Recommended links:
- A Quick Tour Around the World of Scholarly Journal Publishing, by David Crotty, Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press, in The Scholarly Kitchen blog. This is a nice overview of changes and issues from a publisher perspective. If you read this, you’ve got the highlights of scholarly communications issues in one fell swoop!
- Feds Target ‘Predatory’ Publishers, by Carl Straumsheim in Inside Higher Education. “The Federal Trade Commission is “marking a line in the sand” with its first lawsuit against publishers that take advantage of scholars wishing to publish in open-access journals.” More from Chronicle of Higher Education: Federal Prosecutors Join Fight Against Predatory Journals. We have additional information and links about deceptive publishing and conference practices on the Author Beware guide.
- Harvard Library publishes report on converting subscription journals to open access This literature review should be a useful resource when editors and societies and scholars ask about how to “flip” their own journals. Here is the link to the report (224 pages and open access): Converting Scholarly Journals to Open Access: A Review of Approaches and Experiences by David Solomon, Bo-Christer Björk, and Mikael Laakso, with preface by Peter Suber, and comments by multiple authors.
Copyright Law affects the work of scholars and libraries, so it seems worthwhile to know a bit about issues raised this month:
- Rate my copyright law – how well does your law support libraries? EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) has created a checklist of “provisions that every copyright law should have to support library activities and services in the 21st century, such as lending, making an electronic copy of a journal article or book chapter for a user, providing library material for use in virtual learning environments, and undertaking digital preservation.” Current US Law seems to do a pretty good job, but there are challenges and attempts at revision.
- Why is the Copyright Office Trying to Reform Section 108? from ARL Policy Notes, A blog of the Association of Research Libraries Influencing Public Policies strategic direction.
- Deans of Five Academic Libraries in Virginia Send Letter to House Judiciary Chairman Re: Revision of U.S. Copyright Law
- Recent study about an issue which may not be well-addressed: Digitizing Orphan Works: Legal Strategies to Reduce Risks for Open Access to Copyrighted Orphan Works, by David Hanson, 2016, explores revisions of law or legal interpretation which might reduce the risks involved in digitizing orphan works. (Orphan works are copyright protected works for which rightsholders are positively indeterminate or uncontactable.) It’s long, 122 pages, but the Conclusion and Practical Application section is only p. 94-96.
- Just when you thought the ereserves case was finally settled, Publishers Appeal GSU Copyright Case
Three items about peer review in honor of Peer Review Week Sept. 19-25, 2016:
- We should reward peer reviewers. But how?, by Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus
- From July, Let’s make peer review scientific, by Drummond Rennie, in Nature 535, 31–33 (07 July 2016) doi:10.1038/535031a
- Elsevier Awarded U.S. Patent For “Online Peer Review System and Method” I find this story incredible but admit I haven’t read the full patent; [don’t ALL publishers use the internet heavily for peer review?]; but so many people have shared, it really seems to be true.
Clinical data sharing: The August 4th issue of New England Journal of Medicine had 4 articles on data sharing: Strengthening Research through Data Sharing; The Yale Open Data Access (YODA) Project — A Mechanism for Data Sharing; Toward Fairness in Data Sharing; Sharing Data from Cardiovascular Clinical Trials — A Proposal. If you are interested in this topic, don’t miss the Comments.
Scholarly book publishing; to survive, some suggest open access is the answer, but how are costs paid?
- I don’t think we have answers yet and we have scarcely begun this discussion at WU Libraries. Here are a few recent links which might trigger your thoughts.
- The Summer 2016 issue of JEP: the Journal of Electronic Publishing focuses on the economics of scholarly book publishing and the results of a study of a “system of funding in which universities and colleges paid the costs of producing humanities monographs (rather than expecting publishers to recoup their costs from consumer payments)” [Added Sept. 28: This issue is discussed in a Scholarly Kitchen post, How Much Does Publishing Cost? with several comments.]
- Knowledge Unlatched KU Select 2016 package was announced. While WU Libraries has participated in earlier packages, it seems unlikely that we will be able to find the $10K required to participate with this batch. If the package gets enough funding from other universities, we get open access to 147 front list and 196 backlist titles from 54 well-respected scholarly publishers. But if not enough can pay, the unlatching won’t happen.
- This post from Dec. 2015 in The Scholarly Kitchen makes other useful points: For Open Access Monographs, Peter Pays Paul. Who Pays Peter?, by Joseph Esposito with many useful comments; “With the usage of STM journals recording big numbers and many university press books circulating rarely or not at all, the bias is built into the data: the best collection is the most useful collection. This does not mean that monographs don’t circulate or that they have no or little scholarly value; rather the point is that with finite resources, librarians have to make tough decisions. It’s a very difficult thing to be on the wrong side of a tough decision.”
