NEWS AND ANALYSIS News in Brief
COS complete first stage of SHARE notification service prototype The Centre for Open Science (COS) has completed the initial objectives for the SHARE notification service prototype, with results available via RSS feed. This initial prototype includes content from PLOS, UC eScholarship, DOE PAGES, VTechWorks, ClinicalTrials. gov, PubMed Central, arXiv, DigitalCommons@WayneState, CrossRef, DOE SciTech, and DataONE.
Focus on the project will now turn to expanding the prototype, researching the means of distributing notifications, and considering refinements to the metadata captured.
Innovative partners with libraries in the Arab World
Five libraries in the Middle East and the Arabian peninsula have selected the Sierra Library Services Platform from Innovative Interfaces. The new contracts were completed through Naseej, the provider of Sierra and related Innovative products. The new Sierra libraries include: Holy Spirit University of Kaslik, Emirates College for Advanced Education, Institute for Applied Technology (part of Abu Dhabi Centre for Technical and Vocational Training), University of Sharjah, and American University of Cairo.
NPG and Palgrave Macmillan make OA survey data available Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Palgrave Macmillan have made data from their Author Insights survey publicly available from figshare under a CC BY licence. The publishers describe the
survey, which contains views from 30,466 researchers, as the biggest publisher audit of authors’ views to be made open access.
Programme strengthens research publishing in Tanzania
A new programme aims to strengthen and improve the quality of academic publishing in Tanzania through training, skills development and capacity building.
The two-year
programme involves the international volunteer organisation VSO; INASP, an international-development charity that supports the research- communication process in the developing world; the Tanzania
Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH); and the Elsevier Foundation. The project, which launched this year, grew out of work by Brill employee Liesbeth Kanis during a VSO placement in the country from 2010.
One of the first steps in the programme, in June this year, was to create the Consortium of Academic Publishers of Tanzania. The project also aims to will equip staff at academic and
university publishers to operate with consistent, professional standards and strengthen local umbrella organisations to serve as national representatives of scientific research and the publishing industry. As part of the project, four Elsevier editors and publishers will spend time in the country over the next few months working with the local publishing community and other partners.
Publisher prices to increase by five to seven per cent next year
Publisher price increases for academic and academic/medical libraries are expected to be in the range of five to seven per cent (before currency impact) next year. This is according to the 2015 Serials Price Projection Report from EBSCO Information Services.
According to the company, ‘price increases seem to have levelled off recently.’ The company attributes this to the proliferation of multi-term, fixed- increase licence agreements and the growth in the number of open-access journals.
The company also noted that Mobile e-book readers on the rise
More people are now using their mobile phones to read e-books. A survey of 3,000 consumers in the USA and UK, by Publishing Technology, found that some 43 per cent have read an e-book, or part of an e-book,
on their handsets, and that 66 per cent (59 per cent UK/ 72 per cent USA) of mobile phone book readers read more on their phones than they did last year.
However, despite the mobile
phone’s overall growth in appeal and popularity as a reading device, the survey discovered that readers – particularly in the UK – tend to read on their handsets fairly infrequently and in much shorter bursts.
Libraries funding more open access fees, says survey
Academic libraries are getting more involved in the cataloguing and funding of gold open-access publications, according to a survey by the US industry consultancy, Publishers Communication Group (PCG).
The survey of 150 librarians from 30 countries found that the
14 Research Information DECEMBER 2014/JANUARY 2015
responsibility for funding article processing charges (APCs) is still more likely to fall on the author (47 per cent) or granting organisation (38 per cent) than the institution (24 per cent) or library. However, nearly a quarter of respondents stated that the library does provide funding for
APCs, which often comes from existing library materials budget. It was estimated that this cost equates to less than one per cent of the budget for traditional subscriptions, with 19 per cent of institutions establishing a ceiling for APCs, typically ranging from two to three thousand US dollars.
@researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
price changes could vary by institution type, size or research intensity more so than it has in past years. In addition, the report noted that the decoupling of print and online pricing could result in significant increases for institutions whose patrons still rely on print copies.
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