Library Stuff

“UCSF has joined the growing ranks of academic institutions that are offering most, if not all, of their research free to the public, by requiring that all published scientific studies be added by their authors to a university repository accessible to everyone. The policy change at UCSF, which was announced last month, is part of a global shift toward “open access” – improving the exchange of scientific information by allowing free and widespread dissemination of research that has long been contained in subscription-only journals.”

via SF Chronicle

“A new low-cost scientific journal unveiled on Tuesday with an unusual business model will add to the pressure on publishers like Reed Elsevier and Axel Springer and stoke the debate over free access to research. The founders of the new journal, called PeerJ, come with a pedigree. Peter Binfield previously worked for PLoS One, the most successful part of the not-for-profit Public Library of Science, which has pioneered open access to scientific papers, and Jason Hoyt comes from the research database group Mendeley.”

via Reuters

“Students’ library cards are a passport to the specialized knowledge found in academic journal articles — covering medicine and math, computer science and chemistry, and many other fields. These articles contain the cutting edge of our understanding and capture the genius of what has come before. In no uncertain terms, access to journals provides critical knowledge and an up-to-date education for tomorrow’s doctors, researchers and entrepreneurs. But should that access cease at graduation? Or would you rather a graduating medical student, perhaps your future doctor, be able to keep up with the latest advances? Would you rather an ambitious graduate student feel comfortable leaving the academy to found the next Google, knowing she still has access to the latest insight in her field and is able to build upon it?”

via The Washington Post.

UCSF – “The UCSF Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of current and future scientific articles freely available to the public, helping to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results. The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest scientific institution in the nation to adopt an open-access policy and among the first public universities to do so.”

The Boston Globe – “Harvard may be the world’s wealthiest university, but fees for its academic journal subscriptions have gotten so steep – some as much as $40,000 a year – that an advisory council is encouraging faculty to submit their work to “open access’’ online journals that are available for free. The council also asked Harvard faculty to consider resigning from the editorial boards of the high-priced subscription publications and to urge professional associations to “take control’’ of scholarly literature in their fields.”

Yale Daily News – “An online access project has given Yale Law School faculty broader readership than ever before. The Law School Library added roughly 3,000 faculty-published scholarly articles from legal journals to an open access database on its website over the past year — giving it the largest online repository of its kind. The efforthas made Yale a leader among institutions seeking to increase the amount of academic content that is freely available to the public. The database has generated more than 300,000 downloads from visitors worldwide in the last 12 months alone, and law librarians at Yale said they hope the University’s progress will encourage other law schools to implementsimilaropen access initiatives.?While law libraries across the country have already worked to compile repositories likeYale’s, Law School librarian Blair Kauffman said none of these databases are on par with the University’s, which will continue to expand as faculty publish more articles.Julian Aiken, access services librarian at the Law School Library, said the site has received traffic from more than 41,000 visitors in over 160 countries within the last year.”

OMB Watch – “In recent years, government has increasingly embraced the proactive disclosure of information and created online tools to increase transparency. But how do Americans discover that information? Who helps them learn how to use complex government databases and tools? The answer may be a surprisingly familiar one: libraries. Libraries have traditionally played a leading role in helping the public discover and use government information. However, the rapid expansion of e-government creates new opportunities and challenges for empowering the public with such information. The Government Printing Office (GPO) is now considering a proposal that could help libraries around the country to modernize and expand their government information services, supporting equitable public access to information and amplifying the impact of open government initiatives.”

Chronicle of Higher Education – “This past April in Switzerland, Lawrence Lessig gave an impassioned lecture denouncing publishers’ paywalls, which charge fees to read scholarly research, thus blocking most people from access. It was a familiar theme for Mr. Lessig, a professor at Harvard Law School who is one of the world’s most outspoken critics of intellectual-property laws. But in this speech he gave special attention to JSTOR, a not-for-profit journal archive. He cited a tweet from a scholar who called JSTOR “morally offensive” for charging $20 for a six-page 1932 article from the California Historical Society Quarterly. The JSTOR archive is not usually cast as a leading villain by open-access advocates. But Mr. Lessig surely knew in April something that his Swiss audience did not: Aaron Swartz—a friend and former Harvard colleague of Mr. Lessig’s—was under investigation for misappropriating more than 4.8 million scholarly papers and other files from JSTOR.”

NYT – “Digitally savvy academics have been struggling to reconcile new media with traditional scholarly publishing, which is painfully slow and generally locked behind paywalls or unavailable online. One answer has been offered by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which on Wednesday unveiled PressForward, a new open access platform for online scholarship.”

NYT – “Digitally savvy academics have been struggling to reconcile new media with traditional scholarly publishing, which is painfully slow and generally locked behind paywalls or unavailable online. One answer has been offered by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which on Wednesday unveiled PressForward, a new open access platform for online scholarship.”