University of Lund launches Journal Info Service The Swedish University of Lund has launched its Journal Info Service, a registry with information about more than 18 000 titles of scientific journals. Authors can look up general information, accessibility, cost, quality and IF of journals before they decide where to publish. When a certain journal does not allow self-archiving or other OA options, similar titles are proposed that do allow this. The service is a useful tool for authors who do not want to be surprised by, amongst others, copyright regulations. UKB and Springer sign intentional declaration on Open Access Springer, one of the largest STMpublishers, and the UKB (collaboration of the Royal National Library and the University Libraries of the Netherlands) have signed an intentional declaration to investigate the reform towards Open Access publishing together. Read more in the press release. Sparc, Science Commons and MIT launch new instrument to retain authors' rights. In a collaboration with the MIT and SPARC, Science Commons has launched a new instrument to make it easier for authors to retain their rights when publishing. The "Scholars' Copyright Addendum Engine" helps them to create a self-chosen addendum to their article, ensuring their rights to self-archive the article (immediately or delayed), and grant some rights for readers to distribute and re-use it (Non-Commercial). Hence it is an addendum towards the publisher and the reader, combining Creative Commons Licenses and OA addenda in one: an example of the Access-Reuse addendum. Conference proceedings 15-16/02/07 now online The EC has posted the conference proceedings and presentations of the "Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area" conference online. Read them here. The report outlines the future tasks for the EC (OA experiments, harmonisation IP and copyright) and sums up the perspectives of all stakeholders. The difficulty of striking an ideal balance between all parties is clearly addressed, but there's a clear emphasis on the importance of Open Access to publicly funded research results. FWO also mandates OA. After the good news from Liège, Flanders now also has an OA mandate: the FWO (major Flemish research funding body) obliges its researchers to self-archive all articles coming from research funded by the FWO, in OA repositories. This needs to be done at the latest one year after the publication date, to increase visibility and impact. More information on the conditions can be found in their general agreement for researchers. SHERPA wins SPARC EU award at OAI5 On April 18th, SHERPA, our English DRIVER partner, received the SPARC Europe award for 'Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications' ath the OAI5 conference. their projects Romeo, JULIET and OpenDOAR are of great value to the global OA community. More information on DRIVER-SUPPORT. United Kingdom founds national depotservice The Depot, a collaboration between JISC, SHERPA and Edina, provides a national depot service for UK-based researchers who want to self-archive their work. Researchers can deposit their articles centrally, after which these are re-directed to their own IR, or preserved until their own institution has an IR where the articles can be transferred to.The current version is a testbed, the official launch is for the 5-6th of June, with the motto "Put it in The Depot". Apart from the national Depot service, the cooperation will also strengthen the network of institutional repositories and aid institutions with establishing policies for Open Access and self-archiving. A good practice from our neighbours! The Dutch way to Open Access Due to national coöperation, the Netherlands have one of the most succesful networks of institutional repositories and OA publications in Europe. Leo Waaijers, manager of SURFshare, explains how they did it. ULg gets ID/OA mandate! Rector Rentier announced it on his blog last Saturday, March 10th: the University of Liège will mandate self-archiving in the ID/OA manner ( Immediate Deposit/Optional Access), where an author has to self-archive the postprint version of the article in the IR, immediately upon acceptance for publication. This article (author's version) becomes OA when allowed by the publisher's policy, and when it stays closed, it can be requested by a simple 'request article' button. That way, no research impact gets lost because of access barriers, and the university has a transparent measuring instrument to gauge individual researchers' output. The ULg will be the fifth university worldwide to mandate self-archiving, after ECS Southampton, Minho, CERN and Queensland did so. How to increase your impact with Open Acces - KVAB, 13 februari Information on the conference on Open Access and the signing of the Berlin Declaration can be found under the heading '13th of February'. * Pictures of the conference can now be seen on this page.* EC Meeting: Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area 15-16th of February 2007 A comprehensive overview of the events of the months leading up to this conference and the outcome can be found here. Richard Poynder has also written a strategical article on his blog about the consequences of the EC conference for the OA movement. US has now its own OA petition Following the success of the EC petition on open access to publicly funded research results, the US now has its own petition, sponsored by (amongst others) SPARC and ALA. Petition European Commission On Thursday February 15th, the petition on guaranteed access to publicly funded research results was handed to Janez Potocnik, EU Commissioner for Science and Research, signed by over 18 000 researchers, research institutions, National Academies, universities and publishers. In three weeks, more than 18 000 signatures were collected and their number is still growing. Look at the overview of signatories here.You can still sign at www.ec-petition.eu !
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