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Internet Resources for Library Issues in Scholarly Communication
Create Change
http://www.createchange.org
Create Change seeks to address the crisis in scholarly communication by helping scholars regain control of the scholarly communication system-- a system that should exist chiefly for them, their students, and their colleagues in the worldwide scholarly community, not primarily for the benefit of publishing businesses and their shareholders.
SPARC
http://www.arl.org/sparc/home/index.asp
SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations built as a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system. These dysfunctions have reduced dissemination of scholarship and crippled libraries. SPARC serves as a catalyst for action, helping to create systems that expand information dissemination and use in a networked digital environment while responding to the needs of academe.
Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities
http://www.zim.mpg.de/openaccess-berlin/berlindeclaration.html
Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily available to society. New possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the classical form but also and increasingly through the open access paradigm via the Internet have to be supported. We define open access as a comprehensive source of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has been approved by the scientific community.
Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/bethesda.htm
Statements of principle drafted during a one-day meeting held on April 11, 2003 at the headquarters of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. The purpose of this document is to stimulate discussion within the biomedical research community on how to proceed, as rapidly as possible, to the widely held goal of providing open access to the primary scientific literature.
Budapest Open Access Initiative
http://www.soros.org/openaccess/index.shtml
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography
http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
Charles Bailey's bibliography of selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet.
Framing the Issue: Open Access
http://www.arl.org/scomm/open_access/framing.html
A resource guide that highlights the key points to consider in thinking about and discussing open access, gives examples of open access implementation, and provides sources for more information.
IFLA Statement on Open Access to Scholarly Literature and Research Documentation
http://www.ifla.org/V/cdoc/open-access04.html
"IFLA (the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) is committed to ensuring the widest possible access to information for all peoples in accordance with the principles expressed in the Glasgow Declaration on Libraries, Information Services and Intellectual Freedom.
IFLA acknowledges that the discovery, contention, elaboration and application of research in all fields will enhance progress, sustainability and human well being. Peer reviewed scholarly literature is a vital element in the processes of research and scholarship. It is supported by a range of research documentation, which includes pre-prints, technical reports and records of research data."
Economic Analysis of Scientific Research Publishing, A Report Commissioned by the Wellcome Trust (Revised October 2003)
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/images/SciResPublishing3_7448.pdf
"Our analysis also indicates that the commercial publishers are likely to take an increasing interest in the STM journals market and that their objectives are not wholly aligned with those of the research community. It is clear that the commercial publishers carry out many activities very well and provide many researchers with most of the things they need effectively. Taking the dissemination of scientific research as a whole however, the individual actions of academic staff, prompted and supported in some
cases by commercial publishers, do not add up to an outcome which best serves the needs of the community as a whole. We are not confident that the different forces operating in the market will necessarily produce better outcomes of themselves."
The Academic Publishing Industry: A Story of Merger and Acquisition, by Mary H. Munroe
http://www.niulib.niu.edu/publishers/
Open-Access Publication of Medical and Scientific Research, A Public Library of Science Bacground Paper (Updated December 2003)
http://www.plos.org/downloads/oa_background.pdf
"Institutions will face the issue of how, precisely, to dedicate to open-access journals some of the funds that their libraries currently use to pay expensive subscriptions to restricted-access journals. Universities will be challenged to develop systems to reward authors for
publishing in journals which archive works in the emerging open-access repositories that will catalyze a new, open, global interchange of ideas. Finally, funders of research, and especially public agencies who hold a special trust to maximize the impact of the work they fund, will be challenged to consider open-access publishing in the context of their mission.
These challenges, while significant, are worth overcoming because, simply stated, the end result—the removal of barriers to scholarship and the global interchange of scientific ideas—holds spectacular promise for the future of science, education and health."
Open Access: Unlocking the Value of Scientific Research, by Richard K. Johnson, SPARC Enterprise Director
http://www.arl.org/sparc/resources/OpenAccess_RKJ_preprint.pdf
"...open access is not a business model; it is an outcome that may be supported in a range of ways with an infinite variety of business models. These varieties are being
worked out in the marketplace and in individual scholarly communities with different traditions and financial dynamics."
OACS - Open Access Communication for Science
http://oacs.shh.fi/
"The focus is on new business models enabling free electronic access to the primary scientific knowledge for researchers, university students, companies as well as the general public. The fundamental research question is whether such Open Access business models (financed by "open source"-like voluntary work, author charges, grants etc) provide a re-engineered value chain which is radically more cost-effective and offers wider availability of the results of science than the currently dominating model, which is based on subscriptions or site licenses to content given away for free by academic authors to a few large commercial publishers."
For Whom the Gate Tolls, by Stevan Harnad, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm
Tenure/Promotion
"I worry about self-archiving because it does not count as refereed publication, and might even interfere with the chances for refereed publication."
Yet another instance of the archiving/publishing conflation: The self-archiving initiative is aimed at freeing refereed publication from toll-based access/impact barriers (not from refereeing). Unrefereed preprints do not count as publications on-line any more than they do on-paper.
The Future of Scholarly Publishing: Report from the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing
http://www.mla.org/resources/documents/issues_scholarly_pub
The Ad Hoc Committee on the Future of Scholarly Publishing, established by the Modern Language Association in 1999, set out to examine the current state of academic publishing in the fields of languages and literatures. The committee's charge was to investigate and understand the widely perceived crisis in scholarly publishing and make recommendations to address the situation.
Open Archives Initiative
http://www.openarchives.org/
"The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication. Continued support of this work remains a cornerstone of the Open Archives program. The fundamental technological framework and standards that are developing to support this work are, however, independent of the both the type of content offered and the economic mechanisms surrounding that content, and promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a range of digital materials."
Project RoMEO
http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/ls/disresearch/romeo/
The Eprints movement is calling upon authors to consider carefully what rights they assign to publishers if they want to go on and self-archive a copy of their work. Project RoMEO has compiled a list of existing journal publisher copyright transfer agreements, now housed on the Sherpa site at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php.
Self Archiving FAQ for the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)
http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#self-archiving
"To self-archive is to deposit a digital document in a publicly accessible website, preferably an OAI-compliant Eprint Archive. Depositing involves a simple web interface where the depositer copy/pastes in the 'metadata' (date, author-name, title, journal-name, etc.) and then attaches the full-text document. Software is also being developed to allow documents to be self-archived in bulk, rather than just one by one."
Cornell University, Journal Price Study Core Agricultural and Biological Journals
http://jps.mannlib.cornell.edu/jps/jps.htm
"Commercial publishers’ titles in both groups consistently outprice the university, government, and association and society publishers."
Swets Information Services--Serial Price Increase Report, 2004
http://informationservices.swets.com/web/show/id=52169
University of Wisconsin-Madison, Measuring the Cost-Effectiveness of Journals: Ten Years After Barschall
http://www.library.wisc.edu/projects/glsdo/cost.html
"This study focuses on journal costs in the subject disciplines of economics, neuroscience and physics...[it] focuses on the late Henry Barschall's methodology for measuring the cost per thousand characters of journal content and Wisconsin's ongoing effort to apply cost measures to the management of the journal collections."
ICOLC Statement of Current Perspective and Preferred Practices for the Selection and Purchase of Electronic Information
http://www.library.yale.edu/consortia/2001currentpractices.htm
The Costs and Benefits of Library Site Licenses to Academic Journals, by C. T. Bergstrom and T. C. Bergstrom
http://octavia.zoology.washington.edu/publishing/site.html
Because there is no compelling logistic reason for university libraries to participate in the journal distribution process, we ask whether university wide site licenses perform a fiscal function that benefits the academic community. We find a surprising answer. If a journal is priced to maximize the publisher’s profits,
scholars on average are likely to be worse off when universities purchase site licenses than they would be if access were by individual subscriptions only. However, site licenses are not always disadvantageous. We show that institutional site licenses for nonprofit journals such as those published by professional societies and university presses are broadly beneficial to the scientific community.
Academic Journal Pricing and Market Power: A Portfolio Approach, by Mark J. McCabe
http://www.prism.gatech.edu/%7Emm284/JournPub.PDF
"...if we compare titles of similar vintage we find that the average non-profit subscription price is between fifty to seventy-five percent less than commercial titles' rates. At the same time average citation rates for the non-profit journals greatly exceed those of the commercial publishers' in most instances, sometimes by a factor of five."
Free Labor for Costly Journals? by Theodore C. Bergstrom
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jeprevised.pdf
"There is a remarkable difference between the prices that commercial publishers charge to libraries for economics journals and the prices charged by professional societies and university presses. This price difference does not reflect a difference in quality. The six most-cited economics journals listed in the Social Science Citation Index are all nonprofit journals and their library subscription prices average about $180 per year. Only five of the twenty most-cited journals are owned by commercial publishers, and the average price of these five journals is about $1660 per year."
Pricing the Serials Library: in Defence of a Market Economy, by Henk W. Plasmeijer
http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?id=nbxwryhpdvw8r4mv
Journal of Economic Methodology, 9:3 (2002)
The Faustian Grip of Academic Publishing, by Robert P. Parks
http://econwpa.wustl.edu/eps/mic/papers/0202/0202005.pdf
"...academic publishing apparently is 'gripped' in a path-dependent equilibrium, one in which the serials crisis will be present forever."
The Market for Academic Journals, by Owen R. Phillips & Lori J. Phillips
http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?id=prhauqhbg05vrt4w
Applied Economics, 34:1 (2002)
In the 1980s Henry Barschall, University of Wisconsin-Madison Physics Professor, published 2 articles in Physics Today which demonstrated that journals published by scientific societies or associations were more cost-effective than those of commercial publishers. Commerical publisher Gordon & Breach sued the AIP and APS after they used Barschall's findings to promote their journals.
Barchall died in 1997, 6 months before a U.S. District Court finally ruled against Gordon & Breach.
The Cost of Physics Journals
http://barschall.stanford.edu/articles/pt8612.pdf
Henry Barschall's 1986 study from Physics Today
The Cost-Effectiveness of Physics Journals
http://barschall.stanford.edu/articles/pt8807.pdf
Henry Barschall's 1988 follow-up study in Physics Today.
Cost of Physics Journals: A Survey
http://barschall.stanford.edu/articles/baps8807.pdf
1988 Bulletin of the American Physical Society article, with J.R. Arrington
U.S. District Court opinion on Gordon and Breach's suit against AIP and APS
http://www.arl.org/scomm/gb/opinion.html
"Barschall's methodology has been demonstrated to establish reliably precisely the proposition for which defendants cited it -- that defendants' physics journals, as measured by cost per character and by cost per character divided by impact factor, are substantially more cost-effective than those published by plaintiffs. Plaintiffs have proved only the unremarkable proposition that a librarian would be ill-advised to rely on Barschall's study to the exclusion of all other considerations in making purchasing decisions. This consideration in no way makes Barschall's study or defendants' descriptions thereof false, and accordingly judgment is granted to defendants."
Getting the Profession We Want, or A Few Thoughts on the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing, by Jennifer L. Holberg and Marcy Taylor
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pedagogy/v004/4.1holberg.html
"...we would draw your attention to [Cathy N. Davidson's] sensible summary of the problem, which in some ways diverts our attention away from victimization and blame shifting: "We have to stop thinking of these problems and the sufferers as ever and always elsewhere. We're talking about the most basic aspects of scholarship, the foundation of our profession. The bottom line is that scholarly publishing isn't financially feasible as a business model—never was, never was intended to be, and should not be. If scholarship paid, we wouldn't need university presses...
While we agree with Davidson (2003) and others that scholarly publication is a collective "common good" with which our professional organizations, universities, and individual scholars need to be equally concerned (see her proposals for solutions, including subventions from departments as part of a new professor's contract package and dues from professional organizations), we also agree that creative reevaluations of our profession are in order. What do we value? Is it actually the book/article or the action that each produces—the intellectual effort, the possible effect in terms of teaching and learning, the way in which "scholarship" can hope to change minds and hearts and institutions for the better? How might we capture that in criteria for tenure and promotion? Have we, perhaps, relied on quantity (whether of books or of refereed articles) because that is easier than making qualitative judgments regarding what constitutes important scholarly work? Might we instead begin to scrutinize the variety of activities that make up our professional lives, including the range of writing we do and the service we render to our scholarly and other communities?"
Full text of article available in Pedagogy 4.1 (2004) 1-7, which is accessible via Project Muse.
Presses Seek Fiscal Relief in Subsidies for Authors, by Peter Monaghan
http://www.library.gsu.edu/news/index.asp?view=details&ID=3348&typeID=62
Promoting Open Access in the Humanities, by Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/apa.htm
"Humanists may feel less urgency to launch peer-reviewed, open-access journals, and find it harder to do so without funding for processing fees. But there are still reasons to launch such journals and other funding models to sustain them. Humanists may be more skittish about offering open access to their books than to their journal articles, but there are reasons why informed authors will choose to try the experiment. In the next section I sketch some of the strategies to facilitate these advances. "
Shedding Light on Academic Press
http://www.chronicle.duke.edu/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/10/20/417654ed37b9f
"...within the complicated economy of academic presses, researchers in the humanities are discovering that peer-reviewed monographs—expansive works written by one author and evaluated by scholars—are increasingly inclined to perish. Although most professors at Duke are finding the complications in publishing only slightly problematic, the situation is bordering on a crisis throughout higher education."
A Special Letter from Stephen Greenblatt
http://www.mla.org/resources/documents/rep_scholarly_pub/scholarly_pub
"Many factors are involved here, but the core of the problem--which extends beyond our fields to such disciplines as philosophy, musicology, and anthropology--is systemic, structural, and at base economic. Under financial constraint, universities have been unable to provide adequate support both for library budgets and for university presses. Responding to the pressure of shrinking budgets and of skyrocketing costs for medical, scientific, and technical journals, libraries have cut back on the number of books that they purchase. And university presses, suffering severe financial losses as a result of this shift in library purchases and a general decline in book sales, have cut back on the number of books they publish annually in certain fields."
Google Directory of Free Online Archives
http://directory.google.com/Top/Science/Publications/Archives/Free_Access_Online_Archives/
Google Directory of Free Online Science Journals
http://directory.google.com/Top/Science/Publications/Journals/Free_Online_Journals/
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