DigitalKoans

The RIOJA project has released Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives: Results from an Online Questionnaire Survey.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

The Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA) project (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja) is an international partnership of members of academic staff, librarians and technologists from UCL (University College London), the University of Cambridge, the University of Glasgow, Imperial College London and Cornell University. It aims to address some of the issues around the development and implementation of a new publishing model, that of the overlay journal - defined, for the purposes of the project, as a quality-assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides in one or more open access repositories. The project is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC, http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) and runs from April 2007 to June 2008.

The RIOJA project will create an interoperability toolkit to enable the overlay of certification onto papers housed in subject repositories. The intention is that the tool will be generic, helping any repository to realise its potential to act as a more complete scholarly resource. The project will also create a demonstrator overlay journal, using the arXiv repository and OJS software, with interaction between the two facilitated by the RIOJA toolkit.

To inform and shape the project, a survey of Astrophysics and Cosmology researchers has been conducted. The findings from that survey form the basis of this report.

The project team will also undertake formal and informal discussion with publishers and with academic and managing members of editorial boards. The survey and supplementary discussions will help to ensure that the RIOJA outputs address the needs and expectations of the research community. Finally, the overall long-term sustainability of a repository-overlay journal will be assessed. The project will examine the costs of adding peer review to arXiv deposits, of implementing and maintaining the functionality which the survey shows to be most valued by researchers, and of providing long-term preservation of content, and will aim to identify and appraise possible cost-recovery business models.

The Association of College and Research Libraries' journal, College & Research Libraries, is now offering access to preprints on its site; however, access is restricted to ACRL members.

According to the C&RL Manuscript Preparation page, the typical post-review publication delay for papers is about one year.

This preprint strategy does not appear to preclude authors from depositing preprints elsewhere after publication. Below is an excerpt from the C&RL Manuscript Preparation page (emphasis added):

The agreement between ACRL and the author is license to publish. The author retains copyright and thus is free to post the article on an institutional or personal web page subsequent to publication in C&RL. All material in the journal may be photocopied for the noncommercial purpose of scientific or educational advancement.

The American Librarian Library Association's author agreement that C&RL uses states (emphasis added):

1. In consideration of the Publisher’s agreement to publish the Work, Author hereby grants and assigns to Publisher the right to print, publish, reproduce, or distribute the Work throughout the world in all means of expression by any method now known or hereafter developed, including electronic format, and to market or sell the Work or any part of it as it sees fit. Author further grants Publisher the right to use Author’s name in association with the Work in published form and in advertising and promotional materials. Copyright of the Work remains in Author’s name.
2. Author agrees not to publish the Work in print form prior to publication of the Work by the Publisher. [ALA requests that should you publish the Work elsewhere, you cite the publication in ALA’s Publication, by author, title, and publisher, through a tagline, author bibliography, or similar means.]

The author agreement says nothing about restricting the author's right to distribute digital preprints, yet the Manuscript Preparation page implies that the author is not free to do so prior to publication. Which is it?

If authors are free to distribute their own digital preprints, what good does it do to restrict access to preprints at the ACRL Website? This policy appears to make no sense unless ACRL believes that authors' motivation to distribute their own preprints will be undermined by ACRL making them available or unless ACRL believes that its authors simply have little or no interest in distributing their own preprints.

Perhaps the C&RL Manuscript Preparation page is just poorly worded. If so, it would be helpful if it were corrected.

But even if this is the case, it begs the question: "What is ACRL, which is actively promoting open access on many fronts, doing making C&RL's preprint service restricted?" While ACRL directly providing access to preprints at the C&RL Website is a welcome step forward, restricting access to those preprints is taking two steps back, and, although well intended, it sends the wrong message for an organization that is trying to move the open access agenda forward.

Read more about it at "C&RL Launches Preprints!"

Microsoft is developing an Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007, which will support the NLM DTD. A Technology Preview of the Add-in is available.

Here's an excerpt from the Technical Computing @ Microsoft—Scholarly Publishing page:

In support of the increased emphasis on electronic publishing and archiving of scholarly articles, Microsoft has developed the Article Authoring Add-in for Microsoft Office Word 2007. This add-in will support the XML format from the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which is commonly used in the scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishing market as part of the publishing workflow and as the format used for the archiving of articles. Pre-release versions of this add-in will target the staff at STM journals and publishers, at information repositories, and in-house and commercial software developers supporting the STM market.

The Article Authoring Add-in for Word 2007 will enable or simplify a number of activities that are part of the authoring and scholarly publishing process, such as:

• gathering information about the authors and article content at the time the article is written;
• enabling journals to provide authors with templates containing the structure for articles, and information for self-classification of the articles by the authors;
• enabling access to the authors and article metadata contained in the Word file through the use of the NLM format and OpenXML document structure;
• enabling the editorial staff to have access to the article and journal metadata directly within Word; and
• enabling two-way conversion between Office OpenXML and the NLM format.

Greg Tananbaum consulted with Microsoft on the development of the tool.

The VERSIONS (Versions of Eprints—A User Requirements Study and Investigation Of the Need for Standards) project has released the VERSIONS Toolkit.

Here's an excerpt from the "Introduction":

If you are an experienced researcher you are likely to be disseminating your work on a personal website, in a subject archive, or in an institutional repository already. This toolkit aims to:

• provide peer-to-peer advice about managing personal versions and revisions in order to keep your options open for future use of your work
• clarify areas of uncertainty among researchers about agreements with publishers and how these relate to different versions of research outputs
• suggest ways to identify your work clearly when placing it on the web in order to guide your readers to the latest and best versions of your work
• direct you to further resources about making versions of your work openly accessible

The toolkit draws on the results of a survey of researchers’ attitudes and current practice when creating, storing and disseminating different versions of their research. As such the guidance in the toolkit represents the views of active researchers. Survey respondents were predominantly from economics and related disciplines.

The Association of Research Libraries has published "The NIH Public Access Policy: Guide for Research Universities."

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

The new NIH Public Access Policy, which becomes effective April 7, 2008, calls for mandatory deposit in PubMed Central of peer-reviewed electronic manuscripts stemming from NIH funding. The change from a voluntary to mandatory policy creates new expectations, not just of funded investigators, but also of the grantee institutions that support those investigators.

The ARL guide, "The NIH Public Access Policy: Guide for Research Universities," includes the following sections:

• Policy Overview
• Institutional Responses
• Retaining Rights
• How to Deposit
• Resources

The guide focuses on the implications of the NIH policy for institutions as grantees, although some information for individual investigators is included and links to further details are provided. The guide is helpful to a range of campus constituencies that may be involved in implementing the new policy, including research administrators, legal counsel, and librarians.

In addition to compliance concerns, the guide also considers the benefits of the new policy and institutions' opportunities to build on the policy requirements by seeking additional rights for using funded research to address local needs.

Reflecting the dynamic nature of campus implementation activities, the guide will be updated as more campuses release plans, resources, and tools that can serve as models for their peers.

The OAK (Open Access to Knowledge) Law Project has published A Review and Analysis of Academic Publishing Agreements and Open Access Policies.

Here's an excerpt from the "Conclusion and Next Steps":

The review of publishers’ open access policies and practices found that:

• the majority of publishers did not have a formal open access policy;
• only four of the total sample of 64 publishers surveyed had a formal open access policy;
• 62.5% of the publishers were able to provide sufficient information to enable them to be “colour classified” using the SHERPA/RoMEO colour classification system to denote levels of open access;
• using the SHERPA/RoMEO colour classifications:
  • 25% of the surveyed publishers were “green” (permitting archiving of the pre-print and post-print versions of published articles);
  • 4.7% were “blue” (permitting archiving of the post-print version);
  • 6.25% were “yellow” (permitting archiving of the pre-print version);
  • 26.6% were “white” (archiving not formally supported).

JISC has released SHERPA DP: Final Report of the SHERPA DP Project.

Here's an excerpt from the "Executive Summary":

The SHERPA DP project (2005–2007) investigated the preservation of digital resources stored by institutional repositories participating in the SHERPA project. An emphasis was placed on the preservation of e-prints—research papers stored in an electronic format, with some support for other types of content, such as electronic theses and dissertations.

The project began with an investigation of the method that institutional repositories, as Content Providers, may interact with Service Providers. The resulting model, framed around the OAIS, established a Co-operating archive relationship, in which data and metadata is transferred into a preservation repository subsequent to it being made available. . . .

The Arts & Humanities Data Service produced a demonstrator of a Preservation Service, to investigate the operation of the preservation service and accepted responsibility for the preservation of the digital objects for a three-year period (two years of project funding, plus one year).

The most notable development of the Preservation Service demonstrator was the creation of a reusable service framework that allows the integration of a disparate collection of software tools and standards. The project adopted Fedora as the basis for the preservation repository and built a technical infrastructure necessary to harvest metadata, transfer data, and perform relevant preservation activities. Appropriate software tools and standards were selected, including JHOVE and DROID as software tools to validate data objects; METS as a packaging standard; and PREMIS as a basis on which to create preservation metadata. . . .

A number of requirements were identified that were essential for establishing a disaggregated service for preservation, most notably some method of interoperating with partner institutions and he establishment of appropriate preservation policies. . . . In its role as a Preservation Service, the AHDS developed a repository-independent framework to support the EPrints and DSpace-based repositories, using OAI-PMH as common method of connecting to partner institutions and extracting digital objects.

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative has established the DCMI Scholarly Communications Community, which currently includes a mailing list and a wiki.

Here's an excerpt from the home page:

The DCMI Scholarly Communications Community is a forum for individuals and organisations to exchange information, knowledge and general discussion on issues relating to using Dublin Core for describing research papers, scholarly texts, data objects and other resources created and used within scholarly communications. This includes providing a forum for discussion around the Eprints Application Profile, also known as the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) and for other existing and future application profiles created to describe items of scholarly communication.