Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items) |
- Federal Government Agrees to Open Access to Medicare Data about Individual Doctors | Dark Daily
- Sorting Out the Sharing License Shambles | Techdirt
- Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online | The Public Domain Review
- Boycott Elsevier!
- Publisher statements that may get me on the boycott-peer-review bandwagon
- The Research Works Act is a Distraction that Works
- Wikipedians in Residence: Two Years of Open Culture
- Unglue.it Could Save Public Libraries | Mike Cane’s xBlog
- What have the Publishers ever done for us? And do we need them?
- The Parachute: The Cost of Status Enhancement
- Invisible Institutional Repositories: Addressing the Low Indexing Ratios of IRs in Google Scholar
- Development and Practice of Knowledge Service Platform Based on DSpace
- Use of Open Access Resources by the Engineering Students of Punjab (India)
- Public consultation on the European Research Area Framework, Preliminary Report
- Unglaublich: Archiv der Open-Access-Liste von open-access.net hat große Lücke
- Public Access to Scholarly Publications: Public Comment | The White House
- The Effect of Free Access on the Diffusion of Scholarly Ideas
- Media advisory: More free data on the Statistics Canada website
- Research and Markets: Survey of Scholarly Journal Licensing & Acquisition Practices - In 2011-12, Open Access Journals Will Account for a Mean Of 8.62% of Library Journal Subscriptions | Business Wire
- Fighting poverty together: Open Repository partners with Oxfam
| Federal Government Agrees to Open Access to Medicare Data about Individual Doctors | Dark Daily Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:49 AM PST www.darkdaily.com “In a big step forward for public access to data about provider outcomes, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will make its enormous Medicare claims database more broadly available... Both the press and the public will be able to search for information about individual physicians. It is likely that information about pathologists will be searchable in this manner. Specifically, Medicare will relax its restrictions on the release of information about individual doctors who participate in Medicare. This development was reported recently by The Wall Street Journal, which played a role in getting HHS to make physician data available to the public... [the] data has been largely inaccessible because of a decades-old court injunction...the result from a lawsuit jointly filed in 1979 by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the Florida Medical Association... in January 2011... Dow Jones & Company (DJ), publisher of The Wall Street Journal, filed court papers to overturn the injunction... the company maintained, it barred The Wall Street Journal and other news organizations from fully investigating and exposing abuses in the $500 billion system... The decision by HHS to provide public access to this data is consistent with the trend toward increased transparency in provider outcomes and provider pricing. Dark Daily has predicted that the Medicare program will eventually open data about clinical laboratory test providers and pathology group practices as part of this policy. The goal of the new rule is to give access to Medicare’s extensive claim database to employers, insurance companies, and consumer groups. It allows them to use the data to make comparisons in order to produce report cards on local doctors and hospitals... |
| Sorting Out the Sharing License Shambles | Techdirt Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:47 AM PST www.techdirt.com “At the heart of the various movements based around sharing -- free software, open content, open access etc. -- lie specially drawn-up licenses that grant permissions beyond the minimal ones of copyright. This approach has worked well -- too well, in fact, since it has led to a proliferation of many different licenses: the Open Source Initiative recognizes over 60 of them for open source. That's a problem because slight incompatibilities between them often make it impossible to create combined works drawing on elements released under different licenses. To reduce these incompatibilities there has been a general move towards license simplification...” |
| Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online | The Public Domain Review Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:43 AM PST publicdomainreview.org ... “The public domain is a vast commons of material that is no longer protected by copyright, meaning that the material is free to enjoy, share and build upon without restriction... The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into this whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well known... [The Guide to Finding Interesting Public Works Online]...is intended to assist people who are interested in exploring interesting works which have entered the public domain. It covers: [1] Collecting leads, i.e. Leads on interesting public domain works [that] come from a wide array of sources – from exhibitions, museums, concerts, television, the radio, books, newspapers, talking to people, etc. [2] Online Collections [including films, texts, images, and audio as well as links to resources such as Europeana, the Library of Congress, the Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and others] [3] Legal Stuff [including] ( i) Licensing [to identify and understand works in the public domain using cc licenses and] (ii) When Does a Work Pass Into The Public Domain? [including a brief definition of public domain and links to international resources for understanding laws regulating public domain, to public domain calculators, and tools for checking public domain status]...” |
| Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:42 AM PST Shtetl-Optimized, (27 Jan 2012) “If you’re in academia and haven’t done so yet, please take a moment to sign this online petition organized by Tyler Neylon, and pledge that you won’t publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journals. I’ve been boycotting Elsevier... since 2004... Sure, Elsevier is huge and we’re tiny, but the fight against them is finally gathering steam (possibly because of Elsevier’s support for the ‘Research Works Act’), years after the case against them became inarguable... For more information, see this wonderful recent post by Fields medalist and Shtetl-Optimized commenter Timothy Gowers, entitled ‘Elsevier — my part in its downfall...’” |
| Publisher statements that may get me on the boycott-peer-review bandwagon Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:39 AM PST DrugMonkey, (27 Jan 2012) ... “The original post over on @mbeisen's It is NOT junk blog drew out a Elsevier flack Tom Reller who had a thing or two to say about the Research Works Act being peddled by New York CongressCritter Carolyn Maloney... Mr. Reller claimed:... ‘We call final published articles private sector information products because we (the private sector) have added value, as before mentioned, to the articles...’ I find my self searching for this ‘added value’... One Graham Taylor, flack for the UK Publishers Association, has an opinion bit up in the Guardian (in response to something written by Mike Taylor). Mr. Taylor opines: ‘We need a flow of accessible funds through the scholarly communication system to finance what we do. Hitherto these funds have flowed through academic library budgets, the "old" subscription model, which Dr Taylor describes as "a useful service in pre-internet days". In future they will likely flow from research funding agencies (and a few charities and foundations) looking to enable open access...’ Well, yes and no. We do need to continue to finance the distribution of scientific papers / scientific information. For sure. What we don't need is Mr G. Taylor's "we". The publishers are a classic middle man, standing between the producer and consumer. Sometimes that brings value, sometimes it brings blood sucking leechery that adds cost but no value to the system...” |
| The Research Works Act is a Distraction that Works Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:36 AM PST bjoern.brembs.net “You only have to search for ‘Research Works Act’ or look for the #rwa hashtag on Twitter or follow the increasing number of people signing on to the petitions against RWA... Given this opposition, it seems unlikely that this legislation will pass... The RWA is a distraction that works: for weeks now have open access supporters from all walks of science spent countless hours in opposition to this legislation. All these hours could have been spent developing an alternative scholarly communication system... convincing librarians to withdraw their funds from these publishers by cutting their subscriptions...investing the saved funds from these canceled subscriptions into a system that hosts and makes accessible all scholarly literature and data via our libraries... The corporate publishers make an annual profit of about 4 billion US dollars, or just under 11 million every single day of the year. Elsevier, in 2010, made a profit of about 3 million US$ per day... Hence,from now on, I will try to reduce the amount of opposition to publishers and instead focus my efforts more on convincing librarians to skip commercial publishers altogether and use the funds currently tied up in subscriptions to buy some servers to host all the literature and data... Let's bring our scholarly communication system back into our hands! Hit the publishers where it hurts: their pocketbooks...” |
| Wikipedians in Residence: Two Years of Open Culture Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:31 AM PST Open Knowledge Foundation Blog, (27 Jan 2012) ... “It was just under two years ago when Liam Wyatt proposed... that he serve as the ‘Wikipedian in Residence,’ a role that would allow him cultural institutions [to] share their knowledge with Wikipedia... the British Museum agreed. That basic premise has turned into a global movement known as GLAM-WIKI (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). Today, the GLAM-WIKI community is made up of Wikimedians from around the world who work to establish models and best practices that help cultural institutions share their resources with Wikimedia... The concept of building a mutually beneficial cooperation is at the heart of the Wikipedian in Residence scheme. The main role of a resident is to serve as a liaison between the museum and Wikipedia... Following the British Museum, the Wikipedian in Residence trend began to spread [to]... The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, ... Château de Versailles, Derby Museum and Art Gallery, and the Museu Picasso... the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. In July 2011, Daniel Mietchen became the Wikimedian in Residence on Open Science. Working with the Open Knowledge Foundation, this was the first residency to adapt the GLAM model to open science... Each residency has shown its own strength. At the Derby Museum, Roger Bamkin followed through on an idea to improve the multilingual capabilities of QR codes in exhibits. What resulted was QRpedia, a QR code-generating website that detects the language of the user’s phone and links to the Wikipedia article in that language. QRpedia has now been implemented in museums in the US and Europe and has been nominated for a Smart UK award. Dominic McDevitt-Parks, the Wikipedian in Residence at the NARA, has broken new ground in facilitating the digitization and transcription of primary source materials through Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons. NARA’s cooperation with Wikipedia has been strongly incorporated into their broad strategy of increasing digital accessibility to their holdings and has proven to be a point of pride for the Archivist of the United States, David Ferriero.” |
| Unglue.it Could Save Public Libraries | Mike Cane’s xBlog Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:29 AM PST mikecanex.wordpress.com For background information please see Gluejar whose vision is to build “a place for individuals and institutions to join together to liberate specific ebooks and other types of digital content by paying rights holders to relicense their works under Creative Commons licenses.” “‘....unglue,’ the concept that lies at the heart of Gluejar [is defined as follows]: ‘unglue (v.t.) For an author or publisher to accept a fixed amount of money from the public for its unlimited use of an e-book.’ Hellman [founder and President of Gluejar.Inc and Unglue.it ] wants us to consider... a world in which those who hold the rights to books agree to license them through a Creative Commons arrangement... and at the same time creates an environment in which public funding helps “unglue” the books for digital distribution... Crowdfunding — something already in play within organizations as diverse as the Nature Conservancy, NPR, and Kickstarter — provides the fiscal fuel, making sure that both the creators of the book and Gluejar get compensated for their efforts... [implications:] 1) Print publishing now has a cash-out Exit Strategy if this comes to pass. 2) Writers dumped by their publishers could have a new way to reach new readers... 3) What if all public libraries pooled into one fund each year 1-2% of their budgets for this? ... 4) Those who hold rights to currently not-in-e and out-of-print books could have a way to bring them back to life by having the market decide their value up-front...” |
| What have the Publishers ever done for us? And do we need them? Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:26 AM PST petermr's blog, (29 Jan 2012) ... "Tim Gowers has used Spike Milligan as an inspiration for challenging Elsevier: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/ . British satire is one of the things that keeps us going... Mike Taylor is a dinosaur expert who has got so angry with the publishing industry that he not only blogs about it but wrote an article in the Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/16/academic-publishers-enemies-science where he asserted that ‘Academic publishers have become the enemies of science’. I agree with this phrase... There has been a reply from Graham Taylor – director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the UK Publishers Association http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jan/27/academic-publishers-enemies-science-wrong . It makes the case for why the publishing industry creates value. Some of it is reaction to MikeT’s article, but in a few places it attempts to show why the publishing industry is essential and justifies the 10 billion USD it takes in every year. I have extracted the paragraphs that bear on this:... My analysis. ‘publishers are trying as hard as possible to create Open Access’. This is simply false... ‘we’re publishing more each year so we’re putting our charges up’... But in digital industries we see costs plummeting every year. We expect disks, bandwidth, cpu, to get massively cheaper each year. And the software that creates digital objects improves. So any INNOVATIVE industry would be reducing its costs... Petitions can grow very quickly in the Internet age. And that’s what Tim Gowers and Tyler Neylon have started http://thecostofknowledge.com/. ‘If you would like to declare publicly that you will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate, then you can do so by filling in your details in the box below....’" |
| The Parachute: The Cost of Status Enhancement Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:22 AM PST theparachute.blogspot.com ... “It is a widespread and common misconception, in Academia as well as in publishing circles, that what is being paid for is ‘publishing’. I don’t think it is. Publishing (as in ‘making public’) is actually exceedingly cheap... No, what is being paid for is what might be called ‘status enhancement’. The status of individual researchers, of research departments, of universities, even of whole countries... In order to work as a status enhancement mechanism, publishing has to be formal, with ‘quality’ proxies such as peer-review and citation metrics and Impact Factors, with ‘labels’ (journal titles) that indicate these ‘quality’ markers, with redundancy limitation rules (every article must be unique, ‘self-plagiarism’ is not even allowed), etc. The providers of these services – the ‘hijackers’? – call themselves publishers (whether OA or non-OA), of course, but they are in the employ of those in the ego-system who desire status enhancement... And they charge what they can get away with... Those who have ethical or moral questions – or even just economical questions – about the cost of formal publishing and the profits made, should consider asking those questions as well in relation to the necessity of the desire for status enhancement in Academia. Is the importance of such status enhancement worth the cost?" |
| Invisible Institutional Repositories: Addressing the Low Indexing Ratios of IRs in Google Scholar Posted: 31 Jan 2012 04:53 AM PST Library Hi Tech 30 (1), (03 Feb 2012) (Not OA.) From the Abstract: Purpose - Google Scholar has difficulty indexing the contents of institutional repositories, and the authors hypothesize the reason is that most repositories use Dublin Core, which cannot express bibliographic citation information adequately for academic papers. Google Scholar makes specific recommendations for repositories, including the use of publishing industry metadata schemas over Dublin Core. This paper tests a theory that transforming metadata schemas in institutional repositories will lead to increased indexing by Google Scholar. Design/methodology/approach - The authors conducted two surveys of institutional and disciplinary repositories across the United States, using different methodologies. They also conducted three pilot projects that transformed the metadata of a subset of papers from USpace, the University of Utah's institutional repository, and examined the results of Google Scholar's explicit harvests. Findings - Repositories that use GS recommended metadata schemas and express them in HTML meta tags experienced significantly higher indexing ratios. The ease with which search engine crawlers can navigate a repository also seems to affect indexing ratio. The second and third metadata transformation pilot projects at Utah were successful, ultimately achieving an indexing ratio of greater than 90%. |
| Development and Practice of Knowledge Service Platform Based on DSpace Posted: 31 Jan 2012 04:51 AM PST Advances in Computer Science and Education, 163-9 (2012) (Not OA.) Abstract: In this paper, a knowledge service platform according with the features of universities is established after second development and revision of DSpace. The main development process is described in detail, which includes the specification of metadata, the encapsulation of core service based on SRU, the OAI-based metadata harvesting and the user-centered service optimization. |
| Use of Open Access Resources by the Engineering Students of Punjab (India) Posted: 31 Jan 2012 04:43 AM PST International Journal of Library and Information Science 4 (1), 10-5 (Jan 2012) Abstract: This study presents the results of a survey that assessed engineering student’s familiarity with use of open access resources in Punjab (India). The survey was made through questionnaires and completed by 460 respondents. Respondents were generally familiar with open access sources including open access journals, institutional repositories and self-archived materials on the web. Respondents’ attitudes toward open access varied, but most agreed that open access resources are of high quality and that open access would benefit them. In helping researchers find open access information, more respondents had used open access journals than institutional repositories or self-archived materials. Some of the challenges faced by the student fraternity in accessing these resources have been enlisted and appropriate recommendations have also been given. |
| Public consultation on the European Research Area Framework, Preliminary Report Posted: 31 Jan 2012 04:26 AM PST European Commission, Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, (Jan 2012) From the Executive summary: The public consultation on the 'ERA Framework: Areas of untapped potential for the development of the European Research Area' (launched on 13 September 2010) closed on 30 November 2011. This report synthesises the responses to the consultation based on the 590 responses received to the on-line questionnaire as well as the 101 ad hoc contributions received by the end of December 2011 submitted mostly as position papers by national and European research organisations and in the form of official positions of Members States/Associated countries from ministries or national governments. The responses from national and European organisations which represent the interests and views of significant numbers of research stakeholders as well as the official responses from member states point to cross-border operations, Open Access and international co-operation as priorities on a similar footing as researcher-related issues. Open Access: - Open Access to scientific publications and data enhances knowledge circulation and needs to be improved. - National Open Access policies and their coordination in the ERA are insufficient. - In addition, researchers are not sufficiently aware of Open Access to research results. - The actions suggested at EU level to remedy existing barriers include increasing stakeholders' awareness, facilitating the exchange of best practices and setting standards for the establishment of repositories and data-sharing practices. Respondents see a key role for the European Commission in co-ordinating national initiatives, and in monitoring and promoting Open Access policies to publications and data. |
| Unglaublich: Archiv der Open-Access-Liste von open-access.net hat große Lücke Posted: 31 Jan 2012 04:18 AM PST Archivalia, (31 Jan 2012) |
| Public Access to Scholarly Publications: Public Comment | The White House Posted: 30 Jan 2012 06:22 PM PST www.whitehouse.gov "On November 3, 2011, OSTP released a Request for Information (RFI) soliciting public input on long-term preservation of, and public access to, the results of federally funded research, including peer-reviewed scholarly publications as required in the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010. Below are the public comments received by OSTP during the comment period. You can read the RFI on public access to scholarly publications here. Comments on the questions in the RFI were accepted through January 12, 2012. OSTP previously conducted a public consultation about policy options for expanding public access to federally funded peer-reviewed scholarly articles (the full set of comments is here). This RFI takes that process another step, seeking further guidance on access to scientific publications. OSTP has established an interagency policy group under the National Science and Technology Council—the Task Force on Public Access to Scholarly Publications—to identify the specific objectives and public interests that need to be addressed by any policies in this area. The group will take into account the varying missions, types of data, standards, and dissemination models associated with the range of Federal science agencies and scientific disciplines, and will help OSTP address other public access requirements in the COMPETES Act...." |
| The Effect of Free Access on the Diffusion of Scholarly Ideas Posted: 30 Jan 2012 02:01 PM PST MIS Speaker's Series, University of Arizona, (24 Jan 2012) From the Abstract: By using a dataset from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), an open repository of research articles, and employing a natural experiment that allows the estimation of the value of free access separate from confounding factors such as early viewership and quality differential, this study identifies the causal effect of free access on the citation counts. The natural experiment in this study is that a select group of published articles is posted on SSRN at a time chosen by their authors' affiliated organizations or SSRN, not by their authors. Using a difference-in-difference method and comparing the citation profiles of the articles before and after the posting time on SSRN against a group of control articles with similar characteristics, I estimated the effect of the SSRN posting on citation counts. The articles posted on SSRN receive more citations even prior to being posted on SSRN, suggesting that they are of higher quality. Their citation counts further increase after being posted, gaining an additional 10-20% of citations. This gain is likely to be caused by the free access that SSRN provides. |
| Media advisory: More free data on the Statistics Canada website Posted: 30 Jan 2012 12:06 PM PST |
| Posted: 27 Jan 2012 03:28 PM PST www.businesswire.com “Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Survey of Scholarly Journal Licensing & Acquisition Practices, 2012 Edition" report to their offering. This 106-page report examines the scholarly journal licensing and acquisition practices of academic and special libraries, highlighting trends in journal subscriptions, publishers' pricing policies, and library spending on both print and online access journals. Based on a survey of 47 libraries from the United States and abroad, the report details library budgets for scholarly journals over the past two years as well as projections through 2013 while exploring the library's relationship and satisfaction with various subscription agents, including Ebsco, Harrasowitz, and Swets, among others. How has the open access movement affected journal prices and how willing have libraries been to embrace it? How many subscriptions have libraries cancelled over the past year and how many new ones have they added? What role do consortia play in journal purchasing and how do they affect journal acquisition policies? ... For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/6bbfb1/survey_of_scholarl...” |
| Fighting poverty together: Open Repository partners with Oxfam Posted: 27 Jan 2012 03:25 PM PST www.eurekalert.org “Today, Oxfam GB adopts 'Open Repository' – the service from open access specialist BioMed Central, which allows organizations to build, launch, host and maintain their own repositories... Oxfam works with others to overcome poverty and suffering and to have the greatest possible impact on the lives of poor people worldwide... Capturing and structuring, and then showcasing, Oxfam's extremely large and ever evolving output of research and policy information from these programmes was a significant challenge for the organization. Through partnership with pioneering open access publisher BioMed Central, Oxfam now has a flexible, reliable repository solution which allows it to organize and share this material on a global basis... ‘Our repository, the Oxfam iLibrary, will have an immediate impact on our own ways of working internally and, with our new information website (www.oxfam.org.uk/policyandpractice) now live, will make our content available to external audiences across the world.’ BioMed Central's Open Repository service provides an extremely cost effective solution for institutions looking to showcase their open access research. Open Repository is built upon the latest version of DSpace, an open-source solution for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works. Customers of Open Repository benefit from updated system features not only from DSpace themselves, but also from BioMed Central's team who are continually working to enhance their repository service...” |
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