What's Happening Locally
The University of Washington Libraries is committed to supporting new initiatives with the goal of producing change in the current system of scholarly communication. We have set aside resources to acquire and support new publishing efforts, initiatives and economic models. If you have a project or title to suggest, please contact your subject librarian.
Libraries Presentation to the Faculty Senate on Journal Licensing Issues
On March 11, 2004, Betsy Wilson, Director of University
Libraries, gave a presentation to the Faculty Senate describing the current
issues surrounding journal licensing and scholarly communication. The text
for her presentation can be found on the Faculty
Senate website.
University of Washington Libraries Digital Scholarship Retreat
From Vision to Transformation: New Models
of Academic Support for Digital Scholarship
On March 9-11, 2003 the University of Washington Libraries
hosted a retreat on digital scholarship. Made possible through the generous
funding of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
the retreat was a watershed conversation among UW scholars who are deeply
engaged in scholarship and the creation of knowledge that was not possible
before digital technology. The conversation was scholar driven and led. Academic,
library, and technology planners and leaders participated in the visioning
process as well.
Institutional Membership in Support of Scholarly Communications
On 01 October 2002, University of Washington became an Institutional Member of BioMed Central (BMC), www.biomedcentral.com, which is an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate, free access to peer-reviewed, biomedical research. They are committed to developing a sustainable business model which will support and secure open access. SPARC has chosen to partner with BioMed Central to help them develop a sustainable business model and supports their open-publishing models. Our Institutional Membership allows all University of Washington researchers in the biomedical field to publish their articles in any of the BMC journals without incurring the $500 per article fee. Our membership also provides us with a discount on the publications which do require a subscription charge. The UW institutional membership to BioMed Central is being funded jointly by the Kenneth S. Allen Library Endowment and the UW Department of Medical Education and Biomedical Informatics (MEBI).
DSpace Participation
University of Washington has agreed to
work with MIT and 5 other institutions to further develop the new program
called DSpace used for archiving of scholarly works. An article in The Chronicle
of Higher Education on 30 January 2003 talks about this process.
6 Institutions Will Help Fine-Tune a Popular New Archiving Program
http://chronicle.com/free/2003/01/2003013001t.htm
University Week article about University of Washington's participation
in DSpace
http://admin.urel.washington.edu/uweek/archives/issue/uweek_story_small.asp?id=975
Budapest Open Access Initiative
The Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/) arose from a small but lively meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute (OSI) on December 1-2, 2001. The purpose of the meeting was to accelerate progress in the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet. There are nine signatures from the University of Washington.
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) (http://www.plos.org/) is a non-profit organization of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource was founded in October 2000. One of their first actions was to circulate an open letter calling on scientific publishers to make the primary research articles that they publish available online through public libraries such as PubMed Central. Over 30,000 scientists signed the letter from 180 countries, with over 60 signers from the University of Washington.
Presentations
Scholarly Communications in Mathematics: Can the System Survive?