Welcome to the October 2012 issue of ScieCom info. Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication.

Abstract

NEWS:

• The Swedish Government has recently presented the new Research and Innovation Bill for the coming four years. We are happy to note that Open Access is discussed for the first time. The government regards increased availability to scientific information as a prerequisite for successful Swedish research and innovation. More in coming issues.
  
  The government bill also contains an interesting discussion of different ways to relate research performance to funding. See comment by Hampus Rabow,

• DOAJ is now launching the site in Spanish and Portuguese thanks to translation made by Redalyc and the University of Porto (see poster in Portuguese).
  
  To learn more about DOAJ and the site, please have a look at this tutorial video (2:35 min) made especially for Open Access week!

COMING EVENS

• The conference Open Access and Licences will be held at the Technical University of Denmark 7-8 of November. The event is organized by DOAN (Danish Open Access Network) and some of the issues that will be covered are: Publishing Funds, Repository management and Policy-making.More information about the conference here.
  
  
• The 7th Munin Conference on Scientific Publishing 2012 – New Trends will be held 22–23 November 2012 at the University of Tromsø, Norway. The Munin conference is an annual conference on scientific publishing, with an Open Access approach.

• The 17th International Conference on Electronic Publishing -  “Mining the Digital Information Networks” will be held June 13-14, 2013 at  Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden. The main theme will be extracting and processing data from the vast wealth of digital publishing and the ways to use and reuse this information in innovative social contexts in a sustainable way

ARTICLES

As this week also happens to be Open Access Week we are happy to start with two inspiring invitations: one of themto take action before it is too late and the other to pay attention to possible predators within the field of scientific communication.

• Disrupt or be disrupted. That is the message in ”Open Access – a driver for dramatic changes for academic libraries” by Lars Björnshauge, SPARC Europe. He starts with pointing out that libraries, librarians, and library associations have been one of the driving forces behind the Open Access movement. But – what will happen when the tipping point soon arrives ? What will indeed happen to academic libraries if they fail to take the necessary initiatives to adapt to their new environment, i.e. a new life form for scientific communication? Björnshauge refers to the UK solution and the expected developments in the European Commission,  and he believes that these and other developments show that the tipping point will occur in a few years,  when 50% of the annual output of academic research publications will be available Open Access.  Can or shoul libraries collaborate much more to increase their efficiency? Lars Björnshauge examines library work-flows and cost-flows in the potential do-or-die situation of today and suggests radical changes to ensure survival.

• In “Who are the predators?” Jan Erik Frantsvåg at the University of Tromsø, Norway, takes a closer look at Jeffrey Beall’s list of some 195 publishers of dubious quality. Frantsvåg shortly discusses the quality of this list itself, but his main point is that those 'fake' publishers constitute a greater problem for the reputation of OA-publishing than for the purses of researchers. In general, their APCs are low.  The real predators have to be found elsewhere. When the author compares his estimated sum of how much these 195 publishers manage to get out of scientific institutions per year with the “adjusted operation profit “ of a single traditional publisher, in this case Elsevier, he seems to have found an answer to his question.

• The expected developments in the European Commission are presented by Mikkel Christoffersen, Nordbib manager, Copenhagen, Denmark, in his article “The European Commission's recommendation to the member states on access to and preservation of scientific information”. The author examines the most recent recommendation of 17 July 2012 and gives the historical background of this recommendation as well as its content . He points out its new elements and discusses their importance.
  
  
• Ensuring the quality of institutional repositories is of vital importance. Methods for this are presented by Pablo Tapia at Malmö University Library, Sweden. He describes their project “Data Quality Assurance of Research Publications - the Case of Malmö University Institutional Repository.” A couple of years ago they changed their work-flow for reviewing and quality assurance of  the metadata in  their open archive. A third step in their quality control system was introduced. Every single registration of a research publication was now also controlled by a librarian.  The results of this third step are presented together with useful statistics of the most common mistakes made by researchers when registering their data.  One conclusion is that certain fields seem to be more difficult to fill in correctly for  researchers than for librarians.

• Comparative measuring of the quality of repository publishing is also important. Repository managers are interested in seeing how their IRs compare with others in various ranking systems. To be sure of their reliability It is necessary to examine how these systems work. In his article ”Webometrics – Ranking Web of Repositories. To count and not to count” Leif Longva at the University of Tromsø, Norway, takes a closer look at on of these systems and their criteria. He describes the Spanish Cybermetrics Lab and their calculations: “Ranking Web of Repositories”. Their methods are analysed and discussed, and the limitations of the system are highlighted.
  
  
• Research quality is also the topic of our next item. Hampus Rabow, Malmö University, Sweden, briefly comments on the discussion of the use of performance indicators for research funding purposes in the new Research and Innovation Bill from the Swedish Government

• In his other article in this issue "Nordbib's final international conference and workshop : Impressions from the organiser", Mikkel Christoffersen gives a personal description of  the planning of and the thoughts behind the internationale conference “Structural Frameworks for Open, Digital Research : Strategy, Policy and Infrastructure”, arranged by Nordbib June 11-13 2012  in Copenhagen. Christoffersen also presents the results of the conference as well as his personal experiences as manager of the successful long-standing Nordbib, a research and development programme under NordForsk and the Nordic Council of Ministers. As Christoffersen says, this conference was both a celebration and a swan song. .
  
  
• Another type of conference is reviewed by Juho Lindman, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, in “REVIEW:Open Kowledge Festival, Helsinki”. At the annual Open Knowledge Festival people from various fields meet in a creative mix of experts and enthusiasts. This year the confeence lasted a whole week, 17-22 September. For the first time it combined two previously separate annual events: OGDCamp (Open Government Data Camp) and OKCon (Open Knowledge Conference). Over 800 participants arrived from all around the world. The theme of the year was Open Knowledge in Action with focus on the values behind open data publications,  the economic value of opening up different datasets, and the value provided by the increased transparency.
  
  
• The 41st annual LIBER conference took place in Tartu this year under the title “Mobilising the knowledge economy for Europe”. Ludmilla Sööt from the Medical Information Centre of Tartu University Hospital reports from the conference in:“LIBER conference in Tartu“ . The main subject was cooperation between research libraries, but even more attention was given to the presentations and seminars on mobile solutions, cloud services, a digital repository of the data and Open Access. The presentations of BioMed Central and Threaded Publication are pointed out in this report.

• Two Swedish authors, Ebba Ossiannilsson, Lund university, and Markus Schneider, Karlstad University,  present a Swedish OER-project:“OER-Open possibilities for learning. A national initiative financed by the Internet Infrastructure Foundation .SE”. They  discuss the meaning of Open Educational Resources (OER) and the conditions for access, usually based on a Creative Commons licence. While the international OER movement is strong, developments in Sweden have been fairly slow. The teaching staff at HE-institutions needs support to be able to use the OER to their best advantage for student learning. The authors describe the aim and methods of the project and their own experiences together with  advice on the best use of OER.
  
  

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

Ingegerd Rabow

Editor-in-chief
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