St Andrews University joins Open Library of the Humanities

Last month the University of St Andrews joined the Open Library of the Humanities - an open access mega-journal and book publisher (see previous post on OLH here). Dr. Martin Paul Eve, a founder and director of OLH, welcomed St Andrews:

“It is wonderful that the University of St Andrews has joined the OLH LPS [Library Partnership Subsidy] programme. With the help of institutions like St Andrews, we can build a way for OA to work in the humanities that is sensitive to the different environment within which these fields operate.” 

John MacColl, University Librarian and Director of Library Services, added:

“St Andrews has a track record of supporting innovative Open Access platforms such as Peer J, Open Book Publishers and Knowledge Unlatched. This latest membership offers many opportunities for humanities researchers in St Andrews and beyond to make their work Open Access free of charge”

The University of St Andrews is now part of an international consortium of over 80 other institutions that financially supports OLH through membership fees. These fees cover the cost of publication and ensure that there are no author facing charges (APCs). The reason for this type of publishing system is that many researchers feel that the regular “gold” open access system, where authors have to pay APCs, is geared more towards researchers in STEM disciplines, where there is often more money available to cover such charges. For many in humanities disciplines, these charges can present a barrier to open access publication. OLH is seeking to redress this imbalance by offering an alternative publishing system that is tailored specifically to the academic landscape of the humanities.

OLH is directed by Dr Martin Paul Eve and Dr Caroline Edwards of Birkbeck, University of London. Initially, the platform was given start-up support by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Last month Birkbeck awarded OLH a further three-year grant of $741,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Dr Eve had this to say:

“The successful conclusion of our previous planning grant, awarded by the Foundation in 2014, has shown us that there is substantial appetite among libraries, journals and authors for a new model to achieve open access.
“By lowering costs for the international library community, while maintaining peer-review standards and professional publishing practices (such as digital preservation), the OLH offers a new and viable route to open, online publication in the humanities.” Birkbeck, University of London.

Open Library of the Humanities is set to launch in September 2015, with an initial 7 journals.

We now have 5000 items in the repository!

We’ve reached another milestone! We now have over 5000 items in the repository, with a variety of research outputs including theses, reports, books, chapters, journal articles completely free and available for anyone to read.

We have reached this milestone in only 6 months, whereas the previous 1000 milestones took around 12 months. The graph above reflects the recent upsurge in activity. This is largely a response to two recent policies that have helped to reshape the UK higher education publishing landscape. Firstly, Research Councils UK (RCUK) produced an open access mandate requiring RCUK funded authors to make their research outputs open access either by paying an Article Processing Charge (APC) for "gold" access, or by depositing an accepted manuscript in a repository ("green" open access). RCUK later requested a report by institutions who had received a block grant to fund APC payments. They wanted to see where the money had been spent and how much impact the money was having on open access compliance. The library produced a report in September 2014 that showed our compliance rate at 71%, which comparatively speaking was excellent. This involved a lot of communication between the Open Access team and academic colleagues to ensure that those with RCUK grants knew about  the open access requirements. The reaction from the academic community was very positive, and this is reflected in the 71% figure.

The second big motivator contributing to the increased activity is undoubtedly the HEFCE open access policy for the next Research Excellence Framework (REF).  In a nutshell, the policy states that articles and conference proceedings must be deposited in a repository when they are accepted for publication in order to be included in the next REF. Although the policy doesn’t come into effect until April 2016, the Open Access team has been working hard over the past few months promoting the message, and ensuring that the research community is compliant well in advance. The Open Access team have delivered presentations at Physics and Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Economics & Finance, Management, Computer Science, Philosophy, and History. We have also been invited to Earth & Environmental Sciences and Medicine. In support of the presentations we have also been communicating the message through email, having contacted over 80 authors in 16 Schools and Departments across the University.

Copyright Stephen Ritt, CC-BY-SA

We continue to have electronic deposit of our postgraduate research theses into Research@StAndrews:FullText according to University regulations, and the 5000th item in the repository was the PhD thesis A phenomenological-enactive theory of the minimal self, authored by Brett Welch. The thesis presents a fascinating study of self-hood derived from two areas of research: phenomenology and enactivism. To mark the occasion we will be sending a copy of the book Open Access and the Humanities by Martin Paul Eve to Brett at his home in the United States. Martin Eve's book is available open access from the publisher's website and in print form.

The repository holds theses going back to 1949 and, at the time of writing, theses account for 35% of the content, totalling 1,752 items. David Collins is the thesis contact in the OARPS team, and the person responsible for archiving and mediating the deposit of most of the thesis content in the repository. The work involved in obtaining permissions to archive theses is complex and requires a great deal of time and effort. But the rewards for doing so are great as it increases the visibility of the theses and also showcases the high quality postgraduate research the University of St Andrews is famous for.

In the preface to Martin Eve's book, Peter Suber (who's book entitled Open Access is also available freely from publisher) writes about the difference in open access uptake between the humanities and the sciences. He suggests that the reason the humanities have been slower to adopt open access has nothing to do with lack of desire, but is rather because there are fewer working examples of open access in the humanities to prove that it works. We think that it is safe to say that Brett's thesis adds to the body of working examples we have collected in the repository, and, hopefully, it can prove to be an inspiration to others.

Well done to Brett!

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.

Open Access Books: “Books fall open, you fall in”

"Books fall open, you fall in, delighted where, you've never been." 

David T. W. McCord

With this post we want to highlight the importance of open access books. When people think of open access, their minds might naturally think of journal articles and conference papers. But, there are a growing number of Open Access book publishers as well. Recently, we were lucky enough to have representatives from OAPEN and DOAB (Directory of Open Access Books), and Open Book Publishers speak at a roadshow event in the University. Judging by the energy of the presenters and the enthusiasm of the attendees, there is growing momentum behind open access book publishing at the moment.

Mike Lee, CC-BY 2.0

A search of the St Andrews library catalogue reveals the efforts we have taken to deliver open access monographic material. For instance recently the cataloguing team have created records for the entire Open Book Publishers catalogue. Open Book Publishers was started in 2008 by a small group of academics at the University of Cambridge. It is now an international enterprise that publishes books in hardback, paperback, ebook, and free online formats. Elizabeth Cuthill, a member of the cataloguing team here at St Andrews, has been adding value to the catalogue by creating high quality MARC records for the OBP content. These MARC records can then be harvested and re-used by other libraries, ensuring maximum discoverability. Elizabeth commented on the rich variety of material published by OBP:

"There are some very interesting and unusual titles on this publisher’s list of around fifty so far. For example, I’ve just completed cataloguing several titles on Quechan folklore (Quechan is a native American language spoken by a tribe living in southern California and in Arizona south of the Colorado River). It is a language and culture so rare that there are only around 700 native speakers left. One of the titles can be found at this link http://library.st-andrews.ac.uk/record=b2106224~S5. This work documents the tribe’s creation myths. I’m assuming this work must be quite unique in that it is a written document from what is primarily an oral tradition. The book is part of Open Book Publishers’ World Oral Literature series, published  in conjunction with the World Oral Literature Project, a collaborative project which describes itself as "An urgent global initiative to document and make accessible endangered oral literatures before they disappear without record." It’s becoming apparent as I work through cataloguing this material that the vision of a not-for-profit venture such as Open Book Publishers provides a fantastic outlet for freely distributing material which is very specialised and does not conform readily to existing publishing models." Elizabeth Cuthill

We also have records for all of the books created as part of the Knowledge Unlatched project. This unique publishing platform has been covered in the blog before. In the catalogue there are currently records for 28 books produced as a result of the project covering a wide range of subject areas. In total we have 173 open access books on our catalogue, but there are many more to be discovered. Using resources like OAPEN and DOAB you can find thousands of fully open access books, which can be downloaded onto your computer, phone, tablet, or e-reader.

Open access books offer a different way of interacting with subjects, for instance Diderot's 'Rameau's Nephew': A Multi-Media Edition published by Open Book Publishers contains mp3 recordings of contemporary music by the Paris Conservatoire embedded into the book. Why not give the book a read and a listen!

Publishers like Open Book Publishers are developing new means of expressing scholarly research through e-books. And, in recent years new e-reader technologies have emerged making reading electronic books more comfortable for longer periods. Now really is a great time to discover the possibilities of electronic open access books.

Open Access in the Humanities Roadshow - highlights

The SPARC Europe road show in Lower College Hall 26 November was a great success attracting interested University staff and students from St Andrews and beyond. It was good to see a number of postgraduate students attending. What unites them is a shared interest in Open Access (OA) and enthusiasm for the possibilities of making research more accessible and to discover new ways of engaging in and with research.

Eelco Ferwerda (OAPEN and DOAB)
Eelco gave an excellent introduction to Open Access for those new to the area and expanded this to talk about particular issues in the Humanities and Social Sciences:

• Two thirds of research outputs are book chapters compared to one third journal articles
• Less than 15% of publishers in humanities ask for an APC 
• There is a traditional and continuing preference for print. Even when e-book formats are provided there is still an expectation that there will be a print version to help cover costs
• He also dispelled several standard myths about OA publishing, reassuring the audience that OA is compatible with peer review, Creative Commons is compatible with copyright, CC-BY does not endorse plagiarism, and OA does not endanger academic freedom.

Guy Rowlands (St Andrews)
Guy gave an interesting and entertaining talk on his path to online publishing and Open Access. Charting the ups and downs of trying to find a publisher for a 25-50K word long essay (between a journal article and a monograph) he eventually decided to "stuff it" and publish works of this length in a new format dubbed the "midigraph" by his four year-old son. Guy is now the Editor-in-Chief of a series published by the Centre for French History and Culture. It has proved an effective way to disseminate research, e.g. Hold still, Madame: wartime gender and the photography of women in France during the Great War in the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series has received 250 page views and been downloaded 120 times just this year. As there is no way of telling where the digital copies have gone it is probably safe to factor in another 50% of readers for the downloads. Guy has had very positive responses from publishers agreeing to review his upcoming titles. This kind of attention is good for the School of History and the University in terms of esteem measures. He concluded by questioning why the long essay form, of which the noted historian Hugh Trevor-Roper had been a master, had died out.

Rupert Gatti (OpenBook Publishers and Cambridge)
Rupert agreed with Guy that "stuff it" is often the starting point for researchers to take an interest in Open Access. He introduced the idea of legacy publishing, i.e. publication in printed books as the primary means of dissemination. Limited print runs of these books make it difficult for researchers in HSS fields to justify relevance to funders leading to the "crisis of dissemination". He suggested that Open Access is part of the solution to this. He explained that legacy publishers have typically missed IT opportunities to change and improve publishing models although he emphasised that traditional rigorous peer review is still in place. He gave a demonstration of an amazing electronic translation of Diderot that included recordings of contemporary music by the Paris Conservatoire embedded in the footnotes (the printed book has QR codes that point to the same recordings on the internet). The recordings are licensed CC-BY by the Conservatoire. This offers new opportunities to develop scholarship and criticism not currently available under the legacy publishing model.

The talks were followed by a lively Q&A session with the speakers as panelists and Lily Neal of SPARC Europe was a warm and gracious guide throughout.

From left: Dr Rupert Gatti, Janet Aucock, Eelco Ferwerda, Lily Neal, Dr Guy Rowlands

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.

 

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

Open Library of Humanities launches

A new project has launched with the aim of "building a low cost, sustainable, Open Access future for the humanities."


This inititative should be of great interest to those who attended the main event hosted by the University of St Andrews Library for Open Access Week 2012 - The humanities and open access: opportunities and challenges.

Details of the academic backing and plans for the project can be found at http://www.openlibhums.org

Open Library of Humanities (OLH) will be an open access “megajournal” in the style of the US-run Public Library of Science (PLOS) http://www.plos.org and http://www.plosone.org; which will publish thoroughly peer reviewed humanities and social science research under Open Access conditions at a financially fair rate.

The Open Library of Humanities aims to provide a platform for Open Access publishing that is:

• Reputable and respected through rigorous peer review 
• Sustainable Digitally preserved and safely archived in perpetuity 
• Non-profit 
• Open in both monetary and permission terms 
• Non-discriminatory (APCs are waiverable) 
• Technically innovative in response to the needs of scholars and librarians 
• A solution to the serials crisis

The humanities and open access: opportunities and challenges

It is now a week since the main event hosted by the University of St Andrews Library for Open Access Week: The humanities and open access: opportunities and challenges, and we have had time to reflect on some very interesting presentations and discussions. The keynote address and Q and A session from Professor Gary Hall are now available on YouTube, and a summary of the rest of the day follows.

12:10 Starting the open access journey - why choose open access?Dr Chris Jones (Director of Research, School of English, University of St Andrews) Chris has wide research interests in poetry, especially that of the Anglo-Saxon period and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 
Chris started off by giving us his perspectives on open access self-archiving. He remembers being intrigued, though 'a little scared', at the idea of striking out the clause on copyright assignment in his early publishing career. He now finds that more publishers will give permission to deposit in a repository. He is concerned about the authority of published work being accepted when it is open access (he acknowledges the REF may be seen as the ‘problem’ here) but he has also learnt that good metadata and the possibility to add coversheets to author versions ensures that definitive versions can be cited.

12:20 'Why open access is important for the humanities, the University, everyone...'Professor Gary Hall (coventry University and open humanities Press) Gary Hall is Professor of Media and Performing Arts and Director of the Centre for Disruptive Media at Coventry University, UK. He is author of Culture in Bits (Continuum, 2002) and Digitize This Book!: The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now (Minnesota UP, 2008).In 1999 he co-founded the open access journal Culture Machine, which was early champion of OA in the humanities. In 2006 he co-founded Open Humanities Press (OHP), the first OA press dedicated to contemporary critical and cultural theory, which currently has 14 journals in its collective. An OHP monograph project, run in collaboration with the University of Michigan Library’s MPublishing, was launched in 2009.
 
Gary enlightened us with philosophical theories about ‘authorship’ and described the ideological motives behind open access, suggesting scholarship should be about cultivating ideas rather than ‘owning’ a definitive stance on a subject. He asked: ‘Do we need to explore new ways of being academics?’

He went on to describe a number of practical projects that creatively engage with open access, for example allowing contributors to learn about OA issues as they draw content from existing OA sources and repackage it, as in the Living Books about Life series. In the OHP monographs, scholars ‘come together’ around a topic of interest and carry out the editorial work. Each project facilitates a learning experience for authors and reviewers as well as new reusable content for a global readership, thus changing scholarly publishing culture.We heard about the importance of credibility, and this is being answered through the academic networks involved in OHP and the international experts on various Editorial Boards.




The Q & A section focussed on issues of quality, and it was recognised that academics need to consider when, and how far, they push the boundaries of ‘traditional’ publishing.



14:00 Journal hosting services
Angela Laurins & Claire Knowles (Digital Library, University of Edinburgh) [Presentation on slideshare]
Angela gave us an overview of Open Journal Systems (OJS), how it is used globally and the variety of approaches in Edinburgh University’s journal hosting service. We saw how easy it could be to set up and run a new journal with an open access model ‘out of the box’, leaving time for people to concentrate on quality and promotion of content. Claire described how they have helped journal managers use statistics to analyse their readership, for example forging links with Universities in regions where they see a high volume of visitors.

Janet Aucock & Jackie Proven (Library, University of St Andrews) [Presentation on slideshare]
Janet described how a journal hosting service moved from initial conversations about what might be possible, to an embedded service. Jackie continued the idea of conversations to explain the iterative process of setting up hosted journals, and how we have found it a learning experience for all involved.

Gillian Duncan (Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St Andrews)
Gillian gave a case study of how and why the Journal of Terrorism Research uses OJS, particularly the opportunity it gives to students and early career researchers to get experience of publishing. Open access is crucial to many of their readers who could be located in war zones without easy access to subscription journals.

14:45 Disciplinary perspectives
Dr Guy Rowlands (Centre for French History and Culture, University of St Andrews)
Guy gave a detailed account of how he came to publish an open access ebook series: St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture. 2 years ago he saw a need for shorter-length works (25 – 50,000 words), and describes them as ‘midigraphs’. (It is interesting to note Palgrave’s recent move to introduce works of this length in the humanities and social sciences, with its Pivot imprint). Print copies are currently produced for major libraries and as promotional tools, but print versions will be phased out by 2015 when he believes open access versions will have sufficient credibility to stand alone. He is very encouraged by the level of downloads from Research@StAndrews:FullText – far surpassing what print sales would achieve.

Prof Mario Aguilar (School of Divinity, University of St Andrews)
We were given an interesting insight into the Editorial process of an open access journal: Sociology Mind and the way that scholarship happens when ideas are challenged. Through layers of peer review before and after publication, we heard how how ‘open access open a new world’. The quality of articles is improved over time, as well as their ability to reach far corners of the globe.

Dr Sarah Dillon (School of English, University of St Andrews)
Sarah started by saying she found out by accident she was involved with open access – as she had simply chosen to publish with the most appropriate publisher and it turned out to be Open Humanities Press. Work on her research project ‘What Scientists Read’ has also led her to consider visibility and impact of her outputs, and how open access can really help with public engagement. She then described the very real issues faced by academics faced with pressure to publish with ‘reputable’ publishers when research assessment was imminent, perhaps being forced into an outdated publishing format by prevailing culture. She suggested academics have real power to change things, and they need to use it to push boundaries.

In summing up this section, Guy reminded us that what hasn’t changed for scholarly communication since the 17th century is the importance of credibility.

15:35 Open access projects and current awareness [Presentation on slideshare]
Jeremy Upton (Deputy Director of Library Services, University of St Andrews)
Jeremy highlighted new developments with open access ebooks, particularly the OAPEN initiative and Knowledge Unlatched

15:45 Institutional/library perspectives
John MacColl (University Librarian and Director of Library Services, University of St Andrews)
John rounded off the day with some quotes from each of the presenters to illustrate the hopeful and  inspirational opportunities offered by open access, as well as the pragmatic and sometimes difficult challenges we face in this period of transition.