A letter to the editor that briefly introduces the publishing of some leading journals in the west and some ideas about scholarly communications in developing countries.

This paper is the third in a series of studies emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers previous studies of the usage of electronic journal articles through a literature survey. It then reports on the results of a survey of 542 academic authors as to how they expected to use open-access research papers. This data is compared with results from the second of the RoMEO Studies series as to how academics wished to protect their open-access research papers. The ways in which academics expect to use open-access works (including activities, restrictions and conditions) are described. It concludes that academics-as-users do not expect to perform all the activities with open-access research papers that academics-as-authors would allow. Thus the rights metadata proposed by the RoMEO Project would appear to meet the usage requirements of most academics. This article has been accepted for publication by the Journal of Librarianship and Information Science.

This thesis looks at computer-mediated communication (CMC) and publishing system used to facilitate collaborative peer review of multimedia educational objects.

This study shows how structure and process of scholarly communication is being transformed with the advent of digital libraries from 1996 to 2006, the Internet and electronic editions, and how that is being shaped by the citational practices of selected humanities fields. This research is built on the view that citational practices of disciplinary domains are dependent on distinct protocols of argumentation and inter-textual engagement of these fields as communities of practice and therefore are defined by custom and disciplinary traditions. Focusing on two exemplary fields, Classical Studies and English, this study examines how citations to electronic resources are represented in five high-impact journals of these two humanities fields that are also known for related innovation in the area of digital humanities. The method is a combination of quantitative with qualitative analysis of referencing. Findings about incorporation of citation to electronic resources in these journals in the past decade are discussed in terms of the types of online resources, their functionalities, and argumentation. This approach builds on epistemological and bibliometric analyses to demonstrate a new method of analysis of citational practice.

This paper is the second in a series of studies (see Gadd, E., C. Oppenheim, and S. Probets. RoMEO Studies 1: The impact of copyright ownership on author-self-archiving, Journal of Documentation 59 (3) 243-277) emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving). It considers the protection for research papers afforded by UK copyright law, and by e-journal licenses. It compares this with the protection required by academic authors for open-access research papers as discovered by the RoMEO academic author survey. The survey used the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) as a framework for collecting views from 542 academics as to the permissions, restrictions, and conditions they wanted to assert over their works. Responses from self-archivers and non-archivers are compared. Concludes that most academic authors are primarily interested in preserving their moral rights, and that the protection offered research papers by copyright law is way in excess of that required by most academics. It also raises concerns about the level of protection enforced by e-journal license agreements.

This is the final study in a series emanating from the UK JISC-funded RoMEO Project (Rights Metadata for Open-archiving) which investigated the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) issues relating to academic author self-archiving of research papers. It then describes the selection of an appropriate means of expressing those rights through metadata and the resulting choice of Creative Commons licenses. Finally it outlines proposals for communicating rights metadata via the Open Archives Initiative's Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).

These are the notes I used in my talk as panelist on the technical session/panel titled Competing Information Realities: Digital Libraries, Digital Repositories and the Commons, 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Monday, 6 Nov. 2006 (1:30 - 3:00 pm), Austin, Texas; available in three versions: html, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Powerpoint (10 slides). I am a scholar, an academic, and the society's journal editor (JASIS&T). I also played agent provocateur in order to represent the publishers' viewpoint.

American Society for Information Science and Technology 2006 Annual Meeting / This is a presentation (23 slides) made at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Austin, Texas. It reports the current status of Open Access (OA) in the biomedical field, and compares some countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and Japan in terms of the OA situation. There are controversies about the definition of OA. After examining the requirements about OA, we recognized OA as the situation in which researchers could read the full text of articles in unrestricted way. In order to investigate the current situation of OA, 4,756 articles were sampled randomly from articles published between January and September in 2005 and indexed in PubMed. The main results are as follows: 1) The rate of OA articles was 25%, and 75% of all the articles were available online including electronic subscription journal articles. 2) The means of OA was classified into five types. Among them, the rate of OA articles by â OA and Hybrid OA journalsâ was overwhelming (more than 70%), and that of PMC was 26.2%. The rates of OA articles by â institutional repositoriesâ and â authorsâ personal sitesâ were considerably low (6.0% and 4.9% respectively). 3) When comparing the rates of OA articles by countries, Belgium ranked the first with 41.7%. The five countries indicated more than 30% in OA articles: Canada and India (38.7%), Brazil (36.4%), Australia (30.8%), and the U.S. (30.7%). Each country was different in the means of OA. 4) We explored the rates of OA for two groups; one group consists of articles published in journals with IF, and the other consists of articles published in journals without IF. The rate of OA for the group of articles in journals with IF is 20.6%, and that of articles in journals without IF is 30.8%

This presentation was made at a LITA panel on Institutional Repositories at the Annual ALA meeting in Chicago, IL on June 27, 2005. In it, I discuss the use at Cornell of such repositories as DSpace, techreports, and arXiv.org to address the crisis in scholarly communications, and as producer repositories for an OAIS digital preservation system at CUL.

Copyright Transfer Agreements (CTA) are a rich source of rights information related to self-archiving. According to the Eprints Self-Archiving FAQ, "To self-archive is to deposit a digital document in a publicly accessible website, preferably an OAI-compliant Eprint Archive." (1) This poster describes a study undertaken by DLIST whereby the CTAs of selected LIS journals were analyzed for publisher statements on the rights of authors related to self-archiving. The study differs from efforts such as the SHERPA/RoMEO database (2) that resulted from the large open access studies of Project RoMEO (3). The main differences are: 1) our focus on LIS journals and 2) focus on journals rather than publishers, since publishers appear to have different policies and CTAs for each of their journals. RoMEO/SHERPA focus on publishers in all disciplines and as such LIS is not fully/adequately represented. DLIST, Digital Library of Information Science and Technology is an Open Access Archive (OAA) for Library and Information Science and Technology based on E-prints; a cross-institutional disciplinary repository for the Information Sciences that focus on cultural heritage institutions such as Archives, Libraries, and Museums using interdisciplinary perspectives. To some researchers cultural heritage institutions and formal educational organizations are the critical information infrastructures for building the knowledge society.