eIFL doesn't stand still in supporting developing country research!

The latest newsletter from eIFL, see http://www.eifl.net/cps/sections/news/newsletter/no32, leaves an impression of whirlwind activity around the world in support of scholarly information exchange.

As well as supporting libraries, developing consortia, encouraging educational and training material, and bringing new countries into the network (Kenya and Nepal are the latest to join), eIFL has a strong Open Access programme. Item 5 of the newsletter outlines the aims of eIFL-OA as:

"a.. builds networks of Open Access repositories, Open Access journals, Open Access education materials;
b.. provides training and advice on Open Access policies and practices;
c.. empowers library professionals, scientists and scholars, educators and students to become open access advocates."

eIFL will attend the important up-coming Open Repositories 08 Conference at the University of Southampton, UK, see http://or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.html, April 1-4, 2008, and is also organizing a workshop on Institutional Repositories in Nigeria. The newsletter says:

"Nigerian University Libraries Consortium, Department of Library and Information Science, Ahmadu Bello University and eIFL.net will organise a workshop Open Access Repositories: New Models for Scholarly Communication on April 28-29. Hosted by the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, the workshop will address Open Access state-of-the-art, policies and recommendations; subject and institutional repositories, and case studies on Open Access institutional repositories in developing and transition countries."

A lot of people must be working very hard in eIFL-net!

A new OSI-supported OA source book

A richly fertile OASIS looms on the horizon

There is exciting news to report to the research community! The Open Society Institute has agreed a grant to develop an online Open Access (OA) source book that will provide practical steps towards implementing OA for research output.

To be called OASIS (Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook), the resource aims to provide ‘all you need to know’ about OA, its concept, principles, benefits, approaches and means to achieving it. It will provide comprehensive links to resources already established on particular aspects of OA. It will be continually up-dated to take account of the fast-moving changes and information appearing every day.

It will not duplicate existing resources but link them to form an OA supermarket, allowing individuals to mix and match elements as required by their own constituencies. It will be a benign viral educational tool as well, spreading information and establishing connections between the researchers, librarians, repository managers, research managers and funders. It will be a back-up for OA workshops and training courses, and provide periodic online tutoring on specific aspects of OA.

The sourcebook will be in modular format, will be accessible online, as print-on-demand, and on CD/DVD for ready distribution to low bandwidth users. As such it will be an invaluable free-of-cost tool for developing countries wishing to benefit from the OA movement.

The project will be coordinated by two of the foremost OA advocates, Leslie Chan (University of Toronto) and Alma Swan (Key Perspectives), via a contract between the OSI and the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development (EPT). A number of partners with specific expertise will support the project, as will an advisory board of individuals with OA knowledge and commitment.

It is hoped to launch the OASIS website on the occasion of the up-coming ELPUB2008 conference, ‘Open Scholarship: Authority, Community and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0’, to be held in Toronto at the end of June, (see http://www.elpub.net/). The EPT will keep you posted on developments via the EPT blog and web site.

This is a long-awaited resource that will undoubtedly be used world-wide and by all constituencies concerned with open access to research findings. May the OASIS bloom abundantly!

A special OA publication from India

The DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Technology, published in India, has published a special issue on Open access. It is available from http://publications.drdo.gov.in/ojs/index.php/djlit. The Table of Contents appears half way down the page and lists articles by many OA advocates and experts, including Subbiah Arunachalam from Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai. It will be of interest to many researchers, publishers and librarians in the developing world as the issues addressed are not confined to India.

More research articles free to all

And now the European Research Council (ERC) has finalised and published its policy for access to publications arising from its funding: “The ERC requires that all peer-reviewed publications from ERC-funded research projects be deposited on publication into an appropriate research repository where available, such as PubMed Central, ArXiv or an institutional repository, and subsequently made Open Access within 6 months of publication.”

So more and more research findings are becoming freely available to all! With articles arising from the ERC and NIH mandates and 34 others around the world, we are finding that 2008 is a friend indeed of research and so of economies in the developing world. See list of policy statements from http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/.

And research scientists in the developing countries can play a major role in ensuring all publicly funded research output is publicly available for all by following the example of pioneering organisations [for example, in India (21 repositories), South Africa (11 repositories), Brazil (55 repositories), Mexico (8)] and demanding the establishment of repositories for their institutes/universities (free software, free support, low cost). See list of repositories around the world from http://roar.eprints.org/index.php/ and become part of this international development to increase the impact and use of your research.

To follow progress you can log onto Peter Suber’s invaluable Open Access News blog on http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html.

A great step towards OA for all publicly funded research!

President Bush has signed the omnibus appropriations bill (Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007, HR. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. Researchers funded by the NIH will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine's online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.

Worldwide, this now makes a total of 35 OA mandates already adopted and 8 more proposed so far, see ROARMAP: http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/. The NIH now joins 6 of the 7 UK Research Councils, the Wellcome Trust and many other prestigious providers of research funding in acknowledging the immense value of open access to research publications and scientific progress.

To researchers, this means a far greater volume of essential research publications are now available free to all with access to the internet. So congratulations to all who have worked so hard to reach this immensely important end of year present.

Where are we now? - OA strides ahead

It’s the time of year to assess the progress of on-going developments, and looking critically at OA is no exception. Both Peter Suber and Heather Morrison (see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/12-02-07.htm#predictions and http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-2007.html respectively) have provided very encouraging statistics to end the year.

It is now important to remind all libraries and scientific users in the developing world that there are now vast quantities of OA material available for free and immediate use from OA journals and Institutional Repositories.

For example, in Heather Morrison’s blog, the following information is provided:

"There are already more journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals than in the holdings of the world's largest commercial scholarly publisher. There are more non-embargoed, scholarly journals in DOAJ than in the largest of the aggregated packages purchased by libraries.Some brief and approximate figures (non-embargoed, fulltext, peer-reviewed journals):

DOAJ: 3,000 journals
Science Direct: 2,000 journals
EBSCO Academic Search Complete / Gale Cengage
Academic OneFile: 1,700 journals"

For full details, see Directory of Open Access Journals: Already the Biggest of the Big Deals? . . . . Could the Directory of Open Access Journals already be the world's biggest big deal, or aggregation of scholarly journals?’

And how many OA articles are now available from Institutional Repostories?

Heather Morrison provides the following statistics (though not all articles in OAI, for example, are published refereed research articles):

“Scientific Commons: Close to 17 million items, from 7 million authors
OAIster: 14 million items, 914 contributors
PubMedCentral, the world's largest open access archive, hits the one million mark June 21, 2007
rePEC, Research Papers in Economics, surpasses half a million records in the third quarter, about 400,000 or so were online
OpenDOAR lists more than 1,000 repositories November 21, 2007.”

Many developing countries are in the top 15 countries using IRs, as recorded by a number of repositories able to provide this kind of information.

So these facts provide a wonderful end of year gift with which to celebrate the transition from 2007 to 2008. We should be hugely encouraged and celebrate!

It’s the time of year to assess the progress of on-going developments, and looking critically at OA is no exception. Both Peter Suber and Heather Morrison see http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/12-02-07.htm#predictions and http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2007/12/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-2007.html respectively) have provided very encouraging statistics to end the year.

It is now important to remind all libraries and scientific users in the developing world that there are already vast quantities of OA material available for free and immediate use from OA journals and Institutional Repositories.

For example, in Heather Morrison’s blog, the following information is provided:

‘There are already more journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals than in the holdings of the world's largest commercial scholarly publisher. There are more non-embargoed, scholarly journals in DOAJ than in the largest of the aggregated packages purchased by libraries.Some brief and approximate figures (non-embargoed, fulltext, peer-reviewed journals):

DOAJ: 3,000 journals

Science Direct: 2,000 journals

EBSCO Academic Search Complete / Gale Cengage Academic OneFile: 1,700 journals’

For full details, see Directory of Open Access Journals: Already the Biggest of the Big Deals? . . . . Could the Directory of Open Access Journals already be the world's biggest big deal, or aggregation of scholarly journals?’
And how many OA articles are now available from Institutional Repostories? Heather Morrison provides the following statistics (though not all articles in OAI, for example, are published refereed research articles):
‘Scientific Commons: Close to 17 million items, from 7 million authors
OAIster: 14 million items, 914 contributors
PubMedCentral, the world's largest open access archive, hits the one million mark June 21, 2007
rePEC, Research Papers in Economics, surpasses half a million records in the third quarter, about 400,000 or so were online
OpenDOAR lists more than 1,000 repositories November 21, 2007’
Many developing countries are in the top 15 countries using IRs, as recorded by a number of repositories able to provide this kind of information.

So these facts provide a wonderful seasonal gift with which to celebrate the transition from 2007 to 2008. We should be hugely encouraged and celebrate!