British Art Studies: new online journal announcement and call for submissions

St Andrews researchers with an interest in Art and Art History might be intrigued by this new fully peer-reviewed Open Access journal to be officially launched Autumn 2015. It is a collaboration between The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art and encourages submissions on all aspects of British art, architecture and visual culture. The editorial team is based in London and New Haven.

The editors would like submissions to make effective use of the possibilities for visually stimulating articles offered by the online format and provide a forum for debate on digital scholarship, publishing and copyright.

Credit: John Hoppner, 1758-1810, British, An Unknown British Officer, Probably of 11th (North Devonshire) Regiment of Foot, c.1800, ca. 1800, Oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles F. Samson in memory of Charles F. Samson, Yale College, Class of 1902. Public Domain.

Further details and Call for submissions

Writing for British Art Studies

Style Sheet

SHERPA/REF author survey

SHERPA/REF is a resource currently under development that is designed to help authors and institutions demonstrate compliance with the HEFCE open access policy for the next Research Excellence Framework. It is expected that the resource will be able to furnish authors and library staff with information about journal compliance with the HEFCE OA policy.

The author survey can be found here: http://fluidsurveys.com/s/SHERPAauthor/

Since the service is still very much in the development stage the team behind SHERPA/REF are looking to make sure that the resource develops in the right direction and includes all the functionality that the research community would like/expect.

The survey takes around 15 minutes to complete and there is a chance of winning a £50 shopping voucher.

The survey will close at midnight on 28 January 2015.

EThOS #ShareMyThesis competition now open!

Copyright © The British Library Board

The British Library EThOS service has started a Share My Thesis competition (in collaboration with Vitae and Research Councils UK).

How to enter:
Entry for the competition is through twitter using #ShareMyThesis. Entrants must explain in a single tweet why their doctoral research is important.

The fine print:
Entrants must have either completed their PhD degree or be currently studying for a PhD. Equivalent degrees such as DPhil are also allowed. Entrants must only tweet once, and also ensure that their tweet is understandable to a lay audience.The full terms and conditions can be found here.

The next stage of the competition will see the authors of the best 8 tweets write a short article elaborating on what they wrote previously, explaining in more detail why their research is important. This article will be in the style of a blog post no more than 600 words long.

First prize is a 15" retina display MacBook Pro! Second prize is an iPad, and third is a £200 Amazon voucher.

The closing date for entering your tweets is 9th February 2015 at 10am.

A bit about EThOS: The British Library EThOS service aims to increase visibility to UK doctoral research theses by compiling records of all UK doctoral theses in one database. It also offers free access to the full text of as many theses as possible either by links to institutional repositories (such as our own) or directly through the EThOS database. EThOS also offers a digitisation on demand facility where users can request that a thesis be scanned and uploaded to the database. EThOS will then contact the corresponding institution and request that a copy be sent for digitisation. Many St Andrews theses have undergone this process, and we have found that many older theses have found a new lease of life afforded by the greater degree of visibility. The benefits of the EThOS service were perfectly presented in a previous blog post by a postgraduate work experience student Maja, so rather than repeat her words, I'll simply suggest you have a read of her post.

Digital Humanities and New Frontiers

At the end of November the University of St Andrews hosted the Open Access in the Humanities Roadshow. This event showcased some of the important work that is currently going on in the world of scholarly publishing, and in particular book publishing. The response to the Roadshow was overwhelmingly positive, showing that there is clearly a lot of interest in open access book publishing in the humanities. With this in mind, we wrote a blog post to highlight the work the library is doing to increase visibility and accessibility to open scholarly ebooks through our catalogue.

Copyright Quinn Dombrowski

We would like to turn back to journals with this post and point the spotlight on Frontiers, an open access publisher with a very innovative publishing platform (more on that below). Last month the publisher announced that it is making a push on humanities and social science disciplines by announcing a series of HSS journals. Frontiers in Digital Humanities is the first to be announced, and is already open for submission. Digital Humanities is a fascinating new field that exists at the point of intersection between computing and humanities disciplines, and it is great to see that Frontiers have recognised the need to develop and share exciting new research in this area. Here at St Andrews our Digital Humanities Research Librarian Dr Alice Crawford has been working to raise the Library’s profile in this field. She has developed an Islandora repository in which rare books and manuscripts from Special Collections can be digitally displayed, and is assisting staff in academic Schools with a number of other digital projects. A project to convert the University’s Biographical Register of alumni into database format is also underway. The Library is very pleased to be using a range of new digital technologies to make these historical texts and data available to the public and to be opening up new avenues for researchers to explore.  To find more information about Digital Humanities at St Andrews check out the webpage, or visit the blog.

A bit about Frontiers:
Frontiers is a publisher with a twist, since it functions on a community-driven editorial model, with over 40,000 scientists and researchers as editors. Frontiers also uses an interactive open peer review system whereby review editors and authors engage in a discussion in order to seek agreement about the review outcome. This results in a peer-review system that is transparent and quick (Frontiers has an average time of 3 months between submission and publication). All Frontiers journals are also fully Open Access.

Physics publisher to offset open access costs

The University Library is delighted to announce St Andrews participation in the Institute of Physics 3-year pilot offsetting Open Access costs against Library journal subscriptions. This means that in the long term the Library can use subscription rebates from IOP hybrid journal titles of up to 90% of Open Access costs (known as Article Processing Charges or APCs) to fund more OA. Twenty-two university libraries are taking part and the scheme has the support of Research Libraries UK. It is hoped that the pilot will help institutions and authors manage the transition from subscription to author pays publication and demonstrate to the research community that efficient, sustainable Open Access publication models can be agreed that work for researchers, universities and publishers.

Key facts

• The agreement will help the Library to release money to fund future open access publications from the Library budget and will help supplement the block grants being provided by the Research Councils.
• You can publish in IOP journals included in the pilot and be compliant with open access policies from major funders.
• If you wish to choose the paid route to achieve open access you will need to select ‘open access publication’ when you submit a paper to an IOP subscription journal.
• You will need to liaise with the Open Access support team to check on the availability of APC funds from the Library. Contact open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk
• All submissions will go through the normal editorial and peer review process and only articles of sufficient quality will be accepted for publication by IOP.
• Forty five of IOP’s subscription journals are included in the pilot. The full list of journals is available here: http://iopscience.iop.org/info/page/UK-open-access-pilot#journals
• Article charges paid on fully open access journals like New Journal of Physics (NJP) will not be rebated as these journals do not have a subscription charge.
• More information on the pilot is available from http://iopscience.iop.org/info/page/UK-open-access-pilot

Instructions for St Andrews researchers.

If you need help with this or any other aspect of Open Access research publication please contact open-access-support@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Image: © 2015 IOP Publishing