First Liberal Arts College to Adopt Open Access - Trinity University

I want to sincerely congratulate my colleague, Diane Graves, at Trinity University in San Antonio for her major accomplishment. Diane has been active in SPARC and a longtime advocate for Open Access and change in scholarly publishing. Diane has helped the rest of her colleagues in the Oberlin Group libraries by setting an example and leading the way for small, liberal arts colleges to adopt the open access standard. You can read the complete press release here. Kudos Diane!

Oberlin Letter to Scientific American

Scientific American was recently purchased by Nature publishing group. Our subscription was to increase from $24 per year to $300 per year. In addition to canceling our subscription, we joined with other library directors from 48 other Oberlin Group member libraries to send a letter protesting the price increase. Articles have appeared in a variety of places:

Chronicle of Higher Education, Oct. 13, "College Library Directors Protest Huge Jump in 'Scientific American' Price"

Inside Higher Ed, October 13, "Library Directors Protest 'Scientific American' Prices"

Library Journal, Oct. 13,"College Librarians Protest STM Pricing for Consumer Magazine Scientific American"


A copy of the Oberlin letter

And now we have the response from the publisher. If anyone believes we should resubscribe to this journal based on this letter, please do share your thoughts with me.

Letter of Support for Federal Research Access Act of 2009

President Brian Rosenberg is one of the 57 liberal arts college presidents who signed a letter of support for the new legislation to expand public access to federally funded research. An article in today's Inside Higher Education has the details and a link to the letter.

Compact for Open Access Publishing

Four universities have joined together to form a new iniative entitled Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) to support open access publishing. Information on the project which includes Cornell, Harvard, Dartmouth, MIT and my alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, will be found at their website
http://www.oacompact.org/
The point of the project is to support "equity of the business models by committing each university to 'the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in fee-based open-access journals and for which other institutions would not be expected to provide funds.'"

Universities and colleges are encouraged to join the initiative and sign on in a show of support.

More open access content in Google Books

The following article appeared in today's issue of Wired Campus. August 13, 2009

By Marc Beja with good news for open-access and Creative Commons advocates.

Original posting

"Authors who feared the expansion of Google Books' library, or who felt the company was hoarding books and filling its own coffers, now have a little less to worry about.

Google announced today that it will let authors use Google Books to distribute works that they have published under Creative Commons licenses. Readers will be able to download the copyrighted books and share them with other Google Books users as long as they comply with the authors' decisions on how the material can be used. (There are six different Creative Commons licenses, which let authors require, among other things, that their books can be repurposed only with attribution or only for non-commercial use.)

Nine books are already available to download, including Code: Version 2, by Lawrence Lessig, a director of Creative Commons, who is an advocate for open-access for books."

U of California Press and JSTOR announce new platform for scholarship

There have been several news items today about JSTOR including current content beginning in 2011. Here's the notice from today's issue of the Wired Campus - August 13, 2009, by Jennifer Howard

"The University of California Press and JSTOR announced today that they have joined forces to create "a single, integrated platform" for new scholarship. The venture, called the Current Scholarship Program, will debut in 2011. It aims to provide a more cost-effective way for libraries and end users to have "seamless access" to all current content from the scholarly journals published by the California press, including those from scholarly associations. Back issues and primary-source material from libraries will also be included, the announcement said. Other publishers are invited to participate if they embrace an "articulated set of principles" behind the partnership. Those principles include "fair and transparent pricing" as well as long-term access and preservation."

Original post

Open Humanities Press

Five new open-access monograph series are being started with the University of Michigan Press. See full story at Chronicle of Higher Education.