Open Access Week is October 23 -29th. Details are still being worked out, but expect to see library displays, blog content, and an on-campus event that week. Keep an eye out for announcements!
International Open Access Week is organized by SPARC and an Open Access Week Advisory Committee. For this year, they are focusing on the theme “Community over Commercialization.” The theme casts a light on some of the tensions between publishing using commercial publishers, which benefits specific private businesses, and publishing Open Access to benefit the public interest.
The case in the Southern District of New York between the Internet Archive and a group of major publishers has finally wrapped up.
Last March, the Internet Archive’s Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program was held to be a violation of copyright, and not an allowable fair use. The Court requested that the parties work together to figure out a procedure for determining a final judgment in the case. This could have included more hearings to determine several questions relating to damages in the case under 17 U.S.C. 504(c)(2), including issues such as the Internet Archive counting as a library, and if it had reasonable grounds to assume the activity was fair use.
After some delay, the parties came to an agreement that did not involve more hearings. They agreed on monetary damages (the amount and how it was determined remains confidential) and on an injunction prohibiting the Internet Archive from distributing any digitized books that any of the plaintiffs sell commercially as an ebook, or scanning books for that purpose. The publishers had wanted the injunction to cover all books, regardless of availability in an electronic format, but as the trial only included works sold as ebooks, the court concluded that its opinion did not address the issue of books not available as ebooks. The court does not say that is fair use, but it has not said it isn’t fair use either. This leaves the door open for Controlled Digital Lending of books that are not available as ebooks, which could be particularly helpful in the case of CDL of orphan works. The Internet Archive is also still allowed to use the books for accessibility purposes, and for services that have already been determined to be fair use, like Google Books use of digitized books to return snippets of text based on searches.
The case in the District Court may be over, but the Internet Archive has announced its intent to appeal the decision to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. In the meantime, they have a new case with record labels about the Great 78 project to worry about.
Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports has made two major changes for the 2023 release. The first is that it has greatly expanded the number of journals receiving a Journal Impact Factor, or “JIF”. (Journal Impact Factor is a calculation of the number citations to a journal in the last two years divided by the number of citable items from those two years.) Journals in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index and the Emerging Sources Citation Index are now covered. This year those journals only receive a number; next year Clarivate will also include rankings based on the newly covered journals’ JIF against others in its category. Interestingly, the newly covered journals are ranked this year by another metric, the Journal Citation Indicator, which is the average of citable items’ Category Normalized Citation Impact.
The other important big change in that JIF is only reported to one decimal place, rather than three. This cuts out some of the false precision that going to three decimals created. This also means there will be more ties. If you notice that some categories have more than a quarter of its journals in its quartile ranking, that is due to the increased number of ties between journals.
It will be interesting to see the effect of expanding JIFs into new disciplines. There is plenty of pushback to using metrics such as JIF in assessing research and researchers, though the practice continues.
In 2021, MIT Press established the Direct to Open (D2O) model as a sustainable framework that engages libraries as a way to circumvent the profit motive for academic publishing. As publishers continue to raise the prices of APCs – to the point of driving some of their own editorial staffs away – universities and libraries are trying to find more sustainable, cost efficient ways to access scholarly materials so that collection budgets are not consistently weighed down by yearly subscription, or one time purchases of articles. Under the D2O model, if enough libraries agree to purchase a package of books published that year at a certain price, all of the books in the package will be published Open Access. As the count of member libraries increases, the price for each library in turn drops. Direct to Open is also committed to equity, as the fees for participation are determined based on the library size, type, and collection budget. Boston College Libraries, as part of its support of sustainable Open Access Publishing, has participated in the program since its inception.
The increased participation of libraries in Direct to Open allows for MIT Press’ full list of scholarly monographs to be published directly to the MIT Press Direct platform. As the participation has increased, the international scale of D2O continues to grow, as the Press reached agreements with the Big Ten Academic Alliance, the Konsortium der sächsischen Hochschulbibliotheken, the Council of Australian University Libraries, Jisc, SCELC, Lyrasis, and more.
The list of books which will be opened is available on the MIT Press website. While libraries participating can know their payment goes to making what would have been paywalled content open, there is also a direct benefit, as participating libraries have term access to backlist or archives materials, discounts on high-quality works that are also available for print purchase, and opens access to new MIT Press scholarly monographs and edited collections.
