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General Scholarly Communication News
Modern Language Association Releases Report “Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion”
January 3, 2006
Excerpt from Executive Summary: "In 2004 the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association of America created a task force to examine current standards and emerging trends in publication requirements for tenure and promotion in English and foreign language departments in the United States. The council’s action came in response to widespread anxiety in the profession about ever-rising demands for research productivity and shrinking humanities lists by academic publishers, worries that forms of scholarship other than single-authored books were not being properly recognized, and fears that a generation of junior scholars would have a significantly reduced chance of being tenured. The task force was charged with investigating the factual basis behind such concerns and making recommendations to address the changing environment in which scholarship is being evaluated in tenure and promotion decisions."
Access the Executive Summary or the Full Report from
Open Access News
Free Online Podcast Abstracts
January 13, 2007
JournalJunkieprovides free online podcasts of the abstracts of articles in a growing number of medical journals. You can listen to them online or download them to your MP3 player. You can also "subscribe" for automatic downloads. When the journals provide their own podcasts (as Lancet, BMJ, NEJM, and JAMA do, for example), JournalJunkie simply adds links and the layer of subscription management. For journals that don't already provide podcasts, JournalJunkie makes its own. All the voices on its podcasts are human --and it has a standing call for more human readers.
Source: Open Access News,
Public Access to Federally Funded Research to be Discussed at Conference
January 10, 2007
The upcoming SPARC-ACRL forum on emerging issues in scholarly communication, to be held during the American Library Association's Midwinter Meeting in Seattle, will explore Public Access - Federal Research Access Policies and How They'll Change Your Library.
The drive for free public access to publicly funded research is in high gear in the U.S., Canada, and around the globe. For scientists and scholars, it promises not just to change the norms for how research is shared, but also to open new avenues for how it is conducted. The implications for academic and research libraries are no less profound, as the possibility of new and expanded roles in the research process emerge.
The popular SPARC-ACRL Forum looks at what the changes mean for libraries. Speakers will examine current and emerging public access policies and explore key questions facing libraries: What role will institutional repositories play? Do libraries have a part in research funders' plans? How will scholarship and teaching be changed? What can libraries do to strengthen their partnerships with scholars and users in this new environment? What can you do to prepare for the transformation ahead?
Speakers will include:
- David Pershing, Senior Vice-President for Academic Affairs, University of Utah, who will introduce emerging policies and how they relate to the mission of the university and library.
- Carl T. Bergstrom, Associate Professor of Biology, University of Washington, who will explore the tremendous potential for research represented by public access.
- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Scholarly Publishing and Licensing Consultant, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on rights management for public access and how MIT is engaging and supporting faculty.
Come to the Forum for new insight and practical information on one of the most significant scholarly communication developments of recent years.
The SPARC-ACRL Forum will be held:
Saturday, January 20, 2007
4:00 - 6:00PM
The Sheraton Seattle, Metropolitan B
Registration is NOT required
(The event will be available via podcast at a later date).
The forum is followed by the ACRL Scholarly Communication Discussion Group, where there will be an open discussion of key issues that surface at the Forum. The Discussion Group will be held Sunday, January 21, 4:00 - 6:00 PM in the St. Helen's room of The Westin Seattle.
For more information, visit the SPARC Web site at
UK PubMed Central Launched
January 9, 2007
UKPMC, the first PubMed Central International Site, was officially released on January 8, 2007. UKPMC will function as the United Kingdom's archive of free, full text biomedical research articles and will contain most of the content currently available in PubMed Central.
The UKPMC project includes an installation of the United Kingdom Manuscript Submission System (UKMSS), a version of the Portable PubMed Central Manuscript Submission system (pNIHMS) developed at NCBI. These two systems provide a mechanism archiving and distributing research manuscripts funded by the UKPMC consortium.
UKPMC is sponsored by a consortium of organizations involved in funding
biomedical research in the United Kingdom ( and is operated by British Library and the University of Manchester.
Information about PubMed Central International can be found at
UK PubMed Central, a permanent online open access archive, has now launched. All open access content published in BioMed Central's journals will be automatically included. For more, read the UK PubMed Central press release.
New Titles in Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
January 9, 2007
Information on new titles added to the Directory of Open Access Journals is available from The webpage is continuously updated to provide information for titles added in the previous 30 days.
Open Access: the View from a Scholarly Society’s Journal Editor
January 9, 2007
Starting with the January 2007 issue of the journal Plant Physiology, all articles published by members of the scholarly society that publishes the journal, the American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB), are open access at no additional cost to the member. Of the 43 articles in the January issue, 25 are freely available to all scholars with no lag period. Some of these may have been authored by non-members who paid $1,000* in order to provide open access to their article, but I suspect not many. [*$1000 if the corresponding author's institution does not subscribe to Plant Physiology, if it does subscribe it is $500.]
The editor of the journal, Donald Ort of the University of Illinois, wrote an editorial for the ASPB News, "Real-Time Plant Physiology: My View of What’s in It for Authors, the Journal, and ASPB". Following several avenues of analysis, he concludes that open access articles are more highly read than non-open access articles, which in turn he feels will enhance the stature of the journal. He also presents an interesting table listing the top 10 plant research journals and their open access option. Most have a provision for open access if the author pays; Plant Physiology will be the only one that offers free open access publishing to it's member authors. Of course, another perk with offering free open access publishing to members might be a jump in the membership count.
Interestingly, the editorial that Ort wrote for the ASPB Newsletter was only available online to members until he deposited it in the University of Illinois' digitial repository, IDEALS, where it is now freely available to all. It can also be noted that the ASPB has for several years provided free online access to The Arabidopsis Book through a collaboration with BioOne.
Source: Issues in Scholarly Communication,
PLoS ONE Launched: Scholarly Research Portal
December 27, 2006
The launch of the new PLoS ONE scholarly research portal looks like a big win for open access research content from a number of angles. PLoS ONE is posting research and will allow interactive review before and after publication for scientific articles via a very sophisticated publishing environment. The PLoS ONE platform applies many of the best practices of social media, providing ready access to comments posting and awareness of active discussions to draw in more active discussions. PLoS ONE will publish all papers that are judged to be rigorous and technically sound, and had already posted more an 100 papers by its launch - a remarkable number for a just-launched scholarly journal of any kind. By contrast Nature's recently shuttered open-review portal trial, which ran for around four months, attracted only 71 authors willing to post their work online and attracted 92 technical comments.
As we noted in our latest news analysis article one of the keys to successful social media products is a dedicated core of trusted contributors who will be able to ensure editorial success. PLoS ONE starts with a global editorial board of more than 200 scholars, ensuring a broad array of inputs for reviewing content. Some of the fears about having content rejected after having had it exposed to comments prior to publication may be relieved by the PLoS ONE policy that allows papers that have been already rejected by PLoS Biology and Medicine journals to be re-submitted via PLoS ONE. This is a potentially valuable feature, allowing research that may not have yet reached the highest levels of acceptance to mature through its exposure to comments from a broader audience.
PLoS ONE is finally opening the doors to the potential for fundamental changes in how scholarly research proves its worth. With an open exchange of ideas and commentary facilitated by technologies long available to the general public and a solid body of research and reviewers PLoS ONE holds out the potential to liberate the highest levels of scholarly innovation from the regimen of the printing press. Changing the way that research is paid for was a good first step for open access, but with the ability to eliminate artificial distribution bottlenecks that choke off natural conversations PLoS ONE may do for scholarly research what Wikipedia has done for reference materials - with much more integrity in the underlying editorial processes.
Source: Issues in Scholarly Communication,
Directory of Open Access Journals Reaches Milestone of 2500 Journals
December 15, 2006
Lund, Sweden – As of today the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ, contains 2500 open access journals, i.e. quality controlled scientific and scholarly electronic journals that are freely available on the web.
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 all languages and subject areas will be included in the DOAJ. The selection criteria have been updated based on feedback from users to be more understandable
The database records are freely available for reuse in library catalogues and other services and can be harvested by using the OAI-PMH( and thereby increase the visibility of the open access journals.
We are very happy to see that the usage of the DOAJ is constantly increasing on all parameters. Every month visitors from more than 160 countries are using the service, hundreds of libraries all over the world have included the DOAJ titles in their catalogues and other services, and commercial aggregators are as well benefiting of the service.
New titles are added frequently and to ensure that the holding information is correct you have to update your records regularly. We also have to remove titles from DOAJ if they no longer lives up to the selection criteria e.g. during 2006 65 titles has been removed.
In October we launched the "For Authors Service" in the DOAJ. The service is a look up service for authors who wants to publish their research as open access. As of today researchers can find information about the "pure" OA journals from DOAJ and about the "hybrid" journals that for a fee allow the authors to publish their research as OA in an otherwise subscription based journal. We are very pleased to see that the usage of this new service is also increasing. For a closer look at the new service go to and choose "For authors" in the menu.
DOAJ is or has been supported by the Information Program of the Open Society Institute ( along with SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), ( SPARC Europe, ( BIBSAM, the Royal Library of Sweden ( and Axiell (
If you know of a journal that should be included in the directory, use this form to report it to the directory: Information about how to obtain DOAJ records for use in a library catalogue or other service you will find at:
Source: DOAJ,
OxfordUniversity Press Makes Content Available in PubMed Central
November 28, 2006
Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press has announced a new agreement with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) that will allow all content published as open access under its Oxford Open model to be available from PubMed Central.
Source: EContentNews: Digital Content Strategies & Resources,
Funding Agencies Provide Support for Open Access Fees
November 2, 2006
Which funding agencies mandate or recommend that their grantees make their research available in an openly accessible venue?Which funding agencies allow their grantees to use grant funds for open access fees?Which funding agencies have set aside pools of money to support open access publishing by it's grantees?
Several organizations have pulled together information on such funder policies:
- SHERPA's Juliet database of funder policies
- BMC's comparative table of funder policies
- The ROARMAP list of the strongest funder and university policies
- The SPARC Europe spreadsheet of OA policies at the eight Research Councils UK
Source: Issues in Scholarly Communication,
PubMed Central Launches PMC International
November 1, 2006
PubMed Central has developed and launched PMC International. PMCI is a “collaborative effort between NLM, the publishers whose journal content makes up the PMC archive, and organizations in other countries that share NLM’s interest in archiving life sciences literature. The long term goal of PMCI is to create a network of digital archives that can share some or all of their respective locally deposited content with others in the network.”
Impact Factors for BioMed Central Journals Released
June 2006
Eleven of BioMed Central’s open access journals have received Impact Factors. Read press release from BioMed Central.
Open Access Book Series Launched
Summer 2006
The Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies has launched a multidisciplinary series of Open Access books named COLLeGIUM. From their website:
“COLLeGIUM is a scholarly, open-access series of interdisciplinary publications by the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, a research institute for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Helsinki. The series consists of electronic volumes written or edited by the Fellows of the Collegium. The first volume appeared in June 2006 and several other volumes are in preparation. All studies published in the series are internationally refereed.”
The first volume is The Travelling Concept of Narrative and is available from
Copyright News
Creative Commons Add-In for Microsoft Office
December 13, 2006
Microsoft has created a free add-in that enables you to embed a Creative Commons copyright license into a document that you create using the Microsoft application Word, PowerPoint, or Excel. With a Creative Commons license, authors can express their intentions regarding how their works may be used by others.
To learn more about Creative Commons, please visit its web site, To learn more about the choices among the Creative Commons licenses, see
Download the Creative Commons Microsoft Office add-in from the Microsoft website. For a short URL to this resource, use this tinyURL:
Installation of the Creative Commons Microsoft Office add-in will add an option to your File menu whereby you can easily add the CC logo and usage statement to your document.
Source: Issues in Scholarly Communication,
LondonArt Museum to Drop Reproduction Fees for Scholarly Uses
December 1, 2006
By Martin Bailey
LONDON. In a move which could transform art publishing, the Victoria and AlbertMuseum in London (V&A) is to drop charges for the reproduction of images in scholarly books and magazines. Reproduction costs now often make it difficult to publish specialist art historical material. The new scheme will come into effect early next year.
The V&A is believed to be the first museum anywhere in the world which is to offer images free of copyright and administrative charges. It also intends to take a “liberal” view on what should be deemed scholarly or educational. The new arrangements will normally apply to all books published by university presses. Free images will also be available for exhibition catalogues and journals such as Apollo and The Burlington.
Reproduction fees currently bring in just over £250,000 a year for the V&A, and it is estimated that around half this sum will be lost. However, administering the system eats into the profits, so the real loss is much less. Under the new scheme, publishers will be able to download images directly from the internet. Commercial publications will continue to be charged.
The V&A feels that it is important that readers see images of items in the collection, helping to fulfil its educational role and raise its profile internationally. Images of 25,000 objects in the V&A will be available.
The decision to end charging could well have major implications on art publishing since there will be pressure on other UK museums to follow suit.