Category Archives: ScholCom Updates

Open Access Mandate – NIH Implementation Date Moved Up 6 Months

At the end of April, the director of the National Institutes of Health announced that the implementation date for the 2024 Public Access Policy would be pushed up from the end of 2025 to July 1, 2025. The Policy amends a 2008 policy which allowed for a one year embargo before articles publicly funded with NIH grants had to be made fully open access. Effective July 1 of this year, no such embargoes will be allowed.

This is driven perhaps in part by a lack of faith in our scientific institutions, as NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya claims, this move could help strengthen trust in scientific research when many are unsure about the utility of scientists. While this is certainly a step toward transparency, many also wonder how feasible this will be on such relative short notice. With many researches and institutions already working hard to achieve full open accessibility by the original December 31 deadline, the new deadline may pose some difficult challenges.

Inside Higher Ed published an article discussing these changes and cites Matt Owens, who is the president of the Council of Government Relations, who worries that the new deadlines will impose extra burdens on grantees and their institutions. Owens also points out what he sees as a contradiction on the part of the NIH, as the organizations increases certification and financial reporting requirements while at the same time claiming to reduce regulation in the form of moving this deadline up. Owens has issued a statement urging the NIH to reconsider this policy change – while making clear that there is still genuine interest and effort going into meeting the NIH policy demands, particularly under the more realistic timeframe that was originally laid out.

It is difficult to predict exactly what the landscape will look like as we approach the new deadline – but either way, in the short term, universities with faculty or staff that receive NIH grants will have to put a great deal of effort into building open infrastructure that can comply with open access mandates.

Public Domain Day 2025

With the turning of the calendar over to another year, a new subset of canonical (and more obscure!) titles have become available via the Public Domain. Some of the more well known titles entering the public domain this year are Ernest Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury, and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. These three titles were all published in 1929, meaning their 95 year copyright term expired at the drop of midnight on January 1st, 2025.

Additionally, joining some original Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh character sketches that have in the past couple of years entered the public domain – everyone’s favorite spinach-can popping, bicep-flexing sailor, Popeye, will join the public domain as well. And, just as his predecessors before him, it appears he is slated to appear in a number of horror films which have done well to turn classical children’s characters into something else entirely.

Beyond classic children’s characters and classical works of literature, this year the public domain marks a rather large shift in cinema. While the transition had largely already been made, and indeed, some “talkies” hit the public domain last year, having come out in 1928, it wasn’t until one year later, 1929, that these “talkies” took over as the preeminent form of motion pictures. Alfred Hitchcock’s first synchronized sound film, Blackmail, was released in 1929 and has thus entered the public domain this year. Additionally, Hallelujah, which is the first Hollywood film with an entirely black cast, in now in the public domain as well.

Spring ETD Workshops

Completing a dissertation is a significant milestone, and ensuring its proper submission is equally important. The Libraries’ eTD@BC workshops are designed to guide graduate students through the thesis or dissertation submission process. By planning ahead, you can save valuable time when you need it most – at the end. This spring, we’re offering three sessions, one in-person and two virtual, that cover the same essential information.

Dates:

Wednesday, February 12, noon – 12:45 pm, on Zoom.
Tuesday, February 18, 6:30 – 7:15 pm, on Zoom.
Thursday, February 20, noon – 12:45 pm, O’Neill Library 307.

To register, go to https://libcal.bc.edu/calendar/workshops. Upon registration for an online workshop, you will receive a confirmation email with the Zoom link.

Topics to be covered in this workshop include:

The submission website, including a walk-through of the submission process
Important decisions and issues, such as eScholarship@BC, embargoes, copyright, etc.
How to ensure that a published eTD can be discovered and accessed by others
Where to get additional help

Graduate students can contact etd-support@bc.edu with any questions about the workshops.

New Addition to Ebook Collection

More and more across academia, students getting involved with scholarly publishing on their campuses. Whether this takes the form of contributing to research papers or authoring articles and submitting them to journals, young scholars are seeking opportunities to participating in developing discourse and add to the scholarly record. Boston College libraries in particular supports this in a variety of ways; all students are welcome to apply for funding via the Open Access Publishing Fund, which provides support with the coverage of Article Processing Charges for authors interested in submitting work to, and our Open Journal Systems platform, which currently hosts nine student journals publishing material.

Given the relative increased interest, the timing of this new title could not have been better. How to Edit and Manage a Successful Scholarly Journal: Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences was publishing in May of 2024 and consists of eighteen chapters covering a wide variety of central topics that any young scholar should keep in mind. From best practices around building an editorial team to how to judge questionable and predatory editorial behaviors, this helpful guide provides a foundation for higher education practitioners interested in guiding students through the process of being published or attempting to manage a serial. And indeed, the ebook is now fully accessible for rental through the Boston College libraries’ catalogue.

While there are eighteen chapters in the collection that cover a wide range of topics geared towards helping scholars think about publishing in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, Chapter 8 “Rebound and renewal: strategies and tactics for journal revitalisation” focuses on some ideas for picking up journals that may struggle to consistent gather and publish content on a quarterly or yearly basis. The chapter outlines best practices around communications with an editorial board and some suggested leadership roles, and also discusses ideas for attracting submissions, such as publishing “special issues” with a clearly defined focus – inviting a wider array of reviewers for a more non-committal approach to introduce young scholars to participating in scholarly publishing. Additionally, sticking to consistent timelines for the review process leads to more consistent positive relationships with authors, which can help provide sources of content when a journal is looking for submissions.

Here at Boston College, we have a number of journals that still enjoy tremendous global readership, but are no longer publishing current issues. Elements is a interdisciplinary undergraduate journal with a long history of publication at Boston College, but is currently not actively seeking submissions. Additionally, Lingua Frankly, another long time student publication, explores undergraduate work that has to do with language or linguistics, but has not had an active editorial board since the major disruptions of the pandemic. If you have interest in revitalizing or starting your own an open access journal at Boston College, please reach out to Gabriel Feldstein and the Scholarly Communications Team for more information. Click the images below to view the publications from the respective student journals.

*Elements* has been in publication since 2005 and has published 28 issues with Boston College Libraries.

OSTP Federal Research Funding update

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has received funding from Congress to continue its implementation of the Nelson Memo. This memo requires any federal agency that awards research grants to implement a policy requiring immediate public access to publications resulting from that research, as well as access to data and the use of persistent digital identifiers in article metadata.

During the lengthy Federal appropriations process, the House Appropriations Committee released a bill that specifically defunded any attempt to implement the memo. No individual or lobbying group ever came forward to take any credit for trying to kill the OSTP memo in the budget, nor was there much explanation of why it might have been included.

The final appropriation bill (technically the explanatory statement accompanying the bill) only included a requirement that OSTP produce a financial analysis of the impact of the memo, “including the policy’s anticipated impact on Federal research investments, research integrity, and the peer review process,” within 100 days of the bill passing. In other positive news, this was the only requirement. There is no trigger stopping development of policy depending on what the report says. This likely means that after the report, there would be a round of Congressional hearings before more action is taken. Being an election year, there may not be enough time for a truly adverse legislative action. Overall, this means plans will progress, and there should be some good reading on the state of scholarly publishing sometime in mid-June!