Current State of Repositories Report - SPARC - May 21, 2015

SPARC released a report May 21, 2015, Promoting Open Knowledge and Open Science: Current State of Repositories. 

The report was produced on behalf of the COAR Aligning Repository Networks Committee, with significant input from many representatives of the repository community  - including SPARC.  It provides a high-level overview of the international repository landscape, as well as an interesting 

summary of the current repository environment around the world. It also explores potential new future directions that repositories might consider taking.

The report was also submitted  to the Global Research Council (GRC) and the Research Council’s UK as supplementary material for a GRC workshop that SPARC participated in on the future of scholarly communication held in April in London, and will be distributed to the member representatives of both organizations.

Feel free to share this with any interested people in your libraries and network. The full report is available here:

 http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/RCUK-prod/assets/documents/international/COARStateOfRepositories.pdf

Organizations Around the World Denounce Elsevier’s New Policy That Impedes Open Access and Sharing

by Prue Adler | 202-296-2296 | prue@arl.org | on May 20, 2015

image CC-BY-SA by Libby Levi for opensource.com On April 30, 2015, Elsevier announced a new sharing and hosting policy for Elsevier journal articles. This policy represents a significant obstacle to the dissemination and use of research knowledge, and creates unnecessary barriers for Elsevier published authors in complying with funders’ open access policies. In addition, the policy has been adopted without any evidence that immediate sharing of articles has a negative impact on publishers subscriptions. Despite the claim by Elsevier that the policy advances sharing, it actually does the opposite. The policy imposes unacceptably long embargo periods of up to 48 months for some journals. It also requires authors to apply a “non-commercial and no derivative works” license for each article deposited into a repository, greatly inhibiting the re-use value of these articles. Any delay in the open availability of research articles curtails scientific progress and places unnecessary constraints on delivering the benefits of research back to the public. Furthermore, the policy applies to “all articles previously published and those published in the future” making it even more punitive for both authors and institutions. This may also lead to articles that are currently available being suddenly embargoed and inaccessible to readers. As organizations committed to the principle that access to information advances discovery, accelerates innovation and improves education, we support the adoption of policies and practices that enable the immediate, barrier free access to and reuse of scholarly articles. This policy is in direct conflict with the global trend towards open access and serves only to dilute the benefits of openly sharing research results. We strongly urge Elsevier to reconsider this policy and we encourage other organizations and individuals to express their opinions. Signatories COAR: Confederation of Open Access Repositories SPARC: Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, USA ACRL: Association of College and Research Libraries, USA ALA: American Library Association, USA ARL: Association of Research Libraries, USA ASERL: Association of Southeastern Research Libraries, USA AOASG: Australian Open Access Support Group, Australia IBICT: Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology, Brazil CARL: Canadian Association of Research Libraries, Canada CLACSO: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, Argentina COAPI: Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions, USA Creative Commons Creative Commons, USA EIFL: Electronic Information for Libraries, Netherlands EFF: Electronic Frontier Foundation, USA GWLA: Greater Western Library Alliance, USA LIBER: European Research Library Association, Belgium National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China OpenAIRE Open Data Hong Kong RLUK: Research Libraries UK SANLiC: South African National Licensing Consortium University of St Andrews Library, UK Sign on to the statement against Elsevier’s sharing policy.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at http://www.arl.org/.

HathiTrust - Extracted Features Dataset Now Available for 4.8 Million Volumes/1.8 Billion Pages

The HathiTrust Research Center is pleased to announce the release of its Extracted Features Dataset (v.0.2), a dataset derived from 4.8 million public domain volumes, totaling over 1.8 billion pages currently available in the HathiTrust Digital Library collection. The dataset includes over 734 billion words, dozens of languages, and spans multiple centuries. Features are informative, quantified characteristics of a text, and include:

·         Volume-level metadata

·         Page-level features

o    Part-of-speech-tagged token counts

o    Header and footer identification

o    Sentence and line count

o    Algorithmic language detection

·         Line-level features

o    Beginning and end line character count

o    Maximum length of the sequence of capital characters starting a line

These features allow for analysis of large worksets of volumes in the HathiTrust public domain collection, at scales previously intractable for most individual researchers. For example, page-level token (word) counts, can be used to help build topic models, classifications and perform other text analytics. Similarly, features can be used to evaluate readability of a given volume or workset.

How to get the data:

The entire dataset, as well as sample subsets and custom worksets, are available at: https://sharc.hathitrust.org/features

How to cite:

Boris Capitanu, Ted Underwood, Peter Organisciak, Sayan Bhattacharyya, Loretta Auvil, Colleen Fallaw, J. Stephen Downie (2015). Extracted Feature Dataset from 4.8 Million HathiTrust Digital Library Public Domain Volumes (v0.2). [Dataset]. HathiTrust Research Center, doi:10.13012/j8td9v7m.

This feature dataset is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

About the HathiTrust Research Center:

The HTRC is a collaborative research center launched jointly by Indiana University and the University of Illinois, along with the HathiTrust Digital Library, to help meet the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of digital text that researchers face by developing cutting-edge software tools and cyberinfrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.

For more information about the HathiTrust Research Center, visit http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc

Posted: May 8, 2015

NOAA Releases Plan for Public Access to Research - April 2015

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Releases Plan for Public Access to NOAA-Funded Research

by Prue Adler | 202-296-2296 | prue@arl.org | on April 09, 2015

"In early April 2015, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released the, “NOAA Plan for Increasing Public Access to Research Results” (PDF). The plan details the extensive, long-term investments that NOAA has made in the preservation of and access to digital data and how the plan will build upon the existing data and publication policies, infrastructure, and ongoing work of the NOAA Library. The plan notes that administrative and reporting requirements for researchers will be minimized.

For publications, the plan calls for the research results that are produced by both intramural and extramural grantees to be deposited in the new NOAA Institutional Repository that will be managed by the NOAA Library. The repository will make each final, peer-reviewed pre-publication manuscript publicly accessible following a 12-month embargo. Grantees will be required to specify funding sources using FundRef when papers are submitted for publication. Submitted manuscripts will be required to be in a publicly accessible format such as PDF with Adobe Accessibility Check performed. Metadata for each article will include DOIs for the published version of the article and the end date of the embargo."

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NIST Releases Plan for Public Access to Research - April 2015

National Institute of Standards and Technology Releases Plan for Public Access to NIST-Funded Research

by Prue Adler | 202-296-2296 | prue@arl.org | on April 09, 2015

"The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released on April 3, 2015, a “Plan for Providing Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research” (PDF). The NIST plan calls for making peer-reviewed scholarly publications and associated data that result from NIST funding publicly accessible. The plan applies to both NIST employees and grantees.

NIST is taking a phased approach to implementation of the plan regarding publications. There will be a pilot exercise in year one (FY 2015) that will include two journals, the NIST Journal of Research and the Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data. In year two (FY 2016), deposit of NIST-authored publications will be operational and, in year three (FY 2017), extramural publications of scientific research funded by NIST will be required to be deposited in the NIST public access archive system. As of October 2015, there will be standard language regarding public access to data and publications in the terms and conditions for grants and contracts."

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Top Ten UC Irvine Articles Accessed in eScholarship for March 2015

Top Ten UC Irvine Articles Accessed in eScholarship for March 2015

Below is an overview of the number of views and downloads for this month, along with links to your usage numbers from previous months and additional data. We feel that the combination of views and downloads gives a more accurate picture of the interest in and usage of your publications than is reflected in download counts alone, particularly given the enhanced access readers have to your publications prior to download in the eScholarship interface.

UC Irvine Previously Published Works

For this month your total requests = 7430 (views=5377, downloads=2053).

Breakdown By Item

Top Ten Articles Viewed and Downloaded - March 2015

Item	Year	---- Number of Requests ----		Total	Added to
Title	Published	Views	Downloads	Requests	"My Items"
Effects of a combination of beta carotene and vitamin A on lung cancer and cardiovascular disease.	1996	75	20	95	0
Theorizing Practice and Practicing Theory	2011	48	39	87	0
Science education. Changing the culture of science education at research universities.	2011	35	38	73	0
Building the oral language skills of K-2 English Language learners through theater arts	2011	44	13	57	0
Effect of Annealing on Hardness and the Modulus of Elasticity in Bulk Nanocrystalline Nickel	2010	52	3	55	0
The Economics of Autocracy and Majority Rule	1996	39	16	55	0
Sustainability. Systems integration for global sustainability.	2015	22	30	52	0
Sinusoidal heart rate pattern: Reappraisal of its definition and clinical significance	2004	43	9	52	0
Information privacy in institutional and end-user tracking and recording technologies	2010	39	10	49	0
Income Inequality, Race, and Place:  Does the Distribution of Race and Class within Neighborhoods affect Crime Rates?	2007	37	10	47	0

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More information about the UC Open Access Policy is available on the Open Access Policy pages.

Visit the Implementation Plan to learn more about the timeline for systemwide roll-out of the publication management system.

Mellon Grant CDL & UC Press open source management system for open access monographs

University of California Press and the California Digital Library Receive $750K Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 
March 4, 2015 (Oakland, CA)

The University of California Press (UC Press) and the California Digital Library (CDL) have received a grant of $750,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a web-based, open source content and workflow management system to support the publication of open access (OA) monographs in the humanities and social sciences. When complete, this system will be made available to the community of academic publishers, especially university presses and library publishers. UC Press is committed to developing a thriving and sustainable ecosystem for the humanities and social sciences and to preserving the monograph as a key vehicle for original scholarship.

Last month, UC Press announced Luminos (www.luminosoa.org), a new OA program that brings universal access and advanced digital delivery to the monograph. Development of a new Mellon funded content and workflow management system will support Luminos, and other OA initiatives, by stripping out complexity—and cost—and enabling sustainable models to flourish

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