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.

Does your library need a digital humanities center? Essay from OCLC Research

Digital Humanities: Options for research libraries covered in new essay

The digital humanities (DH) are attracting considerable attention and funding at the same time that this nascent field strives for an identity. Some research libraries are committing significant resources to creating DH centers. But questions about whether such an investment is warranted persist across the cultural heritage community. More »

Mythbuster: U.S. Digital dissertations not required for Library of Congress under Mandatory Deposit rules

[Reprinted from posting to ETD-L discussion group on January 31, 2014]

The question of mandatory deposit for U.S. dissertations seems to cause confusion because there are various myths percolating about (1) whether dissertations MUST go to the Library of Congress to comply with the Mandatory Deposit rule in US Copyright law and (2) How to get dissertations to the Library of Congress. With the aim of dispelling myths, an analysis of the question was posted to this blog at http://sites.tdl.org/fuse/?cat=13.

The upshot is that the all-digital dissertations do not need to go to the Library of Congress at this time. That is because their rules specifically exempt dissertations that exist only in digital format.
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LAUC-B 2013 Conference "Making it Count" recorded sessions on YouTube

The LAUC-B Conference Planning Committee is pleased to announce that recorded sessions from the 2013 LAUC-B Conference, "Making it Count: Opportunities and Challenges for Library Assessment" are now available on YouTube. 

The link to the playlist  (or, if you prefer, http://tinyurl.com/LAUC-B2013) 

Recorded sessions include: 

1. Welcome Remarks, Tom Leonard, and Opening Keynote, Steve Hiller

2. Panel Discussion with Joanne Miller, Lyn Paleo, and Merrilee Proffitt 

3. Lightning Talks: Joe Cera, Stephanie Rosenblatt and April Cunningham, Lynn Jones and Susan Edwards, Adam Siegel

4. Breakout Session: Small Data Assessment and Action Research, Stephanie Rosenblatt and April Cunningham

5. Closing Keynote: "Empowerment Assessment," David Fetterman

It was a great conference - watch the videos!

Joint Statement on Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing

The Committee on Publication Ethics, the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and the World Association of Medical Editors are scholarly organizations that have seen an increase in the number of membership applications from both legitimate and non-legitimate publishers and journals. Our organizations have collaborated in an effort to identify principles of transparency and best practice that set apart legitimate journals and publishers from non-legitimate ones and to clarify that these principles form part of the criteria on which membership applications will be evaluated.

This is a work in progress and we welcome feedback on the general principles and the specific criteria. Please see the full statement on the OASPA blog (http://oaspa.org/blog/).

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA
http://oaspa.org/

SCOAP3 Open Access Publishing Initiative to Go Live on 1 January 2014

SCOAP3 Open Access Publishing Initiative to Go Live on 1 January 2014

Thanks to the hard work and steadfast commitment of hundreds of libraries and individuals across the globe, SCOAP3, the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics, will soon become a reality.  This ground-breaking initiative will make a large proportion of the formal literature in high energy physics openly accessible worldwide, through direct financial support of the peer review and publication process by libraries and funding agencies who have agreed to become SCOAP3 Partners.  The initiative has its organizational home at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research located in Geneva, Switzerland.  Publishers participating in SCOAP3 whose HEP journals will be made open access include Elsevier, Hindawi, Institute of Physics, OUP, and Springer, among others.  A press release announcing the launch can be found on the SCOAP3 website at http://scoap3.org/news/news102.html. 

The UC Libraries have long supported this initiative and have recently confirmed participation in a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) between CDL and CERN designating the University of California as a SCOAP3 Partner.  UC was the first institution in the U.S. to indicate its support for SCOAP3 through an Expression of Interest in 2008, and has continued to be an active champion as funding commitments were cultivated elsewhere in the US and around the world. 

SCOAP3 relies on a unique funding model which utilizes the redirection of library licensing fees to fund article processing charges in participating journals, without requiring payments from individual authors.  License fee reductions are in the process of being finalized with the relevant publishers so that these fees can be redirected to SCOAP3.   Participation fees are fixed for the initial three-year term of the project.

CDL’s Director of Collections Ivy Anderson has been involved with SCOAP3 throughout its formative stages as a member of the Steering Committee and chair of the Technical Working Group.  Anderson has recently been elected to the newly-formed Executive Committee of SCOAP3, which will oversee the operation and further development of the initiative, including the SCOAP3 repository being established at CERN. 

n addition to serving as an archival and access repository for the articles funded by SCOAP3, participating institutions will be able to obtain a feed of SCOAP3 papers authored at their institutions for ingestion into institutional repositories.  A list of U.S. members to date can be found on the SCOAP-USA website at http://www.lyrasis.org/scoap3usa. 

CDL has been privileged to help to bring SCOAP3 to birth, and looks forward to assisting in its further development and engaging other stakeholders in the UC library and physics communities.   Please feel free to contact Ivy Anderson <ivy.anderson@ucop.edu> for more information.