Research Councils UK (RCUK) have published an independent study commissioned by the Research Councils into open access to research outputs. The purpose of the study was to identify the effects and impacts of open access on publishing models and institutional repositories in light of national and international trends. This included the impact of open access on the quality and efficiency of scholarly outputs, specifically journal articles.
There is now a ‘ Resources and Media ‘ section on the UK PubMed Central website. So far this includes: Focus group highlights – 2 minute streaming video In late February members of the UK PubMed Central project team ran a focus group at the University of Oxford. 18 PubMed Central users attended, including researchers, technologists and librarians working within the biomedical and health communities.
Following a previous posting on the topic of JoVE, I am pleased to report that the publisher has developed a Wellcome Trust /UKPMC Funders Group-compliant, open access option.
Simply click this button to add the UKPMC search plugin to your browser search toolbar. Supported by Firefox 2+ and Internet Explorer 7 only.
The announcement that the Journal of Visualized Experiments – JoVE – has moved from an open access model, to a subscription-based model, has attracted much comment in the blogosphere, as can be seen from the postings at the Nature Network, and the Scholarly Kitchen blogs. As a consequence of moving to a subscription service, content from JoVE at PMC and UKPMC is now embargoed for two years.
UK PubMed Central is on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UKPubMedCentral – for now just tweeting blog posts and links to UKPMC Funders’ Group-funded articles as they become available in UKPMC.
A learned society has offered the Wellcome Trust an open access, author pays option for researchers who seek publication in their journal. However, the licence they wish to attach to these articles is more restrictive than the Trust would normally require when paying an OA fee.
The Research Information Network and Universities UK have produced a guide [PDF] to provide advice on paying open access publication charges. Recommendations are made for each of the key players involved in the scholarly communication chain – higher education institutions, publishers, funder and authors.
Papers published by the American Chemical Society (ACS) under their Open Choice option are now available in PMC and UKPMC. Currently around 110 papers – drawn from 20 ACS journal titles – are now freely available. These papers can be found by running the following search on UKPMC: ACS Author Choice [filter] All future papers published under this model will be made available through these repositories at the time of publication.
Users of the UK PubMed Central Manuscript Submission System (UKMSS) will soon be able to use a new service – ‘My UKPMC’ – to report on the outcomes of any grant funded by any one of the UKPMC Funders’ Group member organisations.