Why Open Access Really Matters

Wondering why your funder has an open access policy? Trying to decide if that hybrid open access journal is for you? Come and hear the expert view on open access:

‘Why Open Access Really Matters: A Discussion with Professor Stuart Shieber.’ Old Library (School of Psychology), University of St Andrews,
Thursday 5 June, 9.30-10.30 am



Stuart M Shieber is Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and Faculty Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication.

Open Access to research outputs is a way of scholarly publishing which began as a philosophical and moral choice for academic authors, but has become – at least in the UK – an increasingly stringent requirement of research funding by Research Councils, funders like the Wellcome Trust, and now the Funding Councils as they look ahead to the next REF.

Stuart Shieber is Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and Faculty Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication. He is an academic author who has been involved with the Open Access movement for many years, and is an acknowledged expert and blogger on the subject.  Come and hear him give his views and answer questions on the future of Open Access and the development of Harvard’s open access policies in a conversation with University Librarian John MacColl.

Tea and coffee provided.

See the University Events page for more information

Palgrave Macmillan announce launch of new open access journal

Following quickly on from the last blog post regarding the launch of Royal Society Open Science we are delighted to announce the launch of another high quality open access journal but this time serving the humanities, social sciences and business.

Palgrave Macmillan (sister company to Nature Publishing Group) has just announced the launch of Palgrave Communications, a high quality open access online-only, multidisciplinary journal which will publish original research in all HSS related disciplines. The journal offers immediate, free online dissemination via a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license, and is committed to speedy acceptance and review of high quality original research.

Palgrave Communications will offer features such as Altmetrics, enhanced layout and navigation and will include the incorporation of figures, tables, video, multimedia and supplementary information. There will also be no restriction on word limits so all articles that conform to the required editorial standards of the journal will be published regardless of length.

The call for submissions has begun and the journal will publish its first articles later in 2014. If you are interested in publishing with this journal contact the Library at open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk we will give you details of the available open access funding options.

 

Royal Society call for submissions for new open access journal

The Royal Society will launch its second fully open access journal Royal Society Open Science in September of this year and is now calling for submissions. The journal is comprehensive in its scope covering life sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, engineering and computer science. The journal also aims to publish work without the length and scope restrictions observed by more traditional journals.

What is of particular interest is that the publishing model aims to offer open peer review as an option, will offer open access to data, implement article level metrics and offer researchers the opportunity to add post-publication comments.

Papers are made open access on publication on the Royal Society Open Science website and are deposited in PubMed Central on behalf of the author. Authors also retain copyright of their work and papers are made freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution License  (CC BY 4.0). The journal is therefore fully compliant with funder open access mandates.

Open access charges for Royal Society Open Science are waived by the publishers for an introductory period. If you are publishing after this initial period do not fret. The Library has Open Access membership with Royal Society Publishing and this will continue to give University of St Andrews authors a 25% discount on standard article processing charges. Contact open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk for details. 

To find out more about the journal and to submit research, visit the Royal Society Open Science website.

The future of books: what do researchers want?

Please help a major research project to understand how you use books.             

OAPEN-UK, an AHRC and Jisc-funded project on open access monographs, is currently running a survey to understand how researchers in the humanities and social sciences use books, and especially monographs.

The survey design has been informed by a range of funders including HEFCE and Jisc, and the findings will help build an evidence base for future policies to support monograph publishing in the UK.  

No identifiable data will be made public or shared beyond the OAPEN-UK project team. All respondents to the survey can enter a prize draw to win up to £100 of Amazon vouchers.

I hope you’ll spare 10-15 minutes to participate, and to help the researchers understand what you want as both authors and readers of books.

The survey can be found here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/K96XZD5 (closes 6 June 2014)

If you have any questions, please contact the survey researcher, Ellen Collins, on ellen.collins@researchinfonet.org


The survey will form an important input into the HEFCE Monographs and Open Access Project. This study aims to examine the difficulties facing open access publishing for monographs. HEFCE has set up an Expert Reference Group to establish what evidence is needed to inform understanding in this area, and to provide advice on an appropriate programme of work to gather this evidence.

Open Access theses and Research@StAndrews:FullText : a personal view

Even as a student studying towards a degree in Librarianship, there are still many services libraries offer which I never learned about at university. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to do a work placement at the University of St Andrews Library as part of the Digital Repository and Open Access team which opened my eyes to just how vital Open Access and the digital accessibility of research theses can be for the academic community and the exchange and creation of ideas.

Open Access – the free access to research publications – has become a central part of academic research practice. The free access to research publications is, however, not limited to journal articles, book chapters, and conference contributions, but includes free access to postgraduate theses as well. 

At St Andrews, postgraduate theses from a wide variety of subjects can be downloaded from the university’s institutional repository Research@StAndrews:FullText– it’s quick, it’s available to everybody, and it’s free!

In the repository, you will find theses from physics and astronomy to mediaeval history, theses published this year and theses published back in the 1950s – one thesis submitted in 1983 has proved particularly popular and has been downloaded 12 times in the week after its full text was uploaded intothe repository.

Imagine your thesis being still highly sought after several decades after you wrote and submitted it – if you’ve always dreamt of your dissertation being read by dozens of interested students and researchers, allowing your postgraduate thesis to be uploaded into the institutional repository might help you make this dream come true! 

Using our institutional repository benefits both those interested in a particular topic and the authors of the postgraduate theses. Readers gain free access to a hitherto largely unused resource of hundreds of postgraduate theses which they can use as inspiration for their own research, while authors are given the opportunity to reach a larger audience, thus raising the awareness of their research. 

Even theses written many years or decades ago at St Andrews could be of great interest today. This is evidenced by the fact that we recently have received requests from EThOS, the British Library’s UK-wide service for the digitisation of PhD theses, to provide them with theses from every decade since the 1950s. (To me, it was absolutely astonishing to see that theses written back in the day of my parents’ time at university were still read today. I finally have proof that they were wrong when they claimed that “nobody apart from your supervisor will ever read your thesis”!)

If you have written a postgraduate research thesis at St Andrews prior to 2007 and would like your thesis to be electronically available in the repository, please get in touch. With your permission, we will be able to digitise your thesis and make it available to others – you never know what brilliant research your thesis might inspire!

Maja Gusavac
(Guest blogger)

St Andrews thesis ranks highly in EThOS downloads chart

We are delighted to report that a PhD thesis written at St Andrews over 30 years ago has been the second most downloaded thesis from EThOS in March 2014.

‘The Gospel of Thomas and the earliest texts of the synoptic gospels’ by Kenneth V. Neller, who sadly passed away in January last year, has been downloaded 18 times this March. Owing to the kindness of Dr Neller’s widow, who gave permission in his name for the thesis to be uploaded as an Open Access thesis to our institutional repository, Research@StAndrews:FullText, we were able to make it available to researchers and students from all over the world.

Dr Neller’s thesis has been downloaded from EThOS by post-graduates, researchers, and teachers from Finland, Brazil, the US, the UK, and Australia.

Following a request made via EThOS by a post-graduate student from Australia, we uploaded Dr Neller’s thesis to our institutional repository last week. Since the upload, ‘The Gospel of Thomas and the earliest texts of the synoptic gospels’ has been downloaded 12 times in only a week – these are truly phenomenal statistics, more than 1 download per day.

We hope that Dr Neller’s thesis will inspire its readers, encourage further research, and that its popularity will motivate other researchers to make their theses publicly available as well. 

Our thanks go to Mrs Neller for kindly allowing us to upload the full text into our repository.

Maja Gusavac 

(Guest blogger)

Workshop on Open Access for St Andrews staff

Do you want a better understanding of what open access means for you? Do you need to know how to comply with your funders' requirements for open access? Would you like an understanding of how using PURE relates to open access publications?

Why not sign up for our course for St Andrews staff:

Open access: publishing options, funder policies, support services and more

Date: Wed 14 May 2014
Time: 1400-1630
Programme: Academic Staff Development Programme

See more details and sign up on PDMS

https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/pdms/index.php?Mode=Search&AudienceID=2&CourseID=3968