Wednesday 30 October 2013
Open Access Eminent Speaker Forum - Professor Alma Swan, Director of European Advocacy, SPARC*
10.00 - 11.00 am lecture
"Is Open Access just another fad?"
Venue: The Sir Llew Edwards Building (no. 14), Auditorium - ground floor University of Queensland, St Lucia
FREE morning tea to follow lecture

*The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication.

Alma has BSc and PhD degrees from the University of Southhampton and a MBA from Warick Business School. She is a Fellow of the Society of Biology (UK), and as a Chartered Biologist is an elected member of the Governing Board of Euroscience.

UQ Open Access Service - Pilot

Roll out of the UQ Open Access service, managed by the UQ Library and the Office of the DVC(R), will be piloted during July-September 2013. The pilot will start work on capturing the scholarly publications of researchers from the Institute for Molecular Bioscience (IMB), the School of Business and the School of Languages & Comparative Cultural Studies.

The pilot will seek to:
1. Ensure UQ compliance with NHMRC and ARC mandates (already in effect); 2. Encourage self-archiving of researcher publications in eSpace; 3. Establish efficient workflows and centralised support that minimises compliance overhead for researchers; 4. Negotiate UQ-specific agreements with key publishers (e.g., Elsevier), to facilitate bulk deposits to eSpace;

Based on the scholarly output at the pilot sites we will report on the number of peer reviewed articles published since the period July 2012 based on NHMRC funding, the number of other peer reviewed articles and the number of other scholarly outputs that are available for OA. The pilot will be based on UQ eSpace metadata entries for each of the pilot sites. The report will include the OA status/options for each publication and report upon the trends that are identified.

For help regarding open access publishing at UQ queries can be sent to openaccess@library.uq.edu.au

blog written by Lisa Kruesi

Summary of effort to date

• Open Access discussion paper presented to VC's Committee by UL in late March 2013
• VC's Committee endorsed concept of OA and recommended policy be drafted for Research Committee
• Draft policy prepared and submitted to 9th April meeting of Research Committee
• Working party established to report back to Research Committee in June 2013
• First Meeting of the UQ OA working party meeting held 23 April
• Minor edits to the Draft Policy, specifically the wording related to the transfer of copyright was edited from "should" to
"recommends" the transfer of copyright to the publisher be avoided.
• Wanted more information about the procedures
• Agreed OA Policy would not dictate where to publish
• Wanted more information about their disciplines and self-archiving
• Wanted the process to be EASY!
• Agreed to undertake a pilot to determine best practice

Preliminary Findings

A sample of the top 60 ERA journals (mainly Science, Technology and Medicine) and the top ten journals in each 2 digit FoR code (Built Environment, Education, Economics, Commerce, Human Society, Law, Creative Studies, Language, History and Philosophy) has revealed that:
Mostly STM 13/60 = provide delayed or immediate access. Only eight of the sixty allow the publishers PDF to be made available via the repository and some allow the post print to be loaded subject to publisher agreement. Of the non-STM titles reviewed only 1 allowed delayed or immediate OA. Based on this we are preparing for challenging times ahead when the UQ policy is implemented.

We are proposing that an OA pilot will be managed by the UQ Library and the Office of the DVC(R), working with three UQ Schools or Institutes, covering different disciplinary areas, over three months. The pilot will commence after the HERDC data has been submitted (around mid-June 2013)

Pilot will seek to:

- Ensure UQ compliance with NHMRC and ARC mandates (already in effect)
- Encourage self-archiving of researcher publications in eSpace
- Establish efficient workflows and centralised support that minimises compliance overhead for researchers
- Negotiate UQ-specific agreements with key publishers (e.g., Elsevier), to facilitate bulk deposits to eSpace

A librarian will be seconded to work fulltime in the SPADS/eSpace team to undertake the pilot and this staff member will report on the key performance indicators set for the project.
A second Working Party meeting is scheduled for Friday 31 May and will be followed by a discussion on the work at the next Research Committee in June.

UQ eSpace What's New?

• Social Media - A social media badge has been added to the view pages of eSpace records - now your favourite records can be "Liked, Tweeted and Shared".
• Scope and Policy document updated - The eSpace Scope and Policy document has been updated.
• 'Daily Snapshot' - The order of items in the 'Daily Snapshot' on the eSpace homepage now defaults to 'Recently Added ' rather than to 'News' and the order has been changed to give more prominence to the former.
• Sherpa/Romeo - Sherpa/Romeo provides publisher information, links now display in eSpace on the pages from all journals listed in Sherpa/Romeo.
• Improved usability of view pages - Usability of 'View Pages' in eSpace has been improved by moving Document-type, Sub-type and Collections to the foot of each record and relocating the DOI to the top.
• For Unit Publication Officers - The Unit Publication Officer Guide has been significantly updated.

For further information go to UQ eSpace.

A constant flurry of open access developments are underway at UQ, national and international levels.

At UQ

• UQ Library made Peter Suber's Open Access book available via ebrary. The catalogue description: A concise introduction to the basics of open access, describing what it is, showing that it is easy, fast, inexpensive, legal, and beneficial.
• Helen Morgan, Andrew Heath and I have prepared materials for a talk we are giving at the School of Pharmacy, spotlighting open access and pharmacy.

In Australia

• The Australian Open Access Support Group. From this site Dr Danny Kingsley provides an excellent summary of recent major open access developments.

Around the World

On 22 February 2013 the Obama administration announced a New Open access policy known as the White House Directive.

Read recent open access articles:

• For the Sake of Inquiry and Knowledge - The Inevitability of Open Access A.J. Wolpert
• Open but Not Free - Publishing in the 21st Century M. Frank
• Creative Commons and the Openness of Open Access M.W. Carroll
• The Downside of Open-Access Publishing C. Haug

Blog written by Lisa Kruesi Associate Director SPaDS

Positioning ACM for an Open Access Future (from Communications of the ACM, February 2013), discusses how ACM can provide free access to some of its publications. ACM has endorsed a publishing policy that expands author rights and provides greater levels of flexibility to open access. Sustainable options are currently being examined.

Open Library of Humanities, propose that research in the humanities should be open and free to read and re-use, provided that authors are cited. To support this proposal they have established a team who will examine some of the key issue of open access publishing in the humanities. With the ultimate aim to provide a platform for Open Access publishing that is:

• Reputable and respected through rigorous peer review
• Sustainable
• Digitally preserved and safely archived in perpetuity
• Non-profit
• Open in both monetary and permission terms
• Non-discriminatory (APCs are waiverable)
• Technically innovative in response to the needs of scholars and librarians
• A solution to the serials crisis

Mission statement