Scholarly Communication (Publishing, Intellectual Property, Copyright)
Issues in Scholarly Communication
What's happening:
- Indiana Faculty Council Supports Open Access
The University of Indiana Bloomington Faculty Council recently passed a Resolution on Journals, Databases, and Threats to Scholarly Publication. The resolution calls on all members of the Indiana campus community to support open access publishing, encourages faculty " to separate themselves from publishers with a narrow focus on profits at the expense of open scholarly publication," and urges the university libraries to educate the community on the business practices of journals and their implications for the system of scholarly communication. The resolution also states that the Faculty Council " expects librarians to be aggressive in their negotiations with vendors and even to withdraw from negotiations where excessive price increases are demanded." Indiana joins a number of institutions--the University of California system, UC Santa Cruz, Connecticut, Cornell, North Carolina State, Stanford--whose faculty members have passed similar resolutions over the past year. Available URLs for these statements are listed below. If your faculty have passed a similar resolution, please send the URL to Mary Case marycase@arl.org>. - Publisher mergers yield higher prices
- Library purchasing power cannot keep up with price increases
- Annual price increases for journals far above increases in CPI
- Monographic purchasing power decreasing
- Nature hosts Web Focus debate on access to scientific literature
At the University of Arizona:
- The UA Libraries spent 3.66 million on journals in 2003/2004
- The number of monographs purchased by the UA Libraries decreased by 10% from 1984 to 2003
Issues:
Scholars do not control the scholarly communication system| ! You write papers and you review them, but you and your library have to pay for them. |
We need to create alternative ways of publishing that provide open access while retaining scholarly quality.
Strategic responses
What UA faculty can do:
- Create and support competitive alternatives to the present costly system, such as institutional and other digital document repositories.
- Support journals with reasonable pricing models.
- Move too costly journals to university presses or scholarly societies.
- Retain copyrights. Do not sign away all of your rights to the publisher.Faculty can reserve some or all rights to republish or copy their own works, resulting in increased freedom to use your work for teaching and research.
- Influence the publishers. Consider submitting to high quality journals with reasonable pricing practices. Examine the pricing, copyright, and licensing agreements for any commercial journal that you contribute to as an author, an editor, or a reviewer. If you are the editor of a costly journal, move the journal to a nonprofit publisher or resign your editorship and work with a less costly journal.
- Support open access journals and self archiving. Open access permits users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of works, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the Internet. Open access and self archiving increase access while maintaining quality.
Alternatives to high priced commercial publishing
University of Arizona Library iniatives
Alternatives to high priced journals:
Some alternatives to high priced commercial publishing include:
SPARC is a worldwide alliance of research institutions, libraries, and organizations that encourages competition in the scholarly communications market. SPARC introduces new solutions to scientific journal publishing, facilitates the use of technology to expand access, and partners with publishers that bring top quality, low cost research to a greater audience. SPARC's project are in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research. The University of Arizona is an institutional member of BioMed Central; therefore the author's fee is waived for UA researchers who submit articles to the journals published by BioMed Central. BioMed Central features: Online submission and peer-review technology available without charge for groups of scientists who wish to run open access, online journals under their own editorial control; Retention of copyright for authors who publish original research articles in journals published by BioMed Central; Support of PubMed Central and other digital repositories that encourage self-archiving by authors. BioMed Central allows retention of copyright. It makes possible on-line submission and peer review technology without chart for scientists who wish to run open access journals under their own editorial control.
PubMed Central is the U.S. National Library of Medicine's digital archive of life sciences journal literature. Access to PubMed Central is free and unrestricted. The Journal of Insect Science, published on the World Wide Web by the University of Arizona, is available through PubMed Central.
BioOne provides full text access to high impact bioscience journals, the majority of which are published by small societies and noncommercial publishers. It is a collaborative effort between scientific societies, libraries, universities and the private sector. The University of Arizona currently subscribes to BioOne journals. The Journal of Insect Science, published on the World Wide Web by the University of Arizona, is available through PubMed Central.
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
PLoS publishes two new journals, PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. UA authors were in the first issue of PLoS Biology. PLoS journals retain the important features of scientific journals, including rigorous peer review and high editorial standards, but will use a new business model in which the costs of these services are recovered by modest fees on each published paper. All published works will be available immediately on-line, with no charges for access or restrictions on subsequent redistribution or use.
University of Arizona Library iniatives include:
The Arizona Electronic Atlas is an interactive atlas that allows one to create, manipulate, and download accurate and current maps and data. This site has more data available than can easily be viewed in one map, so initially four map themes were developed. These map themes are: Natural Resources, People and Society, Business and Economics, and People and Environment. New map themes will be added to the atlas as they are requested and additional data as it becomes available.
Digital Library of Information Science and Technology
The objective of DLIST is to serve as a repository of electronic resources in the domains of Library and Information Science (LIS) and Information Technology (IT). It includes published and unpublished papers; data sets; instructional and help materials; pathfinders; reports; and bibliographies..
The Geotechnical, Rock & Water (GROW) Digital Library was created with support from the National Science Foundation by the University of Arizona's Department of Civil Engineering, Center for Campus Computing, University Library, and a host of other contributors across campus in the Fall of 2001. GROW is the first development project towards the creation of a National Civil Engineering Resource Library (NCERL) and it is part of the National Science, Mathematics and Technology Digital Library (NSDL)
The Journal of Insect Science publishes papers in all aspects of the biology of insects and other arthropods from the molecular to the ecological. The Journal is published on the World Wide Web by the Library of the University of Arizona. Our guiding principle is that academic institutions should be involved in publishing scholarly work with as few impediments as possible to free access to information. The Journal of Insect Science is currently supported by the Library of the University of Arizona and will be freely available to individuals and institutions. It provides an alternative to excessively priced commercial publications in insect biology. It is the vehicle of choice for the publication of high-quality, rigorously refereed reports on the biology of insects and other arthropods. It is available through PubMed Central and through BioOne.
The official publication of the Society of Range Management, this journal has been in print since 1948. Each issue (published bi-monthly) from 1948 to 1994 has been digitized and converted to PDF format. The abstracts of more recent issues are archived by Texas A&M University.
Rangelands serves as a forum for the presentation and discussion of facts, ideas, and philosophies pertaining to the study, management, and use of rangelands and their several resources. Rangelands is the nontechnical counterpart of the Journal of Range Management
Journal of the Southwest, founded in 1959 as Arizona and the West, began publishing in its current format in 1987. A refereed journal published quarterly by the University of Arizona Press and the Southwest Center, Journal of the Southwest invites scholarly articles, essays, and reviews informing any aspect of the Greater Southwest (including northern Mexico). Dedicated to ail integrated regional study, the journal publishes broadly across disciplines, including: intellectual and social history, anthropology, literary studies, folklore, historiography, politics, Borderlands studies, and regional natural history.
Molecular Biology and Evolution
The Society for Molecular Biology and Evolution has published this bi-monthly journal since 1984. More than a decade of back issues have been converted to PDF files
Collaborative project, produced by biologists from all around the world, containing information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their characteristics, and their history. The information is linked together in the form of a tree.