OpenAccess.se's Steering Committee has issued a statement that objects to Elsevier's self-archiving policy's position on open access mandates.

Here's an excerpt:

Elsevier now requires specific agreements with universities or research funders if there is an open access mandate to deposit and disseminate articles in a specific open archive. These agreements may involve long embargo periods and restrict availability of research results. . . .

We recommend that Swedish universities with open access mandates refrain from concluding separate agreements with Elsevier. Instead, this issue should be managed along with negotiations over national license agreements with Elsevier.

Previously, UKB, a consortium of the thirteen Dutch university libraries and the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, issued a statement about the policy.

Here's an excerpt:

The [Elsevier] clause states that an author "has the right to post a revised personal version of the text of the final journal article (to reflect changes made in the peer review process) on your personal or institutional web site or server for scholarly purposes, incorporating the complete citation and with a link to the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) of the article (but not in subject-oriented or centralized repositories or institutional repositories with mandates for systematic postings unless there is a specific agreement with the publisher. . . .

UKB is deeply concerned about the fact that Elsevier has recently adapted its Open Access policy and has taken the initiative to negotiate directly with universities and research institutions about the conditions under which their authors may deposit manuscripts of their own articles in repositories. UKB aims to expand the digital availability of Dutch scientific output and is an advocate of publication in Open Access. UKB therefore deplores every action that results in the restriction of that accessibility, such as unacceptably long embargo periods. In addition, UKB is concerned about the consequences of this clause, namely that it will become even less clear for authors whether and according to which conditions they are allowed to post their article in a repository. This in turn will create an extra obstacle preventing authors from doing so. It is the view of UKB that an author should in principle have the right to deposit his own article, preferably in the version produced by the publisher but in any case in the final author’s version, a right which should not become dependent on (subsequent) agreements with publishers. UKB is particularly concerned about the fact that publishers may overrule agreements made between authors and funding bodies by means of this policy.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

Peter Suber has published "Seeking Custody" in the latest issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter.

Here's an excerpt:

If we want to make a digital file OA, and we already have an OA repository, then we face just two hurdles. We need a copy of the file and we need permission. We can call these the custody and copyright conditions. "Custody" here doesn't mean ownership of the rights, just possession of a copy. If we have possession and permission, then we don't need ownership.

The OA movement has given far more attention to the copyright or permission problem than to the custody or possession problem. This may have the effect of sweeping a difficult problem under the rug. We often have permission when we lack custody, and often find that solving the permission problem is easier than solving the custody problem. Here are some examples of what could be called permission success and custody failure.

(1) You've published an article in a TA journal which allows green OA or self-archiving. But the journal only allows deposit of the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript, not the published version. You're fine with that and eager to make the manuscript OA. But you can't put your hands on the version you're allowed to deposit. You think it's on your hard drive somewhere, or in your email archive. But you're not sure. You haven't had time to look, or you've looked and found six versions. You don't have time to figure out which one, if any, is the deposit-eligible, peer-reviewed manuscript, or you've taken the time and you're still unsure. Or you have the version you submitted to the journal, and all the correspondence with the editor, but you don't have time to reconstruct the version approved by peer review. Or you might have deleted the relevant version in a fit of spring cleaning, as a superseded version not worth saving, or you might have failed to copy it over from your last computer when you upgraded. With enough detective work you could find out, but you don't know how much time it would take and you're pretty sure it would take more than you have.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Institutional Repository Bibliography |

John W. Houghton has published "The Costs and Potential Benefits of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models" in the latest issue of Information Research.

Here's an excerpt:

The costs and benefits associated with alternative scholarly publishing models demonstrate that research and research communication are major activities and the costs involved are substantial. Our preliminary analysis of the potential benefits of more open access to research findings suggests that returns to research are also substantial and that different scholarly publishing models might make a material difference to the returns realised as well as the costs faced. It seems likely from this preliminary analysis that more open access could have substantial net benefits in the longer term and, while net benefits may be lower during a transitional period they would be likely to be positive for both open access journal publishing and self-archiving alternatives.

| Digital Scholarship | Digital Scholarship Publications Overview | Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography |

In "Thanks but No Thanks Emerald," Kristin Eschenfelder reproduces and discusses a letter that she received from the Emerald Group Publishing Limited. In short, this letter says that Emerald is expanding it's use of Attributor to detect copyright violations from "cyberlockers" to "the full breadth of the internet," and it requests the URLs for her personal, institutional, and corporate websites so that they can be excluded from Attributor searches and its "legally-binding takedown notices."

Will this expanded use of Attributor affect self-archiving of articles from Emerald journals?

Emerald's publication policies are detailed in its Authors' Charter and its Review Copyright Assignment Form. Emerald requires that authors assign their article copyrights to Emerald as a condition of publication.

The Authors' Charter states that (I have added italics in certain places in the below quotes):

Authors are not required to seek Emerald's permission to re-use their own work. As an author with Emerald you can use your paper in part or in full, including figures and tables if you want to do so in a book, in another article written for us or another publisher, on your website, or any other use, without asking us first.

It further states that:

It does NOT, in any way, restrict your right or academic freedom to contribute to the wider distribution and readership of your work. This includes the right to: . . . .

2. Reproduce your own version of your article, including peer review/editorial changes, in another journal, as content in a book of which you are the author, in a thesis, dissertation or in any other record of study, in print or electronic format as required by your university or for your own career development.

3. Deposit an electronic copy of your own final version of your article, pre- or post-print, on your own or institutional website. The electronic copy cannot be deposited at the stage of acceptance by the Editor.

Authors are requested to cite the original publication source of their work and link to the published version — but are NOT required to seek Emerald's permission with regard to the personal re-use of their work as described above. Emerald never charges its authors for re-use of any of their own published works. Emerald does not allow systematic archiving of works by third parties into an institutional or subject repository.

The Review Copyright Assignment Form says:

This assignment of copyright to Emerald Group Publishing Limited is done so on the understanding that permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited is not required for me/us to reproduce, republish or distribute copies of the Work in whole or in part.

Given the above, it would appear that the author can: (1) self-archive an article on his or her personal website, (2) self-archive an article in his or her institutional repository, and (3) self-archive an article in a subject archive (the restriction is for “systematic archiving of works by third parties,” not self-archiving). Institutional repository staff or subject repository staff cannot archive articles for authors.

If this is not correct, it would be helpful to hear from Emerald what its interpretation of these documents is.

Unlike the RIAA and the MPAA, scholarly journal publishers have a limited primary customer base—academic libraries. Moreover, academic librarians are authors as well as customers, and, for some publishers, they are a significant subset of their authors. The endless serials crisis has already seriously strained relations between academic librarians and publishers. Hopefully, scholarly journal publishers will be sensible and sensitive to customer concerns in their attempts to cope with difficult digital copyright issues.

[See Emerald's reply in the comments.]

Yassine Gargouri et al. have published "Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research" in PLoS ONE.

Here's an excerpt:

Background

Articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publisher's version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web (“Open Access”, OA) are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals.

Methodology/Principal Findings

The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression analysis showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and highest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations).

Conclusions/Significance

The OA advantage is greater for the more citable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. It is hoped that these findings will help motivate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by universities, research institutions and research funders.

| Digital Scholarship |

The University of Tromsø in Norway has adopted an open access policy.

Here's the English translation:

Free access to scientific results is an important prerequisite for a well-functioning democracy, for the free exchange of opinions and to enable science to be a tool for the development of society and industry. The University of Tromsø has as its goal that all scientific publications from the university shall be made available either in an Open Access journal or in an institutional repository. Hence, the University of Tromsø will adhere to the following basic principles of Open Access to scientific results.

• Self-archiving: The University of Tromsø has as its general rule that students and researchers shall self-archive their publications in Munin, the university’s institutional repository. Publications will be made available through Munin within the constraints of the agreements the authors have made with the publisher and publishers’ principles for self-archiving. The University Library of Tromsø has the responsibility for investigating and ensuring compliance with publishers’ policies and other questions regarding intellectual property rights in this context.
• Choice of publishing venue: The University of Tromsø has as its general rule that students and researchers shall – provided publications are of equal scientific worth and stature – choose publishing venues that provide the freest access to the publications, either through having a positive attitude to self-archiving or by being an Open Access publishing venue.
• The University as a publisher: The University shall endeavour to make journals and other publications published by the University Open Access publications. It is a goal that all publications published by the University shall permit self-archiving, and that self-archiving of the final published version (publisher’s PDF) shall be encouraged.

| Digital Scholarship |

Teesside University in the UK has launched its institutional repository, TeesRep, and adopted a self-archiving mandate.

Here's the mandate:

For record keeping, research asset management and performance evaluation purposes, and in order to maximise the visibility, accessibility, usage and impact of our institution’s research output, all Teesside University researchers are mandated to deposit the publicly available output of the University’s research activity into TeesRep, the University’s Institutional Repository.

The PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) project has released PEER Annual Report—Year 2.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

Reporting on the past 12 months of activity in this ground breaking collaboration between publishers, repositories and the research community investigating the effects of Green Open Access, the PEER Annual Report highlights the complexity of the infrastructure required for PEER and the substantial progress achieved towards the project’s objectives.

To simulate the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for journal publication, 12 participating publishers are providing content and associated metadata from 241 participating journals. Half of the manuscripts are being submitted directly to PEER, while for the other half, authors are invited by publishers to self-deposit into the project.

All submitted content is being received by the PEER Depot, a central repository created specifically for the project by INRIA, which undertakes filtering for EU research content, metadata matching and transformations, and embargo management prior to distribution to participating repositories.

By the end of year 2 (August 2010), almost 25,000 unique publisher provided manuscripts had been processed by the PEER Depot, resulting in 10,000 EU manuscripts after processing (some still under embargo), with embargo expired manuscripts distributed to participating repositories.

The three areas of usage, economic and behavioural research commissioned by PEER are well underway, with the Baseline Behavioural Report already publicly available from the PEER website.

College & Research Libraries has released a preprint of Holly Mercer's forthcoming article "Almost Halfway There: An Analysis of the Open Access Behaviors of Academic Librarians."

Here's an excerpt:

Academic librarians are increasingly expected to advocate for scholarly communications reforms such as open access to scholarly publications, yet librarians do not always practice what they reach. Previous research examined librarian attitudes toward open access, whereas this article presents results of a study of open access publishing and self-archiving behaviors of academic librarians. Following an analysis of open access to library and information science literature in 2008, several strategies to encourage academic librarians to continue embrace open access behaviors are discussed.

The SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) project has released a series of tutorial videos.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

1. An Introduction to SWORD: Gives an overview of SWORD, the rationale behind its creation, and details of the first three funded SWORD projects
2. SWORD Use Cases: Provides an introduction to use cases, and examines some of the use cases that SWORD can be used for
3. How SWORD Works: A high level overview of the SWORD protocol, lightly touching on a few technical details in order to explain how it works
4. SWORD Clients: The reasons for needing SWORD clients are shown, followed by a tour of some of the current SWORD clients
5. Create Your Own SWORD Client: An overview of the EasyDeposit SWORD client creation toolkit, including the chance to try it out