Extending the open access debate at Repository Fringe

Another interesting and stimulating Repository Fringe was held in Edinburgh last week, coinciding as usual with the start of the Edinburgh Festivals and held right in the heart of the Fringe action. The theme was 'Repositories building bridges and social innovation', and we were treated to a wide variety of presentations and discussions. I attended Day 2 and my highlights are:

Anna Clements and Janet Aucock presented on the opportunities at St Andrews created by our Pure-Repository integration, emphasising the benefits of close working relationships as well as technical infrastructure.

The best audience reaction was undoubtedly for the presentation delivered entirely in song (Robin Burgess on the enhanced repository at Glasgow School of Art). Most interesting innovation for me was FigShare, a tool allowing researchers to 'publish all their data'. Developed by Mark Hahnel from a personal desire to share all the figures and datasets generated during his PhD, the FigShare repository now contains over 50,000 searchable, citable and reusable figures. Read more about FigShare FAQ.

I attended the round table discussion on Open Scholarship which explored ideas for 'opening' the whole research process, not just data and outputs. There was some difficulty in deciding whether a definition of Open Scholarship could ever be relevant across all disciplines, but we agreed it was about aspirations for sharing global knowledge rather than open access to 'stuff'.

Finally we were given a detailed insight into the motivation for Open Access in the humanities and the work of Gary Hall and colleagues, including Open Humanities Press and Liquid Books.

The trip to Edinburgh was nicely rounded off with some non-repository Fringe activities, the best one being a free show (just goes to show quality stuff can be free!).

Recent St Andrews open access ebook highly accessed

The latest open access ebook in the St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture series is in the Top 3 most viewed items from Research@StAndrews:FullText for the last month.

Proven patriots”: the French diplomatic corps, 1789-1799 by Linda S. Frey and Marsha L. Frey is the third in the series of midigraphs produced by the St Andrews Centre for French History and Culture.

Highlighting their open access availability, the introduction to the series states: "In keeping with the mission of the Centre to enhance public understanding of the Francophone world, these publications are free at the point of delivery and come with no charge for consultation, downloading, printing or circulation, either for private use or for educational purposes. Copyright is asserted merely in order to protect the works as the intellectual production of individual scholars."

The series covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture. Titles in the series are rigorously peer-reviewed through the editorial board and external assessors.

The series can be accessed online from our repository and is also available as print-on-demand from the Centre for French History and Culture.

'Explosion of openness' with Creative Commons

There are now more than 400 million works available on the internet under Creative Commons licences - allowing resources such as artworks, literature, films, learning materials and research articles to be shared and reused.

The Creative Commons organisation has released The Power of Open, a new book celebrating the impact of Creative Commons (CC) and highlighting individual stories. These include the adoption of CC for the Open University's OpenLearn website for course materials and the development of the open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS). The Power of Open states "The core principle behind open access journals is impact" and PLoS director of publishing Mark Patterson is quoted as saying “We set out to remove all barriers to reusing research and transforming research literature into a resource for further research,”...“CC has provided a strong, consistent signal that you can use openly published research to do with what you want”

The book also gives a useful overview of CC licences and a description of the vision for a growing culture of openness.The Power of Open © 2011 Creative Commons Corporation can be downloaded here.

New opportunities for open access publishing

In April I noted the recent announcements from major publishers about new open access journals. This trend continues with notable transitions to open access business models as well as completely new journals offering faster publication, higher acceptance rates or new forms of peer-review. If you are a researcher wanting to take advantage of increased visibilty for research outputs, particularly in the sciences, it may be worth considering submitting to these journals.

Open Biology, the first fully open access journal from the Royal Society will accept papers of 'scientific excellence, importance and originality'. Costs are covered by their article processing charge of £1200.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust have announced a new open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research. The journal (as yet unnamed) aims to publish the very best peer reviewed research entirely free to all readers. With support from these organisations, there will be no author fees for at least 3 years. Read more about the new journal.

Polar Research, the international peer-reviewed journal, moved from Wiley to Co-Action Publishing in January 2011, becoming fully open access. With support from the Norwegian Polar Institute there are no author fees and all content is freely available. Co-Action publishes a growing series of journals in various disciplines.

The Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation has launched QScience Connect on its QScience platform. The first peer reviewed articles covering all fields will be published in September 2011, with authors retaining copyright under a Creative Commons licence.

Scientific Reports from the Nature Publishing Group published its first open access articles in June. The article processing charge (APC) for 2011 is £890.
NPG will continue to publish their subscription and 'hybrid' journals, and have also released a position statement about open access publishing which emphasises their commitment to 'green' as well as 'gold' OA:

"NPG has a liberal self-archiving policy for all authors of original research papers. We encourage self-archiving of the authors’ accepted version, with a release date of 6 months post-publication. This is compatible with all major funder access policies and mandates."

Sage Open covers the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities and has an introductory rate of $195. Articles are published continuously following peer review, with an additional feature allowing comments from readers.

Physical Review X from the American Physical Society is another journal with a broad scope and an APC of $1500

Wiley is launching a portfolio of fully open access journals in 2011: Brain and Behavior, Ecology and Evolution and MicrobiologyOpen. As with most of these new journals, content will be available under a Creative Commons licence. There will be publication fees with the introduction of institutional payment schemes.

SpringerOpen, the new open acess branch of Springer has a growing portfolio of journals and is a partner of BioMed Central, an established open access publisher. SpringerOpen APCs range from £670 to £1090

Open Access promotes Polar Research

The move of the journal Polar Research to an open access publisher has allowed us to highlight the results of a long-term survey in the Arctic. St Andrews researchers Tiago Marques and David Borchers are co-authors of: The effect of sea-ice loss on beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas) in West Greenland, Polar Research, 29(2): 198-208.

Tiago and the survey team

David Borchers - CREEM; School of Mathematics and Statistics

“An aerial survey was conducted to estimate the abundance of belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) on their wintering ground in West Greenland in March–April 2006 and 2008. [...] These results, based on nearly 30 years of dedicated survey effort, are among the first available evidence showing a shift in distribution of an Arctic cetacean in response to changes in sea-ice coverage.”

Polar Research is now published by Co-Action Publishing with all content now freely available under a Creative Commons licence.

David Borchers has a number of CREEM reports already available in Research@Standrews:FullText

Tiago Marques already has his PhD thesis on distance sampling available in the repository, and has recently contributed another article: Estimating the Barents Sea polar bear subpopulation size in Marine Mammal Science 25(1). The article describes the importance of scientific methods for population sampling, given the "current intense interest in polar bear management due to the potentially disastrous effects of climate change".

Images taken during this large scale survey illustrate the dramatic Arctic terrain and the adventurous life some of our researchers lead!

Sea Mammal Research reaches wide audience

Assessing the effectiveness of conservation measures: resolving the “wicked” problem of the Steller sea lion was one of the first articles to be self-archived in Research@StAndrews:FullText following the implementation of our Research Information System, Pure. Professor Ian Boyd deposited the author version of his article and it is now in the Top 20 most viewed items in our repository.

Recently, Prof. Boyd has added his article An International Quiet Oceans Experiment, and we have had permission from the publisher of the journal Oceanography to make the published version available.

Along with all the recent e-theses deposited in the repository, this takes our total well over the 1000 items recently celebrated.

'Quest for the fictional Jesus' celebrated in Graduation Week

The item marking our 1000th item in Research@StAndrews:FullText is a thesis from the School of Divinity by Margaret Ramey - The quest for the fictional Jesus : Gospel rewrites, Gospel (re)interpretation, and Christological portraits within Jesus novels

Other theses deposited on the same day included:

The roles of the cathedral in the modern English Church, Peter Rowe - Divinity

Optically guided neuronal growth, David Carnegie - Physics & Astronomy

Enemy within the gates : reasons for the invasive success of a guppy population (Poecilia reticulata) in Trinidad, Caya Sievers - Biology


Authors attended a reception during Graduation week to celebrate their achievements with colleagues in the Library.