PeerJ extends free OA publication offer

From now to 31 March 2014, any article that is submitted to PeerJ PrePrints can go on to be published in the innovative open access journal PeerJ entirely for free.

PeerJ is an open access, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal covering the Biological Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Health Sciences. It aims to reduce the costs of open access to authors by offering publishing plans starting at $99 for life. In order to encourage interest in this new model, the journal is offering a free submission period based on using its related preprint archive.

PeerJ PrePrints - rapid communication & early findings
A PeerJ 'PrePrint' is a draft that has not yet been peer reviewed for formal publication. Similar to preprint servers that already exist (for example arXiv.org), authors can submit draft, incomplete, or final versions of articles they are working on.

By using this service, authors establish precedent; they can solicit feedback, and they can work on revisions of their manuscript. Once they are ready, they can submit their PrePrint manuscript into the peer reviewed PeerJ journal (although it is not a requirement to do so).

Provided you upload a preprint before 31 March, you can go on to submit to the PeerJ journal for free. Your manuscript will then undergo peer review in the normal way. (See PeerJ's editorial criteria.)

For authors who haven't previously made their draft manuscripts publicly available, the PeerJ folk have pointed out that most journals accept manuscripts previously published as a preprint. So using the PeerJ PrePrint server means you could still submit for peer-review elsewhere if you wish (check your chosen publisher's policy to be sure via http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/).

For St Andrews authors interested in a PeerJ lifetime publishing plan, contact Open Access Support

Open access home for St Andrews housing report

The Centre for Housing Research at the University of St Andrews released a new report just before the end of 2013. 'Growing economies and building homes: Reconciling growth and housing wellbeing in St Andrews' examines the impacts of University led growth on the rental housing market in North East Fife. A University press release noted:

The study has found while the success and growth of the 600-year-old University has brought prosperity and employment to Fife, existing pressures on local housing have been increased by an influx of students and staff.

This has added to the disadvantage experienced by some in the local community, most importantly, people on low incomes who have had to look further and further from St Andrews in the search for affordable accommodation.

The CHR report raises important issues and was read with great interest by staff in the Library. In order to ensure high visibility and a permanent home, the report is now available from our institutional repository. We hope that this will encourage further interest in the local community, and we will be able to track usage through our embedded statistics feature.


Maclennan, D, O'Sullivan, T, Maynard, K, Sila-Nowicka, K & Walden, Y. 2013. Growing economies and building homes: Reconciling growth and housing wellbeing in St Andrews. University of St Andrews. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/4316

St Andrews journal becomes member of Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association

The Journal of Terrorism Research has just become a member of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA). JTR is  published by the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at University of St Andrews and hosted by University of St Andrews Library Journal Hosting Service.

OASPA was established to represent the interests of Open Access (OA) publishers globally in all scholarly disciplines. It does this through 'exchanging information, setting standards, advancing models, advocacy, education, and the promotion of innovation'. The organisation has just announced standards for 'legitimate journals' and the criteria for membership of OASPA. The Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing includes expectations for peer review and governing bodies:

1. Peer review process: All of a journal’s content, apart from any editorial material that is clearly marked as such, shall be subjected to peer review. Peer review is defined as obtaining advice on individual manuscripts from reviewers expert in the field who are not part of the journal’s editorial staff. This process, as well as any policies related to the journal’s peer review procedures, shall be clearly described on the journal’s Web site.
2. Governing Body: Journals shall have editorial boards or other governing bodies whose members are recognized experts in the subject areas included within the journal’s scope. The full names and affiliations of the journal’s editors shall be provided on the journal’s Web site.

See the OASPA blog for further details

See the latest issue of Journal of Terrorism Research

International survey on attitudes to open access

St Andrews researchers are invited to complete a very short survey on attitudes to open access.

Professor Thomas Eger from University of Hamburg, together with doctoral student Marc Scheufen, is conducting a survey on the experience of academic scholars with and their perception of open access publishing.

One of our objectives is to examine the commonalities and differences between the academic disciplines. For this purpose, we have already conducted surveys in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Benelux, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey, India, Brazil, and Egypt.

It would be of special interest to gather additional information on universities and research institutes in the UK and compare the results with those of the other countries. Therefore, we have decided, in co-operation with Prof. Guido Westkamp from the Queen Mary University of London, to extend the survey to British universities. We would kindly ask you to forward this invitation to all professors and other scholars of the faculties/departments of your university.

Your participation will help to provide valuable information regarding the recent discussion on how to organize the dissemination of academic publications in a globalized and digital knowledge society.

The survey should only take around 10 minutes, and respondents can request the final results.

Please find access to the questionnaire at: http://www.equestionnaire.de/?q=10874

Prof Eger is Vice-Dean for Research and International Affairs Director, Institute of Law & Economics, University of Hamburg.

Mission statement on quality-assured OA research publishing system

The Max Planck Society has presented a draft mission statement in support of the continuing growth of open access.

Ten years since the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was written, the Max Planck Society hosted the Berlin Open Access Conference (#Berlin11), 19-20 Nov 2013. These conferences have taken place annually, and have been dedicated to support adoption of the Berlin Declaration principles. During Berlin 11, the new mission statement was announced "in order to exploit the innovative and transformational potential of OA", and includes this call:

We call on the signatories of the Berlin Declaration and on all other organisations that perform or support scholarly research to:

1. increase the support for and interoperability of OA repositories for scholarly materials, while reducing and where possible eliminating embargoes, and improving the ability to re-use works;
2. support new and innovative OA publishing models that meet the highest possible scholarly standards, and invest into a publication infrastructure optimised for the needs of research and scholarship; and
3. cooperate with one another to ensure a smooth transition to a stable and functioning, truly open scholarly publishing system, including access to scholarly source and cultural heritage data, where the full text of every research work is open immediately upon publication.

It also urges a strategy that should address standards, quality, stability and a coordinated transition, and concludes:

We believe that a stable, competitive, and quality-assured OA research publishing system offers immense benefits not only to scholarship but also to society as a whole. Scholarly publishing is a global activity, and organisations that perform and support research, particularly those using public money, have a responsibility to work together globally to realise these benefits. It is time to return control of scholarly publishing to the scholars.

See the full Mission Statement at the Berlin 11 Open Access Conference of the Max Planck Society

Horizon 2020: open access to be achieved via repositories

The European Commission has launched its Horizon 2020 programme of research funding. Open access remains a core principle, and the model grant agreement describes the expectations for grant recipients.

All peer-reviewed scientific publications relating to results of a project must be made open access, either by publishing in an open access journal (gold OA), or by self-archiving in a repository (green OA). In either case, a 'machine-readable electronic copy of the published version or final peer-reviewed manuscript accepted for publication' should be deposited into a repository for scientific publications. If the researcher chooses 'gold' open access then the deposited final version will be made open access immediately. Where researchers choose 'green' open access, then the manuscript (usually the author's accepted version) should be made open access within 6 months.

For St Andrews authors, the usual mechanism of depositing into PURE will allow the Library to help with making your publication open access. Contact open-access-support@st.andrews.ac.uk for advice.

The Open Access in Horizon 2020 factsheet provides more detail, including information about related research data: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/sites/horizon2020/files/FactSheet_Open_Access.pdf

The text of the Model Grant Agreement regarding 'Open access to scientific publications' can be found on page 58, section 29.2: http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/data/ref/h2020/mga/gga/h2020-mga-gga-mono_en.pdf

Open access publishing initiative for physics

An international consortium of libraries and funding agencies has announced an innovative new model to achieve open access to peer-reviewed literature in high-energy physics.

Through a long period of consultation and a tendering process led by CERN, the global SCOAP³ (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access in Particle Physics Publishing) has arranged for high-energy physics articles in key journals to be converted to open access, available under a CC-BY licence.

Based on a complex economic model, the SCOAP³ partners will make central payments to cover the costs of peer review and publishing so that there is no article processing charge for authors. Depending on the journal, either all articles will be open access, or a percentage will be OA (those categorised as high-energy physics in ArXiv) with subscription costs reduced for the consortium partners. Over 20 countries are involved in the partnership, with the UK represented by JISC Collections.

The journals included in the initiative include Physics Letters B (Elsevier), New Journal of Physics (IoP) and the European Physical Journal C (Springer)

The SCOAP³ intiative will start in January 2014 and a dedicated repository will be launched to provide full text access to the articles. More details are available at http://scoap3.org/