Welcome to the March 2011 issue of ScieCom info. Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication.

Abstract

National publishing patterns in Lithuania and in Iceland are presented by two articles:

Eleonora Dagienė at the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University Lithuania, describes the “Changes in Lithuanian Research Journal Publishing in 2009–2010.”   The traditions of Lithuanian journal publishing are deep-rooted and count in some cases for more than forty years. The new publishing models only reached Lithuania a few years ago. Now Lithuanian scholarly publishers have to adapt to these changes. Already a decade ago, Lithuanian libraries began to disseminate information about Open Access and its advantages. A recent case study shows that the majority of Lithuanian journals support the OA movement, but not many utilize its potential.

Sólveig Þorsteinsdóttir, Director of the Medical and Health Information Centre, Landspitali University Hospital, Iceland, presents “Scholarly publishing at Landspitalinn the National University Hospital of Iceland.” Landspitalinn is one of the major life sciences research institutions in Iceland.  This overview focuses on citations to Icelandic publications, publication languages, international and local publishing affiliations, the number of articles published as OA, and the coverage of Icelandic scholarly publications in international databases.  The author also looks at the cuts in the library budget during the recession, and how they might affect research at the hospital.
In our previous issue we reported on the Open Access policy adopted by the University of Tromsø in October 2010.  Now we follow up with two articles, one on funding and the other on the current status of OA publishing at the university

Jan Erik Frantsvåg, “The Open Access publication fund at the University of Tromsø” tells the story of how a central publication fund was established shortly after the OA policy decision. In December, the board assigned NOK 300 000  to a publication fund. Frantsvåg discusses rules, procedures, and policy for the fund, and its goal to ensure cost neutrality between  TA and OA publishing and thus create a fairer competition between OA and TA publishers for authors. .
While preparing for the establishing and creation of rules for the publishing fund, they realized that they had very little knowledge about the actual level of Open Access publishing by authors based at the university. In his other article “Open Access publishing - a status from the University of Tromsø”,
Jan Erik Frantsvåg reports how they more or less by accident found two information sources that could provide some interesting knowledge about the OA publishing level of their searcher

From the Swedish horizon, “A new open access policy for Malmö University”  is presented by Jessica Lindholm, Digital Information Services Librarian, Malmö University, and Peter Nilén, Head Digital Information Services, Malmö University. For several years, Malmö University has worked with establishing access to publications by their researchers in order to increase visibility and cooperation with the community. In November 2010 an Open Access-policy was adopted. The authors discuss publishing at Malmö University, the road to the OA-policy, its conditions, and future developments. 

Paving the way for researchers is, of course, essential for the success of parallel publishing, “Bibliofil makes parallel publishing easier”  by Aprile Clark and Yvonne Hultman-Özek describes how the Library & ICT Unit at the Faculty of Medicine, Lund University since 2002 has been assigned to support researchers in the scientific communication process. One of the services offered aims to make the authors' peer-reviewed, accepted, and published articles available as Open Access. The Bibliofil tool has facilitated that work. 

DOAJ, the Directory of Open Access Journals, is since many years the internationally established source for finding OA journals.Linnea Stenson, member of the DOAJ team at the Head Office of Lund University Libraries, Sweden, describes “The development of Directory of Open Access Journals.” The article gives an overview of the history of DOAJ, focusing on the period 2008-2011. Service developments and changes in the collection are presented as well as the reasons for those changes. The use of impact factors and downloads as quality criteria is discussed, as well as the potential complications of introducing such measures.

Jan Hagerlid, Coordinator of the OpenAccess.se programme at the National Library of Sweden, reports from the first OAPEN (Open Access Publishing in European Networks) conference in “Open Access to monographs in the Humanities and Social Science.”OAPEN has been funded by EU and aims to develop and implement an OA publishing model for academic books in the Humanities and Social Sciences. 

We hope that you will have a god read. Your comments and ideas are very welcome

Ingegerd Rabow
Editor-in-chief