Welcome to the summer issue of ScieCom info, Nordic-Baltic forum for Scientific Communication.

Abstract

NEWS

• DOAJ announces new selection criteria, for further information read more at: http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=news&nId=303&uiLanguage=en

• Peter Suber to Direct Harvard’s Office for Scholarly Communication(OSC)

We congratulate Peter to his new appointment and take the opportunity to thank him for his support of ScieCom info over the years.
http://library.harvard.edu/peter-suber-direct-harvard’s-office-scholarly-communication

We can all learn from the Harvard model

Quotes from the Harvard website:
“ Suber's new role with the OSC closely aligns with his work leading the Harvard Open Access Project. Both are driven by a common vision for opening access to cutting-edge research for everyone who can make use of it. Integrating the two roles into one position will allow the projects to better share strategies, staff, resources, and knowledge, and accelerate the progress of open access both within and beyond Harvard./- - -/

The Office for Scholarly Communication spearheads campus-wide initiatives to open, share, and preserve scholarship. In cooperation with the OSC, faculty at eight of Harvard’s schools have put in place default rights-retention open-access policies, which have influenced similar policies at universities throughout the world. The Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard (DASH) repository established and operated by the OSC holds more than 12,000 scholarly articles, which have been downloaded almost 1.5 million times from every continent, some 3,000 downloads per day.”

• Wellcome Trust extends open access policy.
Wellcome Trust recently announces that it is to extend its open access policy to include all scholarly monographs and book chapters written by its grantholders as part of their Trust-funded research.
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2013/WTP052746.htm

ARTICLES

We are pleased to have receives two articles inspired by articles in our previous issue.
In “Researcher Beware!”, Jan Erik Frntsvåg, Tromsø University, analyses the consequences of the increasing tendency of large research funders to use their financial power to put pressure behind their demands for Open Access. Non-compliance with the contracts between funders and grantees will expose institutions and researchers to the risks of both economic and career losses.” (2013:1 editorial) . This inspiered a response from Lars Pettersson, Associate Professor at the Biodiversity Unit of the Biology Department, Lund University. In his article “Compliance in a world of limited choices” he discusses the important consequences for researchers of compliance with funders’ OA requirements , but his focus is on the equally important, but rarely discussed, consequences for smaller, specialized scientific journals .

In the same issue, Leif Longva, Tromsø University, proposed tendering for OA in “Tendering the purchase of Open Access publishing” as a more cost-efficient business model than the present. “He takes a market-oriented view of the fact that many institutions now establish funds to help authors pay their article processing fees (APCs). Longva maintains, the disadvantage of this system it that it lacks real incentives for authors to shop around for journals with the most reasonable APCs.”

Now Ulf Kronman and Anna Lundén, both from the Swedish National Library, respond to Longva's proposal. In their article ”Can open access create a sound scholarly publishing market?” The authors agree with many of Longva's thoughts on the importance of not repeating the mistakes from the subsciption model., hiding the real cost of scientific communication from researchers. The authors' main disagreement is that journal publishing is not a sufficiently competitive market for the use of tendering. Whether in a subscription or an OA model. As long as the journal prestige and impact factors reign it is difficult to create a sound market with free competition. This goal can only be reached, mean Kronman and Lundén, until journal articles are freed from the fetters of journals.

This discussion of the role of the journal leads us over to two articles on metriics, one from Denmark and one from Sweden.
In Denmark, Pernille G. Rasmussen, and Jens Peter Andersen, both from the Medical Library, Aalborg University Hospital in Aalborg, present the concept altmetrics in their article “Altmetrics: an alternate perspective on research evaluation”. They discuss altmetrics as a new quantitative method for research evaluation, using social media and other Internet-based data to measure research impact from other perspectives than traditional bibliometrics. They authors stress the possibilities for evaluating impact on society and as a complement to other forms for evaluation. Both present and potential future uses are discussed.

From Sweden Hampus Rabow, Malmö University, discusses various metrics that have been used to estimate the influence or impact of research publications in ”Polymetrics: a brief review of different ways to measure research impact.” The author outlines different ”areas of impact” and considers the relevance of different indicators for each area.

The problem of correct identification of authors must be solved in a reliable and efficient way. In this issue, we follow up last year's last issue´s presentation of the Danish ORCID project. Now the Swedish ORCID project is presented by Jonas Gilbert, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, in “A Start for Implementing ORCID in the Swedish Research Information Infrastructure”. Jonas Gilbert works at Chalmers University of Technology where he leads a section in the library for publishing services and bibliometrics. He presents shortly the project on author identification and publication databases that the Swedish National Library financed in 2012. The project was managed by Stockholm University Library with participants from Chalmers University of Technology, the Karolinska Institute, and Malmö University.

A Danish OA-supportive project is resented by Jeannette Ekstrøm, Librarianm Technical University of Denmark, DTU Library in her article ”Support open access publishing - a DEFF funded project”. The first aim of this project is to update the SHERPA/RoMEO database with copyright information and policies from Danish journals, serials and publishers. A similar project in Norway has been going for a few years and there is a dialogue between the countries. The project will also look at the possibilities for developing an integrated database of journal publishing channels. In this database journal metadata from several source should be collected and made searchable in one user interface.

Jan Erik Frantsvåg: “The Tromsø publication fund – extreme growth!”.
Frantsvåg tells the story of how the Tromsø University publication fund was established 2011  in a true optimistic pioneering spirit and the outcome was after the first year. The fund stared with a budget of NOK 300 000, but ended up having used only NOK 165 000 on 24 articles. Frantsvåg describes how they realised that there was a lot of marketing to do. In 2012 the budget increased marginally to NOK 309 000, and at the end of 2012 they had already spent 378 000 on 42 articles. For 2013, hoping for a continuing growth also including OA monographs, they boldly asked for NOK 500 000. Early 2013, the fund really took off - NOK 405 000 were already spent.. Follow the exciting tale about big money annd pulishers, and about the possible unfluence of membership. Is this a sustainable market model for the the growing OA-publishing?

An illustration of this growth is given by Jan Erik Frantsvåg: in his other artice in this issue:“Good growth in OA in Tromsø“
Analyses of raw data for publishing activites by researchers from Tromsø University show a steady growth from 2004 onwards, with a very stronf increase in gold publishing. Frantsvåg sees this steady and rapid growth as a trend, indicationg that OA is becoming the dominating publishing model in the near future. The Tromsø publishing fund (see Frantsvåg's other article) may have contributed somewhat to this growth, but has not been a major influence.

We are pleased to be able to present country-wise reports on OA developments from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Lithuania. Here they all come – in alphabetical order:

Mikael K. Elbæk, Project consultant at the Technical University of Denmark, DTU Library presents the Danish infrastructure in ”Open Access policies and the supporting infrastructure: status in Denmark”. He points out that 2012 was an important year for OA in Denmark. In June that year, the five Danish Research Councils released their open access poliicies, covering all their future grants. From 2013, the first grants with the new OA-policy will be coming inte effect. The author presentes the long prelude leding up to these important decisions.

We are given a 10-year perspective of the intensive work in Finland to promote access to research information. Turid Hedlund, Associate Professor at Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki Finland, and Annikki Roos, Library Director Terkko the Medical Library at Helsinki University, and FinnOA chairman, take us through the story of Finnish OA-progress in their article "FinnOA: 10 years of open access work and a road map for the future”. The organisation FinnOA was established in 2003 as an advocacy group with the aim to further OA through arranging seminars and participating in projects. The authors also point to new challenges such as the inclusion of the so-called e-science: access to research data and linking between the data and the research articles. This is both a retrospect and a roadmap for the future. The infrastructure is in place, but there is still much to be done.

The most important developments in Iceland are covered by Sóveiug Thorsteinsdottir (Director of the Medical and Health Information Centre, Landspitali University Hospital, Iceland) in her article ”The important developments within academic publishing and OA in Iceland: a short overview“.
In this overview, the author looks at the changes in the Icelandic academic publishing during the last decade, from the start of the OA-movement til today. What has happened with the number of articles published as OA, and with the covergage of Icelandic scholarly publications in international databases? The search data used come from Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus. Comparisons with other Nordic countries are made. Publiczation language was noted.
The amount of research in Iceland has increased a great deal. At the same time, libraries have suffered severe budget cuts. Diminishing budgets when expected to handle a fast growing research output is a real chellenge for the libraries – but how? Will OA save the situation?
The author also looks at the Big Deals in Iceland and how they might have affected the interest in OA.

We conclude our country reporting with 'Lithuania.
Lina Bloveščiūnienė (Director of Vytautas Magnus University Library, manager of the project "Database Lituanistika“ at the Research Council of Lithuania), and Rūta Petrauskaitė (Vice-president of the Lithuanian Research Council) present the steps “From bibliographic to full text open access database on Lithuanian Studies” Lithuania has a sufficient legal basis supporting OA. The law on Science and Studies of the Republic of Lithuania (2009) requires research results to be made publicly available. In answer to the Minsk Recommendation for Open Access to Scientific Information , the Lithuanian National Commission for UNESCO initiated a statement on Lithuania’s position on OA. In spite of an overall positive developments, the authors remark that there is still a lot to be done to promote and realise OA, both on institutional and on personal, i.e. researcher’s level.
The main idea of the Lituanistika database was not only to compile a unique specialized thematic database of national importance, but also to give priority to qualitative evaluations of SSH research over the widespread quantitative assessment.

We hope that you will have a good read.
Your comments and ideas are always most welcome
Ingegerd Rabow
Editor-in-chief ScieCom info