Welcome to the September issue of ScieCom info. Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication
Abstract
Dear Readers,
The Danish Minister for Science, Technology and Innovation, Charlotte Sahl-Madsen, is prepared to introduce a policy of Open Access to publicly funded research.
Read more in the news item by Adrian Price:
The Swedish Ministry of Education and Research comments:
"The Swedish Government announced last year that they will work on a national Open Access policy for Sweden in 2010. Further information on this will be presented in November."
Katarina Bjelke, Ministry of Education and Research, Sweden.
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ARTICLES
We continue with the discussions of intellectual property rights in the new publishing environment, an area with a lot of insecurity - even confusion. Professor Erik Sandewall attacks the problem of how to manage moral copyright for evolving publications, i.e. works that with today's technology easily can be amended and extended over time. This can be done by the original authors but also by other people, e.g. as comments. Issues of marginal interest for fixed publications have now become more important. Sandewall asks: "by what means will the author be able to exercise her unalienable right of making changes to her work?"
A possible objection to this question may be that published works should not be changed at all; once published they should remain unchanged. The author has a solution to propose and is preparing an experimental implementation.
Erik Sandewall: Exercising moral Copyright for Evolving Publications
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Copyright issues are also discussed by Jan Erik Frantsvåg in his description of the Norwegian RoMEO project. The goal is to contact all publishers publishing more than one serial, and to contact the publishers of all serials accredited in the Norwegian research financing model, i.e. publishing in these serials means extra money to the author's institution. There is little or no information about numerous Norwegian journals, serials and publishers in the international Sherpa/RoMEO service operated by the University of Nottingham.
The project found, that the usefulness of a local collection of such information would be limited. The "service level" would be lower than that of the Sherpa service. Users would search RoMEO and either forget or be unaware that a Norwegian service existed. In order to succeed, information had to be incorporated in the Sherpa/RoMEO service.
Jan Erik Frantsvåg. A Norwegian RoMEO
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Our recurrent theme Open Higher Education is illustrated by Alastair Creelman and Åsa Forsberg in their article "Open Educational Resources - a resource for learning" about a current national project with the aim to promote the use of open educational resources among HE teachers in Sweden.
They want to stimulate interest in using other teachers' material and hope to make teachers realize the advantages of making their own materials freely available. (Copyright issues are discussed and Creative Commons). To inspire a continuous discussion of OER they plan to include a number of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, the Swedish teacher network Dela!, and the social bookmarking tool Delicious. They have already noted an interest among HE-teachers and librarians to know more about OER and to use them.
Alastair Creelman, Åsa Forsberg: Open Educational Resources - a resource for learning
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The Swedish National Library 4-year OpenAccess.se development programme ended last year with an international evaluation, carried out by Leo Waajers (the Netherlands), and Hanne Marie Kvaerndrup (Denmark). Their evaluation has led to a new start for the programme, here described by Jan Hagerlid at the National Library of Sweden. The programme has become permanent, and starts from a new level with a broader perspective. It has now three main areas of action: Open Access policy, Information to researchers about OA, and Development of infrastructure and user services.
Jan Hagerlid. A new start for OpenAccess.se
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Two important international conferences have been held in Helsinki, Finland, and in Lund, Sweden.
- The 14th International Conference on Electronic Publishing - ELPUB 2010 took place in Helsinki 16 - 18 June 2010. The conference was hosted by Hanken School of Economics and chaired by Turid Hedlund (Hanken School of Economics) and Yasar Tonta (Hacettepe University, Ankara). More than 30 papers and short communications addressed the issues of electronic publishing and social networks; scholarly publishing models; and technological convergence, all chosen as themes for the conference.
The two keynote speakers were Professor Carol Tenopir from the University of Tennessee, presenting patterns of scholarly information use for over three decades, and Director for data services Pirjo-Leena Forsström from CSC, Finland, addressing the theme of scientific data magnitude, accessibility and preservation.
Turid Hedlund: ELPUB 2010 - Publishing in the Networked world: Transforming the Nature of Communication
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The EIFL General Assembly 2010, which was held on August 6th - 8th in Lund/Sweden, put this year's main focus on Open Access Policies and Publishing as well as on EIFL programmes, e.g. "Copyright for Librarians", and offered the valuable possibility of meeting publishers and exchanging ideas and information through "speed dating". Librarians from almost all of the 48 EIFL member countries in Africa, Asia or Europe seized the opportunity and came to Lund
Among other issues, the report comments on presentations of OA in the Ukraine and in Poland
The open access situation in Lithuania was described with a focus on the Electronic Academic Library of Lithuania (eLABa). At government level, the Law on Science and Studies of the Republic of Lithuania (April 30th, 2009) declares that "all results of scientific activity carried out in the state science and study institutions must be made public. This also applies to non-governmental institutions
Dina Heegen, The Open Access Situation in Developing and Transition Countries:A Report from the EIFL General Assembly 2010/Lund
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Keeping the focus on Lithuania, we are happy to publish a comprehensive article on their development of OA and, specifically, on the creation of eLABa. Gintarė Tautkevičienė et al. describe the goals of creating the Lithuanian Academic e-Library (eLABa) as a national aggregated OA repository of scientific works, practices and the benefits of its integration into the worldwide OA infrastructure. The first real step in collecting e-documents in Lithuania was taken in 2003 by creating a repository for electronic theses and dissertations (ETD) collection.
The eLABa is registered in the world registries of OA repositories. It is interoperable with other OA repositories such as the NDLTD, DRIVER, DART-Europe and PEER. Participation in the PEER project enables effective verification of the eLABa technological solutions, and will enable the participants to produce a new eLABa collection of peer-reviewed scientific articles. This will ensure OA and expand the eLABa opportunities for participation in the global OA initiative
Gintarė Tautkevičienė et al: Integration of THE LITHUANIAN ACADEMIC e-LIBRARY (eLABa) into THE international open access infrastructure
