News
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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.”
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Google Announces Beta Release of Google Scholar
Google announces the beta release of Google Scholar. The Google Scholar FAQ promises the ability “to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research … from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.” For each article it indexes the service also displays a count of citations of which it is aware.
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UC Response to NIH Call for Public Comment
The UC Office of Scholarly Communication contributed analysis to the preparation of UC’s response to the September 24 NIH call for public comment on their proposed policy on public access and archiving.
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PLoS Launches Second Journal
Open access journal publisher Public Library of Science launches PLoS Medicine, its second journal.
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SAGE Announces Open Access Archiving
SAGE Publications announces that it will allow authors to make available open access postprints without case-by-case requests for permission. Sage thus joins a growing list of like-minded publishers (see, for example, the Sherpa list of publisher copyright policies).
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UC Provost’s Letter in Support of Strengthening NIH Policy
UC Provost Wyatt R. Hume writes a letter to California Senators Feinstein and Boxer encouraging their support of proposed changes to strengthen the NIH policy on public access to research results. In the letter Hume says that the policy goals, including the expanded use of NIH research findings for the advancement of science and public health, “are shared by UC health scientists and by researchers worldwide.”
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“Reshaping Scholarly Communication” in Against the Grain
John Ober, Catherine Candee, and Beverlee French’s article, “Reshaping Scholarly Communication” appeared in Against the Grain. Vol. 16, no. 3. June 2004. Reviews the mounting evidence of the economic unsustainability of scholarly communication systems and outlines the University of California’s strategies for response. [PDF]
