Wednesday, October 29, 2014

OA Scoops

Help this open access journal plan their upcoming Open Source Strategy issue
The TIM Review is an open access journal with an upcoming Open Source Strategy issue they want you to contribute to. Mekki MacAulay is the guest editor for the issue, and in this interview find out more about the journal, this issue, and how you can share your expertise on the subject.

One of the pillars of the open source way is community, so I was quite pleased when Chris McPhee, the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Technology Innovation Management Review, reached out to me to thank me for including the TIM Review in my recent article about open access journals. The TIM Review has an open access policy that makes it a great place to share ideas with the broader open source community and aligns it with two pillars of the open source way: open exchange and participation.

Science Publishing: 'Tis the Season for Sharing Your Data

Attitudes and policies are shifting dramatically in favor of open data, as funders, publishers and researchers alike acknowledge that the benefits data sharing brings to science and biomedical discovery far outweigh the risks. I’ll provide a basic introduction to data sharing benefits and policies, and the resources available here at UCSF to support data sharing.
So, why share your data? Well, it’s good for science.
Data sharing supports data reuse, which can accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. From a funder’s perspective, data reuse increases the impact of their investment. Reanalysis of publicly available data helps confirm original results and helps researchers gain confidence in their novel discoveries. Publicly available datasets help train the next generation of researchers by enabling them to get their feet wet in an experimental or data analysis method that may be new to them. Public datasets are also key assets in the development of novel data analysis algorithms and software. Open data sharing also supports research reproducibility and discourages fraud.

Closed Minds and Open Access 

 Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity—particularly diversity of viewpoints—for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and socialpsychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: 1)Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years; 2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike; 3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking; and 4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology



The Intellectual Property & Science business of Thomson Reuters has announced its collaboration with Times Higher Education to power the latter's BRICS and Emerging Economies Rankings. Thomson Reuters InCites data, the world's leading research evaluation platform and home to Global Institutional Profiles, is the benchmarking engine behind this Times Higher Education ranking. Thomson Reuters also continues to power several other Times Higher Education rankings, as well as working with other ranking providers.

For more than a decade, Thomson Reuters has supported Shanghai Jiao Tong University's esteemed Academic Ranking of World Universities. Earlier this year, Thomson Reuters announced its collaboration with U.S. News & World Report to power the organization's Best Global University Rankings. Thomson Reuters also works with Russia's Round University Research Group to provide content and first level analysis for its Round University Ranking (RUR); URAP for the Middle East Technical University in Turkey; CWTS for its Leiden Ranking; U-Multirank for its European Commission Funded Consortia; and with the National Taiwan University Rankings. Thomson Reuters also collaborates with many evaluation and policy groups around the globe, such as Japan's National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP) to determine the impact of the nation's scientific and technological efforts.

InCites, the evaluation and benchmarking engine from Thomson Reuters, uses the industry's most trusted content and proven citation metrics from the Web of Science as the foundation for objective analytics to evaluate research output, performance and trends, as well as understand the scope of an organization's scholarly contributions, by individual or team.

Click here

Improving Access to Libraries for All

Taking pride in their responsibility to ensure equal and open access to information for people regardless of age, race or ethnicity, ability, primary language or socioeconomic background, these librarians believe they are part of a necessary social revolution supporting some of the most underserved populations in the nation.

Harvard University says it can't afford journal publishers' prices

University wants scientists to make their research open access and resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls

Friday, July 25, 2014

Open Access (OA), Access to Knowledge (A2K) and Scholarly Communication

Open Access For All Ciar McCormick argues that scholarly research should be available for all to access on the internet

“The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.”

American Association for the Advancement of Science Selects Copyright Clearance Center to Handle Article Processing Charges for Its First Online, Fully Open Access Journal

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society, has chosen the RightsLink for Open Access platform from Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a global licensing and content solutions organization, to handle Article Processing Charges (APCs) for Science Advances.
Science Advances, AAAS’s first online, fully Open Access journal, features well-executed, important research across the entire range of scholarly pursuits, including computer, engineering, environmental life, mathematical, physical, and social sciences.
RightsLink for Open Access streamlines the entire author fee transaction for Open Access charges, page charges, color charges, and more, giving publishers a robust pricing, discount and collections engine. It will work with AAAS’s manuscript management and production systems through CCC’s integration with Aries Systems’ Editorial Manager, which allows scholarly publishers a seamless way to collect APCs from within the Editorial Manager workflow. This will provide AAAS’s authors an easy-to-use platform for submitting publication charges.

World’s Largest General Scientific Society to Use RightsLink® for Open Access to Streamline the Entire Author Fee Transaction for Science Advances

Barnard faculty frustrated by plans to remove 40,000 books from library

“How are we conceptualizing the role of the library as it relates to the mission of the college? Twenty first-century colleges are made up of all kinds of media—that’s a fact and that’s, generally speaking, a good thing—but I think the concern really has to do with what the balance is of different kinds of resources for an institution like ours and what are the criteria that are being used to decide how that balance is being established for us?” Castelli said.

The Digital Einstein Papers gives public access to Albert's life 

For die-hard Albert Einstein fans that have always wanted to know more about the life of reputable theoretical physicist, a massive new archive of digitised files stemming from his life and works will let you do just that. 
Released 5 December by Princeton University, the project, entitled The Digital Einstein Papers is an open-access site for all the papers that Einstein ever wrote.

Princeton University has created and released an open-access collection of thousands of documents by theoretical physicist and philosopher of Science Albert Einstein.
MOSCOW, December 6 (Sputnik) Princeton University Press has unveiled its Digital Einstein Papers collection, an open-access site containing thousands of documents by famous theoretical physicist and philosopher of science Albert Einstein, the New York Times reported.
A collaborative project to study over 80,000 documents left behind by Albert Einstein has been underway since 1986, jointly carried out by Princeton and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Einstein willed the latter university the rights to his work. The online project has made about 5,000 documents available. Published earlier in book form, the papers presently comprise 13 volumes; a total of 30 volumes are planned. Thousands more documents will become available over time as they are studied and categorized by scholars.
December 5, 2014
The launch of the Digital Einstein Papers includes more than 5,000 documents that span the first 44 years of Albert Einstein’s life. As the organizations collaborating on the project -- the California Institute of Technology (the project’s home), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (which houses the Albert Einstein Archives) and Princeton University Press -- work to sort through tens of thousands of articles and letters, the website will grow to one day feature what the publisher said may be the first free digital collection of a prominent scientist’s complete works.
“The best Einstein source is now available to everyone, everywhere through the web,” said John D. Norton, a University of Pittsburgh professor of history and philosophy of science who wrote his dissertation on the history of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. “This is a great moment for Einstein scholarship.”

What Is the Point of Academic Books?

So perhaps the goal isn’t commercial success, but the dissemination of knowledge? That seems reasonable—except for the fact that university press books are quite pricey. My own book is around $25 for a paperback—not exorbitant, but a long way from free. Other academic interest books can induce sticker shock; Adam Jones’ wonderful Gender Inclusive is just shy of $50 on Amazon for the paperback; the hardback is a whopping $135. Even $50 is enough to buy a coffee-table book indulgence, not a slim paperback non-fiction volume, however brilliant. (And Jones’ book isn’t even published by an academic press; it’s by Routledge.)
So if academic books aren’t exactly commercial endeavors, and they aren’t exactly providing knowledge for the masses, what are they doing, exactly?

What price open access?

15 December 2014
According to conservative estimates, the UK’s higher education institutions are paying £160m per year for subscriptions to peer-reviewed academic journals; Research Libraries UK (RLUK) puts the figure even higher, at £192m. These are significant ongoing costs that reflect the central importance to UK research of having the widest possible access to articles in scholarly journals.

Moving On, Open Access and Science Communication Impact

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/absolutely-maybe/2014/12/15/moving-on-open-access-and-science-communication-impact/
  Still, it’s relatively easy to be an open access advocate, when you’re a senior scientist who long ago opted for the public science agency road. There was one last tie to that world, though, and it’s been increasingly uncomfortable: blogging for a part of the Nature Publishing Group. It’s been a privilege to be part of a magazine with such a long history

Ethics network that seeks free and open communications turns 10


"Globethics.net has grown during the last 10 years on the basis of a commitment to open access, to the sharing of knowledge and information," for the benefit of all," said the founder of Globethics.net, Christoph Stückelberger.
"The need and the demand are there for resources that are freely available, especially in developing and emerging economies."

Is Nature’s Move to "Free" Publishing a Step Toward Open Access?

The journal Nature announced last week it will offer free access to a number of its articles online.
It’s a move the journal said is a result of research funders "increasingly mandating that scientists make their papers free to read, download and reuse," but there are some strings attached. Articles can’t be copied, printed, or downloaded. They need to be read in a proprietary screen-view format, and can only be accessed through a special type of link.

Nature Communications becomes open-access journal
All articles submitted from 20 October 2014 will be published under an open-access model. The publication costs for authors will amount to USD 5,200 ...

‘Nature’ journals now free, as open access gains steam
The public now has unprecedented access to dozens more research journals, including the prestigious Nature, as publisher Macmillan announced that 49 of its titles will be available through a free content-sharing model, writes Jeff John Roberts for Gigaom.

Under the terms of a one-year pilot programme, journal subscribers and media outlets will be able to create links to articles from the journals – which also include Nature Medicine and Nature Genetics – on ReadCube, a platform for viewing and annotating PDFs, and share them with anyone on the web.

“[It] marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving [Nature Publishing Group or] NPG’s primary source of income – the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles,” the publisher explained.
Full report on the Gigaom site



Macmillan may now offer ‘free access’, but is it really open? 

Earlier this week the publisher Macmillan announced (in somewhat breathless prose) that subscribers to 49 of its Nature journals would be able to share links to the full text of articles that would otherwise be locked behind a subscription paywall. 

JournalClick Launches Library Services for the Open Access World

Tuesday, December 9th 2014

At its core, JournalClick automates the work of finding relevant research and sends content directly to libraries and their users. While manual searching is incredibly valuable JournalClick’s ability to push relevant articles as they are published is set to help searchers save a huge amount of time as well as ensure that they have access to all the latest content at their fingertips.
Read more at http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2014/12/09/journalclick-launches-library-services-open-access-world#Zh0cyixYwAmYwCD7.99

Open access and the direction of travel in scholarly publishing


The subscription model was founded on a great leap forward in technology – the printing press – and has served the research community well for over 300 years. The quid pro quo in which authors and reviewers worked for free while publishers took care of the technical side of production and distribution, and covered their costs by charging subscriptions, worked well – or well enough – for all that time. But the digitisation of words and images, the ease-of-use of modern software and the awesome dissemination power of the web has prompted a reassessment of research publishing and of the relationship between researchers and publishers. The web is also expanding the demand for research publications among special interest groups such as policymakers, small businesses, charities and the general public. These groups increasingly want access, either directly or mediated by news outlets or bloggers who have access to the literature and the ability to recast it into more digestible forms. 

The rise of patient peer review

 
When it comes to clinical research, the participation of the people being treated—the patients—usually ends by the time the study is submitted to a journal. A few U.K.-based publishers are now looking to change that. Last month, BioMed Central, an open-access publisher, announced that in 2015 it will launch the journal Research Involvement and Engagement, which will closely collaborate with patients in all aspects of its editorial processes, including peer review.
The new journal aims to capture the contributions of nonacademics to scientific research; according to Stephens, academic evaluation of public and patient involvement in science has been conducted for many years, but no journal was devoted to the theme, commonly known as PPI. The backers of the new journal point to a 2010 paper in Health Expectations as the type of work they hope to publish. The study offered guidelines for appraising the quality and impact of user involvement in published papers and grant applications. The guidelines represented a collaboration between patients and academics—several authors were patients. But according to Daniel Shanahan, associate publisher for medical evidence at BioMed Central in London, the study would have benefited from patient peer review. “In the case of this article, a lay reviewer would have been able to offer valuable insights as to the quality and potential impact of user involvement, which would help improve the overall quality of the article,” he suggests.

Springer and Simula join forces to provide free eBooks on computing

New open access book series Simula SpringerBriefs on Computing introduces essentials of computing science.Springer and Simula have launched a new book series, Simula SpringerBriefs on Computing, which aims to provide introductions to select research in computing. The series presents both a state-of-the-art disciplinary overview and raises essential critical questions in the field. Published by SpringerOpen, all Simula SpringerBriefs on Computing are open access, allowing for faster sharing and wider dissemination of knowledge. Under this agreement and model, authors also retain copyright.



Open Access in Europe
A number of organisations committed to open access, including OpenAIRE, recently endorsed the overarching  need for immediate access to research articles in an online statement. This was initiated by the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), and one of the outcomes of the recent Aligning Repository Networks Meeting.

In October 2013 Italy enacted a law containing the first national regulations about the open-access availability of publicly-funded research results (publications).This contribution examines how these new regulations match with the specific situation of that open-access pioneering discipline which is astrophysics.

LibGuide on Open Access (OA), Access to Knowledge (A2K) and Scholarly Communication

 LibGuide on Open Access (OA), Access to Knowledge (A2K) and Scholarly Communication.  I hope you will find these resources useful.  Should you have any queries, or should you want to add other useful references to this Guide, please contact Denise Nicholson (see Profile for details)

Amsterdam, July 23, 201
Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, today announced that QUOSA, its literature management solution, and Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) have extended their relationship to support greater compliance in the use of full text articles within corporate or institutional environments. Using CCC's rights advisory API, QUOSA customers who are also CCC licensees can view their license rights directly from QUOSA at no extra cost to the user. - See more at: http://www.elsevier.com/about/press-releases/science-and-technology/quosa-and-copyright-clearance-center-expand-access-to-compliant-literature-with-integrated-rights-management#sthash.8oh8D2sx.dpuf




A Generalized Approach for Computation of Near Field Radiation Pattern of an Antenna
International Journal of Antennas and Propagation is a peer-reviewed, open access journal that publishes original research articles as well as review ...


Open Access: OAI-PMH Feed of SCOAP3 Repository Now Available
The SCOAP3 initiative has converted to Open Access the majority of the literature in High-Energy Physics through a partnership of libraries, publishers ...



Publication Policies of Redfame Publishing
We follow the Gold Open Access way in journal publishing: Authors publish in Redfame journals that provide immediate open access to all of their ...

SAGE Open Access Initiatives

SAGE is the world’s largest independent academic publisher and is committed to global dissemination of research. We have published open access journals for a number of years with the goal of disseminating vital research to the broadest community. SAGE’s mission is founded in the belief that education is intrinsically valuable, and the dissemination of useable knowledge is a key foundation in building a healthy society.

In December 2010 we launched SAGE Open, the first open access journal spanning across the social and behavioural sciences and humanities, and subsequently launched SAGE Open EngineeringSAGE Open Medicine and SAGE Open Medical Case Reports in 2012. 2014 sees the launch of Big Data & SocietyResearch and Politics and many more titles.
SAGE’s Open Access Publishing Modes
SAGE supports both gold open access publication and green open access archiving:

Springer celebrates open access milestone

Springer is celebrating the milestone of 200,000 open access articles published to date. The articles, published acrossBioMed Central andSpringerOpen are freely available and published under a Creative Commons (CC) license. 
Springer now has 417 open access journals publishing across all areas of science – 265 at BioMed Central and 152 at SpringerOpen. In addition, SpringerOpen recently published its 35th open access book...... READ MORE

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Hydra, a open source repository solution



Hydra offers a core repository solution which can be adapted to meet different needs. It is open source software released under the Apache 2.0 licence, originally developed by the Hydra Project. The Project now has 21 Partners and a wide range of users internationally working together as a community to add to Hydra's capability.

It seems to me that preprint repositories may be quite useful in some circumstances but I have not used them personally. I would therefore love to hear from any info pros in Australia who have used arXiv or RePec or institutional repositories or other repositories for research for their clients, How useful were they? Some of them seem to have quite deep archives but I would have expected preprints to be especially useful for very recent information.

    Thursday, January 30, 2014

    open-access, advanced materials journal

    Japan's National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) have signed a 5-year collaborative agreement to co-publish the open access journal Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (STAM).Japan's National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS) and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) have signed a 5-year collaborative agreement to co-publish the open access journal Science and Technology of Advanced Materials (STAM). [30 Jan 2014]
    http://www.manmonthly.com.au/news/japan-switzerland-announce-publishing-collaboratio

    List of Important OA Journals

    Canadian Science Publishing launches new open access journal Arctic Science

    Arctic Science will be on exhibit at ArcticNet’s international Arctic Change 2014 conference taking place December 8-12, 2014 in Ottawa.
    Arctic Science is the first fully “gold” open access journal offered by Canadian Science Publishing (CSP). It will maintain the high quality editorial standards of our other NRC Research Press journals, while providing free, immediate public access to the final published article. For an introductory period, article processing charges (APCs) in Arctic Science will be waived.
    As collaborative, international scientific discovery and research in the Arctic is becoming ever more critical, we found there was an immediate need for an interdisciplinary Canadian‐based, openly accessible, science journal focused specifically on Arctic science.

    Library Science (OA)

    1. Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication (Q) [2013-], published by Pacific University Library

    Life Sciences 

    Pathogenesis (Elsevier) http://www.pathogenesisjournal.com/[published on behalf of The Royal College of Pathologists, a professional membership organization committed to setting and maintaining professional standards and promoting excellence in the practice of Pathology] will provide a home for research covering all areas of illness and normal cellular and molecular development in human and veterinary disease. The journal Pathogenesis will publish peer reviewed original scientific research articles and high quality reviews, editorials and letters to the editor which report on multidisciplinary areas of Molecular and Diagnostic Pathology, Cellular Mechanisms as well as aspects of Haematology, Proteomics, Virology, Microbiology and Chemical Pathology. [29 Jan 2014] http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20140129-908657.html

    OA

    The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is a non-profit corporation with global scope formed to educate about and advocate for the benefits of open source and to build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community.
    Project Gutenberg
       Science Fiction
    Internet Archive

    1. General Wikipedia
    2. Books Wikipedia (free library of editable educational textbooks.)
    3. Computer Wikipedia (Webopedia) for computer relate info
    4. Dictionary Wikipedia (Wiktionary)
    5. Library Wikipedia
    6. Maps Wikipedia (Wikimapia)
    7. Media Wikipedia (freely-licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips)
    8. Medcyclopaedia
    9. Medical Wikipedia
    10. Source Wikipedi (online library of free content publications)
    11. Quotation Wikipedia
    Encyclopedias
    1. Enclopedia Mythica (encyclopedia of mythology, folklore, and religion)
    2. Encyclopedia of Psychology
    3. MSN Encarta Encyclopedia to discontinue its website by Dec 2009

    Others
    • Internet Public library The Internet Public Library is a public service organization and a learning/teaching environment founded at the University of Michigan Schokk of Information

    If you have some more such sites, please let me know

    Research Dissemination in Open Access Journals


    see BIBLIOGRAPGY at the end

    Research Dissemination in Open Access Journals - 10/24/2013 - Georgia Regents University


    The UK government has announced that it will make publicly funded scientific research available for anyone to read for free, accepting recommendations in a report on open access by Dame Janet Finch.
    This will likely see a major increase in the number of taxpayer-funded research papers freely available to the public.
    “Removing paywalls that surround taxpayer funded research will have real economic and social benefits.
    Science Minister David Willetts said:

    “Removing paywalls that surround taxpayer funded research will have real economic and social benefits. It will allow academics and businesses to develop and commercialise their research more easily and herald a new era of academic discovery.
    "This development will provide exciting new opportunities and keep the UK at the forefront of global research to drive innovation and growth.”

    http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/topstories/2012/Jul/government-to-open-up-publicly-funded-research
    Open Access on Wikipedia
    OASIS aims to provide an authoritative ‘sourcebook’ on Open Access, covering the concept, principles, advantages, approaches and means to achieving it. The site highlights developments and initiatives from around the world, with links to diverse additional resources and case studies. As such, it is a community-building as much as a resource-building exercise. Users are encouraged to share and download the resources provided, and to modify and customize them for local use. Open Access is evolving, and we invite the growing world-wide community to take part in this exciting global movement.
    Tensions between publishers and funding bodies over open access to research papers have flared up again after the Publishers Association accused Research Councils UK of riding roughshod over publishers' concerns in a new draft policy on open access. see news

    Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council said it would
    require that the published results of all research it helps pay for be
    made publicly accessible in institutional repositories within 12
    months of publication. The policy, which is to take effect in July,
    puts the council in line with other major supporters of scientific
    research, including the National Institutes of Health and Britain’s
    Welcome Trust.

    http://chronicle.com/blogs/ ​wiredcampus/australia-to-open-​publicly-financed-biomedical-​ research/35505?sid=wc&utm_​source=wc&utm_medium=en

      Welcome to Open Access Science Research Publisher (OASRP)

    Federal Research Public Access Act

    The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is considering a policy of requiring faculty to deposit their work in open-access repositories.

     - The Science 

     Journals:

    Libri. International Journal of Libraries and Information Services

    Researchers publish their results to establish their own claim to the research and to enable other researchers to build upon them. In the case of journal articles, only the richest institutions have been able to afford a reasonable proportion of all the scholarly journals published and so learning about and accessing such articles has not always been easy for most researchers. Open Access changes all this.

    What Open Access is

    The Open Access research literature is composed of free, online copies of peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers as well as technical reports, theses and working papers. In most cases there are no licensing restrictions on their use by readers. They can therefore be used freely for research, teaching and other purposes.

    What Open Access is not

    There are various misunderstandings about Open Access. It is not self-publishing, nor a way to bypass peer-review and publication, nor is it a kind of second-class, cut-price publishing route. It is simply a means to make research results freely available online to the whole research community.

    How is Open Access provided?

    Open Access can be provided by various means. A researcher can place a copy of each article in an Open Access archive or repository or can publish articles in Open Access journals. In addition, a researcher may place a copy of each article on a personal or departmental website. Whilst all three routes to Open Access ensure that far more users can access such articles than if they were hidden away in subscription-based journals, the first two constitute much more systematic and organised approaches than the third and maximise the chance of other researchers locating and reading articles. 
    Open Access archives or repositories are digital collections of research articles that have been placed there by their authors. In the case of journal articles this may be done either before (preprints) or after publication (postprints). This is known as ‘self-archiving’. These repositories expose the metadata of each article (the title, authors, and other bibliographic details) in a format compliant with the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). To access the contents of these archives, you can use Google or one of the specialised search engines for a more focused and efficient search. The latter systematically harvest the contents of the archives worldwide, forming a database of current global research. Open Access repositories may be multidisciplinary and located in universities or other research-based institutions, or they may be centralised and subject-based, such as the one covering certain areas of physics and related disciplines, called arXiv. By the beginning of 2005, there were almost 40 Open Access archives in the UK, and more universities and research institutes are planning to launch their own. A list of Open Access archives in the UK is maintained by the Eprints.org site at Southampton University. If your institution does not have an archive, extensive information on how to set one up can be found on that website. Self-archiving is an international movement that is developing fast, and some grant funders are also now planning central archives to house the articles of their grant-holders. 
    If you are concerned that your journal’s publisher may have copyright restrictions that would prevent you from self-archiving your articles, this will in most instances not be the case. Current publisher policies on self-archiving and copyright are detailed on the SHERPA project website at Nottingham University. 
    Open Access journals are peer-reviewed journals whose articles may be accessed online by anyone without charge. In many cases they may also be published in print. Some, mainly those published from a university department or with substantial subsidy, make no author or page charges. Others levy a charge for publishing an article, turning on its head the traditional model where a library pays for access to the contents of a journal through a subscription. This charge may be paid by the author(s) but in most cases it is financed by a research grant or institutional funds. Your institution may already have taken the decision to pay for Open Access articles to be published, or your grant-awarding body may have adopted this as one of its policies. A list of grant-awarding bodies that explicitly permit funds to be used for this purpose is maintained on the BioMed Central website. BioMed Central is a well-known Open Access publisher with over 100 journals in its portfolio. Other examples are the journals from the Public Library of Science, such as PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology. In the case of an author’s financial hardship, BioMed Central, PLoS and other Open Access journal publishers will waive the publication fee. Fees levied by Open Access journals vary quite markedly but, as a guideline, BioMed Central charges £330 per article for most of its journals, and PLoS charges US$1,500 (approx. £800). In 2003 JISC secured a deal with BioMed Central on behalf of UK institutions to waive author fees for over 90 biomedical journals. 
    A comprehensive list of Open Access journals in all subject areas is maintained by the University of Lund. In early 2005 this list contained over 1,400 journals. Many of these Open Access journals have impact factors and are indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information for its Web of Knowledge/Web of Science service. At June 2004, 239 Open Access journals were in this category. 
    Another form of Open Access is found in ‘hybrid’ journals: these are publications that will make an article accessible to everyone online without charge if the author opts to pay for publication. An example of a hybrid journal is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which will make an article Open Access for a fee of US$1,000.

    Why should Authors Provide Open Access to their Work?

    There is accumulating evidence that shows that research articles that have been self-archived are cited more often than those that have not. Across most subject areas there is at least a twofold increase in citation rate. In some subject areas it is even higher. This form of Open Access means that research has much more impact than before. Moreover, the research cycle – where work is published, read, cited and then built upon by other researchers – is enhanced and accelerated when results are available on an Open Access basis. Would you not prefer to be able to access all the articles you need to read and use for your research, easily and without restriction? 
    This paper has been written by Alma Swan of Key Perspectives Ltd on behalf of JISC and produced and edited by Sara Hassen and the JISC Communications Team. 
    Alternative formats of the briefing paper can be found at:
    www.jisc.ac.uk/publications

    Further Information and Resources

    JISC Open Access initiatives.  
    JISC’s FAIR Programme is evaluating and exploring different mechanisms for the sharing of access to institutional resources. 
    The DAEDALUS and TARDis projects are exploring different models for constructing effective institutional repositories:
    www.lib.gla.ac.uk/daedalus and http://tardis.eprints.org 
    The ePrints UK Project is developing national, discipline-focused services for accessing e-prints from open archive repositories: www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk

    Open Access Archives and Self-Archiving

    The Eprints.org site has general information about Open Access archives, including a list of existing archives and a handbook on how to set one up: www.eprints.org 
    For the best-known Open Archive search engines see:
    OAIster www.oaister.org
    and Citebase http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search 
    The SHERPA project is developing Open Access archives in a number of research-led universities:www.sherpa.ac.uk 
    Permissions policies can be checked by publisher at:
    www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php
    and by journal at: http://romeo.eprints.org 
    The Directory of Open Access repositories is an emerging pilot service offering an authoritative list of Open Access repositories: www.opendoar.org

    Open Access Journals

    For information about BioMed Central, the largest Open Access journal publisher see: www.biomedcentral.com 
    For a list of grant-awarding bodies that make funds available for the payment of publication fees see the list at see:
    www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/apcfaq#grants 
    For the Public Library of Science see: www.plos.org 
    For an up-to-date list of Open Access journals see:
    www.doaj.org

    Open Access Citation and Impact Studies

    The earliest study on the enhanced impact of Open Access research articles was by Steve Lawrence:www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/lawrence.html 
    The most recent work on impact of Open Access articles is by Harnad and Brody:
    www.dlib.org/dlib/june04/harnad/06harnad.html 
    Other Open Access resources:
    http://www.arl.org/sparc/
    www.arl.org/sparc/soa/#forum

    American Scientist discussion forum (mainly for researchers):

    Documents & Multimedia



    References
    1. Evaluation of the JISC’s Open Access Funding Initiative Spring 2006.  Research conducted for the JISC by Key Perspectives Ltd.
    2. Open Access on Wikipedia
    3. http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/topstories/2012/Jul/government-to-open-up-publicly-funded-research
    4. Publishers cry foul over RCUK access plans. 22 MARCH 2012 | BY PAUL JUMP
    5. NATURE | NEWS Researchers opt to limit uses of open-access publications Advocates of open publishing fret that misunderstandings lead scientists to choose restrictive licenses. Richard Van 
      Noorden 06 February 2013 
    6. NATURE | COMMENT Science publishing: Open access must enable open use
      Cameron NeylonNature 492, 348–349 (20 December 2012)
    7. Social Sciences Directory: Open Access Publishing www.socialsciencesdirectory.com
    8. International Research: Journal of Library and Information Science is an international peer-reviewed online journal in the field of Library and Information Science publishing original research papers, survey reports, and reviews & opinions pertaining to the subject.