We are very pleased to announce that the draft UQ Open Access Policy for Research Outputs, which has been authored and championed by the Library, has passed another procedural milestone by getting Academic Board approval. Assuming approval by the Senate, it will go into effect on 1 January 2014. The policy, which applies to all UQ research publications, is based on the ARC and NHMRC policies already in effect.

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

At UQ after approval from the UQ Research Committee the draft Open Access for UQ Research Outputs Policy and Procedures, championed by the UQ Library with the UQ office of the DVC (Research) as the custodian, will be tabled at the September UQ Academic Board. We will keep you posted on the progress of the drafts.

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.

Two organisations, ORCID and CrossRef, have collaborated to solve the problem of ambiguous author names in scholarly content. ORCID began assigning unique identifiers to researchers in October.

ORCID, was established in 2010 as non-profit organisation serving the research community. You may contact the Executive Director Laure Haak at l.haak@orcid.org and follow @ORCID_Org on Twitter.

Scrutiny of scholarly publications and research data has traditionally been undertaken through peer review and proprietary bibliometrics. But should article level metrics alone be used to evaluate the impact of research? Increasingly practitioners are turning to social networks such as blogs, Twitter and Mendeley to assess the scholarly impact of published works.

Open Exeter Data Asset Framework Survey, is a recently published study by The University of Exeter, on data management practice and attitudes to Open Access. The findings for the University has helped them to gain a better understanding of current research data management practices across different disciplines and with different levels of research experience.

Findings included:

Simon Marginson reported in The Australian this week, "We're fighting above our weight when it comes to uni ranking". The article examines how Australian Universities compare within the global rankings.

David Glance, Director of the Centre for Software Practices at University of Western Australia wrote in The Conversation on the 8th July 2012, a thought provoking article on the long tail of academic publishing. The main point being, that the high publication rates of a few high achieving academics is generally matched by the many academics with modest outputs and that universities should not overlook th

Heather Morrison's blog post the June 30, 2012 Dramatic Growth of Open Access http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2012/07/inevitability-of-open-access-june-30.html provides an excellent summary of open access search engines, world archives and the recent growth of their content. Here is a snap shot of the figures: