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Author Rights

Digital Scholarship

Open Access

Open Digital
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SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

New Models of Publishing, Open Access, and
Open Digital Archives

Faculty participate in the system of scholarly communication in a variety of ways. Whether as an author or editor, as a reader or reviewer, they are involved and stakeholders in the current system that is now undergoing widespread and systematic change. Digital publishing made possible by the Internet is changing how information is produced, distributed, peer reviewed, and constructively criticized. These changes will affect how faculty conduct literature reviews, how students do research, and how information may be used for classroom teaching. Most importantly, however, these changes will affect how you publish your own research findings.

This web site is maintained by the Library with the cooperation of the Scholarly Communication Task Force for the purposes of keeping the Macalester community informed of ongoing developments in the areas of:

Background resources

Fall 2007 Events

Scholarly Communication Task Force

The Macalester Scholarly Communications Task Force, formed in the Fall of 2006, the Spring 2008 task force includes: Jim Dawes, English; Martin Gunderson, Philosophy; Khaldoun Samman, Sociology; Eric Wiertelak, Psychology; Jan Serie, Director for the Center of Scholarship and Teaching; Dave Collins, Angi Faiks, and Terri Fishel, Library. Our mission:

"to increase awareness and understanding among faculty and students regarding their stake in this changing landscape and their potential roles in transforming its future. The issues are critical as they not only impact the collections we provide to support the curriculum and faculty and student research, but they also affect the publishing opportunities for our faculty and students." [Mission]

FALL 2007 & Spring 2008 Events

The Future of Scholarly Publishing – it’s impact on teaching, research, and higher education.
"As a scholarly community, we need to become aware of ... the changes in scholarly publishing in order to make informed decisions about our own scholarly publishing and to assist the institution in making decisions about digital archiving, supporting faculty publishing in open-access journals, and distributing finite resources for journal subscription fees that are spiraling out of control." [Future of Scholarly Publishing; announcement to Dept. Chairs, May 2007]

During the 2007-2008 academic year, the library in cooperation with the Center for Scholarship and Teaching and members of our task force will be hosting a series of noon-time conversations about change in scholarly communication. Dates for these events will be posted on this page once they are finalized.

  • Social Sciences Division, Tuesday, Oct. 2, 11:50-12:50, 304 Carnegie
    Topics will include how the current system is being changed by digital publishing, responses by scholarly societies, author rights, and open access. Food and beverages will be provided.
  • Science Division Meeting, Wed., March 5, 4:30; Olin Rice - powerpoint presentation

Change in Scholarly Publishing", a presentation for Windows on our Work, Feb. 21, 2007 is available for review.

There are three resources that are excellent starting points in becoming familiar with the issues:

  • SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) - SPARC is an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations built as a constructive response to market dysfunctions in the scholarly communication system. These dysfunctions have reduced dissemination of scholarship and crippled libraries. SPARC serves as a catalyst for action, helping to create systems that expand information dissemination and use in a networked digital environment while responding to the needs of academe.
  • Create Change - "Shouldn't the way we share research be as advanced as the Internet?""Create Change is an educational initiative that examines new opportunities in scholarly communication, advocates changes that recognize the potential of the networked digital environment, and encourages active participation by scholars and researchers to guide the course of change."

  • Reshaping Scholarly Communication (University of California Office of Scholarly Communication)

Author Rights
When faculty publish their work in scholarly journals, they are asked to sign away their copyright to the journal publisher. This loss of copyright means that faculty cannot post their article on their own web site, or make it electronically available through any other electronic archive. Many scholarly societies and research universities have come to see this restriction on the free exchange of ideas as a crisis, and have developed recommendations and procedures advocating that faculty negotiate to retain their copyright privileges.

Digital Scholarship

Description of an Open Access Publication or Service

An Open Access Publication or Service is one that meets the following two conditions:

1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship[2], as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.

2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).

Adapted from the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, June 20, 2003

Selected Articles of Interest

Key Open Access Concepts by Charles W. Bailey
What is Open Access by Charles W. Bailey, Jr., preprint
Open Access in 2007  by Peter Suber

Open Access Journals in the ISI Citation Databases: Analysis of Impact Factors and Citation Patterns (Thomson Scientific White Paper) - Findings indicate that journals published under the Open Access (OSA) model continue to gain impact in the world of scholarly research." Further, "of the 8,700 selected journals currently covered in Web of Science(R), 239 are OA journals. Though the number is small in comparison to the total number of journals indexed in Web of Science, the number represents an estimated 20% of all OA journals."

Selected Open Access Resources

    • BioMed Central - Digital repository of open access publications including journals across all biomedical fields - from basic life sciences to clinical medicine. All original research articles are peer reviewed and, if published, made immediately and freely available through BioMed Central. Macalester participates with other liberal arts colleges around the country to receive access to BioMed Central.

    • Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) - Provides access to over 800 free, full text scientific and scholarly journals covering a variety of disciplines and languages. Included journals must exercise a peer-review or editorial quality control publishing model. Lund University Libraries, Open Society Institute (OSI), and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC).

    • Open Archives Initiative (OAI) - The Open Archives Initiative develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The Open Archives Initiative has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication.

    • PLoS (Public Library of Science) - Non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. Provides original published reports of ideas, discoveries, and research results in the life sciences and medicine. Currently includes the PLoS Biology journal with the PLoS Medicine journal becoming available in Fall, 2004. Macalester is a participant.


    • Scirus - Comprehensive science-specific search engine that enables users to find scientific, scholarly, technical and medical data on the Web. Designed to find the latest reports, peer-reviewed articles and journals deep within Web sites. filters out non-scientific sites.

    • SHERPA: Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access. Located in the UK, a resource for information on open access publishing, copyright issues and self-archiving.


    • Romeo - a list of publishers copyright and self-archiving policies. Look for "green" publishers who allow authors to retain self-archiving privileges.

Open Digital Archives (Institutional Repositories)
 An institutional repository or open digital archive is:

“a set of services that [an institution] offers to the members of its community for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members. It is most essentially an organizational commitment to the stewardship of these digital materials, including long-term preservation where appropriate, as well as organization and access or distribution. While operational responsibility for these services may reasonably be situated in different organizational units at different universities, an effective institutional repository of necessity represents a collaboration among librarians, information technologists, archives and records mangers, faculty, and [college] administrators and policymakers.” [Clifford Lynch, . "Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age." ARL. February 2003

    • DigitalCommons@Macalester - the open digital archives for Macalester College.
    • OAIster - "The OAIster service establishes a broad, generic, information retrieval resource for information about publicly available digital library resources provided by the research library community. Our goal is to create a collection of freely available, difficult-to-access, academically-oriented digital resources that are easily searchable by anyone. Digital resources include electronic books, online journals, audio files (e.g., wav, mp3), images (e.g., tiff, gif), movies (e.g., mpeg, quicktime), and reference texts (e.g., dictionaries, directories). Project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services, originally funded through a Mellon grant (see the final report). University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services and the University of Illinois. 3,164,254 records from 282 institutions (as of May 2004)"  Macalester DigitalCommons is included in the 800 repositories.  Suggested Search: tree frog
    • University of California Digital Library Escholarship Repository - "The repository, sponsored by the California Digital Library, provides persistent access and makes the content easily discoverable. It is a project of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library within the University of California Office of the President. eScholarship, whose mission is to facilitate and support scholar-led innovations in scholarly communication, is providing this and other services in response to an expressed need for alternative publishing mechanisms. This UC Office of the President/CDL initiative stands to benefit the entire university." Suggested Search: tree frog
 


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Scholarly Societies
Scholarly societies are producing reports and commentary on publishing in the digital age. As reports are produced, we will them to this list. See also "University Publishing in a Digital Age" for related information.



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  • Public Policy
    Current legislation on copyright, fair use, as well as open access for federally funded research, is monitored closely. Impacts on higher education are such that all members of the community should be aware of implications current legislation has on sharing research and making information accessible.

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Last Updated: March 5, 2008