Publisher extends open access choice to monographs

Scholars in Humanities and Social Sciences now have an opportunity to publish open access monographs with Brill’s new initiative:

“As a major publisher in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Biology and International Law, Brill is committed to enhancing access to academic content in any sustainable way. Since its academic book publications are a cornerstone of the program, it is extending Brill Open to include monographs and edited volumes.”

Under Brill's OA option, authors retain copyright and can choose from 2 Creative Commons licences (CC-BY / CC-BY-NC), determining whether commercial re-use is allowed and the cost of the Book Publication Charge. At EUR 5000 for a 350-page book under the CC-BY-NC licence, this ties in with the typical production costs mentioned by Open Book Publishers of £3,500-£5,000, and suggests that a business model for open access book publishing is achievable and affordable.

With the Wellcome Trust extending their open access policy to include scholarly monographs and book chapters* from October 2013 we are likely to see more publishers announcing their options for authors soon.

Previous blog post on examples of OA books and new publishing models

*Wellcome Trust's Monograph and Book Chapter FAQ

3000 items and the open access cake

In what is becoming a regular summer event, this week we celebrated another landmark for our open access repository with the 3000th item made available in Research@StAndrews:FullText

Akira O’Connor deposited a version of his paper in our Research Information System, Pure, in order to make it open access. The publisher of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT Press, allows authors to archive the final version of their article after a short embargo.

“In the JoCN paper, we report an experiment in which we scanned people's brains as they were completing a memory task. Using these fMRI scans, we were able to show that the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (a region of the brain's surface near your left temple) is actually involved in processing the meaning of words, rather than directly involved in memory retrieval as was previously thought.”

Dr O’Connor already has a number of open access papers in Research@StAndrews:FullText: in most cases these are his accepted manuscripts, the version most commonly allowed by publishers. His latest paper is currently submitted to an open access journal, Frontiers in Psychology. When told about our latest landmark, he contacted us to say:

“That the library has put so much effort into making our work accessible to all is something I'm very proud of. The OA fund and Research@StAndrews:FullText provide a range of options for St Andrews researchers to publish their work in the most suitable journal whilst also acknowledging that the way scholarly output is disseminated is changing. It's a comprehensive approach to open access and I look forward to seeing it go from strength to strength.”

UPDATE: More on open access from Akira O'Connor's blog

The ‘3000’ spot was narrowly missed by an open access article in PLoS ONE, which has been added to our repository under a Creative Commons Licence. The lead author of this paper, PhD student Joana Carvalho, is supervised by co-author Dr Tiago Marques, who also has a number of research outputs in the repository and has previously featured in our blog. This new article describes a study of the population status of the western chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes verus, which has been classified as an Endangered species.

Other recent open access items contributed to the repository include Phd theses:
How terrorism ends : understanding the outcomes of violent political contestation by Sarah V Marsden
The victims of a sorted life : ageing and caregiving in an American retirement community by Philip Y Kao
and journal articles:
Policy change and learning in the RBC model by Kaushik Mitra, George W Evans and Seppo Honkapohja
4273π : bioinformatics education on low cost ARM hardware by Daniel Barker et al.

We will be organising a ‘champagne moment’ soon with our winning author by way of celebration. In the meantime Library staff took a few minutes out to share some open access cake. Not only has our content grown since 2010 - so has our cake!

Open access cake 2010

Open access cake 2013

University Librarian John MacColl

HEFCE proposals on open access - consulation

On behalf of UK higher education funding bodies, HEFCE has announced a consultation on open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework. The funding bodies are committed to a policy that supports increased public access to research outputs. Advice was sought on developing a joint policy in Feb 2013, and an analysis of the advice received will be available from HEFCE's page on open access to publicly funded research.

Proposals for implementing an open access requirement in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework have now been published, with responses invited by 30 Oct 2013. Proposals [PDF]

The policy covers journal articles and conference proceedings, and the main criteria proposed are:

• Outputs should be accessible through a UK higher education institution (HEI) repository, immediately upon either acceptance or publication, though the repository may provide access in a way that respects agreed embargo periods.
• Outputs should be made available as the final peer-reviewed text, though not necessarily identical to the publisher’s edited and formatted version.
• Outputs should be presented in a form allowing the reader to search for and re-use content (including by download and for text-mining), both manually and using automated tools, provided such re-use is subject to proper attribution under appropriate licensing.

Monographs are not currently included in the proposals, and there will be allowance for exceptions (either on a case-by-case basis or through an agreed percentage compliance) for example when papers have international co-authors or a publication has no open access option. There are 7 main questions in the consultation, including whether a notice period of 2 years is appropriate.

See the full report: Consultation on open access in the post-2014 REF

The University of St Andrews already provides infrastructure that allows researchers to easily make their outputs accessible. Publications can be recorded in PURE, with links to projects and data added where relevant. Full text can be deposited immediately on acceptance, and automated embargo dates can be set to make the output open access in Research@StAndrews:FullText at the appropriate time. Staff in the Library can help with this.

Contact the library for advice: Open Access support
See our Open Access support web pages