Nature News now Open Access

Nature News has just announced that all of its content is to be made freely available. Previously content was free for the first four days after publication, but the decision for the change has been influenced by the rise of social media use and the wish for Nature News items to be disseminated and discussed as widely as possible. The Nature News archive is now also open access, but Nature and its associated journals remain subscription-only.

Open Access citation advantage?

Swan, A. (2010) The Open Access citation advantage: Studies and results to date. Technical Report UNSPECIFIED, School of Electronics & Computer Science, University of Southampton.

This paper summarises 31 reported studies which have investigated Open Access citation advantage. Of the studies 27 found that there was an advantage to be gained, while 4 did not. Of the studies, 6 are relevant to subjects studied here at Queen Margaret University, and all 6 of these studies did find that citations increased for papers published following an Open Access publishing model.

Click here to read the paper, which also contains links to the studies that it has compared where possible.

Growth of the Scottish Higher Education Digital Library (SHEDL)

Queen Margaret University LRC is pleased to report that, following successful negotiations by representatives of SHEDL, three new publishers have joined the Digital Library this year. They are Oxford University Press, Edinburgh University Press and Berg Publishing and between them provide full text access back to 1996, where available, for 288 titles. The content from 6 publishers is now available under SHEDL agreements, the others being American Chemical Society, Springer and Cambridge University Press.