A nonprofit group called Knowledge Unlatched, has come up with a new model for publishing open access books. In this model, libraries pick titles they would like to be open access and pay a title fee for each of those books. Those fees are meant cover the cost of publishing… read more
Open access
Royal Society launching OA journal
The Royal Society of London will launch a new open access journal this fall, Royal Society Open Science (RSOS). RSOS will operate similarly to PLoS One, meaning it will publish research in all areas of science and mathematics and will base peer review on quality of the research, not novelty… read more
Cultural Anthropology Journal goes OA
The Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA) recently announced that their flagship publication, Cultural Anthropology, would be going open access (OA). Their parent organization, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) had negotiated with Wiley-Blackwell to allow the SCA to become OA even though AAA has a publishing contract with Wiley-Blackwell that runs… read more
Economics of the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem
On January 31st, we had a discussion that was open to all library staff about the Economics of the Scholarly Communication Ecosystem. Those of us in the Open Access Group had been reading about the economics behind open access (OA) publishing, traditional, toll-access publishing, and hybrid publishing. We hoped the discussion… read more
Omnibus Appropriations Bill improves public access to research
The Omnibus Appropriations Bill that was recently passed by Congress, included a provision that will greatly improve access to taxpayer-funded research. Under the bill, federal agencies (with research budgets more than $100 million per year) within Labor, Health, and Human Services and Education will be required to provide the public… read more
SCOAP3 starting January 1st
SCOAP3 will start operations on January 1st, 2014. SCOAP3 is a partnership among libraries, funding agencies, and research centers. SCOAP3 works with publishers to make key journals in high energy physics open access. Partners of SCOAP3 pay into a central fund that is then used to pay the publishers for… read more
Posting articles online
Faculty and researchers have a long practice of sharing their published articles. For a long time this was done through personal requests – via mail, telephone, and email – but for the past ten to fifteen years, faculty have been posting copies of their journal articles on either personal webpages… read more
OA Button
Two students and a volunteer team of programmers and designers recently unveiled the Open Access Button. The OA Button is a browser-based tool that allows people to report when they’ve run into a paywall while trying to access material online. The OA Button is very easy to use. You simply… read more
Open access monographs
The momentum towards open access journal articles picked up substantially this year. Even though we’re still a long way from the ideal world we wish we had, where all academic scholarship can be freely read and used by anyone, anywhere, at least we are well on the way. More and… read more
New preprint repository: bioRxiv
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has launched a preprint repository for the biological sciences called bioRxiv. bioRxiv is a place for scientists to deposit their unpublished manuscripts. This is similar to the preprint repository, arXiv, which has been in existence since 1991 and serves mainly researchers in physics, mathematics, and computer… read more