Scholarly Communication at Texas A&M

Co-Action Publishing and the Lund University Libraries have partnered to develop the Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing. The guide is a comprehensive set of best practices and guidelines for the planning, set up, launch, publication, and management of open access scholarly journals.

(more…)

Texas A&M ranked 19th of 1,084 institutions in terms of number of citations to papers published in journals indexed by Thompson Reuters.  Texas A&M facultyproduced 4,113 papers, which were cited 20,760 times during the twenty years studied — that’s 5.05 cites per article.

(more…)

Texas A&M University is one of the top 200 users of arXiv, an open access repository for more than 580,000 e-prints in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology, Quantitative Finance and Statistics. The Texas A&M University Libraries, along with libraries at institutions including CERN, Columbia, Harvard, Los Alamos National Lab, Michigan, Oxford, and Princton, have pledged to assist Cornell University in maintaining the free availability of  research articles to researchers everywhere.  This support is a short-term funding model, as Cornell debates the best strategy for long-term viability of arXiv. It costs about $400,000 annually to maintain the repository service.

In addition to searching, downloading and reading papers from the site, Texas A&M faculty contribute pre-publication versions of research articles to arXiv.

The full text of Cornell’s press release follows. (more…)

 To promote the preservation and fuller use of data, The American Naturalist, Evolution, the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, Molecular Ecology, Heredity, and other key journals in evolution and ecology will soon introduce a new data archiving policy to ensure that data supporting published articles is preserved and made publicly available. The policy has been enacted by the Executive Councils of the societies owning or sponsoring the journals. (more…)

EXPERT PANEL CALLS ON U.S. RESEARCH AGENCIES TO DEVELOP POLICIES FOR PROVIDING FREE PUBLIC ACCESS TO FEDERALLY SPONSORED RESEARCH RESULTS

Policies Should Protect Peer-Reviewed Publications While Ensuring Rapid Access

An expert panel of librarians, library scientists, publishers, and university academic leaders today called on federal agencies that fund research to develop and implement policies that ensure free public access to the results of the research they fund “as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.”

The Scholarly Publishing Roundtable was convened last summer by the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Policymakers asked the group to examine the current state of scholarly publishing and seek consensus recommendations for expanding public access to scholarly journal articles.

The various communities represented in the Roundtable have been working to develop recommendations that would improve public access without curtailing the ability of the scientific publishing industry to publish peer-reviewed scientific articles. (more…)