Royal Society launches new open access membership

Royal Society launches new open access membership programmes to encourage open access in scholarly communication

January 12, 2012

The Royal Society has this week confirmed that it is at the leading edge of open access in scientific publishing by launching two innovative new open access membership programmes. 

The programmes allow institutions to support open access for their researchers by giving them a discount of 25% when they publish open access articles in the Royal Society’s renowned international scientific journals.

The new membership programmes acknowledge the growth of open access publishing as well as the increasing number of open access articles being published by scientists in the Royal Society’s journals. 

The two new membership programmes have aroused interest from UK and international scientific institutions with three key Institutions signing up already. The Excellence in Science Membership is relevant for institutions publishing across all areas of science and Open Biology Membership for those who wish to just support researchers in the biological sciences at the cellular and molecular level.  Institutions are given a personalised webpage on the Royal Society publishing site, showcasing their research and linking through to the full text of the article.

Speaking of the new membership programmes, Chair of the Royal Society Publishing Board, Professor Mike Brady, FRS commented, “The Royal Society is delighted to play such an active role in the future of open access publishing with the launch of Open Biology and the two new institutional membership programmes.   Open access is an established means of delivering important scientific information to researchers wishing to access and publish content that is freely and openly available on the web.”

The Royal Society is one of the most ‘open access’ friendly of the established science publishers and its journals cover the broad spectrum of science from biology, physics through to mathematics, engineering and multidisciplinary sciences. 

In 2005, the Royal Society introduced its first open access publishing model EXIS Open Choice,   allowing authors to make their articles open-access via the payment of an article-processing fee.  Following this, the Royal Society recently launched its first completely full open access journal Open Biology, publishing original, high quality research in the field of cell and molecular biology. All papers are made freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution License permitting use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original work is cited.

NOTES FOR EDITORS

1. The Royal Society is the UK’s national academy of science.  Founded in 1660, the Society has three roles, as a provider of independent scientific advice, as a learned Society, and as a funding agency. Our expertise is embodied in the Fellowship, which is made up of the finest scientists from the UK and beyond. 

2. For further information on the Royal Society please visit royalsociety.org. Follow the Royal Society on Twitter at http://twitter.com/royalsociety or on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/theroyalsociety .

For further information contact:

Daisy Barton

Press and Public Relations

The Royal Society, London

Tel: 020 7451 2510

Email: daisy.barton@royalsociety.org

Phil Hurst
Publisher
http://www.linkedin.com/in/philhurst

Tel +44 (0)20 7451 2630
Web royalsocietypublishing.org

The Royal Society
6-9 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AG

Registered Charity No 207043
The Royal Society: supporting excellence in science

Royal Society Publishing offers authors a rapid and high quality publishing service. To find out more or to submit an article visit http://royalsocietypublishing.org/authors

JSTOR Register and Read

JSTOR Tests Free, Read-Only Access to Some Articles

Chronicle of Higher Education - Wired Campus
January 13, 2012, 10:32 am

By Jennifer Howard

It’s about to get a little easier—emphasis on “a little”—for users without subscriptions to tap JSTOR’s enormous digital archive of journal articles. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will make available the beta version of a new program, Register & Read, which will give researchers read-only access to some journal articles, no payment required. All users have to do is to sign up for a free “MyJSTOR” account, which will create a virtual shelf on which to store the desired articles.

But there are limits. Users won’t be able to download the articles; they will be able to access only three at a time, and there will be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days per article, which means that a user can’t consume lots of content in a short period. Depending on the journal and the publisher, users may have an option to pay for and download an article if they choose.

- More -

HathiTrust LibGuide

HathiTrust Digital Library

LibGuide prepared by Washington University, St. Louis MO
http://libguides.wustl.edu/content.php?pid=269860&sid=2383922

What is the HathiTrust?
The HathiTrust is a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in an extraordinary digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form. Established in 2008 by 13 universities, it has grown to over 60 partners.

What Does the Name Mean?
hāthī (हाथी) (pronounced HAH-tee) is the Hindi word for elephant, an animal highly regarded for its memory, wisdom, and strength.

Springer launches interdisciplinary open access journal SpringerPlus

Transparent and fast publication process for authors in a journal with guaranteed high scientific standards

Berlin / New York / London, 12 January 2012

Springer’s new open access journal SpringerPlus is a further addition to the publishing company’s SpringerOpen portfolio, underlining its flexible publication strategy. It is the publisher’s first open access journal with a broad interdisciplinary approach covering the entire scientific spectrum. Papers from emerging areas of research are welcome.

A transparent and fast publication process is the hallmark of SpringerPlus. If a manuscript meets the necessary scientific criteria as determined by peer review, the paper will be accepted immediately and without major revision. The only thing that counts is the high quality of research described. The peer review process is organized efficiently so that authors can count on a very short time to publication. SpringerPlus is published as an online-only journal.

SpringerPlus will feature interdisciplinary manuscripts describing original research, case studies and methods. The journal guarantees a high standard of scientific quality while extending the range of data formats, accepting audiovisual formats, data reports, and extensive tables either as complete articles or part of the paper. There will be no restrictions on the number of words or figures, and articles detailing statistically negative correlation will be considered.

More information at www.springerplus.com 

eScholarship Introduces New Submission Management System

eScholarship Launches New Submission Management System

The eScholarship team is excited to announce the official launch of our new submission management system.  

This milestone marks the completion of a two-phased project, begun in 2009, to transition eScholarship (UC’s Open Access scholarly publishing and institutional repository service) onto a new platform designed to better serve the publishing and dissemination needs of our users.  The first phase of the project focused on creating a customized access interface for eScholarship content, emphasizing local branding and robust tools for interaction with the publications.

This most recent transition to a new submission management system has enabled increased flexibility and agile technical infrastructure, freeing us to adapt our services as user needs evolve and new research practices give rise to new forms of scholarship.

eScholarship's new submission management system provides users with targeted workflows for managing a range of publication types. Scholars working with any of eScholarship's 40+ original academic journals now have access to the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform, favored by over 8,000 Open Access journals worldwide.  OJS provides a robust, multi-lingual platform for managing the submission, peer review and editing processes associated with journal publishing. Scholars submitting other types of publications to eScholarship (including working papers, monographs and postprints) now benefit from an intuitive, streamlined submission management workflow built in-house by CDL.

In conjunction with the launch of this new system, the eScholarship team has developed a new help center for eScholarship administrators, editors, authors and reviewers.  This help center features a series of short tutorial videos that offer step-by-step instructions for completing specific tasks within the new submission management system, as well as detailed PDF manuals that provide more in-depth workflow description and instruction for users.

Learn more about the advantages of publishing with eScholarship:

http://escholarship.org/publish_overview.html

View the eScholarship Help Center: 

http://submit.escholarship.org/help    

To inquire about publishing with eScholarship, contact us:

help@eScholarship.org

Dissing the Dissertation
January 9, 2012 - 3:00am
By Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Ed


Discussion at MLA 2012 (Seattle, 3-6 January 2012) about the evolution of the Ph.D. Dissertation, the length of time spent creating the document, and the role for digital publication, alternate forms of content, and the push to shorten the time to complete the Ph.D.

"The average humanities doctoral student takes nine years to earn a Ph.D. That fact was cited frequently here (and not with pride) at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. Richard E. Miller, an English professor at Rutgers University's main campus in New Brunswick, said that the nine-year period means that those finishing dissertations today started them before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Kindles, iPads or streaming video had been invented."

"The MLA's discussion of the dissertation is in some ways an outgrowth of a much-discussed report issued by the association in 2006 about tenure and promotion practices. That report questioned the idea that producing monographs should be the determining factor in tenure decisions. When the report was released, many MLA leaders said that the ideas the association was endorsing also called for reconsideration of graduate education, and especially of the dissertation.
As part of the process of encouraging change, the MLA recently conducted a survey of its doctoral-granting departments. Among the findings:

• 62 percent of departments reported that their graduate schools have guidelines for dissertations, but most of those guidelines are general, dealing with issues such as timelines, composition of committees and so forth, and not dictating the form of a dissertation.
• 33 percent of departments have written descriptions of what kind of dissertation is expected of graduate students.
• Minorities of departments have specific rules authorizing nontraditional formats for dissertations, and even smaller minorities of departments have approved a dissertation using one of those formats.
• Of those with traditional dissertation length requirements, the range of minimums was 150 to 400 pages. Most maximums were 400 to 500 pages."

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/09/mla-considers-radical-changes-dissertation#ixzz1jAryoOix
Inside Higher Ed