DOAJ launches new application form

Today [March 20, 2014], after an extended period of consultation and development, DOAJ launched a new and much extended form for journals wishing to be included in the DOAJ.

 Read the press release and access the form here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dr3jnOygvuDlONSBv8lho4McQsEPFd0a5gtxjCmKd9k/edit?usp=sharing

 The form has been structured to collect upfront from the publishers as many quality indicators as possible about the journal. These indicators will be assessed as part of a journal's application. The form also introduces the DOAJ Seal, a mark of approval that shows how a journal strives towards Best Practice.

UC Irvine School of Education professors named inaugural editors of new open-access journal

March 2014

 The American Educational Research Association has named Greg Duncan, Mark Warschauer and Jacquelynne Eccles (pictured left to right) as the inaugural editors of AERA Open, a new open-access journal. Warschauer, professor of education and informatics and associate dean of UC Irvine’s School of Education, will serve as editor-in-chief of the publication, with UC Irvine Distinguished Professors of education Duncan and Eccles as co-editors. AERA Open is among only a few open-access journals being produced by social and behavioral science associations. Warschauer, Duncan and Eccles were selected after an extensive nomination and application process. “Education research is a field that seeks to study and lead in innovation and learning,” said AERA executive director Felice J. Levine. “Who could hope for anything more than the Warschauer-Duncan-Eccles team as inaugural editors?” The journal will publish important cumulative and incremental research and aims to serve as a forum for innovation, new inquiry and ideas, interdisciplinary bridge building, and work that fosters the connection of research to policy and practice. It will begin receiving manuscripts on July 1, the start of the new editors’ four-year terms.

Launch of Open Access Workflows for Academic Librarians (OAWAL)

Given the rapid expansion of open access content both by commercial entities and academic institutions, Graham Stone, University of Huddersfield and Jill Emery, Portland State University have created a wiki/blog encapsulating the major building blocks of open access management in the academic library setting.

 The intention of OAWAL is that it will be an openly accessible wiki/blog site for librarians working on the management of open access content. We hope that librarians can build on OAWAL to create context sensitive workflows at their given institutions. We are crowdsourcing feedback from the scholarly communication community currently working with open access management to see if these concept overviews are of value and if there are others that should be included.

You can find OAWAL at: https://library3.hud.ac.uk/blogs/oawal/

You can submit feedback to this project via the comments sections of the blog or directly via email to Graham Stone (G.Stone at hud.ac.uk) or Jill Emery (Jill.Emery at gmail.com).

We also encourage anyone who has existing workflows in place to share these with us in order to help build a repository of OA management examples. Graham Stone and Jill Emery will  be hosting roundtable discussions on this project at ER&L, if attending please join us for this discussion: Introducing OAWAL:crowdsourcing best practices for open access workflows in academiclibraries. In: Electronic Resources & Libraries 2014, 16-19 March 2014, AT&T Conference Center Austin, Texas.

Updated Univ. of California website puts answers to copyright questions at your fingertips

An updated and revised UC Copyright Website was quietly launched in mid-February and has been publicly announced on the UCnet website at: http://ucnet.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/2014/03/updated-website-puts-answers-to-copyright-questions-at-your-fingertips.html .  This revised site will be very helpful in working with faculty on the subject of copyright.

The new look and feel is aligned with the UCnet “brand,” and has clearer navigation and a more welcoming and accessible format than the previous version, which was 10 years old. The pages were edited for clarity and web-based reading, and to help users get to the information they need.  Based on comments from around the UC community, more information will be added to the site in the near future, including help with interpreting UC’s Copyright Ownership Policy.  Other changes and additions can easily be made with the new format and new content management system.

The site is the responsibility of the Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee (SLASIAC) and its Standing Subcommittee on Copyright Policy.  

University of California awards contract to Symplectic for the implementation of a publication harvesting system to support UC’s Open Access Policy

The California Digital Library (CDL), in conjunction with University of California campus partners, has chosen Symplectic as the vendor to implement a publication harvesting system in support of the UC Open Access Policy, passed by the Academic Senate in July 2013. 

Symplectic’s flagship product, Elements, will form the basis of a research information management system intended to simplify participation in UC’s OA Policy by providing an efficient method for faculty to deposit their research into eScholarship, UC’s institutional repository. This system holds great promise for dramatically increasing the rate of deposit of faculty publications in accordance with the policy.

With a robust set of features that address the specific requirements of the UC OA Policy and the needs of UC authors, Elements will closely monitor publication sources, including public and licensed publication indexes, for any new materials published by UC authors. Once a new publication is detected in the indexes, the system will collect as much information about that publication as possible and contact the author(s) by email for confirmation and manuscript upload. Author-approved publications will then be automatically submitted to eScholarship, where they will be openly available to the public.

Symplectic, a UK-based developer of integrated research information management systems, was chosen after an exhaustive RFP process, conducted by members of the CDL team and representatives from the three pilot campuses: UC Irvine, UCLA, and UCSF.  The publication harvesting system will launch in June 2014, and will serve the three pilot campuses. Contingent on funding and review by the Academic Senate, the system will be extended in June 2015 to cover the remaining UC campuses.

Further developments in the implementation of this harvesting system can be tracked by visiting the Open Access Policy Implementation (OAPI) wiki or subscribing to the OAPI mailing list.

To learn more about the UC Open Access Policy or to contact us with questions, visit the Office of Scholarly Communication site.