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June 2012 saw publication of the Finch report into expanding access to published research findings, the UK Government's response to the report and the issuing of a revised policy on open access publication of research papers by the UK Research Councils. All appear to be driving the UK towards the world's most rigorous adoption of open access publication of publicly funded research outputs. This article looks at the potentially profound consequences of these steps for publishers, librarians and researchers in the UK, and for scholarly communications in general, not least for the centuries-old model of peer review. It concludes that the success of the policy will depend to a considerable extent on the availability of funding and mechanisms to support it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For students with print impairments, e-books offer great potential to remove barriers to information. However, for various reasons, not all e-books are fully accessible. Significant variability exists between different platforms and titles. To benchmark e-book accessibility, a group of library and disability professionals across the UK higher education sector organized a crowdsourced e-book accessibility audit, using simple criteria to capture end-user experiences. The audit can act as a framework for librarians and e-book providers to discuss accessibility and effect improvements. This audit was of 275 e-books from 65 publishers across 44 platforms, resulting in an interactive spreadsheet on the project website and individual feedback reports for each platform. Most of the volunteer auditors had little accessibility expertise so a byproduct of the process was training to introduce key accessibility concepts and support for those using the audit tool. This paper explores the process, including key findings from a follow-up questionnaire for testers. The results indicate increased awareness of e-book accessibility and empathy for disabled learners and an appetite for further training, in particular using e-books with screen reading and text-to-speech software. The study suggests crowdsourced research can be highly effective on multiple levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The HHuLOA (Hull, Huddersfield, Lincoln Open Access) project is a two-year Jisc-funded project, which seeks to identify how open access (OA) support mechanisms can be used to assist with the development of research. One such area is policy landscape, which has shifted dramatically in the past two years. Many academic staff have been left confused, frustrated and stressed by new obligations placed upon long-established publishing practices and by the way in which these changes have been communicated. This paper describes the project's initial work undertaken in this area, with the aim of enabling academic audiences to better navigate the policy environment they find themselves in to comply and better understand the rights they have when using OA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa is viewed as a consumer of the world's knowledge production. A significant factor influencing this status is the low research output, with the main contributor to this status being minimum access to scholarly content to support research. Stellenbosch University, a leading research institution on the African continent, is committed to contributing to changing this status quo through the distribution of its own research output utilizing open sources. Given the challenges that have plagued Africa in developing processes for the distribution of their research, Stellenbosch University has developed the African Open Access Repository Initiative (AOARI) which uses open source software for two platforms that support the 'green' and 'gold' route to sharing scholarly literature: Ubuntu is used as the operating system, DSpace is used for its repository and Open Journal Systems for its publication platform. It is anticipated that AOARI will be the bridge that facilitates the sharing of research output and nurtures a culture of research production in Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The academic publishing industry is set to celebrate 350 years of peer-reviewed scientific journals. However, there are significant shifts in the practice of scholarship, as scholars and citizens alike participate in an increasingly digital world. Is the scholarly article still fit for its purpose in this data-driven world, with new interdisciplinary methodologies and increasing automation? How might it be enhanced or replaced with new kinds of digital research objects , so as not to restrict innovation but rather create a flourishing sense-making network of humans and machines? The emerging paradigm of social machines provides a lens onto future developments in scholarship and scholarly collaboration, as we live and study in a hybrid physical-digital sociotechnical system of enormous and growing scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been tremendous growth in the amount of digital content created by libraries, publishers, cultural institutions and the general public. While there are great benefits to having content available in digital form, digital objects can be extremely short-lived unless proper attention is paid to preservation. Reflecting on our experience with the digital preservation service Portico, we provide background on Portico's history and evolving practice of sustainable preservation of the digital artifacts of scholarly communications. We also provide an overview of the digital preservation landscape as we see it now, with some thoughts on current requirements for preservation, and thoughts on the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apps are now a dominant content medium: in the US people spend more time on apps than they do watching TV. Non-fiction content is being avidly consumed on mobile devices, but in a completely different way to the book model. This article explores three strands of potential that the app medium holds for nonfiction content, putting forward the case that apps have the power to further weave non-fiction into the fabric of society and life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly communication change and open access (OA) initiatives in Australia have followed an Odyssean path in the last decade. The stop-start nature of early initiatives demonstrates that institutional leadership is essential for the successful deposit of academic content in an institutional repository. Similarly, OA policies from the two Australian Research Councils were delayed for nearly a decade, partly due to publisher pressure and bureaucratic conservatism. More successful has been the development of full, or hybrid, open access university e-presses. These presses, usually embedded in the scholarly infrastructure of the university, provide monographic models for wider global consideration. Australian universities are now reflecting, partly through recent Research Council edicts and monitoring global OA developments, greater awareness of the need for action in scholarly communication change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the proliferation of electronic publishing, libraries are increasingly relying on publisher-supplied metadata to meet user needs for discovery in library systems. However, many publisher/content provider staff creating metadata are unaware of the end-user environment and how libraries use their metadata. This article provides an overview of the three primary discovery systems that are used by academic libraries, with examples illustrating how publisher-supplied metadata directly feeds into these systems and is used to support end-user discovery and access. Commonly seen metadata problems are discussed, with recommendations suggested. Based on a series of presentations given in Autumn 2012 to the staff of a large publisher, this article uses the University of Washington Libraries systems and services as illustrative examples. Judging by the feedback received from these presentations, publishers (specifically staff not familiar with the big picture of metadata standards work) would benefit from a better understanding of the systems and services libraries provide using the data that is created and managed by publishers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The web is destined to become humankind's cognitive commons, where digital knowledge is jointly created and freely shared. The UK has been a leader in the global movement toward open access (OA) to research but recently its leadership has been derailed by the joint influence of the publishing industry lobby from without and well-intentioned but premature and unhelpful over-reaching from within the OA movement itself. The result has been the extremely counterproductive 'Finch Report' followed by a new draft of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) OA mandate, downgrading the role of cost-free OA self-archiving of research publications ('green OA') in favor of paying subscription publishers over and above subscriptions, out of scarce research funds, in exchange for making single articles OA ('hybrid gold OA'). The motivation of the new policy is to reform publication and to gain certain re-use rights (CC-BY), but the likely effect would be researcher resistance, very little OA and a waste of research funds. There is still time to fix the RCUK mandate and restore the UK's leadership by taking a few very specific steps to clarify and strengthen the green component by adding a mechanism for monitoring and verifying compliance, with consequences for non-compliance, along lines also being adopted in the EC and the US. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

You have probably heard about them: the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) 1 , Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR) 2 and now, Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) 3 . The abbreviations pop up on familiar list-discussions and blogs. The services are mentioned at conferences, referred to in articles about scholarly publishing, and their data is used in research about open access (OA). You might ask yourself what all this fuss is about? Are these directories contributing to scholarly communication? If so, how exactly? This article argues for the value of the directories, mainly focusing on two of them: DOAJ and DOAB. It provides an introduction to the services, containing a brief history and status report, and addresses the differences between OA journal publishing and OA monograph publishing. It also highlights the value of these services and discusses whether the financial models behind them are sustainable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles Kate Wittenberg, managing director of digital preservation service Portico. Topics discussed include her career at Columbi University Press, her role in the foundation of the Electronic Publishing Initiative at Columbia (EPIC), and her work in publishing. Also mentioned are her thoughts on possible future directions for digital scholarship.

The article presents information about text mining, copyright, and barriers to innovation in the electronic publishing industry as of July 212. The discussion topics include the value and cost of copyright research and text mining and also two studies in Great Britain concerning intellectual property and the text mining market. Also noted is the Wellcome Trusts' survey of periodicals' open access articles.

The state of inter-library lending (ILL) in the world today is placed in the context of the still developing electronic publishing environment: in particular the impact of the big deals, open access and retrospective conversion of serial back-files which have contributed to the dramatic decline in ILL over the last ten years. The factors that influence developments in ILL are identified and analysed. The robust state of ILL and document supply in the US, or American 'exceptionalism', will be considered briefly. The continued importance of the inter-lending and document supply service is stressed, given the background of reduced library budgets, increasing serial prices and increasing demands from more researchers for material not held locally. Reference is made to developments in various countries, especially the UK, Denmark, the US and The Netherlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]