About the Libraries

BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com)

Commercial venture, Internet-only biomedical publishing house with peer review. Offers free access to research papers with its authors not having to sign over exclusive copyright. As a member of BioMed Central, the University of California pays each $500 fee for an accepted manuscript submitted by a UC faculty member. An author can track the number of times people have viewed or downloaded his/her article.

BioOne: Full-Text Access to Aggregated Database of Bioscience Research Journals (http://www.bioone.org)

Non-profit venture by mainly smaller scientific societies and non-commercial publishers. Provides uniquely integrated, cost-effective access to a thoroughly linked information resource of interrelated journals focused on biological, ecological and environmental sciences.

Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.soros.org/openaccess)

The Budapest Open Access Initiative arose from a meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute in 2001. The Initiative calls on all interested institutions and individuals to help open up access to online literature and to remove barriers that stand in the way. This site includes a FAQ (http://www.earlham.edu/%7Epeters/fos/boaifaq.htm) with self-archiving information.

NEW! Open Access Journal Business Guides (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/oajguides/)

E-BioSci (http://www.e-biosci.org)

An EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) initiative funded by the European Union to provide access to digital information in the life sciences ranging from bibliographic or factual data to published full text.

ELSSS, the ELectronic Society for Social Scientists (http://www.elsss.org.uk/)

ELSSS is a not-for-profit organization aimed at solving the crisis in economics in scholarly and scientific communication with institutional support from the Royal Economic Society, the University of St. Andrews, the Consortium of University and Research Libraries, and Scottish Enterprise, Fife. Includes a highly innovative publishing template for ease of manuscript submission and peer review.

EPrints.org (http://www.eprints.org/)

EPrints.org is part of the Open Citation Project, a DLI2 International Libraries Digital Project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Councils, in collaboration with the National Science Foundation. EPrints.org is dedicated to opening access to the refereed research literature online through author/institution self-archiving.

eScholarship (http://www.escholarship.org/)

eScholarship provides a suite of open access, scholarly publishing services and research tools that enable departments, research units, publishing programs, and individual scholars associated with the University of California to have direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship.

With eScholarship, you can publish the following original scholarly works on a dynamic research platform available to scholars worldwide:

• Journals
• Books
• Working Papers
• Conference Proceedings
• Seminar/Paper Series

eScholarship also provides deposit and dissemination services for postprints, or previously published articles.

FIGARO (http://www.figaro-europe.net/)

A European academic e-publishing project formed by the Dutch Roquade initiative and German Academic Publishers. Supported by a grant from the European Commission to become operational at the end of 2004.

International Consortium for Alternative Academic Publication (ICAAP) (http://www.icaap.org)

Based at Athabasca University in Canada, the ICAAP was founded to provide support for current and potential journal publications by hosting journals and furnishing final production assistance such as markup language tagging and copyediting. In addition to providing services to scholars wishing to start their own independent scholarly journals, ICAAP maintains a database of free scholarly journals and other resources.

International Scholarly Communication Alliance (http://www.anu.edu.au/caul/cisc/isca/)

The ISCA, an initiative and research library associations in Australia, Hong Kong SAR, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, is an action-oriented global network that will collaborate with scholars and publishers to establish equitable access to scholarly and research publications.

Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (http://www.ndltd.org/)

Accessible digital libraries of these and dissertations.

OAIster (http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/)

OAIster is a Mellon-funded project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services. The project's goal is to create a wide-ranging collection of free digital resources. This site allows searching for any digital resource in any digital collection in OAIster. There were 847, 559 records for 104 institutions as of September 13, 2002.

Open Archives Initiative (http://www.openarchives.org)

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. The OAI has its roots in an effort to enhance access to e-print archives as a means of increasing the availability of scholarly communication.

PEAK, Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge (http://www.lib.umich.edu/retired/peak)

Describes a project sponsored by the University Library and the Program for Research on the Information Economy and the University of Michigan.

Public Knowledge Project (http://pkp.ubc.ca/)

The Public Knowledge Project is a Canadian government funded research initiative that seeks to improve the scholarly and public quality of academic research through innovative online environments. It includes a metadata archive called "Open Archives Harvester."

Reshaping Scholarly Communication (http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/)

UC website featuring action plans for UC publishing discounts, managing copyright, retaining author rights, using alternative forms of publishing, and other efforts to keep publishing costs sustainable.

Roquade: Electronic Publishing Services for Scientists (http://www.roquade.nl)

Three Dutch libraries have instigated the Roquade project whose mission is to enhance scientific communication in the interest of the academic community by 1) setting up an infrastructure for organizing, co-coordinating, supporting and facilitating the digital publishing process for individual authors as well as for structured editorial boards and by 2) working together with learned societies and scientific publishers.

Scholars Portal Project (http://www.arl.org/arl/pr/scholars_portal.html)

The Scholars Portal Project is a collaboration between seven libraries that are members of the Association of Research Libraries and Frewell-Downing, Inc. The project's goad is to provide software tools for an academic community to have a single point of access on the Web to find high-quality information resources and to deliver the information directly to the user's desktop. The project is based on the ARL Scholars Portal Working Group Final Report (http://www.arl.org/access/scholarsportal/final.html), May 2002.

SPARC: The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (http://www.arl.org/sparc/)

SPARC Institutional Repository Checklist and Resource Guide (http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/IR_Guide.html)  NEW 

SPARC is a worldwide alliance of research institutions, libraries and organizations that fosters expanded competition in scholarly communication. It creates "partnerships" with publishers who are developing high-quality, economical alternatives to existing high-priced publications. Gaining Independence (http://www.arl.org/sparc/GI/) is a manual for planning the launch of a nonprofit electronic publishing venture.

The Stoa: A Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities (http://www.stoa.org/)

Coordinates electronic scholarship in the humanities with a special focus on the ancient Western world and the classical Western tradition.

"Trusted Digital Repositories: Attributes and Responsibilities" (http://www.rlg.org/longterm/repositories.pdf)PDF

This site presents a report by the RLG/OCLC Working Group on Digital Archive Attributes. RLG is a not-for-profit membership corporation of over 160 universities, national libraries, archives, historical societies, and other institutions with remarkable collections for research and learning. OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Ind. is a non-profit membership organization serving 41,000 libraries in 82 countries and territories around the world. The report articulates a framework of attributes and responsibilities for trusted, reliable and sustainable digital repositories held by large and small research institutions.