OpenAccess@StAndrews

The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) has announced a new scheme to help researchers pay for open access publishing.

“UK institutes who are RSC Gold customers will shortly receive credit equal to the subscription paid, enabling their researchers, who are being asked to publish Open Access but often do not yet have funding to pay for it directly, to make their paper available via Open Science, the RSC's Gold OA option.” http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2012/gold-for-gold-rsc-open-access.asp
This follows a series of events that are reshaping the way research outputs are published. Over the last month there has been a flood of announcements about making publicly funded research outputs available to anyone for free (open access). The UK Government has backed a transition to open access, with the release of the report of the Working Group on Expanding Access to Published Research Findings (Finch report) which stated:
“The principle that the results of research that has bee…

The latest open access issue of the Journal of Terrorism Research has been published. The journal is hosted by the University of St Andrews Library Journal Hosting Service and published by the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence.
The aim of this Journal is to provide a space for academics and counter-terrorism professionals to publish work focused on the study of terrorism. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the study of terrorism, high-quality submissions from all academic and professional backgrounds are encouraged. Students are also warmly encouraged to submit work for publication. Each article is published in PDF and HTML, and the complete issue is also available as a single PDF. All content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Journal of Terrorism Research, Volume 3, Issue 1 (2012) Special Issue: Assessing the Emergency Response to Terrorism

RCUK has announced a new policy on open access to research outputs, significantly strengthening the existing requirements for grant holders to ensure their peer-reviewed articles are freely available to all.

The new policy will apply to peer-reviewed research articles and conference proceedings submitted for publication from 1 April 2013. Researchers will still be able to choose whether to publish in an open access journal (which may require payment of an Article Processing Charge (APC)), or to deposit an accepted manuscript in an institutional or subject repository. Where an APC is paid, the resulting article must allow unrestricted reuse including downloading and text mining under a Creative Commons licence. If papers are made open access through the repository route, there will be a maximum delay (embargo) allowed of 6 months (12 months for AHRC and ESRC).

As well as publishing outputs in journals which comply with the policy, researchers will be expected to include details of the …

We have now passed another milestone, with over 2000 items in our open access repository Research@StAndrews:FullText.


Our 2000th item turned out to be a little bit of Scottish History, with a thesis originally requested through the British Library's EThOS service:

Annette M. Smith (1975) The Forfeited Estates Papers, 1745: a study of the work of the Commissioners for the Forfeited Annexed Estates, 1755-1784, with particular reference to their contribution to the development of communications in Scotland in the eighteenth century This adds to a thriving digital collection of Scottish History theses. Our most viewed item in this collection is Reading the Scottish Enlightenment : libraries, readers and intellectual culture in provincial Scotland c.1750-c.1820 which has been downloaded nearly 100 times.

Our project to deposit retrospective theses has also added to our varied collections including English, Mediaeval History, Modern Languages, Divinity, International Relations and B…

We are delighted to see that we have less than 20 items to go until we reach 2000 in our open access repository!

Just over a year ago we celebrated reaching a landmark 1000 items in Research@StAndrews:FullText so it has been a busy and exciting year to see our content double.