspectives on OA held by different stakeholders, both through interviews with University staff (of which more in a future post) and through a review of the recent literature on OA. In conducting this review we interpreted ‘literature’ in its broadest sense, embracing everything from peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers to media releases from research councils and ‘opinion pieces’ in blogs that reflect academics’ uncertainty during the months preceding the finalisation of the RCUK’s policy. They are all recorded in a Google document.

For readers who are specifically interested in the findings of scholarly research into OA, I summarise here a selection of papers that seem particularly enlightening. They are, of course, open access – either green or gold. I have listed them in logical (rather than chronological) order, starting with a historical overview, then moving through matters of green vs gold and APCs to questions of impact.

Laakso, M. & Björk, B-C. (2012). Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development and internal structure. BMC Medicine, 10:124.
An overview of developments since c.2000. The authors calculate that OA publishing has been ‘steadily’ increasing by roughly 1% annually across all scientific disciplines, with the greatest growth (unsurprisingly) in biomedicine.

Gargouri, Y., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Carr, L. & Harnad, S. (2012). Green and Gold Open Access Percentages and Growth, by Discipline. 17th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI), Montreal, 5th–8th September 2012.
An investigation into the growth of green and gold OA by discipline over the period 1998–2010 and found that green exceeds gold by a factor of 10 except in biomedicine. The authors suggest that the proportion of green OA will triple if institutions make self-archiving mandatory. In contrast to Laakso & Björk they consider an overall growth rate in OA of 1% as ‘still very slow.’

Solomon D.J. & Björk, B-C. (2012). A Study of Open Access Journals Using Article Processing Charges. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63: 1485-1495. (Link is to the preprint.)
An analysis of journals listed in the DOAJ as charging APC (2010 data). The authors found a price range from $8 to $3900. As one might expect, the lowest APCs are mainly charged by journals in developing countries and the highest by the publishers of high-impact journals. Moreover, journals published by scholarly societies, HE institutions, and academics have lower APCs than those published professionally.

Björk, B-C. (2012). The hybrid model for open access publication of scholarly articles: a failed experiment?
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 63: 1496-1504. (Link is to the institutional repository version.)
The author notes the high level of APCs charged by hybrid journals, which may account for the low proportion of authors taking up this option (estimated at 1–2%). He concludes that the hybrid model has not helped significantly to increase the volume of OA articles (at least, at the time of writing), and suggests that publishers will tend to set up new journals that are wholly OA instead.

Davis, P.M. & Walters, W.H. (2011). The impact of free access to the scientific literature: a review of recent research.
Journal of the Medical Library Association, 99: 208-217.
Review of recent studies to evaluate the impact of OA publishing on scientists’ academic behaviour. Findings include evidence that a) the access status of a journal is not an important factor in deciding where to publish; b) OA increases the number of times an article is downloaded (but impact on citations is unclear); and c) not enough is known yet about the extent to which the general public accesses OA articles in the biomedical sciences. The authors conclude that there is ‘little evidence to support the idea that there is a crisis in access to the scholarly literature.’ They recommend that research be carried out into the informal dissemination of scientific literature.

Björk, B-C. & Solomon, D.J. (2012). Open access versus subscription journals – a comparison of scientific impact. BMC Medicine, 10:73.
A comparison of the scientific impact of OA journals with subscription journals, controlling for journal age, the country of the publisher, discipline and (for OA publishers) their business model. The authors suggest their results indicate that ‘OA journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus are approaching the same scientific impact and quality as subscription journals, particularly in biomedicine and for journals funded by article processing charges.’

Articles may be accessed from :-

http://openaccess.ox.ac.uk/researching-into-open-access/

author: Liz Masterman
source: OAO (22/4/13)

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University of Iowa Libraries and Provost Office Launches Open Access Publishing Fund

23/04/2013 – 9:07 am
Tony McCall

[Last] week, the Office of the Provost and UI Libraries established a $50,000 fund to cover researchers’ publication fees for open access journals, which can be as much as $3,000. Library officials say it will be an annual fund.

When researchers publish in an open access journal, they’re charged a publication fee. Mike Wright, UI’s interim associate university librarian for collections and scholarly communication, estimates that fees range from $100 up to $3,000. For researchers who don’t receive grant funding for their work — funding tends to concentrate in the medical and biological sciences — the fee is enough to deter them from open access, he said.

“If I’m an assistant professor in a humanities discipline, I’m probably not bringing in a huge salary, and a $2,500 publishing fee is a heck of a lot of money,” Wright said. “If I have a choice between an open access journal and a traditional journal that doesn’t charge me, I’m probably going to go with the traditional journal.”

More, and link to full article, at:-
http://www.infodocket.com/2013/04/22/university-of-iowa-libraries-and-provost-office-launches-open-access-publishing-fund/

author: Gary Price
source: InfoDocket (22/4/13)

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Open access: four ways it could enhance academic freedom

23/04/2013 – 9:01 am
Tony McCall

The power of funding alone should not be enough to override academic freedom, argues Curt Rice, nor does open access automatically skew the world of scholarship.

Are politicians stealing our academic freedom? Is their fetish with open access publishing leading to a ‘pay to say’ system for the rich? And will the trendy goal of making publicly financed research freely available skew the world of scholarship even further towards the natural sciences? I don’t think so. But it took me a while to get there.

The freedom to choose

Academic freedom lets scientists choose the research questions they want to ask. They can pursue their hypotheses however they like. Their results and reasoning can be discussed without any fear of reprisals from governments or universities. The frontiers of knowledge move forward without political interference or personal risk because of academic freedom.

The Norwegian government recently wrote about open access publishing as a potential threat to academic freedom: “All research that is publicly financed should be openly accessible. This principle, however, must not hinder the academic freedom researchers enjoy to choose their preferred channels of publication.”

How could academic freedom be impeded by a requirement to publish in open access journals? Doesn’t it seem just a bit too luxurious to turn this principle into something about the business models of journals? Maybe. But experts writing about academic freedom recently asserted a right “to decide how publication shall happen”.

More at:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2013/apr/22/open-access-academic-freedom-publishing

author: Curt Rice
source: The Guardian (Higher Education Network (22/4/13)

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