Library Resource Guide for: SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATIONS

Journal Cost Solutions and Enhancements

The untenable journal inflation situation is described on the Yale University site: Journal Cost Update web page.

There are a number of scenarios being developed that take advantage of the enhanced capabilities of electronic journals:

  1. integrated media materials (i.e. simulations, sound bytes),
  2. faster turnaround time,
  3. less expensive distribution costs,
  4. commenting capabilities,
  5. full text searchability,
  6. related item links (i.e. SFX and citation tracking)


Concept Models and Scenarios

Action Items: Theoretical



Action Items: Actual

  • Harvard To Collect, Disseminate Scholarly Articles For Faculty-- Harvard faculty vote to make their scholarly articles available through a Harvard repository.
  • The Open Archives initiative -- interoperability among author self-archiving solutions -- (Santa Fe Convention)
  • publiclibraryofscience.org - free access to published biological and medical literature initiative
  • Collection Management Initiative University of California selected print journals in UC libraries for which electronic access is available through the California Digital Library will be temporarily removed from the shelf to test user behaviors and preferences.
  • Faculty of 1000 - online research tool that highlights the most interesting papers in biology, based on the recommendations of over 1000 leading scientists.
  • BioMed Central news - charging authors per article (hoping libraries will pay; why not Federal payment???)-- actual BioMed Central -- a full text initiative in the bio-med area (peer review and non-peer reviewed material)
  • arXiv -- Ginsparg (Los Alamos) High Energy Physics (+) preprint approach
  • Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
    Michael L Rosenzweig, Professor, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, "Reclaiming What We Own: Expanding Competition in Scholarly Publishing" (migration of the entire editorial board to a less expensive publisher) Machine Learning - all 40 people resigned from the Editorial Board of the Machine Learning Journal
  • Journal of Logic Programming: the entire editorial board resigned in frustration at their inability to convince a publisher to put a reasonable price on their journal, and they instead are creating a new journal Theory and Practice of Logic Programming.
  • Journal of Algorithms: the resignation of the JoA editorial board and the formation of ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG).
  • Electronic Society for Social Scientists: Manfredi La Manna's economist ejournals at half price
  • PERI -- Programme for the Enhancement of Research Information (African cooperative)
  • ICAAP -- International Consortium for Alternative Academic Publication
  • Roquade -- Three Dutch university libraries have instigated the Roquade project: Utrecht University Library, Delft University of Technology Library and the Netherlands Institute for Scientific Information Services.
  • BioLine -- developing countries' journal publication project
  • Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) - provides free or nearly free access to the major journals in biomedical and related social sciences, to public institutions in developing countries.
  • ASCUS -- From the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship (CIOS), a not-for-profit, state-of-the-art system for archiving and indexing Communication scholarship provisionally named ASCUS (Academic Serials in Communication Unified System).
  • university Superarchives approach -- freely available repositories for locally created research material
  • Directory of Open Access Journals -- freely available peer reviewed journals
  • OAI testbeds: UIUC Open Archives Initiative Information in Engineering, Computer Science, and Physics, myOAI, SAIL-eprints
  • Texas teaching tools consortia -- Four Texas university systems and Rice University will collaborate on a digital repository whose goal is to offer online resources, such as teaching aids, dissertations, and practical information, although not books.
  • The Scholar's Copyright Addendum Engine helps authors generate a PDF form that can be attached to a journal publisher's copyright agreement to ensure that the author retains certain rights.
  • The entire editorial board of the Springer journal K-theory resigned in frustration at their inability to convince a publisher to put a reasonable price on their journal, and they instead are creating a new journal by Cambridge University Press.


Alternatives

Selected example alternative dissemination products:

Selected example alternative journal products: