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 | NIH Policy Spurring Discussion of How Best to Ensure Public Access
Three years and many battles after it was first proposed, the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) mandatory public access policy has gotten Congressional backing. But if increasing public access to research is the goal of the NIH, will the proposed policy be effective? Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society (APS), told the LJ Academic Newswire the 56 publishers and authors who signed on to the 2004 DC Principles for Free Access already make their articles freely available within 12 months of publication, so the net gain in access could be rather limited. "I don't have an exact number, but that probably translates into approximately one million articles freely available," Frank says, adding that, through HighWire Press, publishers offer another 1.7 million articles.
While compliance with the NIH's voluntary deposit policy lagged at around five percent last year, Frank said publishers proposed to NIH a plan that could have boosted access by linking to journals' free content. "We met with NIH in March 2006 and offered a proposal to NIH and even agreed to deposit NIH-funded content into a dark archive for the NIH's use in portfolio management and data mining strategies," Frank noted. The goal, he explained, was a program that would retrieve articles requested from NIH through PubMedCentral (PMC) from the publisher's web sites. Under that plan, NIH would respect the embargo for the journal and only display an HTML version of the article, he noted. "If the user wanted a PDF version of the article, they would be sent to the journal to get the PDF. That drove traffic back to the journal and insured that the reader would get a PDF branded by the publisher." .In an era of Google,"why is there a need for a single public repository for the NIH funded literature?" Frank questioned.
That proposal, however, fell apart in July 2006, after NIH insisted that publishers permit the "cloning" of content deposited in PMC so NIH could transfer the contents to PMC's international repositories. Most publishers "walked away from the agreement" at that point, Franks recalled, "concerned that the 'cloning' put our content out of our control even more since each repository was going to configure their sites to suit the needs of their countries."
Individual authors, meanwhile, could have the greatest impact on public access, maintains the University of Southampton's Stevan Harnad, a researcher and pioneering advocate of author self-archiving. He agreed that mandating deposit in a central archive is neither necessary nor optimal for increasing public access in an increasingly distributed age when open access publishing is growing and author self-archiving is now allowed by many commercial publishers. "An article whose final draft has been self-archived in the author's own institutional repository or an article that has paid for open access on the publisher's web site would be OA immediately," he observed, "It would only be the PubMed version that was embargoed."
Although critical of the NIH plan, Harnad said he was not opposed to it and appreciates the public access principles behind it. "I still prefer it over the old policy or over no mandate at all," he told the LJ Academic Newswire. "It's just that with a few small parametric tweaks it could be so much more useful, and, as it stands, it provides a bad model, which may now be mimicked blindly for several years to come."
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The Lights Go On in Georgia! Valdosta State Accredited, Giving Georgia a Library School
The State of Georgia once again has an accredited library education program. The Valdosta State University's (VSU) Master of Library and Information Science Program was officially accredited by the Committee on Accreditation of the American Library Association (ALA) at its meeting June 24. The VSU MLIS is now the only ALA-accredited program in Georgia, following the 2004 closure of the program at Clark Atlanta University, and one of just 56 accredited programs in the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. The program at Valdosta State is primarily distance education, incorporating Internet instruction and some face-to-face classes at central locations, usually weekends at Macon State College. Approved by the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia in 1999, the program formally began in fall of 2001. After five years of evaluation, the COA granted VSU initial accreditation for the full term of seven years. The program's next review is scheduled for spring 2014.
In other COA actions, continued accreditation status was granted to the following programs, with the next comprehensive review visit at each institution scheduled to occur in 2014: Master of Library and Information Studies, University of Oklahoma, Norman; Master of Library and Information Science, San Jose State University, CA; Master of Science in Information Studies, University of Texas at Austin. Conditional accreditation status was granted to the Master of Library and Information Studies program at the University of Rhode Island, Kingston. The next comprehensive review visit is scheduled to occur in 2010. The conditional accreditation status of the Master of Library Sciences and the Master of Arts in Library Science programs at Texas Woman's University, Denton, was continued. A progress review visit is scheduled to occur in 2010.
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| Vaidhyanathan Named Virtual Fellow at the Institute for the Future of the Book
Scholar, author, copyright expert and Library Journal Mover and Shaker Siva Vaidhyanathan is, well, moving and shaking. In addition to moving this fall from New York University to the University of Virginia, where he will teach media studies, he will also shake things up as the first "virtual scholar" at the Institute for the Future of the Book (IFBook). IFBook fellow Ben Vershbow said the contours of the fellowship weren't set, but would develop over time. For now, the Institute will host Sivacracy.net, Siva's popular blog.
In addition, IFBook will launch a new web site devoted to Vaidhyanathan's latest book project: The Googlization of Everything, billed as "an examination of Google's disruptive effects on culture, commerce, and community." "Siva is one of just a handful of writers to have leveled a consistent and coherent critique of Google's expansionist policies," Vershbow said, "arguing not from the usual knee-jerk copyright conservatism that has dominated the debate but from a broader cultural and historical perspective." Vershbow said the site will launch in the coming months.
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| Northwestern University Police Close "Secret Room" At the Library
We've heard lots of stories about students getting involved in designing library space, but this one takes the prize. According to the Daily Northwestern Northwestern University Police discovered "a furnished room under the stairway by the University Library entrance" that had been used as a "student hangout." The room was reportedly discovered by a senior named Patrick Fennig, who told reporters he discovered it at the end of April. With the help of friends, he brought in furniture and even created "a hidden Facebook group" for the space, which he dubbed "the Northwestern Public Library."
Fennig said the room was visited by hundreds and open to everyone "to protest the university's policies restricting public access to the library." A library staff member eventually got wise to the room and informed police last Thursday, who closed it off. Fennig, meanwhile, said he plans to send a letter to library administrators and the police explaining the purpose of the room—after he returns from a vacation.
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Best Sellers in Literature, December 2006–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13-digit ISBNs included in brackets)
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Thomas Hardy
Tomalin, Claire
Penguin Books
2007. ISBN 1594201188 [9781594201189]. $35.00
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Edith Wharton
Ed. by Hermione Lee
Alfred A. Knopf
2007. ISBN 0375400044 [9780375400049]. $35.00
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Notebooks [of Tennessee Williams]
Williams, Tennessee
Ed. by Margaret Bradham
Yale University Press
2006. ISBN 0300116829 [9780300116823]. $40.00
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Notebooks of Robert Frost
Frost, Robert
Ed. by Robert Faggen
Belknap Harvard
2006. ISBN 0674023110 [9780674023116]. $39.95
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Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge
Sisman, Adam
Viking
2006. ISBN 0670038229 [9780670038220]. $27.95
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Shakespeare the Thinker
Nuttall, A.D.
Yale University Press
2007. ISBN 0300119283 [9780300119282]. $30.00
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American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne
and Henry David Thoreau
Cheever, Susan
Simon & Schuster
2006. ISBN 0743264614 [9780743264617]. $26.00
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Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita
Ladenson, Elisabeth
Cornell University Press
2007. ISBN 0801441684 [9780801441684]. $29.95
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Feeling like A Kid: Childhood and Children's Literature
Griswold, Jerry
Johns Hopkins University Press
2006. ISBN 0801885175 [9780801885174]. $19.95
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Castle in the Forest: A Novel
Mailer, Norman
Random House
2007. ISBN 0394536495 [9780394536491]. $27.95
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Shylock Is Shakespeare
Gross, Kenneth
University of Chicago Press
2006. ISBN 0226309770 [9780226309774]. $22.50
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John Donne: The Reformed Soul
Stubbs, John
W. W. Norton
2007. ISBN 0393062600 [9780393062601]. $35.00
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Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life
Pâté, Ralph
Yale University Press
2006. ISBN 030012337x [9780300123371]. $35.00
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Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation
Saunders, Ben
Harvard University Press
2006. ISBN 0674023471 [9780674023475]. $35.00
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Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African American Writing
Franco, Dean J.
University of Virginia Press
2006. ISBN 0813925606 [9780813925608]. $19.50
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Shakespeare's Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning behind the Plays
McGinn, Colin
HarperCollins
2006. ISBN 0060856157 [9780060856151]. $24.95
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Henry James Goes To Paris
Brooks, Peter
Princeton University Press
2007. ISBN 0691129541 [9780691129549]. $24.95
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Shakespeare and Co.: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Johnson, Thomas Middleton,
John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story
Wells, Stanley W.
Pantheon
2006. ISBN 0375424946 [9780375424946]. $26.00
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Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's Poetry
Patrick Cheney
Cambridge University Press
2007. ISBN 0521608643 [9780521608640]. $24.99
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John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man
Heilpern, John
Alfred A. Knopf
2006. ISBN 0375403159 [9780375403156]. $35.00
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