Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) Announces Print Archiving Milestone

 

Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST) Announces Print Archiving Milestone

 

 

The Western Regional Storage Trust (WEST), a partnership to create a distributed retrospective print journal repository in the western United States, has completed its first round of print journal archiving under a three-year program jointly funded by WEST members and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In this first cycle in the 2011-12 academic year, 12 WEST libraries serving as archive holders on behalf of the partnership have archived more than 6,100 journal titles, comprising more than 160,000 volumes. These totals include almost 5,100 titles archived at the Bronze level (no validation; also have digital preservation), more than 500 titles archived at the Silver level (validated for completeness at the volume level) and more than 500 titles validated at the Gold level (validated for both completeness and condition at the issue level).

The WEST validation levels are designed to ensure that library collections are preserved and made available for long-term use by future generations of students and scholars, while investing in archiving efforts appropriate to the level of risk. These WEST archiving commitments have been recorded in the OCLC WorldCat database and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) Print Archives Preservation Registry (PAPR) using Print Archives Metadata Guidelines developed in conjunction with an OCLC pilot project last year, making this information available in a standardized form to libraries across the U.S.

Building on these archiving commitments, WEST has produced individualized collection comparison reports for most of its members — an important benefit of WEST membership. To aid in making collection management decisions, each member library that provided information about its print journal holdings has received a report listing the titles in its collection that have been archived by another WEST partner library.

WEST also is pleased to welcome eight new members who joined in 2012: California State University – Northridge; New Mexico State University; and, through the consortial membership of the Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC), California Baptist University, La Sierra University, Santa Clara University, University of Redlands, University of San Diego and Whittier College. This brings the total WEST membership to 109 libraries in 18 states, many through consortial partners Orbis Cascade Alliance and SCELC.

More information about WEST is available at www.cdlib.org/west.

About WEST

Western Regional Storage Trust is a distributed retrospective print journal repository program serving more than 100 research libraries, college libraries and university libraries, and three library consortia, in the western part of the United States. WEST is funded by member fees and by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The California Digital Library (CDL) serves as the administrative host for WEST.

About the California Digital Library

The California Digital Library supports the University of California libraries in their mission of providing access to the world's knowledge for the UC campuses and the communities they serve through the development and management of digital collections, innovation in scholarly publishing and the long-term preservation of digital information. The University of California library system, which includes more than 100 libraries on the 10 UC campuses, collectively is the largest research/academic library in the world. More information about CDL is available at www.cdlib.org.

Data Mining Astrophysical Literature - Interview with ADS

Mining the astronomical literature

A clever data project shows the promise of open and freely accessible academic literature.

by Alasdair Allan  |  O'Reilly Radar (http://s.tt/1kStE)

"There is a huge debate right now about making academic literature freely accessible and moving toward open access. But what would be possible if people stopped talking about it and just dug in and got on with it?

NASA’s Astrophysics Data System (ADS), hosted by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO), has quietly been working away since the mid-’90s. Without much, if any, fanfare amongst the other disciplines, it has moved astronomers into a world where access to the literature is just a given. It’s something they don’t have to think about all that much.

The ADS service provides access to abstracts for virtually all of the astronomical literature. But it also provides access to the full text of more than half a million papers, going right back to the start of peer-reviewed journals in the 1800s. The service has links to online data archives, along with reference and citation information for each of the papers, and it’s all searchable and downloadable."

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http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/08/data-mining-the-literature.html

How Fair Use Can Help Solve the Orphan Works Problem

Jennifer M. Urban

University of California, Berkeley - School of Law

June 18, 2012

Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 27, 2012
UC Berkeley Public Law Research Paper

Abstract:     
Many works that libraries, archives, and historical societies, among others, would like to digitize and make available online are "orphan works," that is, works for which the copyright holder either is unknown or cannot be located after a diligent search. Encountering orphan works can be stymieing because the lack of an owner means that there is no way to obtain permission to use them. While Congress nearly passed legislation to deal with the orphan works problem in 2008, its ultimate failure to enact this bill has left those who possess orphan works in limbo. Because of the risk of high statutory damages if an owner later shows up, nonprofit libraries and similar institutions have been reluctant to digitize these works and offer them to the public. The orphan status of these works thus creates a barrier to access to important cultural and historical information despite recent improvements in digitization technologies that could bring these works out of obscurity and make them much more widely useful. As such, there is international consensus that the “orphan works problem” must be addressed.

Download full paper:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2089526

Open Access Publishing Mandate at UC San Francisco

UCSF joins trend offering published research free

Erin Allday

Thursday, June 21, 2012

"UCSF has joined the growing ranks of academic institutions that are offering most, if not all, of their research free to the public, by requiring that all published scientific studies be added by their authors to a university repository accessible to everyone.

The policy change at UCSF, which was announced last month, is part of a global shift toward "open access" - improving the exchange of scientific information by allowing free and widespread dissemination of research that has long been contained in subscription-only journals.

With most academic research now available online, there's no reason to restrict access to it, many scientists argue."

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Peer J Inc.- New Open Access Model

New OA Journal, Backed by O’Reilly, May Disrupt Academic Publishing

By Michael Kelley on June 12, 2012 Comments

From

An open access academic publishing company called Peer J Inc. launched today, and its notable co-founders are promising that the company’s business model will revolutionize the field.

The company’s co-founders are Jason Hoyt, formerly the chief scientist and vice president for research and development at Mendeley, and Peter Binfield, until recently the publisher of PLoS One. The duo said they are poised to exploit a looming “wholesale move” toward open access in academic publishing, and they “expect to be at the forefront of a revolution in how academic content is published and distributed.”

“It was incredibly satisfying to run PLoS ONE, and I believe that PLoS ONE has been one of the major forces for change in the industry,” Binfield said. “However, I wanted to break out and see how much further I could push the envelope towards new, and innovative, modes of open access publication, while all the time maintaining the highest standards of professional publication.”

PeerJ will do without the widely employed and often expensive article-processing charge (commonly called author fees) of other OA journals, which average about $900 per published paper, according to a recent study.

Instead, PeerJ will use a “pay once, publish for life” model, which will offer individual membership plans starting at $99. Authors who join are granted lifetime rights to publish for free in the company’s peer-reviewed journal, also called PeerJ. Each author on a paper must be a member.

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MLA Journals to Shift Copyright to Authors - Ticker - Chronicle of Higher Education - June 6, 2012

Good news for Humanists on the Scholarly Communications issue of authors rights for retaining copyright. MCB

With New Agreement, MLA Journals Shift Copyright to Authors

June 6, 2012, 8:47 am    The Chronicle of Higher Education

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"The journals of the Modern Language Association will switch to a new author agreement that leaves copyright with writers, the scholarly group announced on Tuesday. The MLA had previously asserted that the journals themselves held copyright.

Under the new agreement—which takes effect with the next full issue of each journal—authors will also be permitted to post their manuscripts on personal or departmental Web sites, or in open-access repositories."

Open Access Petition to White House - June 4, 2012

25,000 Advocates Urge White House to 

Open Taxpayer-Funded Research to Everyone

“We the People Petition” hits 25,000 signatures in just two weeks

Washington, DC – June 4, 2012  - The movement to make taxpayer-funded research freely available online hit a new milestone on Sunday when advocates hit their goal of 25,000 signatures to a “We the People” petition to the Obama administration. The petition, created by Access2Research (a group of Open Access advocates, including SPARC’s Executive Director, Heather Joseph), requests that President Obama make taxpayer-funded research freely available.

According to the petition site’s rules, any petition securing 25,000 signatures within 30 days will be sent to the White House Chief of Staff, and will receive an official response. The Open Access petition hit the 25,000 mark in half the allotted time.

“The community is fully engaged in sending a clear message to the Administration – access to taxpayer-funded information is in the public’s interest, and they want it now,” said Heather Joseph, SPARC’s Executive Director.
The petition says: “We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research.”

The Open Access mandate builds on the National Institutes of Health’s policy, noting that that agency’s experience “proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process,” urging the president “to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.”

John Wilbanks, Senior Fellow in entrepreneurship for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and one of the creators of the petition believes that the fast uptake by the public signals a new pace in the Open Access debate. “Opening access to taxpayer-funded research is no longer a policy discussion happening away from researchers, scientists and taxpayers. People are now fully part of the conversation, and that changes everything.”

“The next step is for the White to House to issue an official response,” said Mike Rossner, Executive Director at The Rockefeller University Press and an original sponsor of the petition. “Our hope is that they will act quickly and will require expansion of the successful NIH policy to all other major U.S. federal funding agencies.”

A number of key organizations outside the academic community endorsed the petition. The Wikimedia Foundation endorsed the petition and included a feature article on its Wikipedia’s English Homepage. Patients advocacy groups from Patients Like Me to the Avon Foundation promoted the petition to their members, as did a variety of publishers, university libraries, commercial companies and advocacy organizations.

For further information on the petition, its sponsors and supporting organizations see the SPARC website at http://www.arl.org/sparc and the Access2Reserach website at http://access2research.org/.
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SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC’s advocacy, educational, and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.