Dear
Readers,
Welcome
to the May issue of ScieCom info. Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific
Communication.
The
managing of intellectual property rights in a new publishing environment is an
area where there is a lot of insecurity - not to say confusion. Two of
the articles in this issue discuss these problems.
Bertil Dorch et al describe the recently
established hprints.org – a Nordic initiative and the first of its kind
in the Nordic countries. hprints.org is an Open Access repository for
scholarly documents within the arts & humanities and the social sciences.
Copyright and authors’ rights were seen as key issues. The SURF/JISC /
Knowledge Exchange “Licence to Publish” was created to support the
principles of Open Access. This licence was chosen as the model licence for
hprints.org and has now been translated into all five Nordic languages.
Dorch,
Bertil et al: ”Utilizing hprints.org as a subject based research
infrastructure”
Karolina
Lindh and Mikael Graffner present the results of a short survey on copyright
and self-archiving policies applied by Nordic academic journals using the Open
Journal System (OJS). They highlight the difficulties and differences in
interpreting copyright agreements, and they conclude that the rights issue
needs further attention. The copyright management function built into OJS is
easy to handle, but the legalities of copyright are more difficult to manage
for some of these small journals.
Lindh,
K., Graffner, M.: ”Copyright agreements and licences used by Nordic
OJS-journals”
Copyright
issues turn out to be something of a stumbling block also for the prestigious
Nobel Project, which aims to make the Nobel Prize awarded work available as Open
Access. Anna-Lena Johansson describes the project background, the cooperation
with the Nobel Web AB, and the experiences from the pilot phase.
The
main purpose of the pilot was to identify potential problems regarding
copyright issues and digitalization of the publications, but also to create
workflows and methods that could be used in a full scale project including all
Nobel Laureates with 1-20 key publications each.
Johansson,
Anna-Lena: “Open Access to Nobel Prize awarded work – a pilot
project”
The hows and whats of Open Access
policies are discussed by Lise Mikkelsen in
”An introduction to the recommendations for implementation of Open Access
in Denmark“, and by Peter Linde in “Beyond OA-policy”.
Lise
Mikkelsen comments on the recommendations and statements recently made public
by the Danish Open Access Committee. The Committee was appointed by the Danish
Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation after signing the 2007 European
Council Conclusions on access to scientific knowledge in the digital age.
She lists 14 Committee recommendations on how to implement Open Access in
Denmark, e.g. a national Open Access policy should be established by the Ministry
of Science, Technology and Innovation, the focus should be on green Open
Access, and, as far as possible, access should be free to the results of
research funded by public money. The author sees the Committee
recommendations as the first steps towards a nation-wide open access strategy
and believes that they have the potential to really accelerate the development
of OA in Denmark.
In 2007, as the first HE-institution
in Sweden, Blekinge Institute of Technology (BTH) adopted an OA-mandate. After
three years with the mandate, Peter Linde reflects on the outcome. How has the
mandate influenced researcher behaviour? Have they made their work freely
available? He found some answers by using the BTH publication database to
compare article production and publication channels between 2005 and 2009. He
realized how important it is that the principles of Open Access publishing are
really understood by the researchers. They see a dilemma in the fact that they
now both face demands from their institutional management to publish in
ISI-journals to get evaluation points and face OA mandates from research
funders and their institutional management. There is an acute need for
guidelines, practical support, and adequate economic conditions to make this
dilemma manageable.
Linde,
Peter: “Beyond OA-policy”
Recently
two successful OA events were arranged in our region; one in Iceland and one in
Finland. Sólveig Thorsteinsdóttir gives “A
short report of a successful OA symposium held in Iceland on April 13th
2010”.
Turid
Hedlund reports from the FinnOA symposium on the theme “Paving the ways
for open science” in Helsinki. “A
road map for open access to research results”
IN
SHORT
The
DOAJ team in Lund reports that the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
celebrates its 7 year anniversary and 5.000 journals. 107 countries are
represented. Read more about the current status of DOAJ here,
The
Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority (ABM) has given funding
for a NORA-based project (with University of Tromsø, University of Bergen and
Telemark University College as participants) to collect information on the
self-archiving policies of Norwegian journals and publishers. In collaboration
with Sherpa this information will be entered into the Sherpa/RoMEO database
continuously as the project collects it.
As always, your comments and ideas are very welcome,
Ingegerd Rabow / Editor-in-chief