U.S. Call to action: 2011 White House RFI on public access (deadline Jan. 2)

U.S. OA Librarians and organizations elsewhere with OA policy experience, see this call to action fron the Alliance for Taxpayer Access: http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/action_access/11-1117.shtml

September 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the September 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Peter's description as posted to the SPARC OA Forum: Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, this issue reflects on the problem of access to dangerous knowledge. It also describes how I'll have to trim future issues to make time for a large new OA project at Harvard. The look-back sections reprint short excerpts from SOAN five and ten years ago this month.

August 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the August 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. No feature article this time, this issue focuses on 5 and 10 years ago and the latest roundup.

New OA journal for us! Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication

Thanks to Issac Gilman for a pointer to a new OA Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. So far Pacific University and California Polytechnic State University have put together a great editorial team; now let's do our part by helping this new journal out with some great content!

Open Access and Copyright - July 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Open Access and Copyright is the feature article in Peter Suber's just-released July SPARC Open Access Newsletter.

E-LIS reaches 12,000 documents

E-LIS, the subject repository for library and information science, passed the 12,000 document mark today (it's at 12,004 as I type). Congrats to E-LIS for reaching this level. While this is a fairly auspicious number, there's still loads of library and info. science-related content that could be added to E-LIS. So, to all OA Librarian readers, if you write and present in the subject area, I challenge you to add your material! It's easy to do, taking mere minutes!

Andrew

PS Disclosure: I am one of the Canadian editors for E-LIS.

June 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the June 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month: Seeking Custody - when you have permission for OA, but don't have a copy. Plus the usual monthly roundup.

Barbara Fister: 4 options for librarians

Barbara Fister has 4 suggested options for libraries to further OA publishing in Library Journal. The options are, in brief:

• Start an open access publishing program with a local focus.
• Mergers of libraries and university presses.
• Redirect funding from subscriptions to paying author fees for open access (Fister does not think this is workable on a grand scale; note that I would disagree)
• Build small and nimble coalitions among libraries with scholars who do get it

Andrew Waller winner of BMC OA Advocate of the Year award!

BioMedCentral presented OA Librarian's own Andrew Waller with their OA Advocate of the Year award last night - congratulations, Andrew! Details at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/researchawards/previousawards#2010

Update May 9: here is another more direct link to the announcement

Text from science journalist Vivienne Parry: He is the Open Access Librarian in the Scholarly Communication Centre, part of the Libraries and Cultural Resources unit at the University of Calgary, Canada. Andrew is responsible for the Open Access Authors Fund, which has made possible over 170 articles for University of Calgary authors since its inception in 2008. This fund was the first of its kind in Canada. It is one of several programs in the University of Calgary’s outstanding open access suite. It includes an institutional repository; an expansive digitization program; OA journals and monographs in the University of Calgary Press. Andrew has regularly written on and spoken about open access over the last several years. He is one of the people behind the OA Librarian blog and is a Canadian editor for the open access repository for library and information science, E-LIS.

Comment: the University of Calgary's Open Access Authors Fund, led by Andrew, is just one of the initiatives that I hope Andrew will do more speaking and writing about in the near future. It is a pleasure to see this award go to someone who has frequently been a co-author, co-presenter, co-OA Librarian, and co-E-LIS member. Thanks for all that you do, Andrew!

May 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has released the May 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlighted this month: Free Offline Access: A Primer on OA' (OA Prime)

April 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the April 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month is open access as humanitarian aid, focused on efforts of publishers to provide open access generally to selected works in response to this month's massive earthquake in Japan. Another new feature is a look back to SOAN 5 and 10 years ago.

New interface for DOAJ

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has announced a new interface, which can be seen at www.doaj.org. There is a note about the new interface here.

Also, in a posting to the American Science Open Access Forum, Anna-Lena Johansson from DOAJ notes:

"Now there are more than 6300 journals from more than 110 countries in more than 50 languages in the DOAJ. More than 2500 journals are providing metadata on article level, which means that more than 500,000 articles are searchable from DOAJ."

U.S. Urgent Action Alert: Act by April 14 to expand NIH mandate

Details at SPARC

College and Research Libraries goes open access!

ACRL's College and Research Libraries is going open access - details here! Kudos to ACRL!

Librarians Against DRM shareable icons

Free reusable icons - librarians / authors against DRM:
http://readersbillofrights.info/

thanks to Alvin Schrader

March 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the March 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month: 6 recent watershed events for OA. So far, love the blurb from an upcoming Publishers Association / Association of Learned and Scholarly Publishers meeting which starts: Open access is here to stay, and has the support of our key partners

Core values of librarianshp

Thanks to the American Library Association for articulating these 11 Core Values of Librarianship. I'm repeating the full list here - for convenience as I've had trouble finding these on the ALA website before - and also because they are worth repeating. This is what librarianship is all about!

The foundation of modern librarianship rests on an essential set of core values, which define, inform, and guide all professional practice. These values reflect the history and ongoing development of the profession and have been advanced, expanded, and refined by numerous policy statements of the American Library Association. Among these are:

• Access
• Confidentiality/Privacy
• Democracy
• Diversity
• Education and Lifelong Learning
• Intellectual Freedom
• Preservation
• The Public Good
• Professionalism
• Service
• Social Responsibility

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to express our values more eloquently than ALA already has in the Freedom to Read statement, the Library Bill of Rights, the ALA Mission Statement, Libraries: an American Value and other documents. These policies have been carefully thought out, articulated, debated, and approved by the ALA Council. They are interpreted, revised, or expanded when necessary. Over time, the values embodied in these statements have been embraced by the majority of librarians as the foundations of their practice. Adopted, 2004.

Thanks to Al Kagan for the pointer.

February 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the February 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlighted this month is the US Department of Labor mandate for Open Educational Resources (OER) and Word Contest #2, coming up with terminology for the phrase to "provide open access to."

Science Online 2011 tweeting and streaming

If you can't make it to the Jan. 13-15 Science Online meeting, note that there will be live tweeting and streaming - see http://scienceonline2011.com/ and http://www.science3point0.com/scio11/ (thanks to Graham Steel).

Polish version of 2010 Dramatic Growth of Open Access

The 2010 Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available in Polish here and here - many thanks to E-LIS Editor Bożena Bednarek-Michalska. The English version can be found here.

December 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the December 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month is an in-depth look at open access in 2010 - a busy year for OA!

2010 Dramatic Growth of Open Access

The 2010 Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available.

Excerpt:

2010 was the strongest year for open access growth so far. In 2010, 1,401 journals were added to DOAJ for a total of 5,936 journals. The Electronic Journals Library now records over 27,000 journals that can be read free of charge; over 3,500 were added in 2010. 1,037 journals actively participate in PubMedCentral, an increase of 313 over the past year, and more than half of these journals contribute all articles as open access. PMC now provides access to over 3.2 million free articles, an increase of over 300,000 this year. OpenDOAR lists 1,817 repositories, having added 257 this year. A Scientific Commons search encompasses 38 million items, an increase of over 6 million since last year. There are 261 open access mandate policies, an increase of 83 this year.

Happy New Year to the Open Access movement!

Heather Morrison