Scholarly Communication at Texas A&M

Our University community is home to many distinguished TAMU faculty members who have, over the years, written textbooks and other important monographs for academic and scholarly audiences. With the passage of time, some of these titles have gone out of print and are no longer readily available to potential readers. Certain that demand still exists for such works, their authors have reclaimed the rights once transferred to publishers. These authors are, in effect, ‘re-publishing’ their works via open access using today’s digital and Internet technologies. In this way, TAMU authors are extending the reach and impact of their works to serve new audiences worldwide.

One example of this open access republishing trend is the work of Dr. Ray M. Bowen, Professor and President Emeritus of Texas A&M. Thanks to Dr. Bowen’s efforts to reclaim the rights to his previously published works, three books previously sold under the imprint of Plenum Press have now been freely republished in the Texas A&M Digital Repository (Dr. Bowen’s digital collection is online at http://repository.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/2500.) These titles now see wide usage from around the world.

If a TAMU author believes that demand exists for his or her out-of-print publication, s/he is encouraged to explore whether the rights to that work can revert back to the author. Historically, the standard language in book contracts required that authors transfer to the publisher the right to reproduce the work and the right to distribute copies of the work to the public. Such contracts also contained a reversion of rights clause by which the publisher’s rights terminated if/when the book went out of print.

Authors wishing to pursue a reversion of their rights need to check the original publishing contract, if available, to see if an appropriate clause was included. It may be necessary to write to the publisher’s rights and permissions department to clarify the procedure for reclaiming reverted rights.

Once rights have reverted to an author, s/he is invited to digitally republish the work via the Texas A&M Digital Repository. There is no cost to the author or the users for this service, and it provides an easy and effective way to extend the life of the work for many years to come.

Information about submitting works to the Texas A&M Repository is available online or by contacting the Libraries’ Digital Services & Scholarly Communication Office at digital@library.tamu.edu

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education puts an interesting spin on open access journals http://chronicle.com/article/Open-Access-Journals-Break/64143/.  The February 14 article, “New Journals, Free Online, Let Scholars Speak,” includes comments form John Willinsky, professor of education at Stanford and founder of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) http://pkp.sfu.ca/. PKP produces open source tools for the dissemination of research , including Open Journals System, Open Conference System, and Open Monograph Press, among others. (more…)

Authors interested in posting their own scholarly or scientific articles online for free access have a powerful (and growing!) tool to discover publishers’ policies on open access archiving. The RoMEO database (short for “Rights MEtadata for Open archiving”) compiles information about the permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement. The number of publishers represented in RoMEO just passed the 700 mark and spans an extensive, worldwide list, from the very large (Elsevier) to the small (New Zealand Nurses Organisation).

Each journal record in RoMEO displays a color code to classify the publisher’s archiving policies and inform authors of what can be done with their articles. The coding system differentiates between two versions of the article:

1. Pre-prints, representing the first draft of the article, before peer-review has been applied;
2. Post-prints, the revised version of the paper after peer-review. Post-prints have the same content as the final version of the article, as published in the journal but do not reflect the publisher’s final type-setting and formatting.

With either version, authors typically cannot use the publisher-generated PDF file. Rather, they must make their own .pdf versions for submission to a repository.

The color-coding system used in the RoMEO database follows this scheme:

• Green = can archive pre-print and post-print
• Blue = can archive post-print
• Yellow = can archive pre-print
• White = archiving not formally supported

Note that RoMEO’s color-coding system does not include “gold”, a term sometimes used in open access parlance to describe open access publishers where all versions of an article may be freely shared online. RoMEO treats OA journals as green.

Of the 704 publishers included in the RoMEO database at present, 63% formally allow some form of self-archiving. Among these, 198 (28%) are green; 173 are blue (25%); and 72 (18%) are yellow. (source: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/statistics.php)

The RoMEO database is maintained by the SHERPA Project (Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research, Preservation and Access) and generously funded by the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).

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.

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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.

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