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Electronic Highways
The future of paper/print publishing
Today, scholars, publishers, universities, professional societies and academic research libraries are working together and harnessing information technologies to transform scholarly publishing and knowledge-distribution business models. UB supports and contributes to this transformation. What are the issues? What is happening? What do individual scholars/authors need to know?
The UB Libraries sponsor the Web site Transforming Scholarly Communication & Publishing to inform the UB community of developments and emerging models for the creation, sharing, publishing and archiving of scholarship.
Numerous major issues already are impacting most scholars.
Open access initiatives present journals and other materials that are freely available online. Open access, subscription-based journals may be made available via an institutional or discipline-based repository or Web site. Commercial publishers also are increasingly offering an open access option. Open access is now required by law for publications resulting from research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. As a result, all such publications must now be made freely available online in a timely manner via PubMed Central. These publishing models are fully compatible with copyright, peer review and tenure/promotion processes. Universities such as MIT, Harvard and Boston University, as well as university presses have endorsed open access policies for publications authored by their faculty. Watch “Electronic Highways” on Oct. 15 for a feature devoted to open access and the growing evidence of its citation advantage.
Many universities and scholarly societies have created institutional repositories for collecting, preserving and widely sharing the curricular materials, research and publications of faculty and students. UB presently is developing its institutional repository, with some pilot projects already under way. Faculty will be contacted to consider depositing their publications and other research products in UB’s IR.
Scholarly authors increasingly are negotiating with journal and book publishers to retain copyright for their published work and to allow deposit in institutional repositories with open access models. SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition, offers a short video on author rights. Book authors should be aware of the pending Google books settlement, with a court hearing scheduled for Oct. 7. The Association of Research Libraries provides a quick guide answering such questions as “Is your book likely to show up in Google Books?”, “How much content from a book under copyright would display online?” or “How will copyright holders receive royalty payments?” On Aug. 26, the Open Book Alliance, which opposes the Google Books business model, launched a drive to secure open access and competition in book digitization and distribution markets.
Monitor the Transforming Scholarly Communication & Publishing Web site for updates and news, as well as what you and UB can do to support and facilitate emerging models of scholarly publishing and access.
—Judith Adams-Volpe, University Libraries
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