Scholarly Communication at Texas A&M

A hot-off-the-press announcement [sent yesterday as a detailed email to graduate schools; today available as an official press release on their website] from ProQuest reveals that they will no longer charge institutions for uploading electronic theses and dissertations to the ProQuest digital database. This cataclysmic change will go into affect on September 27, 2010 for all clients who use the ProQuest ETD Administrator tool to handle the transfer of ETD files and metadata to the company. This means a savings of $65/$55 per dissertation or thesis, respectively.

For institutions not using the proprietary upload tool, fees will still apply. Also, the option of publishing the ETD via Open Access will still cost $95. per document, regardless of submission method.

Once the shock wears off over this announcement, an analysis on what this development means for scholarly publishing, libraries and the ETD community will be forthcoming. I promise! For now, it’s enough to celebrate this windfall reduction in cost for graduate students.

For the first time, Texas A&M Libraries will join in the worldwide celebration of Open Access Week, a global event, now in its 4th year, promoting Open Access as a new norm in scholarship and research. The celebration takes place October 18-24, 2010 and will be marked with a variety of events at Evans and West Campus Libraries. Stop by the OA information booth to view the displays, chat with a campus OA specialist, and pick-up giveaway buttons and posters. Faculty may also request an in-class visit from Library Faculty specializing in Open Access issues including copyright, fair use, Creative Commons sharing, scholarly publishing, e-science, or digital libraries. For more information about the Open Access Week @ TAMU, please drop an email message to digital@tamu.edu.

Visit Open Access Week


The Fay series is available open access via the Texas A&M Digital Repository.

From the Friday April 9 Aggie Hotline:

The Journal of Analytical Psychology, the foremost international academic journal in the field of Jungian psychology, has praised Texas A&M University Press in its April issue for making available online all 15 titles published to date in the Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology. To celebrate what it calls a “laudable venture that is of worldwide benefit to the Jungian community,” the journal commends Texas A&M Press for providing free, full-text, open access digital editions of all of the books in the series through its redesigned web site (www.tamupress.com), in cooperation with the University Libraries’ Institutional Repository and the Texas Digital Library.  The special lead review offers the journal’s readers a retrospective evaluation of each of the books. It featured eight of the books in the April issue and plans to review the remaining seven later in 2010. All new Fay series books going forward will be released simultaneously in both print and digital, open access editions. Each of the books carries a foreword by Texas A&M Professor David H. Rosen, holder of the McMillan Chair in Analytical Psychology, under whose leadership both the book series and the lecture series from which it derives were established, with the support of Carolyn Grant Fay, founding president of the C. G. Jung Educational Center in Houston. The review is available in the journal’s latest issue and will be published online in the coming weeks.

Over the past two years, the open access (OA) movement in the United States has gained momentum with the adoption of campus-wide deposit mandates at several prominent institutions (Harvard, MIT, Univ. Kansas, Trinity University and Oberlin College). Yesterday, Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida became the sixth member of this group when the Arts and Sciences Faculty unanimously approved an institutional deposit mandate. Under this new policy, all members of the Rollins Faculty will deposit a copy of their peer-reviewed articles in the institution’s digital repository, Rollins Scholarship Online. These digital reprints will not be released for public access until the article has been formally published in the journal of the author’s choice.

Following the models of the other campus OA mandates, Rollins faculty have agreed to grant to their institution nonexclusive permission to make available the final, peer-reviewed, manuscript version accepted for publication of his or her scholarly articles. Faculty concerned with publishing pressures (e.g., tenure expectations) or facing unanticipated circumstances may request a waiver, or “opt out,” of the institutional license for a given article.

In sharing the news of their new open access policy, Rollins officials credited faculty advocates for their excellent in work in championing the importance of a campus-wide mandate. Dr. Thom Moore, Physics Professor, serves as Chair of the Faculty’s Professional Standards Committee and as Director of the school’s Student-Faculty Collaborative Research Program. Dr. Claire Strom, History Professor, is Editor of the journal “Agricultural History”.

In addition to the important leadership demonstrated by these faculty, the entire Rollins community actively contributed to campus OA efforts through awareness-raising activities and programs on various issues of scholarly communication. The campus publishes its own Open Access journal, Rollins Undergraduate Research Journal. Through the Scholar-In-Residence Program, the campus hosted Dr. Peter Suber, leading advocate of the Open Access Movement for scholarly publication, who presented “Open Access: Implications for the Future of Scholarly Communications” and “Open Access and Libraries: A Roundtable discussion.” The college library published a piece on “Open Access: What is it and why should you care?” in their newsletter.

Additional information and news about the Rollins Open Access policy is avialable via the Library Director’s blog.

Scholarly Communication refers to the system through which research and scholarly works are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use. It is a shared system of research and scholarship, and stakeholders in the system include researchers, scholarly societies, publishers, university administrators, funding agencies, and libraries. The system is undergoing profound changes, with lasting impact on how the results of research and scholarship are shared.

Scholarly communication issues are complex, and it is difficult to keep up with even the issues most relevant to us in our roles as researchers and instructors. Therefore, Texas A&M Univerity Libraries (specifically, Digital Services and Scholarly Communication) have started this blog to highlight scholarly communication news of particular interest to the Texas A&M research community