Hopkins faculty and students will be able to publish their research on a new Internet database entitled JScholarship, giving the public more access to free scholarly information in a joint effort by the Sheridan and Welch libraries.
Currently, only faculty-sponsored research will be published, but there is the possibility of publishing student works in the future, such as senior design projects and undergraduate honors theses.
"Faculty often sign away some of their rights when they publish an article in a journal. This may include the right to publish a free copy of their article," said David Reynolds, manager of Scholarly Digital Initiatives.
Faculty articles which have already been published in a journal can be submitted to JScholarship as long as the copyright allows. The library can provide assistance to faculty with determining the publishing policies of journals.
Among the digital library collections which are available on JScholarship are the government collections. Also posted are high-resolution scans of maps, as well as a number of other collections.
Archives of old research can be made available, and some technical reports dating from the 1970s and the 1980s are already available. There is also the possibility that faculty members will be able to post teaching resources on JScholarship.
Recently there have been two breakthroughs to change the world of scholarly publications and make free access more readily available. First, it is now required that all research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to be deposited in PubMed Central within 12 months of publication.
Secondly, the Harvard faculty senate passed a mandate that requires all faculty research to be deposited in Harvard's repository within a certain time frame.
According to Reynolds, the steps taken by these two organizations can lead to greater access of articles to the public. Faculty members at Harvard and researchers funded by the NIH won't be able to publish in a journal that won't allow them to post a free copy due to copyright issues.
"If these trends continue then the publishers will have to adapt in order to continue receiving articles. Faculty members are going to start getting their rights back," Reynolds said.
JScholarship is one of the many electronic resources made available by the library system. The library has an annual budget of $10 million. This past year was the first time that the library had a large percentage of the budget going towards electronic instead of print resources; there is about 56 percent of the budget going to electronic resources.
The Sheridan libraries have over 700,000 books available online as well as 55,000 print and electronic journal subscriptions.
"We try to supply journal subscriptions to fit the needs of faculty members. If a faculty member requests a journal subscription we try to get it," said Elizabeth Mengel, head of collection management. "Currently we are looking into getting the back files of journals we are already subscribed to so that as users you can be at your desk and get what you need."
The official launch of JScholarship was Feb. 1 of this year although we have been piloting the program for almost a year. There is currently very little is available on JScholarship, but they are currently in the process of talking to all the academic departments about obtaining more for JScholarship. The hope is to have more available within six months to a year.
"A number of theses and dissertations, as well as a smattering of research and technical reports are available," Reynolds said.
JScholarship uses free open source software called DSpace. Currently a library programmer is working on software for DSpace that will allow faculty to embargo articles published on JScholarship. This would mean that the article could be made available only to a certain set of people.
Once this software is finished it will be shared with the other users of DSpace. This software is being used by 307 other institutions in 51 countries worldwide. Many other Universities have repositories similar to JScholarship that have been running for a long time.
All files will be backed up and retrievable.
"Digital file formats are always changing and because of this there are a lot of issues relating to the preservation of digital files," Reynolds said.
"Although usable file formats can not be guaranteed, when possible we will be doing file migration from unsupported file types to supported files types."
