The Imperial Russian Newspapers collection, with a preliminary release of 230,000 pages, spans the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries and will include core titles from Moscow and St. Petersburg as well as regional newspapers. Central and regional ‘gubernskie vedomosti’ will be complemented by a selection of private newspapers.
Last year the UC Berkeley Library’s Collection Services Council charged a working group to develop local best practices to guide investment in open access (OA) products and services. Advancing open access to scholarship is one of the Library’s key goals, and addressing how and when UCB invests in OA resources and materials is one path to supporting this priority. In May 2020 the working group completed its report, recommending key criteria and a workflow for evaluating open access investment opportunities.
Even though the Library is in the early stages of implementing the proposed criteria and review process, we submitted a proposal for the 2021 ACRL Conference to share our work with the broader academic library community and to receive feedback as we develop the process. We also wanted to hear how related projects address open access investments, and understand the challenges (and hopefully, solutions) others have encountered along the way.
Our panel was titled Open access investment at the local level: Sharing diverse tactics to improve access & affordability. We know that many decisions about open access investments take place at administrative or consortial levels, but librarians frequently field requests for access, resources, or partnerships at the local level through their relationships with students, researchers, and faculty. The panel aimed to share real-world examples of where and how academic libraries decide to invest in open access resources, and discuss commonalities and differences in strategies and give attendees examples they can apply in their own roles.
Panelists included:
Sam Teplitzky, Open Science Librarian, UC Berkeley
Timothy Vollmer, Scholarly Communication & Copyright Librarian, UC Berkeley
Sharla Lair, Senior Strategist, Open Access & Scholarly Communication Initiatives at LYRASIS
Tom Narock, Assistant Professor of Data Science at Goucher College
Justin Gonder, Senior Product Manager, Publishing, California Digital Library
Tim discussed the findings and recommendations of the UC Berkeley Library Open Access Investment Working Group, including the main criteria and processes by which the Library could evaluate open access investment opportunities. Sharla outlined the Open Access Community Investment Program, a new community-funded OA publishing program launched by LYRASIS and Transitioning Society Publications to Open Access (TSPOA). It aims to match nonprofit publishers who are seeking financial investments with funders looking to support OA publishing projects. Tom and Justin talked about the goals and infrastructure required to support preprint servers such as EarthArXiv, and explained the partnership that EarthArXiv entered into with the California Digital Library. Sam led the group discussion at the end of the panel.
We thank the panelists for their time and engaging conversation, and hope the discussion sparks ideas for open investments beyond Berkeley. You can view the panel presentations and discussion below. If you have questions or comments, please send them to schol-comm@berkeley.edu.
Agreement to publish open access books across all subject areas will increase the reach and impact of future publications.
Berkeley | Heidelberg | London, 23 March 2021
Springer Nature has signed its first ever institutional open access (OA) book agreement with the University of California, Berkeley Library. The agreement will cover a broad range of book titles across all disciplines — from humanities and social sciences to sciences, technology, medicine and mathematics and, starting in 2021 and running for at least three years, will provide open access funding to UC Berkeley affiliated authors. The open access book titles will publish under the Springer, Palgrave, and Apress imprints, with initial titles set to publish later this year.
This agreement with UC Berkeley Library follows the UC systemwide landmark transformative agreement with Springer Nature announced last year to enable UC authors to publish research articles open access in over 2700 Springer Nature journals. While the transformative deal covers the publication of journal articles, books are the common or expected publishing format in some disciplines. The need to account for a variety of scholarly outputs prompted UC Berkeley Library to sign a new agreement providing direct assistance to book-publishing authors.
The books will be published under a CC BY licence and readers around the world will have free access to the books via Springer Nature’s content platform SpringerLink. With research showing that open access books are downloaded ten times more often and cited 2.4 times more, this important agreement will significantly enhance the visibility, dissemination and impact of important academic research.
Niels Peter Thomas, Managing Director Books, Springer Nature, said:
“We are delighted to be partnering with UC Berkeley Library in what is our first ever institutional partnership for open access books and our first US agreement for open access books. This represents a big step towards ensuring access to funding for book authors. By utilising our experience as the largest academic book publisher and expertise in enabling the transition to open access, we look forward to increasing the impact and reach of book authors at UC Berkeley and their research.”
Jo Anne Newyear-Ramirez, UC Berkeley Library’s Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources, said:
“UC Berkeley Library has been working with publishers to create sustainable and inclusive paths to open access, for both scholarly articles and books. For the past several years, through our Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, we have covered a significant portion of book processing charges for any open access book our authors publish, but this agreement with Springer Nature takes an even bigger leap forward. Under this agreement, we will cover 100% of standard publishing costs for open access books that UC Berkeley authors publish with Springer Nature for at least the next three years. This will help yield important progress on our journey to advance knowledge by making more UC Berkeley-authored books open to the world. We’re equally thrilled to be pioneers among U.S. academic institutions in entering into this type of agreement with Springer Nature.”
END
About UC Berkeley Library
The UC Berkeley Library is an internationally renowned research and teaching facility at one of the nation’s premier public universities. With 24 distinct destinations, including Doe and Moffitt libraries, The Bancroft Library, the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, and an array of subject specialty libraries, the UC Berkeley Library offers services and materials that span the disciplines. The Library holds paintings, lithographs, papyri, audio and video recordings, and books, and offers robust services that connect users with these remarkable resources — and more — to inform their research and advance their understanding of the world.
About Springer Nature
For over 175 years Springer Nature has been advancing discovery by providing the best possible service to the whole research community. We help researchers uncover new ideas, make sure all the research we publish is significant, robust and stands up to objective scrutiny, that it reaches all relevant audiences in the best possible format, and can be discovered, accessed, used, re-used and shared. We support librarians and institutions with innovations in technology and data; and provide quality publishing support to societies.
As a research publisher, Springer Nature is home to trusted brands including Springer, Nature Research, BMC, Palgrave Macmillan and Scientific American. For more information, please visit springernature.com and @SpringerNature
Contact
UC Berkeley Library: With questions about this agreement, please contact UC Berkeley Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication Services: schol-comm@berkeley.edu.
We are pleased to announce that the Global Social Responses to COVID-19 Web Archive has been launched. Created in March 2020 at the onset of the pandemic — and curated by 29 librarians throughout the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation and beyond — the Archive documents regional, social responses to the pandemic, which are critical in understanding the scope of the pandemic’s humanitarian, socioeconomic, and cultural impact. With an emphasis on websites produced by underrepresented ethnicities and stateless groups, the Archive covers (but is not limited to): sites published by non-governmental organizations that focus on public health, humanitarian relief, and education; sites published by established and amateur artists in any realm of cultural production; sites published by local news sources; sites published by civil society actors and representatives; and relevant blogs and social media pages. At the time of its launch, the Archive featured over 2,000 websites from over 80 countries in over 50 languages.
For more information about the Global Social Responses to COVID-19 Web Archive (including a full list of curators), see: libguides.princeton.edu/covid-ivy.
The Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation’s Web Collecting Program is an initiative of the Confederation’s Collection Development Group, under the direction of the Web Collecting Advisory Committee and Samantha Abrams, the Web Resources Collection Librarian. If you have questions about the Global Social Responses to COVID-19 Web Archive (or if you’d like to get involved by proposing one of your own collections), please reach out to ivyplusweb@library.columbia.edu.
I hope you’ll join me in recognizing those (copied here) involved in making this important resource available to researchers and the general public: Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, Ellen Ambrosone, Yuusuf Caruso, Paloma Celis Carbajal, Stuart Dawrs, Charlotte Giles, Glaudia Götze-Sam, Tristan Hinkel, Bogdan Horbal, Lunja Jeschke, Thomas Keenan, Ksenya Kiebuzinski, Miree Ku, Joshua Kueh, Hyoungbae Lee, Heather Martin, Brandon Miliate, Brendan Nieubuurt, Setsuko Noguchi, Liladhar Pendse, Anna Rakityanskaya, Deborah Schlein, Joshua Seufert, Alain St. Pierre, Sean Swanick, Amy Torres, Gudrun Wirtz, Ryan Wolfson-Ford, and Lou Zhou.
Source: Samantha Abrams, Columbia University Libraries. Posted by Liladhar Pendse- participant-curator in the archival project (UC Berkeley Library).
On the eve of “old” Russian New Year, I would like to extend a warm welcome to all who are interested in exploring with us both print and e-culture of the Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies collections. Often, we are questioned what Eurasia is? While there are multiple answers to the nuanced question, I will focus on Eurasian from the perspective of the often “forgotten” part of Asia- the Caucasus and Central Asia. An article on Russian culture in Luxembourg Times provides information on Russian Christmas. A brief overview of the Old and New Russian New Year is provided here.
While the New Year is here upon many in Russia, we must continue with our teaching and research under constraints imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. I leave you to explore openly accessible books of the Institut Vostokovedeniia RAN (1818- ). The Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The about section of the IV RAN‘s website provides information on the institute’s history and mission. The section of publications has basic bibliographic information on the items and provides access through the PDF. Happy Exploring!
Below is the landing page of one of the books with PDF access.
For example, if one clicks on the PDF icon as shown in the image, one can access the full-text of Istoricheskie, kulʹturnye, mezhnat︠s︡ionalʹnye, religioznye i politicheskie svi︠a︡zi Kryma so Sredizemnomorskim regionom i stranami Vostoka : IV mezhdunarodnai︠a︡ nauchnai︠a︡ konferent︠s︡ii︠a︡ (Sevastopolʹ, 6-10 okti︠a︡bri︠a︡ 2020 g.) : materialy konferent︠s︡ii, as shown below:
This is our first post in the New Year so we wish all a very happy new year. New Year is supposed to bring hope but hope is something that we always harbor. So we wish you resilience and success in your lives. Open Access in Latin America mandates a brief discussion of the publications of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). Its publications repository provides access to hundreds of OA publications in English, Spanish and Portuguese.
ELCLAC’s Publications Page
As shown below, the thematic selections now include ECLAC publications on COVID-19.
ECLAC’s website also offers access to statistical databases related to Latin America.
ECLAC Statistics
We leave you with good wishes and invite you to explore the ECLAC Open Access this year. Open Access Matters!
“Colección iberoamericana of Biblioteca Virtual de Prensa Histórica,” represents a treasure trove of open access materials that are hosted by the Virtual Library of Historical Press by Spain’s Ministry of Culture and Sports. The interface is easy to use and has the option to chose from Basque (Euskara), Catalan, Galego, Valencian, and English languages.
Below is a screenshot of the landing page of the Ibero-American collection of the site that might of research value to the users of this blog. At the time creating this blog post, we were having trouble accessing some components of this website. However, these can be fortunately accessed here.
This year’s welcome back newsletter for those working in the romance languages focuses mostly on digital resources. After abrupt closures in March due to the global pandemic, the UC Berkeley Library has recently resumed acquisitions of non-digital formats but the bulk of this material remains in transit or is still being processed. For the most up-to-date information about the evolving services in the Library, please consult the Library services and resources during COVID-19 page.
Dibs Earth by Philip Chapman-Bell on Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
FLASCO Andes is a union catalog of the digital library of the Andes and it provides access to the multi-disciplinary e-books, e-journals, and e-dissertations from Ecuador and other Andean region countries.
It also serves as the access gateway to multiple Open Access databases that are not only of local interests but also have international and continental dimensions. I hope that the user will find this union catalog with full-text access to great use when conducting research on the Andean region. Below are some of the screenshots of the resource. If you click on any of the screenshots, the embedded links will take you the resource itself.
For educational purposes only!
For educational use only. The image above shows the landing page of different OA databases from Latin America.
This is a third episode of Open Access in Latin American and Caribbean Studies Digital Resources. Today, I want to introduce the readers to the Costa Rican Historical Newspapers that have been digitized by SINABI Costa Rica. SINABI (Sistema Nacional De Bibliotecas: Costa Rica) is a system of Costa Rican libraries.
SINABI’s Landing Page.
There are over 300 historical newspapers that have been digitized and ready to be used for research. These can be accessed here.
Periódicos of SINABI.
The site allows any user to download these as PDF files. For example, “Actualidades: bisemanario de la vida nacional.” This particular periodical was directed and edited by Francisco Soler and among his collaborators were Mario Sancho, Leonidas Pachecho, and Julián Marchena. It included political information. It began publication on December 4, 1916.
There isn’t evidence that the periodical is OCR’ed and can be cross-searched against the other digitized periodicals and newspapers. Nevertheless, Costa Rica’s 300 historical newspaper titles are available for academic research.
Below is the landing page of one of the books with PDF access.
ELCLAC’s Publications Page
ECLAC Statistics
For educational purposes only!
For educational use only. The image above shows the landing page of different OA databases from Latin America.
SINABI’s Landing Page.
Actualidades, Issue 1. 1916.