Consultation on scientific information in the digital age: last chance to register your views

(Now closed)

The European Commission is interested in your views on access to and preservation of digital scientific information. The consultation phase closes on the 9th September. The questionnaire is online at: http://ec.europa.eu/research/consultations/scientific_information/consultation_en.htm

RSP Event: RoMEO for Publishers

The Repositories Support Project (http://www.rsp.ac.uk/) recently held an event to explore how RoMEO http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ can help both repository staff and publishers. This event had representative speakers from RoMEO, repositories and publishers. Here’s a quick recap from the day;
The opening speaker was Bill Hubbard - Centre for Research Communication http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk/ . In his presentation he promoted the opportunities of OA; including the archival benefits of institutional repositories and how OA can actually help to prevent plagiarism. OA was also presented as an inevitable change in publishing and academic dissemination. With many researchers sharing files informally online and on their own websites the need for formal engagement with OA is needed to protect copyright and academic standards - Bill’s message to the publishers’ sitting in the room, “repositories are your friend”.
Azhar Hussain then gave a brief over view of the history of SHERPA RoMEO and its significance for publishers. Plans for the future include developing a more interactive community of users with real-time knowledge base for anwering copyright queries and developing more links with Web of Science. Mark Simon from Maney publishing http://www.maney.co.uk/ then outlined why they have chosen to be a “green publisher”. The morning finished with Marie Cairney who is the Team Leader for Enlighten, the University of Glasgow’s Institutional repository http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/. Due to a mandate since 2008 their repository seems to be a much bigger operation with more staff involved. This includes members of the library’s cataloguing team and also proxy depositors in departments whom they give training on RoMEO to. Glasgow has decided to have a dedicated person who will be responsible for sending information to RoMEO.
The afternoon session saw further presentations by staff from RoMEO, including a demo of the site’s new launch next month which includes a new Policy Generation Tool for publishers: http://www.romeo.ac.uk/publishers/policytool.php A presentation from Emerald Publishing http://www.emeraldinsight.com/ explained why they have not chosen the “gold” route at the moment – but have not ruled it out altogether.
The final part of the day consisted of breakout sessions where people were asked to consider how RoMEO can help publishers and how publishers can help RoMEO.
This was a very useful event where ideas were shared between repository staff and publishers, and where the publishers present seemed to want to engage and work with OA and repository staff.

Anthea Tucker & Gemma Storr

Reason to celebrate: First book added to White Rose Research Online

White Rose Research Online is delighted to have been able to add an entire book to the repository. Dr Mark Westgarth is an academic with the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies and had been encouraged by the School’s Research Committee to add his items to Symplectic (the university’s central publications database) so that his research profile was up to date. Dr Westgarth discovered that via Symplectic the item could be added to White Rose Research Online. When this item arrived in the repository we wrote to the Regional Furniture Society to see if they would be happy for us to make this available –which they were (they requested we also add a link to their website http://www.regionalfurnituresociety.com/ ).


Dr Westgarth (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/fine_art/07_Staff/Current/mw.html ) is very pleased that his book is now available worldwide and of course to the students taking his module, and White Rose Research Online is excited to now have an entire book from a fairly under represented subject area in its collection. If you are interested in seeing the book it is at: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/42902/ Westgarth, MW (2009) A Biographical Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Antique and Curiosity Dealers. Regional Furniture, XXIII . Regional Furniture Society.

White Rose Etheses Online passes 1000

We now have over 1000 doctoral theses in the White Rose Etheses Online (WREO) service – the companion service to White Rose Research Online. Some theses are temporarily embargoed but most are immediately and freely available to all who wish to read them.
Our Google Analytics usage data show we are attracting readers from around the globe. Readers in the UK are the heaviest users of the service, followed by the USA, India and Canada.
WREO hosts recently awarded theses deposited by their authors plus older theses digitised by the British Library’s EThOS service or provided by individual departments and alumni.
For further information about WREO see our Frequently Asked Questions page.
Theses deposited in WREO are available through Google, Google Scholar, the British Library’s EThOS service and the DART Europe E-theses Portal.

Has making your research openly available changed its impact?

Respondents sought for a questionnaire about the "green road" to open access. The "green road" means making a copy of your research publications available online - ideally in an open access repository such as White Rose Research Online. The research is being undertaken at the Institution of Library and Information Science, Uppsala University, Sweden.

The survey aims to reach "...researchers from all disciplines, with experience of publishing research articles in both traditional non-OA channels and of self-archiving in institutional and/or subject based open archives. "

The survey will be available until March 2nd 2011.
https://survey.mamut.com/s?s=20424

RePosit project - publications management system deposit investigated

The JISC funded RePosit project (RePosit: positing a new kind of repository deposit)http://jiscreposit.blogspot.com/ is investigating the effectiveness of a deposit tool in central research management system - Symplectic Elements - with a local institutional repository (WRRO). Many researchers at the University of Leeds interact with Symplectic on a regular basis and Symplectic acts as the university's central publication database. Shortly, depositors from Leeds will be able to upload full texts of their works to Symplectic; the metadata and any attached files will be immediately posted to WRRO for review. RePosit aims to create useful training materials / events to let depositors know about the new deposit route and obtain their feedback about it. We hope to see a rise in content over the course of the project and will be monitoring this closely.

Although University of Leeds is the project lead, the findings will be relevant for University of Sheffield (as a Symplectic site) and for the University of York. University of York is rolling out the PURE Campus Research Information System later this year. The outcomes from RePosit will be immediately relevant for York; it is envisaged PURE will become the main locus of deposit for WRRO content deposited by York researchers. A connector between the PURE system and WRRO is currently under development.
If you have any questions about the RePosit project, please email eprints@whiterose.ac.uk

Royal Society policy supports open access self-archiving

The Royal Society no longer requires authors to wait 12 months before making their papers freely available in White Rose Research Online; Royal Society authors can now make their work available immediately. The final peer reviewed manuscript, as accepted for publication, can be deposited. Here are the Royal Society's Open Access options.

Uploading your accepted manuscript to White Rose Research Online is supported by many publishers - the RoMEO service lists hundreds of publishers which allow the final peer reviewed manuscript of your work to be made openly available. Some have an embargo period, some, like the Royal Society, Elsevier and Springer, do not have an embargo period. Most publishers don't allow open posting of the final, as published, PDF of a work with the publisher formatting etc - though some do.

• Publishers allowing the posting of final PDFs.


• Proportion of publishers allowing final peer-review draft posting


• Search for your publisher here