May issue of ScieCom info

[Ingegerd Rabow <Ingegerd.Rabow@lub.lu.se>]

[Apologies for cross-postings]

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the May issue of ScieCom info. Nordic-Baltic Forum for 
Scientific Communication (http://www.sciecom.org/sciecominfo).

The managing of intellectual property rights in a new publishing 
environment is an area where there is a lot of insecurity - not 
to say confusion.  Two of the articles in this issue discuss 
these problems.

Bertil Dorch et al describe the recently established hprints.org 
- a Nordic initiative and the first of its kind in the Nordic 
countries.  hprints.org is an Open Access repository for 
scholarly documents within the arts & humanities and the social 
sciences. Copyright and authors' rights were seen as key issues. 
The SURF/JISC / Knowledge Exchange "Licence to Publish" was 
created to support the principles of Open Access. This licence 
was chosen as the model licence for hprints.org and has now been 
translated into all five Nordic languages.
Dorch, Bertil et al: "Utilizing hprints.org as a subject based 
research infrastructure"

Karolina Lindh and Mikael Graffner present the results of a short 
survey on copyright and self-archiving policies applied by Nordic 
academic journals using the Open Journal System (OJS). They 
highlight the difficulties and differences in interpreting 
copyright agreements, and they conclude that the rights issue 
needs further attention. The copyright management function built 
into OJS is easy to handle, but the legalities of copyright are 
more difficult to manage for some of these small journals.
Lindh, K., Graffner, M.: "Copyright agreements and licences used 
by Nordic OJS-journals"

Copyright issues turn out to be something of a stumbling block 
also for the prestigious Nobel Project, which aims to make the 
Nobel Prize awarded work available as Open Access. Anna-Lena 
Johansson describes the project background, the cooperation with 
the Nobel Web AB, and the experiences from the pilot phase.  The 
main purpose of the pilot was to identify potential problems 
regarding copyright issues and digitalization of the 
publications, but also to create workflows and methods that could 
be used in a full scale project including all Nobel Laureates 
with 1-20 key publications each.
Johansson, Anna-Lena:  "Open Access to Nobel Prize awarded work - 
a pilot project"

The hows and whats of Open Access policies are discussed by Lise 
Mikkelsen in  "An introduction to the recommendations for 
implementation of Open Access in Denmark", and by Peter Linde in 
"Beyond OA-policy".

Lise Mikkelsen comments on the recommendations and statements 
recently made public by the Danish Open Access Committee. The 
Committee was appointed by the Danish Ministry of Science, 
Technology and Innovation after signing the 2007 European Council 
Conclusions on access to scientific knowledge in the digital age. 
She lists 14 Committee recommendations on how to implement Open 
Access in Denmark, e.g. a national Open Access policy should be 
established by the Ministry of Science, Technology and 
Innovation, the focus should be on green Open Access, and, as far 
as possible, access should be free to the results of research 
funded by public money.  The author sees the Committee 
recommendations as the first steps towards a nation-wide open 
access strategy and believes that they have the potential to 
really accelerate the development of OA in Denmark.
Mikkelsen, Lise: "An introduction to the recommendations for 
implementation of Open Access in Denmark "

In 2007, as the first HE-institution in Sweden, Blekinge 
Institute of Technology (BTH) adopted an OA-mandate. After three 
years with the mandate, Peter Linde reflects on the outcome. How 
has the mandate influenced researcher behaviour? Have they made 
their work freely available? He found some answers by using the 
BTH publication database to compare article production and 
publication channels between 2005 and 2009. He realized how 
important it is that the principles of Open Access publishing are 
really understood by the researchers. They see a dilemma in the 
fact that they now both face demands from their institutional 
management to publish in ISI-journals to get evaluation points 
and face OA mandates from research funders and their 
institutional management. There is an acute need for guidelines, 
practical support, and adequate economic conditions to make this 
dilemma manageable.
Linde, Peter: "Beyond OA-policy"

Recently two successful OA events were arranged in our region; 
one in Iceland and one in Finland.   S?lveig Thorsteinsdottir 
gives "A short report of a successful OA symposium held in 
Iceland on April 13th 2010".

Turid Hedlund reports from the FinnOA symposium on the theme 
"Paving the ways for open science" in Helsinki. "A road map for 
open access to research results"

IN SHORT
. The DOAJ team in Lund reports that the Directory of Open Access 
Journals (DOAJ) celebrates its 7 year anniversary and 5.000 
journals. 107 countries are represented.  Read more about the 
current status of DOAJ here,
. The Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority (ABM)  has 
given funding for a NORA-based project (with University of 
Troms?, University of Bergen and Telemark University College as 
participants) to collect information on the self-archiving 
policies of Norwegian journals and publishers. In collaboration 
with Sherpa this information will be entered into the 
Sherpa/RoMEO database continuously as the project collects it.

As always, your comments and ideas are very welcome

Ingegerd Rabow / Editor-in-chief