Early library closing Friday 28th June

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Some rights reserved by Master of Felix

 

  The Library will be closing at 4pm on Friday 28th June in preparation for an Alumni Association event. The Library will re-open as usual at 9am on Saturday 29th June.

 

Wiley and Open Access

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 A series of occasional posts looking at major publishers and their role and stance on Open Access. Wiley are a very big publisher for STM with over 1500 journals and they have recently begun publishing wholly open access journals as part of their Wiley Open Access series. They also have OnlineOpen which allows researchers to make articles in ‘subscription’ journals open access by paying an article processing charge which is usually met by a funder or institution. So Wiley are a great publisher. But are they really? 

I would venture that if you were to ask any repository manager or open access advocate about the publisher they most have problems with Wiley rather than Elsevier would come out top of the list. Why? Unlike Elsevier, Wiley have never allowed an earlier version of a paper e.g author accepted manuscript to be deposited in an institutional repository, not even with an embargo. Any information about making a version available would be met by ‘you need to check what the author contract states’, the few times we did manage to locate this contract it would state no but you could ask the publisher at which point they would again say no. However now that RCUK have put into place their new open access policy which requires all funded research to be made open Wiley have embraced an idea of open access as long as you give them money. 

Enquiries as to whether an author who does not have RCUK funding or access to funds could make an earlier version (author accepted manuscript) available were greeted with a resounding no. The argument that Wiley and others have made is that making earlier versions available would damage their business but yet they also argue that their final published version adds considerable value to the research, if that is the case why would an earlier version damage their business if the final published version is so much better?

Wiley will continue to publish many articles and many journals and while I wish our academics wouldn’t publish with them or would try to retain copyright it’s not gonna happen  but Wiley are not interested in open access for the sake of disseminating and maximising  scholarly knowledge but only in open access as another revenue stream.

SCOPUS upgrade allows more downloads

SCOPUS was upgraded at the weekend and it now allows you to download up to 20,000 results at a time. This is a big improvement on the previous limit of 2,000 which I know was incredibly frustrating, especially for those doing a systematic review.

More details on the update are available from Elsevier's most recent SCOPUS product release.

ResearchGate: 'Add full-texts to them to create exposure for your research'

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johntrainor

In the last few months I’ve had a few queries from academics about uploading their full text articles to ResearchGate often prompted by them receiving an email saying 'Add full-texts to them to create exposure for your research'. The purpose behind this is of course increasing access to the research itself but there are a few issues with this in ResearchGate

However first I must say that ResearchGate is a great site and service, it brings together researchers from all areas of science, ignoring institutional affiliations in the way that researchers and science does. It links up researchers in other areas, provides with a good ‘home page’ , suggests other research they may be interested in, shows who else they are working with and has ‘forums’ for discussion. It identifies your papers for you and asks you just to confirm that and then for you to upload your papers. At present it has 521 LSHTM staff registered on it (although how many are active is another thing) and each day I get notificaton of new members and more papers being added.

What can you upload to ResearchGate? Well remember that in the majority of cases the copyright will have been transferred from the authors to the publisher and as such only with specific permission can you redistribute that research online. But there are many different versions of research papers and different licenses, which allow different things.

Publisher pdf version of record: If you have published with Elsevier, Wiley, Cambridge, Oxford, Springer, Lippincott or most other traditional publishers you cannot upload this.

Author accepted manuscript (post-print): Many publishers (though not Wiley) do allow this to be redistributed/hosted after an embargo but only on your own institutional site and not for commercial use. ResearchGate is a commercial site.

Paid Open Access articles with PLoS and BioMed Central: all these articles can be uploaded to ResearchGate and this is due to the fact that they also will have a CC-BY license which allows commercial reuse.

Paid Open Access articles with other publishers: This will depend on what license has been applied, if you chose CC-BY then yes you can upload this.

WellcomeTrust funded articles: All Wellcome Trust funded articles are now required to have a CC-BY license so these can be uploaded.

RCUKfunded articles: RCUK indicate that where a article processing charge is paid it needs to be released under a CC-BY license which would allow you to upload

How do you check this? Well we use the wonderful site SherpaRomeo http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ for information on publisher permissions and SherpaFact http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/fact/ on whether individual journals are compliant with funder requirements

So you can see it can be quite complicated to work out and in fact restrictive and maybe this is why ResearchGate prefers just to say ‘upload your full text’. Yet publishers have been pretty diligent in telling institutional repositories such as ours what we can and cannot host or distribute and we at LSHTM Research Online are very careful in ensuring we don’t breach copyright. But sites such as ResearchGate and Mendeley have taken a much more hands off approach to copyright and publishers have not really questioned them. 

Why is this? Well maybe publishers view such sites as future/potential businesses. Recently Elsevier bought Mendeley and Bill Gates also invested $35min ResearchGate itself. The value in both of these sites are the researchers themselves, they voluntarily provide huge amounts of data about themselves, their research and associations. ResearchGate has been described as the ‘Facebook’ for scientists and Facebook’s value is all in the data that they have gathered. So maybe publishers allows such sites to gather research papers without questioning their ‘loose’ monitoring of copyright breaches since there is another value and if the site gets enough academics and scientists registering then buying them out is worth much more than stopping copyright breaches. Whereas institutional repositories offer publishers nothing at all, all we try and do in our own small way is to manage and control the research that our academics and institutions produce and that is more of a threat than a social media company that can eventually be bought.

Library Opening Hours 20th June 2013

The Library will be closing at 4 pm on Thursday 20th June in preparation for a Gender Violence and Health Centre event. The Library will re-open as usual at 8.30 am on Friday 21st June.

Start of the AIDS cataloguing project



Material from the AIDS collections



Chris Olver, the new Cataloguing Archivist started work today. He will be working on a project to catalogue, preserve and increase the accessibility to the School's AIDS archive collections. This project is funded by the Wellcome Trust's Research Resources in Medical History in a joint application between the Library & Archives Service and Virginia Berridge, Professor of History. There are six collections which will be catalogued, two of these originate from Professor Berridge, these are her papers for the study of the social impact of HIV/AIDS and the AIDS Social History Programme. Other collections include the papers of Professor Peter Piot and Professor Kaye Wellings, Project SIGMA and material from the Centre for Sexual and Reproductive Health. 



Material from the AIDS collections



Watch out for more news on the project which will be posted regularly and contact the Archives Service for further information at: archives@lshtm.ac.uk





Wellcome Trust extends open access to monographs and book chapters

Book Depot float, Red Cross Procession, Brisbane, 1944

  hdl.handle.net/10462/deriv/78949

no known copyright restrictions

 
One enquiry that comes up fairly regularly from researchers has been about open access book chapters and monographs, either asking if they came make them open or where they can find open access monographs and book chapters. Often important research is disseminated within these formats and their presence online has been small, especially since over time books tend to just stay within library walls. Wellcome Trust have just addressed this by now extending their open access policy to cover these http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2013/WTP052746.htm

A couple of points to remember:

1. This only applies to book chapters and monographs NOT textbooks or edited collections
2. The policy comes into effect for current Wellcome Trust grant holders from October 1st 2014 and for new grant holders from October 1st 2013

Those who are interested in making upcoming monographs or book chapters open access please get in touch.