From the Creative Commons (CC) website at http://creativecommons.org/ “Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination thereof.”
To search Creative Commons (CC) for creative works marked with Creative Commons licenses go to http://search.creativecommons.org/
As you may remember from 2007-2008 QUT Library set aside money to pay for author submission fees to BioMed Central and PLoS journals as a trial.
Biomed Central and PLoS open access journals provide free access to research articles by charging author fees in lieu of subscription fees.
QUT researchers are now invited to submit manuscripts to BioMed Central and PLoS journals in 2009 and the author-fee per accepted article will again be automatically allocated by QUT Library (as approved by the Library and the University’s Research and Innovation Committee) to an annual ceiling of AU$40,000.
When your article is accepted for publication, BioMed Central and PLoS will send you an an invoice.
Please forward your PLoS invoices to Stephanie Bradbury, Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, and the fee will be paid by QUT Library.
For more information please contact Stephanie Bradbury (x86078; s.bradbury@qut.edu.au).
QUT is now an Institutional Member of PLoS as outlined at http://www.plos.org/support/instmembers/australia.html
This entitles QUT researchers to reduced charges on the publication fees for publication in all PLoS journals.
The PLoS journals are starting to rate very highly by Journal Impact Factor and therefore are worthy of your consideration for publication of your research articles.
The move to the later release of EPrints software gave us the opportunity to progress our plans for merging the repository deposit process with the HERDC reporting process. In the long-term, the will reduce some of the double-handling that is currently taking place with regards to reporting of publication data. However, it has impacted on the the deposit process and the search/browse functionality.
More information will be required for items nominated for inclusion in the HERDC. For HERDC, the Office of Research needs to have Faculty/School/Institute/Centre affiliation information at the author level instead of the paper level.
We have now created a new search feature called “Affiliation”. This will gather together all records that include the specified affiliation (eg CARRS-Q). Of course, it assumes that the relevant affiliation data w ill be entered by the depositor. You will find the Affiliation search in the left-hand margin of the new QUT ePrints home page.
You can also access this feature directly via this link: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/cgi/affiliation_report/
The feature allows you to nominate an affiliation and limit the search to retrieve specific document types and/or date ranges. It is quite slow (as it involves a lot of database checking) – but it does work. Future plans include offering a list of affiliations to select from when a name is entered in the deposit form and the ability to create an rss feed from reports.
This Affiliation search gathers together all the records that meet the search criteria specified. If a Faculty (School. Institute or Centre) wishes to have a link to all their publications in QUT ePrints, they can run andAffiliation search and then copy the URL from the address box.
HERDC Integration: This is still a work in progress. So far, we have implemented a system of genrating a semi- completed HERDC form from any records in QUT ePrints. Anyone with a QUT staff username and password can generate the form. It does not have to be the author or even the depositor.
The ARROW Discovery Service, available at http://search.arrow.edu.au/, allows you to search simultaneously across the contents of Australian university research repositories such as the QUT ePrints archive. One can search across 254,602 Australian research outputs, including theses; preprints; postprints; journal articles; book chapters; music recordings and pictures.
Also on the Arrow Discovery Service website, in the left-hand column, each of the universities with repositories are listed.
Selecting one of these enables you to search that university’s repository.
In early 2005 Professor Ray Frost began uploading postprint versions of his journal articles to QUT ePrints at http://eprints.qut.edu.au. When he saw how frequently they were being accessed, he uploaded some of his older publications (from 2000-2004) and now has over 350 of his publications in the repository. Professor Frost says he has found that it actually saves him time as it only takes him around 5 minutes to upload each paper and he now has far fewer emails requesting free copies of his work.
However, the best return on his investment (of time) has been the phenomenal growth in his citation rate since 2005 (as indicated in Web of Science).Ray Frost is convinced that the dramatic increase in his citation rate is due to the open access copies of his papers that now supplement the journal versions. Since 2005, the postprint versions of his articles have been downloaded over 174,000 times; including 115,866 downloads in the last 12 months. Most of his repository records include a ‘doi’ link to the published version of the fulltext, but these links are only useful to people with a subscription to the journal or the database (eg ScienceDirect). Therefore, it is probably safe to conclude that most of the people who downloaded copies of Professor Frost’s articles would otherwise not have had access to his work – and that some of these additional readers went on to cite his work in their own publications (hence, the increased citation rate).
QUT ePrints has released an updated version of their website.
There are a number of benefits including:
- the ability to import information via a DOI or EndNote record, which will save time
- a cleaner user interface
- saved searches: get updates on new additions based on your search terms
- contextual help throughout the input forms
- QUT Login integration.
For more information about this service, please contact eprints@qut.edu.au
Earlier this year, Bruno Starrs, a PhD researcher from Creative Industries wrote a letter to the Editor of Campus Review ,’extolling the virtues of QUT ePrints’. The letter was justly awarded “Letter of the Month” status by the Editor. Bruno has just uploaded a copy of the letter to QUT ePrints – so the whole world will now get to read his comments via the magic of Google. 
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00015311/
Freely available online respository arXiv, available at http://arxiv.org/ has reached a new milestone in October 2008 with half a million e-print postings in the subject areas of Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Quantitative Biology and Statistics now available.
arXiv was developed by Paul Ginsparg in 1991 when he was working for Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. When Ginsparg went to Cornell as a faculty member in 2001, the repository came with him and is now a collaboration between Cornell University Library and Cornell’s Information Science Program. The Library maintains the repository; information science handles research and development.
It is the primary daily information source for hundreds of thousands of researchers in many areas of physics and related fields. Its users include the world’s most prominent researchers in science, including 53 Physics Nobel Laureates, 31 Fields Medalists and 55 MacArthur Fellows, as well as people in countries with limited access to scientific materials.
The famously reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted the proof for the 100-year-old Poincaré Conjecture solely in arXiv.
More than 200,000 articles are downloaded from arXiv each week by about 400,000 users, and its 118,000 registered submitters live in nearly 200 countries, including Suriname, Sudan and Iraq. Fifteen countries host mirrors of the main site, which is located on Cornell’s campus in Ithaca, N.Y. In Australia the mirror site is hosted at the University of Adelaide at http://xxx.adelaide.edu.au/
The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA, has announced its official launch in conjunction with an OA Day celebration hosted by the Wellcome Trust in London.
The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of Open Access (OA) journals publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines through an exchange of information, setting of industry standards, advancing business and publishing models, advocating for gold OA journals publishing, education and the promotion of innovation.
Open Access (OA) scholarly publication refers to the dissemination of peer-reviewed manuscripts containing original research or scholarship immediately upon publication, at no charge to user groups, without requiring registration or other restrictions to access. OA publications also allow users to “copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship….”
For more information about the organization, visit the OASPA website at http://www.oaspa.org/
The 2008 edition of the _ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology_ that was released this week includes extensive data and analyses on the use of Social Networking Sites and Services by Higher Ed Citizens.
The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008 (ID: ERS0808)
Gail Salaway (EDUCAUSE) and Judith Borreson Caruso (University of Wisconsin-Madison) /With: Mark R. Nelson (NACS) / Introduction by: Nicole Ellison (Michigan State University)
Documents Contributed by ECAR, Research Studies (10/21/2008)
Abstract: This 2008 ECAR research study is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 ECAR studies of students and information technology. The study is based on quantitative data from a spring 2008 survey of 27,317 freshmen and seniors at 90 four-year institutions and eight two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 75 students at four institutions; and analysis of qualitative data from 5,877 written responses to open-ended questions.
