60% of Journals Allow Immediate Archiving of Peer-Reviewed Articles

Peter Millington at Nottingham University's Centre for Research Communications has just published recent analysis of self-archiving policies of journals indexed by the Sherpa-ROMEO service.  An impressive, and myth-busting, 60% of journals allow immediate archiving of peer-reviewed articles, and after embargoes have lapsed, this rises dramatically, to 80%.  In all, taking into account special requirements by publishers and embargo periods that vary from 3 months to 5 years, 94% of journals do allow self-archiving of the peer-reviewed article.  All good news for those of us hitting the advocacy trail at the moment.

The full article can be found here on the Sherpa Services Blog.

Measuring uptake of Open Access - addendum

So, having completed searching for OA journals in DOAJ, I have been trying to decide on the best way to work through the remaining 2600 journal articles in my spreadsheet.  I have started by working through the known publishers and identifying which have an OA (Open Choice, or similar) option on their subscription journals to try and reduce the number of articles I have to check.  So having added a step to my initial workflow, I am back at it, trying to get to the end data.

Correction - my original starting number of articles is 2771, of which so far I have identified 131 as Open Access, so my original post stating 1700 items to check was somewhat optimistic.  Still, it's good that our researchers are producing so much, and I now have a list of 131 items to target for Queen Mary Research Online.  Silver linings anyone?

Defining and describing a research collection - part 1

I have been working with Corporate Affairs here at Queen Mary to integrate Research Publications into the College's stylesheet and template for the Research website.  It's been an interesting experience!  As part of a broader aim to provide a better range of information for researchers, both internally and externally, I've been asked to provide details of research collections and services for researchers within Library Services.  On the surface, this seems simple enough, think about each discipline, identify where there are particular 'strengths' for researchers and how this reflects current research, and bob's your uncle.  Right?

Wrong.

OK.  Let's break this down a bit...

How do you describe a 'research collection' as distinct from a 'teaching collection'?
What makes a research collection 'strong' or denotes 'quality'?
Is there a shopping list of texts, and other content, that constitute the basis of a good quality research collection in a given discipline?
Would this shopping list, if it existed, provide the minimum that would be required, across the whole discipline, and if so, what else would be needed to provide a truly quality collection?

Where do you begin to review a collection that you already own, to identify what is research relevant?
How do you decide between what is research relevant to your own researchers, and what is research relevant externally?
What happens to the parts of your collection that are not currently research relevant to your institution, but might be relevant externally, or might be relevant in the future?  Is this a good enough reason to keep this content, and if so, what opportunities are there for promoting this content to the outside world?

Perhaps the term 'collection' is the problem.  A collection is a group of materials.  That's it.  Just a group of materials.  As librarians, we assign all sorts of other criteria to these collections by tacking on other words to describe their content and how they behave.  This then changes the definition to meet our needs.  Add the terms, 'development' or 'management' to 'collection' and things can get really complicated.

Should a research collection be subject to the same development and management strategies that teaching collections are subject to?
Should a research collection grow over time, because somebody somewhere will need to access something at sometime?  Or should the research collection evolve, as teaching collections do, to reflect a change in need, discarding content no longer useful to the institution?  Would this still constitute collection development?

Who decides?

Lots of things to consider over the coming months, starting with that shopping list!

Measuring uptake of Open Access at QM

I am currently trying to put together all the relevant bits of data, and there are plenty, that will allow me to calculate what proportion of Queen Mary publications are Open Access (OA).  So far, the process has been time-consuming and not a lot of fun, but I feel like I am starting to make some progress.  Please someone out there doing a similar job to me, is there a better way?

The plan:

• Extract a report from PubLists, the publications management system at QM - this gives me a recently updated and reasonably complete set of data (thank you REF dry-run!)
• Identify OA publishers where all journals are OA and flag all the records in my spreadsheet
• Identify OA journals by publishers whose other titles are subscription - judicious use of DOAJ very important here - flag more records
• Filter my spreadsheet to show only those records where I haven't identified them as OA and then start working through the remaining records to find out if they are OA papers in a hybrid journal
• Calculate the number of paid OA/OA published papers in 2010
• Check through the remaining records for self-archived copies in QMRO
• Start calculating how many of the 1700 records are available OA somewhere

I am still identifying OA journals at the moment and have spent 2 days working on it so far.  I was hopnig to have it finished by the end of the week, but this seems to be less and less likely.  The sheer size of the task is quite daunting, and I am only concentrating on 2010 for now, as the most recent full calendar year, but I'd like to be able to do this in a more systematic and timely way...

Initial thoughts about how to make this simpler:

1. Please, please, please could I have an extract from DOAJ that would make the process of identifying OA journals much easier
2. Please, please, please hybrid journal publishers, provide me with a report of my OA content, download and other usage statistics would be lovely, but at the very least I need to know what there is!