[Apologies for cross-posting]
[IMAGE]
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the Christmas issue of ScieCom info. Nordic-Baltic Forum
for Scientific Communication,
http://www.sciecom.org/sciecominfo
We start with the evaluation of our financial supporter Nordbib.
Nordbib is a four year funding programme for R&D within the area of
Open Access to scholarly information in the Nordic countries. As the
four-year period was coming to an end, an official evaluation was
commissioned. Here the evaluators Jon Duke and Andy Jordan summarize
their evaluation report:" Nordbib - a success story." Now we are
waiting to see if the "success story" will result in a Nordbib.2.
The hot topic of OA business models is discussed in three articles.
Mikkel Christoffersen, project manager of Nordbib, presents "The
Danish experience of the Houghton studies: costs and benefits of
alternative publishing models" and highlights the startling results
of the studies as well as the basic method and assumptions made to
achieve them and the potential implications for Denmark.
In his provocative piece " "Free" Open Choice - beware of Greeks
bearing gifts" the economist Jan Erik Frantsvåg, University of
Tromsø, raises important questions regarding the economic
consequences of hybrid journal solutions Frantsvåg points at two
major problems one has to be aware of if pursuing this kind of
strategy. Reflect on his conclusions and feel free to comment.
Jörgen Eriksson follows up on a previous article announcing the
establishment of a central fund for OA publication fees at Lund
University. The fund is managed by the Libraries Head Office. In his
article "Lund University supports publishing in OA journals: an
examination" Eriksson analyzes the usage of the fund from January to
late September 2009. He shows the actual costs for the university
with the current model, and draws conclusions for the near future.
A new important Nordic institutional mandate - The Copenhagen
Business School (CBS) Open Access Mandate - was adopted in June 2009,
and covers publication of peer-reviewed journal articles and
contributions to conference proceedings. Leif Hansen, senior adviser
at the CBS, presents background, decision process, and experiences of
the implementation. "Greater access to scholarly publications from
Copenhagen Business School- The CBS Open-Access Policy - 2009".
With more and more mandates in place, it becomes increasingly
important to inform researchers about the implications of OA. Peter
Linde, Aina Svensson, and Helena Stjernberg have taken active parts
in a series of meetings with researchers at Swedish HE-institutions.
They present their experiences from these meetings, discuss the
changed roles of research libraries, and give us good practical
advice. "Open Access at Swedish Universities and University Colleges:
From Headwind to Tailwind?"
In 2008, Finland's universities of applied science created a digital
repository for theses and research publications. The Theseus project
was founded by Finland's Ministry of Education and the country's 26
universities of applied sciences. It had two parts: an open access
web journal and a repository for publications. In their article
"Theseus.fi: Open Access Publishing in the Finnish Universities of
Applied Sciences" Herkko Hietanen and Anna-Kaisa Sjölund describe the
project, legal issues, and the challenges involved in its
implementation.
Finally, we are happy to present two comprehensive conference
reports:
Insights into the current situation for Open Access in the Baltic
countries and the Ukraine are given by Iryna Kuchma, eIFL Open Access
program manager, in her report on a seminar held at the University of
Latvia in October 2009. It was attended by a mixture of researchers,
research managers, policy-makers, journal editors, publishers,
librarians, and ICT specialists. "At the event. Open Access:
Maximising Research Quality and Impact seminar." .
Kristoffer Holmqvist reports from the NOAP conference "Nordic
Scientific and Scholarly journal publishing - interesting times
(NSSJP)", held in Uppsala 25 November. NOAP is funded by Nordbib to
aid scientific journals towards OA publishing. Representatives from
various Nordic countries and with different professional backgrounds
were invited. Perspectives discussed included Business Models,
Journal Support Tools, and Copyright Issues as well as new publishing
concepts.
As always, your comments and ideas are very welcome
Ingegerd Rabow
Editor-in-chief
[ Part 2, "image001.jpg" Image/JPEG 58KB. ]
[ Unable to print this part. ]
Received on Fri Dec 11 2009 - 12:34:18 GMT