News
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Wellcome Trust Implements Open Access Mandate
The Wellcome Trust, one of the largest research funders in the UK, starts implementing its new open-access mandate for Wellcome-funded research.
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UC Berkeley Faculty Scholarly Publishing Statement of Principles
In the wake of a heavily attended faculty conference on scholarly publishing on March 31, UC Berkeley’s faculty senate adopt a Scholarly Publishing Statement of Principles. The statement has clauses covering faculty control of their intellectual property, advancement and promotion, incentives to establish and use alternative publishing forms, and support for the library in its efforts to curtail unsustainable pricing structures for scholarly materials. Statement of Principles Executive Summary
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American Chemical Society Expresses Opposition to NIH’s PubChem
The press reports that the American Chemical Society is calling on Congress to shut down the NIH’s PubChem, a freely accessible database that connects chemical information with biomedical research and clinical information, organizing facts in numerous public databases into a unified whole. PubChem is a critical component of the NIH strategic “roadmap” to speed new medical treatments and improve healthcare.
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UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate Passes Resolutions on Scholarly Publishing
The UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate passes four resolutions on scholarly publishing. They include calls for a specific mechanism to engage faculty support for library content negotiations, exploration of the challenges of academic evaluation, pursuit of a collective copyright to bolster faculty copyright management, and tying immediate scholarly communication issues to the larger question of stewardship of UCSC’s scholarly assets.
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UC “Postprint Repository Services” Report Released
Postprint Repository Services: Context and Feasibility at the University of California. This March 2005 research report, generously supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, provides contextual information and recommendations for a repository for open-access distribution of UC faculty article publications. It based its recommendations for establishing, promoting, and further studying a UC postprint repository service on results from six research objectives that collectively provide baseline data about the number and proportion of UC faculty articles that can be made available for simultaneous distribution in an open-access postprint repository, and faculty attitudes toward managing copyright in their work as a means […]
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SLASIAC’s “Resolution I”
Saying that “a failure to respond [to scholarly communication issues] will jeopardize UC’s pre-eminence, its contributions to scholarly inquiry and the progress of knowledge, its effectiveness in teaching and learning, and its service to the citizens of California,” UC’s Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee (SLASIAC) writes and endorses Resolution I: The University’s Role in Fostering Positive Change in Scholarly Communication. The resolution calls upon the university and its faculty to take a number of certain steps to “regain control of and strengthen scholarly communication processes.”
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EScholarship Announces Postprint Service
The University of California’s eScholarship Repository announces its new “postprint” service. UC faculty who have retained the appropriate copyrights or who obtain permission from their publishers can easily deposit previously published articles into this publicly accessible online repository. The postprints are fully searchable, available free of charge, and are persistently maintained in a centrally managed database. The established popularity of the repository, with more than one million full-text downloads of content since 2002, makes it an ideal venue for faculty to reach new audiences of researchers. Press release
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NIH Releases Final Version of Public Access Policy
The NIH releases the final version of its policy on enhancing public access to archived publications resulting from NIH-funded research. Beginning May 2, 2005, NIH-funded investigators are requested to submit to the NIH National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) PubMed Central (PMC) an electronic version of the author’s final manuscript upon acceptance for publication, resulting from research supported, in whole or in part, with direct costs1 from NIH.
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PLoS Announces Three New Journals
Leading open access publisher Public Library of Science, announces three new open-acces journals: PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, and PLoS Pathogens. As with all PLoS journals, access is open to the public at no charge while production costs are covered by a mixture of sources including publication fees and institutional memberships. PLoS describes the new publications as “community journals” and is partnering with the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) on the first of these.
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University of Southampton Announces Open Access Support
The University of Southampton in the UK commits itself to providing open access to the research output of the university. According to the press release: “The University of Southampton is to make all its academic and scientific research output freely available. A decision by the University to provide core funding for its Institutional Repository establishes it as a central part of its research infrastructure, marking a new era for Open Access to academic research in the UK.”
