What UI Libraries is Doing | Where You Publish Makes a Difference
Open Access | Embargo | Hybrid Models | Digital Repositories | Emerging Models
In traditional commercial publishing, the library pays for subscriptions (print or electronic) and authorized users have free access. The advent of web-based publishing, combined with dissatisfaction with the existing scholarly communication system, has led to the development of several alternative publishing models.
This chart of the characteristics of scholarly publishing options offers a succinct overview of the options. All of these models have variations within the model. Some commercial publishers have begun to allow author archiving or deposit in repositories after a period of time (called an “embargo.”)
Through Iowa Research Online and Iowa Digital Library, The UI Libraries' offers a place for working paper series, conference presentations and other grey literature, images, sound and video files, as well as a repository of individual scholarly journal articles. We also offer a journal hosting service, which includes editorial management software, called EdiKit, to manage submissions, editorial functions, and peer-review for locally published journals.
The University of Iowa Libraries also supports the following initiatives and organizations through institutional memberships or subscriptions.
BioMed Central
BioMed Central is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research. The University of Iowa is an institutional member of BioMed Central; there is a 15% discount on the author's fee for researchers who submit articles to the journals published by BioMed Central.
Bioone
BioOne is an innovative collaboration between scientific societies, libraries, universities and the private sector. BioOne provides access to full-text high-impact bioscience research journals, the majority of which are published by small societies and non-commercial publishers, and, until now, have been available only in printed form.
Nucleic Acids Research
Through the University of Iowa's monetary support of this OA journal, researchers who submit articles to NAR get a 50% discount on author's fee.
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource. The University of Iowa is an institutional member of PLoS; there is a 10% discount on the author's fee for researchers who submit articles to the journals published by BioMed Central.
SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics)
SCOAP3 is a consortium that facilitates Open Access publishing in High Energy Physics by re-directing subscription money. In this model, HEP funding agencies and libraries, which today purchase journal subscriptions to implicitly support the peer-review service, federate to explicitly cover its cost, while publishers make the electronic versions of their journals free to read. Authors are not directly charged to publish their articles OA.
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition)
SPARC is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to correct imbalances in the scholarly publishing system. Its pragmatic focus is to stimulate the emergence of new scholarly communication models that expand the dissemination of scholarly research and reduce financial pressures on libraries.
Your choice of where to publish may make a difference in how often your article is read or cited. By understanding the options available through open access publishing, you can make it easier for your colleagues to read and make use of your work.
Several studies indicate that articles that are freely available have as much or even more research impact as other articles.
OpCit Project: The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies
The Impact of Open Access Journal: A Citation Study from Thomson ISI
A 2004 study shows that open access peer-reviewed journals have impact factors and citation rates equal to traditional peer-reviewed journals.
Open access holds the promise of making scholarly articles freely available to everyone, regardless of affiliation, on the internet. Digital access is free to users with the cost being borne by authors, their sponsors, the society, or the library. Peer review and proper attribution of authorship are unchanged. A variety of income models income models are currently in use to support open-access journals . Recently, a few institutions have signed a compact to cover costs when authors lack other funding.
Examples include:
Science
BioMed Central
BioMed Central is an STM publisher, whose articles are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication. Publishing costs are covered with article processing charges, defrayed in part by The University Libraries.
Chemistry Central
Chemistry Central publishes peer-reviewed open access research in chemistry. Chemistry central is part of the Biomed Central group. Publishing costs are covered with article processing charges, defrayed in part by The University Libraries.
Optics Express
Optics Express, published by the Optical Society of America, publishes original, peer-reviewed articles that report new developments of interest to the optics community in all fields of optical science and technology. There is no subscription fee for access; the journal is funded by modest author publication fees. Drawing on unique features of the electronic medium, Optics Express offers authors: rapid publication, the chance to include color images at no additional cost, and the medium for presenting data and results in ways not possible in print via audio and video multimedia files.
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS has chosen to apply the less-restrictive Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) to all works they publish. The publication fee is reduced by The University of Iowa's institutional membership.
Social Science
Asian Ethnology
Asian Ethnology is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the promotion of scholarly research on the peoples and cultures of Asia.
Behavior and Social Issues
Behavior and Social Issues is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal that serves as a primary scholarly outlet for articles that advance the analysis of human social behavior, published by the University of Illinois, Chicago. The journal is supported by subscriptions to the archival, hard copy edition. Authors retain copyright but grant exclusive first publication rights and a non-exclusive license to have the work reproduced in other ways.
Cultural Analysis
Cultural Analysis is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to investigating expressive and everyday culture. Published by the University of California, Berkeley.
Humanities
Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Comitatus is a peer-reviewed annual publication of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The author retains copyright and grants the publisher a non-exclusive, perpetual right to use the digital assets for noncommercial use.
eLanguage
The goal of the eLanguage Project is to effectively utilize modern, web-based publishing technologies in order to provide researchers in the academic discipline of Linguistics with a platform for the management of peer-reviewed, open-access electronic journals. With eLanguage the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) enables researchers to establish their own "co-journals" which are accessible both individually and in an aggregated form on eLanguage.net.
Open Humanities Press
Open Humanities Press is an international open access publishing collective in critical and cultural theory. Authors retain the copyrights for their works and have a choice of Creative Commons licenses.
Philosopher's Imprint
Philosophers' Imprint is a refereed series of original papers in philosophy, edited by Stephen Darwall and J. David Velleman, with the advice of an international Board of Editors. Published by the University of Michigan Digital Library. Authors retain copyright for their work.
Some journals are becoming Open Access after an embargo of 6-24 months. These journals generally do not have author submission charges and are instead funded by the subscription for the most recent issues. These are not fully open access titles, but the less current content becomes freely available.
HighWire Press
HighWire Press is a division of the Stanford University Libraries, which produces the online versions of high-impact, peer-reviewed journals and other scholarly content. HighWire partners with influential scholarly societies, university presses and publishers to create a collection of the finest, fully searchable research and clinical literature online. Many of their titles are freely available after an embargo period. Many titles are also free to developing economies.
Medieval Feminist Forum
Medieval Feminist Forum is a peer reviewed journal hosted by the University of Iowa Libraries. The current year is restricted to members of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship. Older issues are completely free.
Bowing to some of the pressures of open access publishing, certain publishers have made some of their journal content free and open while shielding other articles behind the subscription fees (usually the author has the choice to pay for his/her article to be OA). While having access to some information is better than nothing, this model is a complex one to manage. It is a challenge to librarians and to the public to know what is free and what is not. An article on the subject, from a publisher’s point of view, is Open Access, yes! Open Excess, no! (Blood, 2004, 103(9):3257).
Publishers with paid options for open access can be found on SHERPA's website.
Many publishers now allow some form of archiving locally (see SHERPA/RoMEO). This means that authors can deposit their work voluntarily in repositories at their own institutions or funding agencies, or a disciplinary repository. Sometimes the publisher's version of the PDF may be included in a repository, but commonly authors need to contribute their final, peer-reviewed version of the article.
Iowa Research Online, UI's institutional repository, was created to organize, preserve, and increase the impact of scholarly and creative work at The University of Iowa. It is a dynamic archive of the research produced by faculty, researchers, and students, from published articles in peer-reviewed journals to presentations, theses, dissertations, and unpublished papers. Many institutions all over the world have repositories. To see a map, visit Repository66.org.
Examples of disciplinary repositories include:
Science
arXiv.org
Open access to over 500,000 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. Hosted by Cornell University Library.
PubMed Central
PMC is the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. All research funded by the NIH now goes into PMC, with a maximum embargo period of 12 months.
Social Science
AgEcon Search
AgEcon Search collects, indexes, and electronically distributes full text copies of scholarly research in the broadly defined field of agricultural economics including sub disciplines such as agribusiness, food supply, natural resource economics, environmental economics, policy issues, agricultural trade, and economic development. Maintained at the University of Minnesota by Magrath Library and the Department of Applied Economic.
RePEc Research Papers in Economics
REPEc is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in 63 countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, journal articles and software components. All RePEc material is freely available.
Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
SSRN is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences.
Humanities
History Data Service
The History Data Service collects, preserves, and promotes the use of digital resources, which result from or support historical research, learning and teaching. From the University of Essex.
OLAC (Open Language Archives Community)
OLAC is an international partnership of institutions and individuals who are creating a worldwide virtual library of language resources by: (i) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and (ii) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources.
Oxford Text Archive
The Oxford Text Archive develops, collects, catalogues and preserves electronic literary and linguistic resources. From Oxford University.
PLoS HUB - Clinical Trials
The PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials collects PLoS journal articles that relate to clinical trials. The Hub is a site for researchers to share their views and build a dynamic, interactive community. The PLoS Hub for Clinical Trials features articles originally published in PLoS Clinical Trials, along with articles from all the PLoS titles that publish clinical trials. In the future, it will also feature open-access articles from other journals plus user-generated content.
NanoHUB
The nanoHUB is a rich, web-based resource for research, education and collaboration in nanotechnology. It hosts over 1600 resources, including online presentations, courses, learning modules, podcasts, animations, and teaching materials. It also offers web-accessible simulation tools which simulate nanotechnology devices. The nanoHUB also provides collaboration environment via workspaces, online meetings and user groups.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a scholarly dynamic reference work, with each entry is maintained and kept up to date by an expert or group of experts in the field. The project is funded entirely by donations and grants.
Vectors, journal of culture and technology in a dynamic vernacular
Utilizing a peer-reviewed format and under the guidance of an international board, Vectors features submissions and specially-commissioned works comprised of moving- and still-images; voice, music, and sound; computational and interactive structures; social software; and much more. They publish only works that need, for whatever reason, to exist in multimedia.