Tag: Open Access

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Digital

Open Access Knowledge?

The sciences may be embracing open access, but the humanities remain cool to the idea. Paul Jump investigates

Many observers have hailed the recent surge of open-access titles launched by commercial publishers as evidence that science is firmly on the road to a fully open-access future.

But it’s a different story in the humanities and social sciences, and the jury is still out on the wisdom of SAGE, the US social science publisher, in launching the first major open-access title outside the sciences.

Even Jayne Marks, vice-president and editorial director of the publisher’s library information group, described SAGE Open, which will span the humanities and social sciences, as “very much a test model”.

Recent figures suggest that 14 per cent of open-access journal publishers are in the humanities, but they account for just 4 per cent of all open-access articles.

Niche open-access journals often operate out of university departments and rely on little more than what Michael Jubb, director of the UK’s Research Information Network, called “the goodwill and hard work of the people who run them”.

Read full story. An interesting story, as many permanent contracts rely upon academics publishing in journals… to spread knowledge further and raise their research profile… so would open-access reach that brief?!

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Digital

Submission fees could pave way to open-access future

Defray scholarly journals’ peer-review costs with per-paper charge, study advises. Paul Jump writes

Major journals could move to an open-access model if they charged a fee for every paper submitted to them, a study has suggested.

Most open-access journals are currently funded solely via charges to the authors of papers accepted for publication.

However, high-profile journals such as Science and Nature do not offer open-access options on the grounds that their high rejection rates would force them to impose prohibitively high charges in order to cover the cost of administering peer review.

But a new report commissioned by Knowledge Exchange, the European association of organisations committed to open access, says that a better business model for journals that reject more than 70 per cent of submitted articles would be to combine charges for accepted papers – known as article-processing charges – with submission fees.

Read full article in Times Higher Education.

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Digital

You want to go to the library at 3am?

The University of Bath pioneered all-day opening during term-time when its library was refurbished in 1996.

Gavin Rea, the deputy librarian, said that for the past two years “it has been open 24 hours a day for 365 days a year, as many overseas students are unable to go home for Christmas”.

Since the library security desk doubles as the university reception, and there is sometimes only a single member of staff on duty, the extra expense comes to less than £20 an hour at night-time, he added.

Although he admitted that late-night occupancy can be “very low”, or dominated by overseas students using computer facilities to contact home, Mr Rea stressed the “unbelievable flexibility” that the policy offers students. They can “spontaneously turn up and do a couple of hours’ work when the mood takes them”.

Read full story. At the University of Winchester, we give out swipe cards on a 24 hour basis which can be used to access one of the open-access computing areas (most first year students, however, live in networked areas of the campus), but the library isn’t really required all night.

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Academic Digital

Brian Lamb calling for open access

It is almost “criminally irresponsible” to hoard academic knowledge in the digital age, according to a Canadian specialist in the field.

Brian Lamb, manager of emerging technologies and digital content at the University of British Columbia, also said that open educational resources (OERs) could help to reassert the academy’s role as a “leader and guardian of free and open enquiry”.

He made the comments at the Open Educational Resources International Symposium in London, which was sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee.

Mr Lamb said that OER – freely available course material – was “one small piece” of a broader movement. “Yes, we want open content, but also open source tools, the adoption of open standards, open data and open and transparent practices,” he said.

He added that it was possible universities did not have the answers to the world’s problems and that the human race was “doomed”, but that hoarding knowledge was “perverse”.

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Digital

Open-access campaigner told to back off by US blog

A fervent campaigner for open-access journal publishing has been asked to stop posting comments on a new open-access blog by both supporters and opponents of his cause.

Stevan Harnad, professor of cognitive science at the University of Southampton, has said it is his personal mission to “ram open access down everybody’s throats”.

But his postings on a blog launched by the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to discuss ways to improve public access to federally funded research have caused controversy.

The pro-open access Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has written to Professor Harnad to ask him to stop posting critiques that inhibit new open-access advocates from participating in the forum.

“Some of our community members are hesitating to participate, as they are concerned that the dynamic has become ‘post a comment and have it critiqued by Stevan’,” writes Heather Joseph, SPARC’s executive director.

Read full story