June 2005 | Main | December 2005
July 12, 2005
Duke University Press Launches e-Duke Scholarly Collection
For immediate release
July 1, 2005
For more information, contact:
Kim Steinle, Library Relations Manager
libraryrelations@dukeupress.edu
http://www.dukeupress.edu/edukecollection
Duke University Press is pleased to announce the official launch of its
new e-Duke Scholarly Collection, hosted by HighWire Press at Stanford
University. The new e-Duke Scholarly Collection will replace the interim
electronic journals package that was offered in the summer of 2004 to the
libraries that had formerly accessed Duke's humanities and social sciences
journals via Project Muse.
"We are proud to have partnered with HighWire Press, an influential leader
in electronic publishing in its development and provision of premier
electronic hosting technology, and also an invaluable resource and friend
to the scientific and academic communities," commented Duke University
Press Director Steve Cohn. "Our partnership with HighWire, whose mission
statement so closely mirrors our own as a university press-that is, a
shared commitment to advance the frontiers of knowledge and contribute
significantly to the international community of scholarship-will
undoubtedly benefit our subscribers and the larger academic and research
communities that we serve."
A division of Stanford University Libraries, HighWire earned the 2003
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers Award for
"Service to Not-for-Profit Publishing." With this new partnership,
subscribers to the e-Duke Scholarly Collection will reap the many benefits
of HighWire's impressive list of features-including toll-free access
across cited journals within HighWire's collection-and its commitment to
preservation, as Duke University Press will now become a participant in
the Stanford-based LOCKSS program (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe).
The e-Duke Scholarly Collection includes online access to twenty-nine Duke
University Press humanities and social science journals (see list below),
including a newly acquired title for 2006, /New German Critique/. Pricing
for the collection is based on the regular subscription rate of twenty
titles; the nine journals that remain available on Project Muse are
included in the e-Duke Scholarly Collection for no additional cost. Access
to all twenty-nine journals in the collection includes not only the 2006
issues as they are published, but also all available issues from the
2000-2005 volumes.
Derived from the model originally created by Project Muse, the e-Duke
Scholarly Collection pricing model will combine a tier system, based on
Carnegie classifications, with usage statistics to create price
categories. As no reliable usage statistics are currently available, the
2006 and 2007 e-Duke Scholarly Collection prices for all libraries will be
based on median usage. Based on this calculation, all institutions that
subscribe for 2006 and/or 2007 will receive discounts of 33-84% off the
full value of the collection. Once Duke University Press has reliable 2006
usage statistics from HighWire Press, usage quartiles will be implemented
in combination with the current tiered pricing to determine e-Duke
Scholarly Collection rates in 2008.
Finally, in combination with the electronic collection, Duke University
Press is also pleased to introduce a tiered, substantially discounted
pricing model for print subscriptions as add-ons to the e-Duke Scholarly
Collection, with e-Duke subscribers receiving discounts of 60-80% off the
normal print prices.
For more information on the e-Duke Scholarly Collection, including further
details regarding the new pricing model, please visit
http://www.dukeupress.edu/edukecollection.
Posted by Donna Braquet at 09:38 AM
July 11, 2005
Several Studies Show Willingness to Archive
A wide-ranging new international study across all disciplines has found
that over 80 per cent of academic researchers the world over would
willingly comply with a mandate to deposit copies of their articles in an
institutional repository.
The findings of the study, carried out by Key Perspectives Ltd, for the
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK, have been greeted by
Southampton's Professor Stevan Harnad as 'a historic turning point in the
worldwide research community's progress towards 100 per cent Open Access'.
The new results are being reported this week at the International
Conference on Policies and Strategies for Open Access to Scientific
Information in Beijing, China (22-24 June 2005) by Dr Alma Swan of Key
Perspectives, along with new findings from Dr Les Carr, of the School of
Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, the
only UK university that already has a self-archiving mandate. Southampton
is a leader in the worldwide Open Access movement.
The international, cross-disciplinary study on Open Access had 1296
respondents. The main findings are:
* The vast majority of authors (81 per cent) would comply willingly with a
mandate from their employer or research funder to deposit copies of their
articles in an institutional or subject-based repository; a further 14 per
cent would comply reluctantly, and only 5 per cent would not comply
(highest willingness, US: 88 per cent; UK: 83 per cent; lowest, China: 58
per cent).
* 49 per cent of respondents had already self-archived at least one
article in the previous three years
* 31 per cent of respondents were not yet aware of the possibilities of
self-archiving
* Use of institutional repositories for self-archiving had doubled since
the first survey (2004) ; the University of Southampton has the highest
rate of self-archiving in the UK
* Only 20 per cent of authors who self-archived reported any degree of
difficulty in self-archiving, and this dropped to 9 per cent with
subsequent experience. Les Carr's analyses of Southampton web-logs show
that it takes 10 minutes for the first paper, and even less for subsequent
papers.
* Self-archiving is done the most by those researchers who publish the
most papers
* Researchers' primary purpose in publishing is to have an impact on their
fields (i.e., to be read, used, built upon, and cited)
In a separate exercise the American Physical Society (APS) and the
Institute of Physics Publishing Ltd (IOPP) were asked about their
experiences over the last 14 years of existence of arXiv (the open e-print
archive which has over 300,000 physics papers deposited). Both publishers
said that they could not identify any loss of subscriptions due to arXiv,
did not view it as a threat to their own publishing activities and indeed
encouraged it.
'These results are hugely important,' said Stevan Harnad, 'and will be
highly influential. Currently only 15 per cent of articles are being
self-archived worldwide, but we can see from the survey that the
overwhelming majority of academic authors everywhere would willingly
self-archive if they were asked to do so. The results are already
confirmed by the 90% self-archiving rate at Southampton, the first
institution to adopt a self-archiving mandate, and by CERN, the world's
biggest institution to adopt a self-archiving mandate, with likewise over
90% self-archiving.
'Universities and research-funders who have hesitated about requiring this
now have the clear evidence that a self-archiving mandate would not lead
to resistance or resentment. And those who hesitated to mandate out of
concern for publishers should note that the publishers with the most and
longest experience with author self-archiving welcome it.'
On the critical question of whether the optimal route for self-archiving
is the central one (as favoured by the US National Institutes of Health)
or the distributed institutional model (favoured by the UK), Professor
Harnad says that the JISC/Key Perspectives reports provide strong support
for the UK Parliamentary Select Committee, which specifically proposed
distributed institutional self-archiving. This is now likely to form the
basis of a recommendation from Research Councils UK (RCUK), which has been
considering the future of Open Access to UK-funded research output.
1. Web links for further information
Swan, A. and Brown, S. (2005)
Open access self-archiving: An author study.
Technical Report, External Collaborators, JISC, HEFCE
Powerpoints
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/alma-amst.pdf
http://www.eprints.org/berlin3/ppts/02-AlmaSwan.ppt
Key-stroke study of archiving time
Publisher responses including APS and IOPP
Swan, A. (2005) JISC Open Access Briefing Paper.
Technical Report, JISC, HEFCE.
Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O'Brien, A.,
Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints
and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned
Publishing 18(1):pp. 25-40.
2. The University of Southampton is the home of GNU EPrints software, the
most widely used software for building Institutional Repositories, and the
JISC (the Joint Information Systems Committee) TARDis (Targeting Academic
Research for Deposit and Disclosure) project, which has been investigating
the technical, cultural and academic issues which surround institutional
repositories.
3. The University of Southampton is a leading UK teaching and research
institution with a global reputation for leading-edge research and
scholarship. The University has over 20,000 students and over 5000 staff.
Its annual turnover is in the region of 270 million.
Posted by Donna Braquet at 09:43 AM
July 08, 2005
PLoS Debuts with 13.9 Impact Factor
San Francisco, CA; June 27, 2005 - The open-access journal PLoS Biology has been assessed by Thomson ISI to have an impact factor of 13.9*, which places PLoS Biology among the most highly cited journals in the life sciences. This is an outstanding statistic for a journal less than two years old, from a new publisher promoting a new business model that supports open access to the scientific and medical literature.
An impact factor of 13.9 places PLoS Biology above such established journals as EMBO Journal, Current Biology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In fact, in ISI's category of general biology journals, PLoS Biology is ranked number 1.
>>Continue reading the press release
Posted by Donna Braquet at 09:48 AM