Quick links April 26

Comparison of Scopus, GS, PubMed, WoS; The Economics of Open Access Publishing; Scientists and Web 2.0 - Expression Patterns

MIT follows Harvard to Open

"To assist the Institute in distributing the scholarly articles, as of the date of publication, each Faculty member will make available an electronic copy of his or her final version of the article at no charge to a designated representative of the Provost's Office in appropriate formats (such as PDF) specified by the Provost's Office." via Peter Suber

Boston University goes with Open Access

BU "University Council voted to support an open access system that would make scholarly work of the faculty and staff available online to anyone, for free, as long as the authors are credited and the scholarship is not used for profit" via FF

Open voices from Oz

"The report, VenturousAustralia (the 'Cutler Report'), makes a large number of recommendations, many particularly pertinent to Open Access, including (but not only) the following:

• Recommendation 7.10: A specific strategy for ensuring the scientific knowledge produced in Australia is placed in machine searchable repositories be developed and implemented using public funding agencies and universities as drivers.
• Recommendation 7.14: To the maximum extent practicable, information, research and content funded by Australian governments, including national collections, should be made freely available over the internet as part of the global public commons. This should be done whilst the Australian Government encourages other countries to reciprocate by making their own contributions to the global digital commons.." via Alma Swan
  

Publishing chess game

Springer acquires BioMed Central

Stanford follows Harvard's "open-access" mandate

" Faculty members grant to the Stanford University permission to make publicly available their scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. They grant to Stanford University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to their scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are properly attributed to the authors not sold for a profit.

The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while a faculty member of the School of Education, beginning with articles for which the publisher's copyright agreement has yet to be signed. The Dean or the Dean's designate will waive application of the policy upon written request from faculty who wish to publish an article with a publisher who will not agree to the terms of this policy (which will be presented to the publishers in the form of an addendum to the copyright agreement).

No later than the date of publication, faculty members will provide an electronic copy of the final version of the article at no charge to the appropriate representative of the Dean of Education's Office, who will make the article available to the public in an open-access repository operated by Stanford University." via DigitalKoans

Harvard Law goes with "Open Access"

After arts and science faculty, Harvard Law becomes the first law school to go with open access.

Open online Access to NIH funded research becomes Law

Now that's an holiday gift for some people.

While most STM publishing community and my publishing colleagues are in Holiday, President Bush signs the "Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007" which "includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency."

"The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal." via ATA

via Charles Bailey

PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials

PLoS new hub is another way to create a dynamic and interactive community in is specialized topic. Register users will be able to rate, annotate and discuss articles.

"Currently, the PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials features articles originally published in PLoS Clinical Trials, along with clinical trials articles from PLoS ONE.

In the future, this new resource will expand to include articles from all the PLoS titles that publish clinical trials. It will also feature open-access articles from other journals plus user-generated content." via bbmg

Barbie and open access debate

The debate between government-funded research results is getting interesting. It's time for the GTA to take a position on this (no blood please). William Walsh has more insights on this.