The potential effect of making journals free after a six month embargo

This report commissioned by the UK Publishers\u27 Association finds that providing open access to research publications after 6 months rather than 12 might have a material effect on libraries’ subscriptions; and that the impact on publishers’ revenues would be considerable. Higher Education Institutions’ libraries may be impacted by the collapse or scaling down of academic publishing houses. The world’s most distinguished research institutions would, the report suggests, be impacted the most, since published outputs are essential for the work carried out by their researchers. The reports’ results indicate that  Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) publishers could expect to retain full subscriptions from 56% of libraries, compared with 35% for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences journals (AHSS) publishers.  The report documents the results of a survey carried out to obtain a significant body of information on how the acquisitions policies of libraries might be affected by an across-the board mandate to make journals articles free of charge six months after publication. The report analyses the results of responses from 210 libraries across the world who were asked whether they would continue to subscribe to research journals were their content freely available within six months of publication. Libraries were asked to send separate responses for Scientific, Technical and Medical (STM) journals and Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences journals (AHSS)

Gold Open Access Publishing Must Not Be Allowed to Retard the Progress of Green Open Access Self-Archiving

Universal Open Access (OA) is fully within the reach of the global research community: Research institutions and funders need merely mandate (green) OA self-archiving of the final, refereed drafts of all journal articles immediately upon acceptance for publication. The money to pay for gold OA publishing will only become available if universal green OA eventually makes subscriptions unsustainable. Paying for gold OA pre-emptively today, without first having mandated green OA not only squanders scarce money, but it delays the attainment of universal OA

Opening Access by Overcoming Zeno's Paralysis

Open Access (OA) means free access for all would-be users webwide to all articles published in all peer-reviewed research journals across all scholarly and scientific disciplines. 100% OA is optimal for research, researchers, their institutions, and their funders because it maximizes research access and usage. It is also 100% feasible: authors just need to deposit ("self-archive") their articles on their own institutional websites. Hence 100% OA is inevitable. Yet the few keystrokes needed to reach it have been paralyzed for a decade by a seemingly endless series of phobias (about everything from piracy and plagiarism to posterity and priorities), each easily shown to be groundless, yet persistent and recurring. The cure for this "Zeno's Paralysis" is for researchers' institutions and funders to mandate the keystrokes, just as they already mandate publishing, and for the very same reason: to maximize research usage, impact and progress. 95% of researchers have said they would comply with a self-archiving mandate; 93% of journals have already given self-archiving their blessing; and those institutions that have already mandated it are successfully and rapidly moving toward 100% OA

The Open Challenge: A Brief History

Milestones in the history of the Open Access (OA) Movement, especially the 1994 "Subversive Proposal" for authors to self-archive their peer-reviewed journal articles, the creation of the first OAI-compliant open source software for creating an Institutional Repository (EPrints, 2000), the evidence for the OA impact advantage (2001), the first OA Self-Archiving Mandate (U. Southampton ECS 2002), the OA Mandates Registry (ROARMAP, 2003), and the creation of the OA Policy Guidance organization for universities worldwide, EnablingOpenScholarship (EOS 2010)

The persistence of media control under consolidated authoritarianism: containing Kazakhstan’s digital media

Citizens of Kazakhstan have greater access to the Internet now than at any time in the past. However, the Nazarbaev regime has systematically cut off the supply of political analysis on the country's web sites while simultaneously shifting popular on-line consumption habits in non-political directions. The result is that the presence of the Internet in Kazakhstan is helping the authoritarian regime remain in power

Implications of Mandatory Registration of Mobile Phone Users in Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa ranks among the top regions in terms of growth in the number of mobile phone users. The success of mobile telephony is attributed to the opening of markets for private players and lenient regulatory policy. However, markets may be increasingly saturated and new regulations introduced across Africa could also have a negative impact on future growth. Since 2006, the majority of countries in the region have introduced mandatory registration of users of prepaid SIM cards with their personal identity details. This potentially increases the costs of using mobile telephony. I present a fixed effects model for the estimation of the impact of mandatory registration on mobile penetration growth, which is based upon a panel dataset of 32 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa for the years 2000 to 2010. The results show that the introduction of mandatory registration depresses growth in mobile penetration.Telecommunication, government policy, consumer protection, privacy

Green on What Side of the Fence? Librarian Perceptions of Accepted Author Manuscripts

INTRODUCTION There is a growing body of accepted author manuscripts (AAMs) in national, professional, and institutional repositories. This study seeks to explore librarian attitudes about AAMs and in what contexts they should be recommended. Particular attention is paid to differences between the attitudes of librarians whose primary job responsibilities are within the field of scholarly communications as opposed to the rest of the profession. METHODS An Internet survey was sent to nine different professional listservs, asking for voluntary anonymous participation. RESULTS This study finds that AAMs are considered an acceptable source by many librarians, with scholarly communications librarians more willing to recommend AAMs in higher-stakes contexts such as health care and dissertation research. DISCUSSION Librarian AAM attitudes are discussed, with suggestions for future research and implications for librarians

Science 3.0: Corrections to the Science 2.0 paradigm

The concept of Science 2.0 was introduced almost a decade ago to describe the new generation of online-based tools for researchers allowing easier data sharing, collaboration and publishing. Although technically sound, the concept still does not work as expected. Here we provide a systematic line of arguments to modify the concept of Science 2.0, making it more consistent with the spirit and traditions of science and Internet. Our first correction to the Science 2.0 paradigm concerns the open-access publication models charging fees to the authors. As discussed elsewhere, we show that the monopoly of such publishing models increases biases and inequalities in the representation of scientific ideas based on the author's income. Our second correction concerns post-publication comments online, which are all essentially non-anonymous in the current Science 2.0 paradigm. We conclude that scientific post-publication discussions require special anonymization systems. We further analyze the reasons of the failure of the current post-publication peer-review models and suggest what needs to be changed in Science 3.0 to convert Internet into a large journal club.Comment: 7 figure

The relationship between ILL/document supply and journal subscriptions

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to provide insights into the relationship between ILL/ document supply and journal subscriptions and to assess recent trends in the ILL service. Design/methodology/Approach: This survey is based on data from the ILL service conducted over the five year period 2005-2009 through the Italian NILDE (Network for Inter-Library Document Exchange) network. Findings: This article bears out important previous findings that ILL is not used as a surrogate for journal subscriptions. This is supported by the analysis of a broad number of titles and over a wide time-range. On the contrary, analysis of data transactions, particularly of the most requested journals, can bring about positive effects on new title acquisitions and negotiations with publishers. This paper also shows, at least for Italy, an overall growth and vitality of ILL, in spite of the widespread availability of e-journals acquired through consortia purchasing. Originality/Value: An insight into the relationship between ILL and journal subscriptions in Italy, a country where few studies have been carried out, and none at all for such a large number of libraries and transactions