First Author*

On February 4th, a discussion group was held at the Wellcome Trust in London to work out what UK researchers want from UK Pubmed Central (UKPMC), the UK’s free archive of full-text journal articles. Based on PubMed Central (PMC), the U.S. National Institutes of Health free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, UK PubMed Central provides a stable, permanent, and free-to-access online digital archive of full-text, peer-reviewed research publications. UKPMC is part of a network of PMC International (PMCI) repositories. PMCI is a collaborative effort between the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), the publishers whose journal content makes up the PMC archive, and organizations in other countries that share NLM’s interest in archiving life sciences literature. Launched a year ago, UKPMC has become established as a part of the national research infrastructure but as with all online projects the scope for enhancement is ever present.

As described on Nature’s Nascent blog, proceedings of the meeting were kicked off by introductory talks from three leaders in the initiative of open access publishing–-Biomed Central’s publisher Matt Cockerill talked about the state of commercial Open Access publishing; Nature’s Timo Hannay talked about Web 2.0; and Deitrich Rebholz-Schuhmann (EBI) and Sophia Ananiadou (U Manchester) talked about text mining and semantic enrichment of scientific literature. Their presentation slides will be going online at UKPMC soon.

Discussion groups then pondered the question about priorities for further UKPMC development. Three broad areas were put forward: adding in Web 2.0 community participation, adding in new content types, and adding in new user services.
The organizers hoped others would include their thoughts via a short online survey form, and a summary report will be put up on the UKPMC website in due course.

For more in depth information regarding the meeting’s proceedings, Matt Day offered his own first hand experiences on Nascent.

The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities has been updated to offer a Ranking of Open Access Repositories that presents the best 200 ones of the world. The best ranked are three of the largest thematic Open Access deposits: Arxiv, dedicated to physics and related sciences; RePEc, an effort from the realm of economics; and E-LIS committed to Library and Information Sciences and Documentation.

The ranking still shows an academic digital divide between North American universities and the European ones, as almost the 60% of the 200 first positions are occupied by North American universities. On the first positions of the ranking are MIT, Stanford and Harvard universities. The University of Cambridge, which goes down the list until 27th position, continues being the first European university that appears in the ranking followed by Oxford and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich.

Australian National University in Oceania and UNAM from Mexico in Latin America improved their positions as regional leaders, and also seem to be approaching status as world leaders .

Another interesting result observed is the marked improvement of Japanese universities. Tokyo and Kyoto universities increased their position in the ranking which reflects the commitment of these institutions to open access publishing. A few Chinese universities, such as the National Taiwan University, and the University of Hong Kong and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, also showed improvement.

Amongst the Research Councils there is also a predominance of North American organizations, including the NIH and NASA iranked first and second, respectively. However, the European CNRS, the Max Planck Institute and CERN are among the top ten positions.

Some interesting news for those looking for new ways to share medical reseach data:

The UK Medical Research Council (MRC) is seeking partners to help establish a Data Support Service.

It is hoped that the Service will “underpin wider access & use of biomedical research data” and include:

* An ‘MRC Data Portal’: intuitive web access to information, tools, guidance on data curation, and population-based research datasets
* Study-specific solutions for enhancing discovery, access and use of MRC data

In future years the Data Support Service is expected to be expanded to include a large data archive and repository.

The MRC has invited responses from potential organisations, although they are still at the pre-tender stage. Pre=qualification questionnaires (PPQs) can be obtained from Yvonne Kiamtia at MRC. The closing date for requesting the PQQ is 26th November 2007. Completed PQQs must be received by 17th December 2007.

The 3rd international Open Repositories Conference will take place on 1st-4th April 2008 in Southampton, UK. The organizers have issued a Call for Papers.

The aim of this conference is to address the technical, managerial, practical and theoretical issues that arise from diverse applications of repositories in the increasingly pervasive information environment.

As in previous years, the conference will feature open user group meetings for DSpace, Fedora, and Eprints, as well as the general conference sessions on overarching topics.

This year the theme is “Practice and Innovation” and will cover:
> Transformational change in the knowledge workplace
> Professionalism and practice
> Sustainability
> Legal issues
> Successful interoperability
> Models, architectures and frameworks
> Value chains and scholarly communications
> Services built on repositories
> Use cases for repositories

The deadline for submissions is Friday 7th December 2007.

Preservation of digital content is an increasingly important concern, with companies such as Google and Microsoft, as well as major publishers, engaged in large-scale digitization projects.

CLIR (Council on Library and Information Resources) has published a white paper [pdf] examining this issue, and is seeking public comments on it.

The paper examines the motivations behind some high-profile commercial and non-profit digitization initiatives, and makes thirteen recommendations. These recommendations tend to emphasize the importance of collaboration between cultural institutions. Interestingly, author Oya Rieger draws a parallel with the past example of successful cooperation in preservation microfilming.

Details of how to make comments can be found on the CLIR website. The deadline is Friday 5th October.

An interesting press release from eIFL.net:

Ezra Shiloba Gbaje has been awarded the Dr. James O. Daniel prize for the Most Innovative Library-based ICT project by the Nigerian Library Association (NLA) for his Open Access work. Ezra installed and configured Dspace for his university, Ahmadu Bello University. During the award presentation at the NLA meeting this September, Ezra demonstrated the role of an institutional repository and there was great interest from the 400 participants to learn more. eIFL is working with Ezra to organize an open access workshop in Nigeria next year which will build upon this enthusiasm.

eIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) is a non-profit organisation that supports and advocates the wide availability of electronic resources by library users in transitional and developing countries.

DSpace is an open-source solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works. You can read an excellent interview with Michele Kimpton, executive director of the DSpace Foundation, in the current issue of Campus Technology magazine.

Hublog has commented on a recent paper which quantified the usage of the ‘Related Articles’ feature of PubMed, in non-trivial searches.The paper concluded that at least 1/5 of all searches relied on Related Articles to find relevant literature.

According to Hublog and many of the blog’s readers, the chronological presentation of search results can be quite difficult to navigate, and it is the ‘Related Articles’ feature which is generally more fruitful. However, the scientists at First Author acknowledge that both search filters are useful, as the most current information can be incredibly useful to find, while the related articles link can be vital in supplying background literature.

The four hundred year-old Bodleian Library is no stranger to controversy and has never been afraid to innovate. First Author talks to Richard Ovenden, Associate Director and Keeper of Special Collections, about the University’s digitalisation programs and its partnerships with Google.

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The number of science blogs is growing rapidly and it can be hard to keep track of all of those that are relevant. ScienceBlogs groups its blogs by discipline and displays the latest posts on the front page. Postgenomic tracks and displays popular posts according to links to them. It also offers statistics that are useful to publishers, such as finding out which books and papers are being discussed in the blogosphere. It also lists the publishers that are most popular: when I tried this Nature and Science predictably came out on top, but interestingly were followed by arXiv, the open access physics repository.  For bloggers who would like to be included in Postgenomic, a good plugin is available from blogSci. Nascent noted some more interesting plugins for science blogs using wordpress.

BioMed Central has issued a challenge to find the discipline with the highest percentage of OA articles, offering a free t-shirt to the winner! HubMed also has a great tool which instantly gives the open access quotient for keyword search, which does seem to reveal enourmous differences between subject areas: for example, ‘heart disease’ scores almost 10% less than ‘infectious disease’. This should prompt some interesting discussion, although there may need to be a slightly clearer distinction made between a discipline and a keyword for meaningful comparisons to be made.