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Two New Databases from EBSCO for Art and Architecture Researchers

Thursday, November 19th, 2009

From the Announcement:

Art & Architecture Index and Art & Architecture Complete, EBSCO provides definitive research databases for the study of art and architecture. Designed for use by a diverse audience, Art & Architecture Index and Art & Architecture Complete will appeal to art scholars, artists, designers, college students and general researchers.

These new art & architecture resources include cover-to-cover indexing and abstracts for more than 620 academic journals, magazines and trade publications as well as over 140 books. Selective coverage is also provided for more than 135 additional publications.

Art & Architecture Complete also contains full-text coverage of more than 230 art & architecture-specific periodicals and more than 100 books. These databases are available via the EBSCOhost platform.

Source: EBSCO

Posted in Arts and Humanities, Databases, Directories, and Guides, Information Industry, Resources, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Old-Book Smell, Sniffing, and Preservation

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

An interesting out of the way question and the NY Times goes on a hunt to find out in this story.

From the Article:

If you have torn yourself away from the virtual library that is the Internet long enough to visit a real library, you know that the smell of old books — musty, slightly acidic, even grassy — is instantly recognizable. But is it quantifiable? And if so, might old-book odor prove useful to librarians and conservators charged with preserving collections?

[Snip]

Dr. Strlic said he got the idea one day at a library when he saw a conservator sniffing an old piece of paper, trying to determine what it was made of. “I thought, certainly a technique could be developed to do that more accurately,” he said. The approach is similar to breath analysis used to diagnose illness, he added.

He and his colleagues analyzed the volatiles produced by 72 samples of old paper of different types and in varying condition from the 19th and 20th centuries, using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. They found that some compounds were reliable markers for paper with certain characteristics — high concentrations of lignin or rosin, for example, which make paper degrade relatively quickly. Their findings were published in the journal Analytical Chemistry.

Source: NY Times

Posted in Preservation/Conservation, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

The Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Use of Digital Repositories and Views on Open Access: A New Report from Primary Research Group

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Primary Research Group reports are fee-based.

However, their ‘new report” announcements always offer some useful and interesting highlights. Here’s what was made available for the following report:

The Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Use of Digital Repositories and Views on Open Access presents data on how higher education faculty in the United States and Canada view the growing digital repository/open access movement. The report helps to answer questions such as: Who cooperates with requests from librarians to participate in repositories and who does not? Who gives their articles to repositories? Who among faculty sympathizes with the aims of open access? How many scholars have had a publication fee paid for them by their library or academic department?

The report presents the results of a survey of more than 550 higher education faculty in the United States and Canada. Data is presented in the aggregate and for 12 criteria including academic field, size of college, type of college, academic title and other factors.

Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:

+ 13% of the faculty in the sample had ever used a college’s institutional digital repository for scholarly research purposes.

+ About 28% said that they sympathize and try to help out by providing open access to their research materials as much as they possibly can.

+ Although the tenured are less likely than the untenured to have heard of digital repositories, they are roughly twice as likely to have actually contributed an article to one of them.

+ 74.62% of the faculty of the sample understood the meaning of the term “open access”. Individuals on the left wing of the political spectrum were more likely than those on the right wing to understand this term.

The complete report costs $92/U.S. and runs more than 65 pages.

Posted in Libraries and Librarianship, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Scholarly Publishing: Elsevier Begins Pilot of Cutting-Edge Research Tool Named “Reflect” in the Journal Cell

Friday, November 13th, 2009

It’s official, the journal Cell published by Elsevier, is beginning a pilot of a new research tool named “Reflect.”

From Today’s Announcement:

…the innovative research tool ‘Reflect’, winner of Elsevier’s Grand Challenge 2009, will be piloted on the research articles in the November 12th issue of Cell. The ‘Reflect’ tool identifies the proteins, genes and small molecules mentioned in the Cell articles, and generates pop-up windows containing relevant contextual information, with additional links, about those entities.

The Cell-Reflect pilot is the next step in Elsevier’s ongoing Content Innovation effort with the scientific community to determine how a scientific article is best presented online. This follows Elsevier’s recent launch of an initial ’External link Article of the Future’ prototype with Cell, where the traditional linear journal article is displayed in a much more useful format for life scientists.

[Snip]

Inside an article, ‘Reflect’ tags and colors gene, protein, or small molecule names on any web page, usually within seconds, without affecting the article itself or its web page layout. Clicking on a tagged or colored item opens a popup, showing a concise summary of contextually important features, such as sequence (for proteins) or 2D structure (for small molecules).

You can view articles from Cell that utilize “Reflect” here.

In July, 2009, Elsevier released two prototypes as part of its “Article of the Future” (AOTF) program.

Source: Elsevier

Posted in Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing, Science | No Comments »

Something You Don’t See Everyday, Two Scholarly Journals Will Have Lower Site-License Prices in 2010

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

Nature Publishing is reducing the subscription price of The EMBO [European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO] Journal and EMBO reports by 9% in 2010 due to the, “increased publication of Open Access content in 2008.”

From the Announcement:

We’ve taken into account all of the relevant data in reaching this decision, including the number of Open Access articles published in 2008,” said David Hoole, Head of Content Licensing, NPG. “This change reflects the recent growth in the amount of Open Access content in both journals and the corresponding partial coverage of publication costs by author charges.”

For the 2010 subscription year, there will be a 9% reduction on the 2009 site licence list price. This reduction is net of an annual inflationary price increase. Print and personal subscription prices are unaffected.

[Snip]

For the 2011 subscription year onwards, both the site licence price and author fees will be considered in an effort to achieve equitable distribution of the costs of publication. This evaluation will involve an in-depth review of all factors relevant to the publication process, including the proportion of Open Access content and authors’ ability to pay for Open Access and other publication-related costs.

NPG publishes and EMBO reports on behalf of EMBO. An Open Access option on both journals was introduced in January 2007. NPG has implemented hybrid models across many of its academic journals, and expects those titles to show price reductions in due course, as the volume of open access increases.

Source: Nature Publishing Group

Posted in Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Digital Preservation: Two New Publishers Join CLOCKSS

Monday, November 9th, 2009

From the Announcement:

CLOCKSS is pleased to announce that two new society publishers have recently joined the CLOCKSS archive. The Royal Society of Chemistry and the Royal Society have signed agreements this fall to join CLOCKSS and preserve their materials in the CLOCKSS network of geographically and geopolitically distributed archive nodes. CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is a community-governed, not-for-profit archive founded by librarians and publishers to ensure the long-term availability of scholarly digital content.

As part of joining CLOCKSS, the two societies agree to release their archived content to the world for free if a time comes when it is no longer available from any publisher (”trigger event”).

Access the Complete Announcement

Source: CLOCKSS

Posted in Digital Preservation, Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

MLA to Include International Bibliography in the Summon Web-Scale Discovery Service

Friday, November 6th, 2009

From the Announcement:

The Modern Language Association (MLA) has signed an agreement with Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest, to include [its] MLA International Bibliography in the Summon web-scale discovery service. The agreement enables the Bibliography to be discoverable through the Summon service…

The MLA International Bibliography provides a subject index to print and electronic books, articles and web sites published on modern languages, literatures, folklore, and linguistics. Coverage includes literature from all over the world–Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North and South America. Folklore is represented by folk literature, music, art, rituals, and belief systems. Linguistics and language materials range from history and theory of linguistics, comparative linguistics, semantics, stylistics, and syntax to translation. Other topics include literary theory and criticism, dramatic arts (film, radio, television, theater), history of printing and publishing, rhetoric and composition, and teaching. Compiled by the staff of the MLA Office of Bibliographic Information Services with the cooperation of more than 100 contributing bibliographers in the United States and abroad, it presently includes over 2.2 million records with 72,000 books and articles added annually.
(more…)

Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

File Sharing and Academic Journals

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

Do similar networks exist for other disciplines. Our guess, yes they do. Why do medical professionals and students have to swap articles illegally when they likely have access to them via a academic or public library? We wonder if ease of use (no searching required) and lack of awareness of what their library offers come into play.

From a Blog Post:

A new study, published in the Internet Journal of Medical Informatics, looks at a site aimed specifically at medical professionals and students and finds that thousands of people were obtaining non-open-access materials free of charge. The article says that in a six-month period of watching the unnamed site, nearly 5,500 articles were exchanged, costing journals about $700,000 in that time, or about $1.4-million a year.

The site had 127,626 registered users, who during the study period put in requests for 6,587 journals. There was an 83 percent success rate in finding the article. Nature and Science were the most commonly swapped journals.

Access the Complete Study (via The Internet Journal of Medical Informatics)

Source: Wired Campus (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Posted in Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Transitions in Scholarly Communications

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

From the Announcement

The scholarly communications landscape has been transformed over the past few years, in the UK and across the world. Technological change has brought – and continues to bring – profound changes in the roles that researchers, funders, research institutions, publishers, aggregators, libraries and other intermediaries play in disseminating and providing access to quality-assured research outputs, in their goals and expectations, and in the services they provide and use. There are shared ambitions for significantly enhanced access, but no consensus on how best to achieve it.

Understanding the nature and implications of these changes, and the interrelationships between them, is thus of critical importance if we are to exploit the potential of new technologies and services to the full. The Research Information Network (RIN), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP), the Publishers Association (PA), the British Library (BL), Research Libraries UK (RLUK), the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL), SPARC Europe, Research Councils UK (RCUK), Universities UK (UUK), the Wellcome Trust and others have been working to this end. They are now seeking to establish a joint portfolio of work to underpin and facilitate transitions over the next few years.

The joint portfolio will focus initially on four projects, though more may follow (details about each in the announcement):

+ Transitions to e-only publication

+ Gaps in access

+ Dynamics of improving access to research papers

+ Futures for scholarly communications

Again, details about each of these projects available here.

Source: British Library

Posted in Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Elsevier Announces Free Webinar Series for Librarians

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

From the Announcement:

Elsevier [has] announced it is partnering with several universities from around the globe to launch Scholarly Perspectives 2009, a webinar series for librarians and researchers. Senior researchers and librarians from the University of Aberdeen, Princeton University and HKU (The University of Hong Kong) will discuss best practices and share case studies on a range of topics including the strategies and tools needed to support multidisciplinary research as well as the role of Ebooks, among others.

Each live, 65-minute webcast in the Scholarly Perspectives 2009 series will focus on a key issue impacting today’s academic libraries and feature both a senior librarian and researcher from the hosting university as well as an Elsevier representative. A brief question and answer session will close each event.

Webinar #1: Research Without Borders: Interdisciplinary Research” – Hosted by the University of Aberdeen, took place today. We will try to find out if an archive is available.

Webinar #2: “A Life Science Lens: Connecting to Relevant Sources” – Hosted by Princeton University November 20th, 9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. EST.

Topics scheduled:

+ Researcher case study: Framing the information retrieval challenge for the life scientist

+ “How can library services and expertise help address the Life scientist’s information retrieval challenge?”

+ “Using smart technology to accelerate life science research”

Webinar #3: “Enriching Research and Teaching Through Ebook Content” – Hosted by Hong Kong University, November 30th, 9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m. GMT

Topics scheduled:

+ Understanding the role of Ebooks in the research workflow”

+ Hong Kong University: Lessons learned from building the world’s largest Ebook collection”

+ “Course case study: A primer on building Ebooks into a course reading list”

Registration

If you are interested in registering for any one of webinars in the Scholarly Perspectives 2009 series or for more information, please contact Jessica Disch at jdisch@psbpr.com or +1-212-752-8338.

Source: Elsevier

Posted in Libraries and Librarianship, Scholarly Publishing, Webcasts and Podcasts | No Comments »

Survey of Higher Education Faculty: Use of Print & Electronic Library Collections of Scholarly Journals

Monday, November 2nd, 2009

This new report was released today by Primary Research. The full text is fee-based but a few highlights from the report are available online.

The report is based on a representative survey of more than 550 higher education faculty in the United States and Canada. Faculty present their opinions on preferences for print or paper journal formats, degree of problems with archival access, use of url-catalog links to journals, extent to which their college library journal collection satisfies their scholarly needs, and frequency of database access and library visits. Data is broken out by 12 criteria including age, academic field or specialty, type of college, size of college, frequency of library use, and many other factors.

Here are Just a Few Findings From the Report:

+ Canadian faculty were more likely than American faculty to think of the paper copies as a waste of time – nearly 45% thought so.

+ In general, age was highly inversely correlated with the tendency to think of paper copies as wasteful and redundant when online versions were available.

+ Only 13.86% of faculty at research universities prefer paper to online journal formats.

+ Only a third of community college faculty express support for increased spending on academic journals while about 64.3% of faculty in MA/Ph.D. granting colleges expressed such support.

See Also: The Survey of Academic & Research Library Journal Purchasing Practices

Here’s another related fee-based report from a related Primary Research report.

Some Findings:

+ The libraries in the sample acquired a mean of more than 46% of their journal subscriptions in bundles of more then 50 titles.

+ The libraries in sample canceled a mean of 53 journal titles in the past year.

+ Mean spending on print edition only subscriptions was $130,721, less than a sixth of total spending.

+ About a quarter of the libraries in the sample believe that open access has already slowed the increase in journal prices.

+ 15.56% of the libraries in the sample have paid a publication fee on behalf of an author from their institution.

+ For 42.22% of the libraries in the sample, all new subscriptions to journals include electronic access.

+ More than 64% of the libraries in the sample keep track of their various journal subscriptions through use of a commercial software product.

+ In general, subscription agents seem to enjoy a relatively high level of customer satisfaction. On the issue of timeliness of service, none of the libraries in the sample said that they were highly dissatisfied with their subscription agent and only 2.22% said that they were dissatisfied.

+ Non-academic research libraries have done more than their academic counterparts to make sure that contracts renew at the same time. Smaller institutions, those with journal budgets of less than $100,000 per year, were less likely to make such efforts than libraries with higher budgets.

Source: Primary Research

Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Highlights from International Open Access Week 2009

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

From the Announcement:

The first International Open Access Week (October 19 – 23) may have just come to a close, but the broad spectrum of initiatives that it showcased ensures that Open Access to research will play a central role in advancing the conduct of research and scholarship for years to come. Events took place on more than 300 higher education, research, and other sites worldwide, illustrating the dramatic growth of the global network that has emerged in support of Open Access.

The post goes on to highlight five key events from International Open Access Week. You’ll read about and find related links to:

+ The establishment of new access policies at agencies and research institutes.

+ The adoption of campus-based open-access policies.

+ The release of extensive research on the economic and social impact of Open Access.

+ The commitment of significant new funds to support open-access publication.

+ A groundswell of support by college and university students.

Source: SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)

Posted in Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Univerisity of Illinois Press Signs Agreement With JSTOR

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

From the Announcement:

The University of Illinois Press, the not-for-profit publishing division of the University of Illinois, and JSTOR, the preservation archive and research platform that is part of the not-for-profit ITHAKA, announced an agreement today to make leading journals from the Press available worldwide as part of the Current Scholarship Program.

The Current Scholarship Program is a new collaboration initiated by University of California Press and JSTOR and first announced on August 13, 2009.

[Snip]

Current and historical content from at least ten University of Illinois Press-published journals will be available on a re-designed JSTOR in 2011. This will offer faculty and students around the world access to current issues alongside back issues and a growing set of primary source materials from libraries easily and seamlessly. JSTOR’s nearly 6,000 library participants worldwide will be able to license the Press’s current journals, either individually or as part of current issue collections, together with JSTOR back issue collections in a single transaction. University of Illinois Press-published journals available as part of the Program will include American Journal of Psychology, American Music, Journal of Aesthetic Education, and Journal of American Ethnic History among others. The journals will also be preserved in Portico, the digital preservation service that is also part of ITHAKA.

Source: ITHAKA

Posted in Digital Repositories, Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Podcast: Professor Robert Darnton on Harvard’s Success With Open Access

Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

From the Summary:

In October 2008 Harvard University in the US adopted an open access policy for all its research papers to be made available in their university repository, in an opt out basis. 12 months on, since the policy was adopted, JISC’s Rebecca O’Brien speaks with Professor Robert Darnton, Director of Harvard University Library and trustee of New York Public Library and the Oxford University Press (USA), about the cultural change that is taking place at Harvard and the background to why professors at the university decided to share their knowledge in this way.

The podcast runs 23 minutes. You’ll find it near the bottom of this page.

Source: JISC

See Also: DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard): Harvard University Scholarly Repository

See Also: Harvard University Library: Open Collection Program

Posted in Digital Repositories, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Here they Come Again? Microsoft Research Launches Academic Search Database (Beta)

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Well, well, well. It’s time to say hello to a new database (it’s also a “test bed) from a company that once offered something similar.

Here’s a new “Academic Search” database (beta) from Microsoft (technically, it’s from Microsoft Research) that, according to its homepage, allows you to search over 3.3 million academic papers in the computer sciences.

Background

Microsoft’s previous effort in this area, Windows Live Academic was launched in April, 2006 and was gone by May, 2008.

Here’s a copy of the Live Academic Home Page via The Wayback Machine to get you started if you want to start comparing with the defunct Windows Live Academic service.

With the caveat that it’s the first day and there is no documentation available. I think MS Research is off to a solid start especially when you compare it with the Live Academic product. That said, they still have a lot of work to do. Of course, all of this is moot if this is simply a technology test.

What the Help Page Tells Us

+ “A free academic search engine developed by Microsoft Research Asia, and it is also a test-bed for our object-level vertical search research.”
+ An brief explanation of how results are ranked
+ Academic papers about the technology used to build Academic Search (beta)
+ Search and result page help

The Home Page and Top-Ranked Papers

The Academic Search home page offers direct links to top-ranked papers (by two citation measures, in-domain citations and total citations) in more than 20 computer science domains. Here’s a link to the top-ranked papers (in this database) about Computer Education topics.

Btw, CiteSeer from Penn St. University offered subject-specific search engine for computer science and related disciplines for over 10 years. Now a new version of the service is in beta, it’s named CiteSeerX. Btw, we noticed many links to CiteSeer in the Academic Search.

Searching

The tabbed home page allows you to search for papers, by author, by conferences, and by journals.

Now, let’s look at each tab with some sample searches:

The papers tab is the default and searches words in the title and in the abstract. Here’s a search for the term “ethernet”. Search terms are highlighted in the snippets, lists of related authors, conferences, and journals can be found in the right rail. There are two boxes near the top of the page that allow you to refine your results by year.

An actual result includes the title, authors name(s), publication year, journal or source name, and the number of citations the paper has (in this database). It’s going to take someone like Dr. Peter Jacso to do some research and determine how accurate the citation counts are. He recently did this research with Google Scholar.

A result entry has a few clickable items:

+ Title
+ Author(s) Name
+ Citation Count

Clicking the author link runs an “author search” and takes you to a page for that specific author (an object detail page). There, you’ll find a listing all of that authors articles in the database, citation counts, a link to the authors home page, etc.

One of the most interesting parts of the database is the data visualization tool located “author pages”. Look for the “Visual Explorer” link on the top right of the page.

From the help page:

Microsoft Academic Search automatically summarizes the co-author information for each author. Through visual explorer, user can browse the top co-authors of authors by clicking one author in the displayed graph.

Here’s an example of Visual Explorer for Vint Cerf (now at Google, the author page says something else)

Selecting the title or citation count links moves you to a page with a complete abstract, links to download the full text of the paper, In some cases, they are to a fee-based digital library while at other times they are free. Also, each paper has a hypertext list of a papers references that are listed in the database.

Question. If MS expands this project will they consider a link resolving service for libraries?

Other Searches

An author search allows you to either enter an authors name (just a last name will also work) and get a list of results. Note: We were also able to enter a few search terms get results. In other words, it searches more than the authors name.

A conference search will limit your results to only conference publications and proceedings. Clicking the conference title will give you a hypertext list of all of the papers in that specific volume along with a total citation count (all articles). Finally, you can limit your results by year, citation count, and rank. Wow, look at this. If you cursor over the word “rank” it actually provides a brief explanation. (-:

Last but not least, a search by journal (we need a journal list) allows you to enter search terms and then see all of the articles in the database from a specific journal. For example, here’s a search for GIS. A results list shows the journal title first. Click and you’ll see a list with the titles of all papers in the database from that specific publication independent of date. Again, you can sort by year, citations and rank.

The papers themselves appear to be coming from a wide variety of fee and free services. This article lists several locations to find the article for free.

There is also an advanced search interface that cannot be directly linked to. It allows you to simultaneously search several fields:

+ Keywords
+ Paper Title
+ Author
+ Conference
+ Journal
+ Year

Final Thoughts

As we said before, this is the first day the database is live. We have a lot of questions that need answering. One that we have mentioned to this point is MS Academic Search just a research project or something that the company plans on expanding over time by adding more disciplines. Again, we think this database has a much better feel than what MS used to offer. We would love to know precisely what the short and long term future holds for Academic Search

Stay Tuned!

Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing, Search News | No Comments »

Law Bytes: Canadian universities closed-minded on open access

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

From the Article:

This week is International Open Access Week with universities around the world taking stock of the emergence of open access as a critical part of research and innovation. The basic principle behind open access is to facilitate public access to research, particularly research funded by taxpayers. This can be achieved by publishing in an open access journal or by simply posting a copy of the research online.

In recent years, many countries have implemented legislative mandates that require researchers who accept public grants to make their published research results freely available online within a reasonable time period. While Canada has lagged, a growing number of funding agencies, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Canadian Cancer Society and Genome Canada have adopted open access policies.

[Snip]

Canadian universities may benefit from far more public funding than their U.S. counterparts, but they have been much more reluctant to adopt open access mandates. While there are some exceptions – Athabasca University along with the library departments at York University and the University of Calgary have adopted open access policies – most have been strangely silent on the issue.

Second, Canadian university publishers have been generally hostile toward open access.

Leading university presses such as Oxford University Press and Yale University Press have experimented with open licences, but most Canadian presses have not.

Access the Complete Article

Source: Toronto Star

Posted in Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Netherlands: New Open Access Website Encourages Exchange of Research Data

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

From an Announcement:

SURF, the higher education and research partnership for network services and ICT in the Netherlands, is launching the website www.openaccess.nl. The website has been developed on behalf of the whole higher education sector and links up with international Open Access week (19 to 23 October).

The Open Access website provides structured information about Open Access to research results and the advantages that Open Access has. Practical examples are used to illustrate the possibilities opened up by the Internet for innovations in scholarly communication.

The website provides researchers with information about how Open Access can give their work a larger potential audience. Openaccess.nl shows the options that each discipline has for making research results openly accessible.

Posted in Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Brown Univesity Gets Ready to Launch Digital Repository Using Fedora Software

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

Yesterday, we posted about a massive digitization project recently announced at NYU and an editorial from the Princeton University newspaper focusing on Google digitization and the HathiTrust.

Today, we move to Providence, RI and Brown University.

From the Article:

The Center for Digital Initiatives is preparing to launch the Brown Digital Repository, an online database to allow faculty members to easily and safely store thousands of documents — and share them with their students and colleagues.

The service, which aims to make faculty research and teaching materials more accessible in the present as well as preserve them for posterity, could be operational as soon as next semester, according to Patrick Yott, head of the library’s digital services department and the Center for Digital Initiatives.

[Snip]

Many digital repositories, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s, use a program called DSpace, which Yott said is less flexible. The new program, Fedora, improves on older repository software.

“We were waiting for some of the technologies to mature,” Yott said. “We just waited to do it the way we wanted to do it.”

[Snip]

The repository will allow users to upload faculty papers, research data, electronic dissertations, teaching materials and other files. One feature of the Fedora platform allows files to be updated into newer formats should old ones become obsolete, preserving the documents for generations to come.

Source: The Brown Daily Herald

See Also: Learn More About Fedora (via Wikipedia)

Posted in Digital Repositories, Libraries and Librarianship, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

Wellcome Trust Calls for Greater Transparency From Journals on Open Access Publishing Costs

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009

From the Announcement:

As Open Access Week 2009 gets underway, the Wellcome Trust has called for greater transparency among publishers to counter the argument that access fees are being paid twice – once through subscriptions and again through publication fees.

The call comes as the Trust announces a further £2 million to fund open access publication fees for its researchers over the next 12 months. The funds are part of the ongoing commitment to ensuring that the results of all Trust-funded research are made freely available online.

[Snip]

In recent months, however, concern has been expressed by the research community that publishers are using open access fees as an additional revenue stream without making a concerted effort to adapt their business models. In other words, access fees are being paid twice, through subscriptions and through publication fees.

“We would like to see a commitment from publishers to show the uptake of their open access option and to adjust their subscription rates to reflect increases in income from open access fees,” says Sir Mark [Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust]. “Some publishers, for example Oxford University Press, have already done this and we would like to see all publishers behave the same way.”

Access the Complete Announcement

Source: Wellcome Trust

See Also: ResourceShelf’s Compilation of Open Access Week Resources

Posted in Information Industry, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

New Online: Institutional Repository Bibliography, Version 1 from Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. the person who brings us so many useful and important resources, several of them linked below, has announced that Version 1 of the Institutional Repository Bibliography. is now available online.

Charles Writes on the DigitalKoans Blog:

To celebrate Open Access Week, Digital Scholarship is releasing version one of the Institutional Repository Bibliography. This bibliography presents over 620 selected English-language articles, books, and other scholarly textual sources that are useful in understanding institutional repositories. Although institutional repositories intersect with a number of open access and scholarly communication topics, this bibliography only includes works that are primarily about institutional repositories.

Most sources have been published between 2000 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 2000 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to e-prints in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories.

Congats and Kudos, Charles.

Here are Some of the Other Resources Charles Makes Available:

+ The DigitalKoans Weblog

+ Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals

+ The Open Access Webliography

+ Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography

+ Google Book Search Bibliography

+ and Many Other Resources All Linked on His Digital Scholarship Site

Posted in Libraries and Librarianship, Scholarly Publishing | No Comments »

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