Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items) |
- 1812 Almanac is Milestone Book for UNC Digitization Program
- The Story of Tahira Mughal, Assistant Professor of Botany at the Lahore College for Women University
- Open Access is a business
- Frontiers | Decoupling the scholarly journal | Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience
- A .data Top-Level Internet Domain?
- Nuthing But.Net: My reply to the "Public Access to Digital Data" RFI
- The Data-Mining's The Thing: Shakespeare Takes Center Stage In The Digital Age
- Open-Data-Bewegung: App ins Leben - Medien - Tagesspiegel
- Ten Million and Counting | www.hathitrust.org
- Copyright Clearance Center Acquires Pubget
- Nuit Blanche: Tim Gowers' Model of Mathematical Publishing
- Taking on the jobs argument for the RWA
- Elsevier under fire from American OA advocates
- BYU scholar is a leader in advancing education technology
- 20 things you need to know before you self-publish
- Unfortunate: 'Open' Advocate Darrell Issa Sponsoring Bill That Will Close Off Open Access To Gov't Funded Research | Techdirt
- Copyright Corruption Scandal Surrounds Anti-Piracy Campaign | TorrentFreak
- Request for Logic: Why does the ACM act against the interests of scholars?
- Nuit Blanche: You think peer review as currently implemented suck ? Wait till it is going to be the only way to publish
- Open Access Needs Better 'Government Relations'
- Have many not-for-profit scholarly publishers joined the private sector? If so, has anyone checked their tax status lately?
- Time for academics to withdraw free labour
- The enormous profits of STM scholarly publishers
- What *should* the publishers lobby for?
- Cameron Neylon, IP Contributions to Scientific Papers by Publishers: An open letter to Rep Maloney and Issa
- Informing public access to peer reviewed scholarly publications and data resulting from publicly funded research
- Could Elsevier shut down arxiv.org?
- Threat of job loss as motivation for Research Works Act: real or fear-mongering?
- The Research Works Act would deny taxpayers access to federally funded research. | Crude Matter, Scientific American Blog Network
- Real Intellectual Property Theft
- Research Bought, Then Paid For - NYTimes.com
- Wikipedia is one way to share knowledge - SciDev.Net
- Illustrations of the global reach of the open access movement
| 1812 Almanac is Milestone Book for UNC Digitization Program Posted: 11 Jan 2012 08:14 AM PST www.lib.unc.edu "Two hundred years after its publication, Thomas Henderson’s 1812 North Carolina Almanack has a new digital life. It is the 10,000th book that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library has digitized from its collections...." |
| The Story of Tahira Mughal, Assistant Professor of Botany at the Lahore College for Women University Posted: 11 Jan 2012 08:11 AM PST Metadata, (10 Jan 2012) "The open-access movement has freed up scholarly communication. One example of this new freedom is Dr. Tahira Aziz Mughal, a young and prolific Pakistani woman researcher. She is a rising star of open access, for all of the peer-reviewed articles she has published since starting on tenure track have appeared in open-access journals...." |
| Posted: 11 Jan 2012 08:10 AM PST Social Disruption, (09 Jan 2012) "It wasn’t originally supposed to be a business, not in the beginning. If you look at the Bethesda, Budapest and Berlin statements, I doubt you’ll find any detailed business models or conspiracy plans. But once publishers, researchers and libraries got involved, I think it was only a matter of time before we saw business rear it’s head. The two most recent US bills introduced: SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, and RWA – the Research Works Act, are examples of why OA is a business. Both of these bills are targeting content that lies outside of the traditional publishing environment. Content that used to be controlled solely by a small number of companies, some private and some public...." |
| Frontiers | Decoupling the scholarly journal | Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience Posted: 11 Jan 2012 08:07 AM PST www.frontiersin.org Abstract: Although many observers have advocated the reform of the scholarly publishing system, improvements to functions like peer review have been adopted sluggishly. We argue that this is due to the tight coupling of the journal system: the system's essential functions of archiving, registration, dissemination, and certification are bundled together and siloed into tens of thousands of individual journals. This tight coupling makes it difficult to change any one aspect of the system, choking out innovation. We suggest that the solution is the “decoupled journal.” In this system, the functions are unbundled and performed as services, able to compete for patronage and evolve in response to the market. For instance, a scholar might deposit an article in her institutional repository, have it copyedited and typeset by one company, indexed for search by several others, self-marketed over her own social networks, and peer reviewed by one or more stamping agencies that connect her paper to external reviewers. The decoupled journal brings publishing out of its current 17th-century paradigm, and creates a Web-like environment of loosely joined pieces—a marketplace of tools that, like the Web, evolves quickly in response to new technologies and users' needs. Importantly, this system is able to evolve from the current one, requiring only the continued development of bolt-on services external to the journal, particularly for peer review. |
| A .data Top-Level Internet Domain? Posted: 11 Jan 2012 08:05 AM PST Stephen Wolfram Blog, (10 Jan 2012) "My concept for the .data domain is to use it to create the “data web”—in a sense a parallel construct to the ordinary web, but oriented toward structured data intended for computational use. The notion is that alongside a website like wolfram.com, there’d be wolfram.data. If a human went to wolfram.data, there’d be a structured summary of what data the organization behind it wanted to expose. And if a computational system went there, it’d find just what it needs to ingest the data, and begin computing with it...." |
| Nuthing But.Net: My reply to the "Public Access to Digital Data" RFI Posted: 11 Jan 2012 08:04 AM PST www.nuthingbut.net "I am writing to the OSTP office concerning the “Request for Information: Public Access to Digital Data Resulting From Federally Funded Scientific Research” ..." |
| The Data-Mining's The Thing: Shakespeare Takes Center Stage In The Digital Age Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:56 AM PST "Folger Shakespeare Library director Michael Witmore is using 21st-century tools to analyze the Bard's work. When data-mining techniques borrowed from the sciences and business research were applied to classic Shakespearean plays, surprising discoveries were made...." |
| Open-Data-Bewegung: App ins Leben - Medien - Tagesspiegel Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:55 AM PST |
| Ten Million and Counting | www.hathitrust.org Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:55 AM PST www.hathitrust.org "HathiTrust reached a major milestone on January 5, 2012, exceeding 10 million volumes in its digital collections. More than 2.7 million of these volumes are in the public domain, with viewing and downloading options available online. Statistics about the collections and a graph charting growth over time are available below (see also Statistics and Visualizations). We have also prepared a timeline noting significant events on our way to 10 million volumes. As of January 5, 2012, 23 of HathiTrust's 67 partners are depositing content in the repository. Details on contributions by institution can be found in our monthly updates. See also our News and Publications page for press releases, papers, presentations, and more about HathiTrust over the last several years...." |
| Copyright Clearance Center Acquires Pubget Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:53 AM PST www.copyright.com "Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), a not-for-profit organization and leading source of licensing solutions, has acquired MA-based Pubget, a solutions provider focused on expediting the acquisition and analysis of content. Pubget offers search, retrieval and browse capabilities for content. Its solutions make research more efficient by simplifying the process of finding, managing and analyzing information. Pubget has served more than 5 million researchers and 500 research centers in 2011...." |
| Nuit Blanche: Tim Gowers' Model of Mathematical Publishing Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:51 AM PST |
| Taking on the jobs argument for the RWA Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:47 AM PST plus.google.com "The Association of American Publishers (AAP) contends that the Research Works Act (RWA) is necessary to protect jobs and sustainability in the publishing industry <http://goo.gl/aaVnw>. Here are five arguments against this unargued claim...." |
| Elsevier under fire from American OA advocates Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:45 AM PST openaccess.nl "Looking a bit further in the MapLight database that tracks political contributions you can even find that Darrell Isa received US$ 13,900 from the publishing industry over the past 5 years of which US$ 5000 from Elsevier. Whereas representative Carolyn Maloney even received a total of 85,790 US$ from the publishing industry in the USA in the past 5 years, of which 39,050 US$ from Elsevier over that period. Interestingly the CEO of AAP, T.H. Allen, also made a contribution to Carolyn Maloney in 2010...." |
| BYU scholar is a leader in advancing education technology Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:41 AM PST www.sltrib.com "When David Wiley sees something broken, he wants to fix it, especially if it has to do with access to education. With emerging technology that can transform the way instructional content is delivered, the Brigham Young University scholar contends that now is the time to reform a system bogged down by proprietary concerns....Now he has a new platform for that pursuit, as a senior fellow with Digital Promise, a congressionally authorized center devoted to developing technologies that improve teaching and learning. He starts his work Monday with the Washington-based nonprofit, which is funded by education-oriented foundations and the U.S. Department of Education...." |
| 20 things you need to know before you self-publish Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:40 AM PST Higher Education Network | guardian.co.uk, (09 Jan 2012) "There is no lack of intellectual integrity in open access or self-publishing: The perceived lack of elite positioning in self-publishing is rapidly changing. My biggest argument for self-publishing and for open access in the academic community, is this: Would you rather wait two years for your work to appear in a learned journal locked behind a firewall and read by few, or would you like to get your fantastic arguments out to the public in a month and accessible to many? I'm on the editorial board of Learned Publishing and we've published papers that demonstrate that impact has far more to do with access than with peer review...." |
| Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:38 AM PST www.techdirt.com "Furthermore, the bill appears to create a new copyright-like "right" for publishers outside of copyright itself. That is, it grants the final say in permission to the publisher, rather than the copyright holder. So, even in a case where an author retains the copyright, or retains distribution rights, this bill could potentially grant the publisher extra rights out of thin air....There's no two ways about it. This is a bad and dangerous bill that will only serve to lock up important, taxpayer-funded research. As we've discussed in detail in the past, such locking up of research does tremendous harm to important scientific research, puts people in harm's way and slows down innovation. It's tremendously disappointing that Rep. Darrell Issa would be behind such a bill. It really does seem to go against everything that he stands for...." |
| Copyright Corruption Scandal Surrounds Anti-Piracy Campaign | TorrentFreak Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:33 AM PST torrentfreak.com "Anti-piracy group BREIN is caught up in a huge copyright scandal in the Netherlands. A musician who composed a track for use at a local film festival later found it being used without permission in an anti-piracy campaign. He is now claiming at least a million euros for the unauthorized distribution of his work on DVDs...." |
| Request for Logic: Why does the ACM act against the interests of scholars? Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:31 AM PST requestforlogic.blogspot.com "[T]he "Research Works Act" makes it clear that ACM's membership in the Association of American Publishers is an egregious and unacceptable instance of working against the interest of scholars and ACM members. We should be thinking about how to demand that our professional organization, the Association for Computing Machinery, do two things: 1) withdraw from the Association of American Publishers 2) take the clear position that the so-called "Research Works Act" is an unacceptable piece of legislation that is not supported by the computer science community...." |
| Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:28 AM PST nuit-blanche.blogspot.com "Nobody seems to say it aloud, so let me be clear on that: the only thing a commercial or non-profit publisher does is brand an article based on free external advice...." |
| Open Access Needs Better 'Government Relations' Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:24 AM PST bjoern.brembs.net "Apparently, the Open Access movement is falling behind and needs better 'Government Relations'. Today, everyone has their "Vice President for Government Relations" or some other office like that: Universities (e.g., University of Colorado, UM, Rice, the UC system, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Washington State, University of Minnesota, Columbia, Carnegie Mellon, only to name a few), professors (via AAUP) and of course, the scholarly publishing industry, for example Elsevier's Angelika Lex, "Vice President for Academic and Government Relations"....These past few days, we've seen a rare glimpse into how these publishers secure their profits. Not only do they invest in full-time employees whose sole purpose it is to lobby governments into preventing Open Access. They also buy access to elected members of parliaments....Given this continuity in their efforts to block Open Access, it is not entirely unrealistic to expect the industry to oppose OA on multiple levels at the same time and wage war by attacking OA in a two-pronged approach on two fronts simultaneously: both by supporting RWA and by providing many industry-friendly answers to the OSTP RFIs. Given the attention RWA has gotten, maybe we will be able to block this legislation, but have enough of OA supporters sent in their answers to the OSTP RFIs? ..." |
| Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:17 AM PST The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, (06 Jan 2012) "The Association of American Publishers (AAP) applaud the “Research Works Act,” bipartisan legislation to end government mandates on private-sector scholarly publishing....This is an awful bill, which would prevent the U.S. government from requiring public access to research funded by the U.S. public....Among the members of the AAP are many traditional not-for-profit publishers, such as scholarly societies and university presses. If they are now claiming, through AAP, to be private-sector publishers, does this mean their not-for-profit status has changed? If so, has anyone checked their tax status lately? Yet another reason for such publishers to denounce the AAP's stand and distance themselves from AAP until such time as AAP stops supporting this move against the public interest." |
| Time for academics to withdraw free labour Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:13 AM PST BishopBlog, (07 Jan 2012) "Jack is a sheep farmer. He gets some government subsidies, and also works long hours to keep his sheep happy and healthy. When his beasts are ready for slaughter, he offers them to an abattoir. The abattoir is very choosy and may reject Jack’s sheep, which is a disaster for him, as there is no other route to the market. If he is lucky the abattoir will accept the animals, slaughter them and sell them, at a large profit, to the supermarket. Jack does not see any of this money. The populace struggle to afford the price of meat, but the government has no control over this. When Jack feels like a nice piece of lamb, he buys it from the supermarket. Meanwhile, Jack provides his services for free as an inspector of other farmers’ animals. Crazy story, right? But that’s the model that academic publishing follows....But as from now, I shall include publisher in the criteria I adopt, and avoid Elsevier as far as I can. Also, if asked to review for a journal, I’ll check if it is in the Elsevier stable, using this handy website, and if so, I’ll explain why I’m not prepared to review. I suggest that if you are as annoyed as I am by this story, you do likewise, and refuse to engage with Elsevier journals...." |
| The enormous profits of STM scholarly publishers Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:09 AM PST The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, (08 Jan 2012) "All are in the for-profit sector, and the profits are enormous. As reported in the Economist (2011): “Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through the recession. Last year it made £724m ($1.1 billion) on revenues of £2 billion —an operating-profit margin of 36%”. Springer’s Science + Business Media (2010) reported a return on sales (operating profit) of 33.9% or € 294 million on revenue of € 866 million, an increase of 4% over the profit of the previous year. In the first quarter of 2012, John Wiley & Sons (2011) reported profit of $106 million for their scientific, medical, technical and scholarly division on revenue of $253 million, a profit rate of 42%. This represents an increase in the profit rate of 13% over the previous year. The operating profit rate for the academic division of Informa.plc (2011, p. 4) for the first half of 2011 was 32.4%, or £47 million on revenue of £145 million, an increase of 3.3% over the profit of the previous year...." |
| What *should* the publishers lobby for? Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:08 AM PST Research Remix, (08 Jan 2012) "The Research Works Act is a very poor move by traditional publishers. Publishers will come out strongest if they side with the future: the future is immediately open, reusable, all-value-added versions of research results and peer reviewed publications....What *should* traditional publishers fight for, to stay on the right side of both history and their balance sheets? [1] Time. They should insist that any federal mandate that requires the article-of-record be made openly, immediately available does not take effect for a year or two, to give themselves time to change their business models (to author/funder pay-on-publish or pay-on-submit or some other method, thereby saving their companies and jobs). [2] Access to publication funds for federally-funded authors. Publication costs are already available to NSF and NIH awardees as budget line items in grants. I don’t know if all other federally-funded investigators have access to author-pays grant money… if not, publishers should argue that access to these resources must be a condition of a mandate. There must be a creative way to redirect money which payed for university library subscriptions into university OA funds or federally-disseminated research distribution reimbursement (has anyone proposed such an approach yet?)…. publishers should lobby for this. [3] Measurement of the impact of the papers they publish. When research papers are openly distributed, redistributed, deconstructed, and mashed up it becomes much harder for publishers to understand (and therefore brag about, and then capitalize on with higher publication charges) the impact their publications have had vis-a-vis their competitors. Publishers could insist that all federal hosting services report back usage stats (as PubMed Central does), and lobby for requiring a manner of attribution that facilitates easy and robust impact tracking (beyond just mention or citation)...." |
| Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:05 AM PST cameronneylon.net "As a researcher I like to base my work on solid data, so I thought it might interest you to have some quantitation of the level of contribution of IP that publishers make to the substance of scientific papers....Methodology: I examined the final submitted version (i.e. the version accepted for publication) of the ten most recent research papers on which I was an author along with the referee and editorial comments received from the publisher. For each paper I examined the text of the final submitted version and the diagrams and figures....Results: The contribution of IP by publishers to the final submitted versions of these ten papers, after peer review had been completed, was zero. Zip. Nada. Zilch...." |
| Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:03 AM PST Open Science Working Group, (06 Jan 2012) "Controlling access to a resource is a common way to generate profit; because gold is inherently hard to access, it is a good basis for an economy. Similarly, all sorts of materials that are found to have desirable properties become valuable, usually as a function of their desirability in relation to accessibility. Digital artefacts, however, are very easy to copy and distribute. In cases where an industry has grown up around the distribution of a product that has become digitally easy to copy and share, efforts have been made to artificially maintain that difficulty via the application of the concept of digital piracy....Encumbering digital artefacts with artificial accessibility restrictions does not make them hard to find, copy, or distribute – it just makes them needlessly complicated...." |
| Could Elsevier shut down arxiv.org? Posted: 11 Jan 2012 07:01 AM PST The Quantum Pontiff, (01 Jan 2012) "I think that appealing to Elsevier’s love of open scientific discourse is misguided. Individual employees there might be civic-minded, but ultimately they have $10 billion worth of reasons not to let the internet drive the costs of scientific publishing down to zero. Fortunately, their business model relies on the help of governments and academics. We can do our part to stop them by not publishing in, or refereeing for, their journals....There is another concrete way to stand up for open access. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has requested comments on the question of public access to federally-funded scientific research...." |
| Threat of job loss as motivation for Research Works Act: real or fear-mongering? Posted: 11 Jan 2012 06:58 AM PST Research Remix, (07 Jan 2012) "I find it difficult to silently read the AAP endorsement of the Research Works Act. Multiple readings later I still find myself yelling aloud at its twisted positions and statements. Most of my rebuttals take the form of expletive + “no, that isn’t true” or “give me a break” + a silent prayer that policymakers won’t take the positions seriously. But what about the AAP threat that the industry and 30,000 jobs are in danger if the government supports, requests, or requires more open scholarship? I suspect many politicians in the US government will take that very seriously. Threatening job losses in the US right now is a Great Card, and publishers keep bringing it to the table. The Jobs Card makes me furious because *if* scholarship can be done better it *should* be done better, full stop. But with the government really considering about these issues and soliciting feedback, it is time to get beyond that and see if, you know, it happens to be true that 30,000 US jobs are in jeopardy. If so, we need to figure out how to address that in our discussions, because we can be darn sure the government will balance that against the benefits of openness. First, what is at risk? Scholarly publishing as an industry isn’t going away any time soon: physicists have arXiv and they still publish in journals. What is at risk is the traditional subscription-based business model. If the scholarly article-of-record is made immediately available with no restrictions, there is no reason for anyone to pay subscription fees. Luckily, BMC and PLoS have already demonstrated that an author/author’s funder-pays model can work (at least for fields funded by federal money, with access to publication budget line items… the same fields that would be subject to federal mandates on openness). Traditional publishers could move to this model if they wanted to. So what is at risk is the business model, not the industry....Publishers are fear mongering with talk of loss of jobs. As far as I can tell, there is no big risk, if publishers are willing to move with the times and embrace new business models...." |
| Posted: 11 Jan 2012 06:57 AM PST |
| Real Intellectual Property Theft Posted: 11 Jan 2012 06:55 AM PST Julian Sanchez, (19 Dec 2011) "The pillaging of the public domain is real “intellectual property theft.” How about a crackdown on that?" |
| Research Bought, Then Paid For - NYTimes.com Posted: 11 Jan 2012 04:54 AM PST www.nytimes.com "The [Research Works Act] is backed by the powerful Association of American Publishers and sponsored by Representatives Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, and Darrell Issa, a Republican from California. The publishers argue that they add value to the finished product, and that requiring them to provide free access to journal articles within a year of publication denies them their fair compensation. After all, they claim, while the research may be publicly funded, the journals are not. But in fact, the journals receive billions of dollars in subscription payments derived largely from public funds. The value they say they add lies primarily in peer review, the process through which works are assessed for validity and significance before publication. But while the journals manage that process, it is carried out almost entirely by researchers who volunteer their time. Scientists are expected to participate in peer review as part of their employment, and thus the publicly funded salaries most of them draw through universities or research organizations are yet another way in which taxpayers already subsidize the publishing process. "Rather than rolling back public access, Congress should move to enshrine a simple principle in United States law: if taxpayers paid for it, they own it....But it is not just Congress that should act. For too long scientists, libraries and research institutions have supported the publishing status quo out of a combination of tradition and convenience. But the latest effort to overturn the N.I.H.’s public access policy should dispel any remaining illusions that commercial publishers are serving the interests of the scientific community and public...." |
| Wikipedia is one way to share knowledge - SciDev.Net Posted: 11 Jan 2012 03:17 AM PST |
| Illustrations of the global reach of the open access movement Posted: 10 Jan 2012 11:02 PM PST The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, (11 Jan 2012) Two charts, based on data from DOAJ and OpenDOAR, illustrate the global reach of the open access movement. Both show Europe with the largest share (40% range), followed by North America (20% range). Third place is South America for journals, Asia for repositories. |
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