Wednesday 1 February 2012

Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items)

Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items)


Sublime threats and ridiculous consequences as the works of 3 great English writers enter the global public domain

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 04:51 AM PST

 
Sublime threats and ridiculous consequences as the works of 3 great English writers enter the global public domain
James Firth
Slightly Right of Centre, (30 Jan 2012)
“Copyright enforcement may be seen as a global problem, but drafting new obligations like ACTA via the back door of a "trade agreement" in secret and outside of the world bodies responsible for overseeing global intellectual property treaties and the trade in copyright-protected works risks overlooking the complexity of the problem... In an era where very low barriers to self-publishing make us all both copyright owners and capable of serious infringement, fundamental questions about enforceability and proportionality are being raised. Will a system of copyright which attempts to detect and punish every minor infringement ever work? At least not without the threat of disproportionate punishment alongside the ability of Big Brother to monitor every web server, internet connection and home computer... “

F1000 Research

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:44 PM PST

 
F1000 Research
f1000research.com
"We are delighted to announce our plans to launch F1000 Research (from Faculty of 1000), a novel, fully Open Access publishing program. The project, which will begin publishing later this year, is intended to address three major issues afflicting scientific publishing today: timely dissemination of research, peer review and sharing of data....The default will be to use the most open of the Creative Commons licences, CC-BY for articles and, although we will not be hosting the data ourselves, we will be encouraging use of the CC0 licence for the data...."

ACL Anthology: A Digital Archive of Research Papers in Computational Linguistics

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:26 PM PST

Invisible Institutional Repositories: Addressing the Low Indexing Ratios of IRs in Google Scholar

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:10 PM PST

 
Invisible Institutional Repositories: Addressing the Low Indexing Ratios of IRs in Google Scholar
Kenning Arlitsch and Patrick Obrien
Library Hi Tech 30 (1), (03 Feb 2012)
From the abstract: 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....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....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%....The second survey was limited to forty titles from each of seven repositories, for a total of 280 titles. A larger survey that covers more repositories may be useful....Institutional repositories are achieving significant mass, and the rate of author citations from those repositories may affect university rankings. Lack of visibility in Google Scholar, however, will limit the ability of IRs to play a more significant role in those citation rates....

Interlending and document supply: a review of the recent literature: 77

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 06:07 PM PST

 
Interlending and document supply: a review of the recent literature: 77
Mike McGrath
Interlending & Document Supply 40 (1)
From the abstract: "Purpose - To review the current LIS literature for document supply and related topics....Based on the reading of about 150 journals, reports and web sites....[T]he price of Big Deals are under greater attack than ever. and alternatives are being acticle explored. A more assertive approach is being adopted to expand the role of Open Access. Resistance is growing, particularly in the UK, to the publishers' ability to override copyright law in their contracts with libraries...."

New Crowdfunding Initiative to Unglue Ebooks Launches in Alpha

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 05:58 PM PST

 
New Crowdfunding Initiative to Unglue Ebooks Launches in Alpha
newsbreaks.infotoday.com
"Imagine this: a site that wants people to donate money for a book they love so others can read and enjoy it. It’s an altruistic public-broadcasting kind of model called Unglue.It that its founder says can work for making ebooks more accessible. Unglue.It hopes to offer a win-win solution to readers who want to read and share their favorite books conveniently and to rightsholders who want to be rewarded for their works. Eric Hellman, the founder and president of Gluejar, Inc., the company behind Unglue.It, says, “eBook distribution is even cheaper than radio, because you don’t have to pay for transmitter power, and you don't have to own a frequency license. It’s the monetization machinery that costs money: the ecommerce systems and the DRM. If the producers of ebooks had some way of covering their fixed costs (with profit to make it worth their while), ebooks could work just like free radio.” Unglue.It is free for users to join and explore. Anyone can go to the website and create a list of books they’d like to be “unglued.” Supporters pay only if they choose to support campaigns, and the amount is up to them. Unglue.It takes a small percentage from successful campaigns, with the remainder going to the rights holders. The books will be issued with a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. This license will make the edition free and legal for everyone to read, copy, and share, noncommercially, worldwide—i.e., unglued...."

CIDRAP >> Experts continue to clash over NSABB recommendation

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 05:55 PM PST

 
CIDRAP >> Experts continue to clash over NSABB recommendation
www.cidrap.umn.edu
"As more details emerged today on an advisory group's recommendation for scientific journals to withhold key details of H5N1 transmission studies, another round of discussion on both sides of the controversy played out today on the pages of a major microbiology journal. Three viewpoints on the topic appeared in mBio, the online open access journal of the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). Two supported the recommendation to withhold details about the study methodology and mutations due to bioterror concerns, which have been raised by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), a panel of independent experts that advises the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on dual-use research issues. The third commentary argued for releasing the full details of the studies...."

American Anthropological Association Takes Public Stand against Open Access | Neuroanthropology

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 05:53 PM PST

 
American Anthropological Association Takes Public Stand against Open Access | Neuroanthropology
blogs.plos.org
"On January 12th, 2012, the American Anthropological Association took a firm stance against any further expansion of public access to research. In a letter submitted to the White House, and signed by Executive Director William Davis III on behalf of the Association, the AAA argues that there is already broad scholarly access to published research, and that a move to an open-access model would cripple the Association’s ability to publish its journals. Hence, “no federal government intervention is currently necessary.” Three points of the letter will likely provoke controversy among the members of the American Anthropological Association...."

Academic publishing is full of problems; lets get them right.

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 05:46 PM PST

 
Academic publishing is full of problems; lets get them right.
Copyright Librarian, (25 Jan 2012)
"I think I've pretty much fully addressed the misconception of a "publisher/JSTOR nexus", but wanted to point out that continuing to provide print access is not the thing that's hanging up this dysfunctional cycle. Online-only access carries plenty of costs of its own. The non-profit open access publisher PLoS charges a publication fee of couple thousand dollars an article to underwrite only some of their costs. Many institutions or grants underwrite open access publishing fees or even whole open access publications, though. In the long-run, the costs are much lower to institutions than when subsidizing commercial profits....There are things JSTOR does that I do have issues with. I wish it was doing more to provide more open access to the public domain materials it holds, for example...."

DataFlow project

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 05:37 PM PST

 
DataFlow project
www.dataflow.ox.ac.uk
"DataFlow is creating a two-stage data management infrastructure that makes it easy for you and your research group to manage your research data. You manage this locally using your own instance of DataStage, while allowing your institution to deploy DataBank easily to preserve and publish your most valuable datasets. Published datasets have assigned DOIs to make them citable and to gain you academic credit...."

Welcome to the VIDaaS website

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 05:36 PM PST

 
Welcome to the VIDaaS website
"VIDaaS (Virtual Infrastructure with Database as a Service) is a project of two halves. The 'DaaS' part will develop software that enables researchers to build, edit, search, and share databases online; the 'VI' part involves the development of an infrastructure enabling the DaaS to function within a cloud computing environment...."

E-presses punch above their weight

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 05:02 PM PST

 
E-presses punch above their weight
www.theaustralian.com.au
"Without professional bookshop distribution and conventional marketing, it is true, it is difficult to be taken seriously by established review organs and make the social and cultural impact a press might hope for (which is why MonUP has such distribution and marketing), but if the cost of these things is an unworkable business model and comparatively low readership, is it worth it? What kind of an impact can you make if you go broke or are not actually read except by those people who purchase a copy of your title during the few months a store will generally stock your book (which is why MonUP titles are also available online open-access)? ..."

American Anthropology Association FAIL!!!! This Time on an Epic Scale

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 04:47 PM PST

 
American Anthropology Association FAIL!!!! This Time on an Epic Scale
Doug Rocks-Macqueen
Doug's Archaeology, (31 Jan 2012)
Posted by Klausgraf to oa.new on Wed Feb 01 2012 at 00:47 UTC | info | related

Your Comments on Access to Federally Funded Scientific Research Results | The White House

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 03:48 PM PST

 
Your Comments on Access to Federally Funded Scientific Research Results | The White House
www.whitehouse.gov
"In November, OSTP issued two Requests for Information—one on Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research and the other on Public Access to Digital Data Resulting From Federally Funded Scientific Research. Today we are posting the public comments for those two solicitations and encourage you to take a look at what scientists, citizens, publishers, scientific societies, libraries and other stakeholders had to say. Comments to the scholarly publications RFI are available here, and comments to the digital data RFI are here. We received 118 comments on public access to digital data and 377 on public access to scholarly publications. These comments came from organizations and individuals representing a wide variety of fields and stakeholders including scientists, publishers, librarians, scientific societies and companies. These comments will inform the deliberations of two interagency working groups within the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC)—the Task Force on Public Access to Scholarly Publications and the Interagency Working Group on Digital Data— that were formed in response to requirements in the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010. That law, signed by President Obama in early 2011, requires that the NSTC coordinate the development of Federal science agency policies related to the dissemination and long-term stewardship of the results of unclassified research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications, supported wholly or in part by funding from the Federal science agencies. The two groups will carefully consider all of the public comments during their deliberative process...."

Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 12:49 PM PST

 
Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics
Josh Fischman
Wired Campus, (30 Jan 2012)
"Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available. He asked for a boycott in a blog post on January 21, and as of Monday evening, on the boycott’s Web site The Cost of Knowledge, nearly 1,900 scientists have signed up, pledging not to publish, referee, or do editorial work for any Elsevier journal....The company has sinned in three areas, according to the boycotters: It charges too much for its journals; it bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don’t want in order to get a few things they do want; and, most recently, it has supported a proposed federal law (called the Research Works Act) that would prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by its grant recipients freely available. Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an open-publishing advocate, signed the pledge and wrote that “With the moves of these megapublishers, we [are] seeing the beginning of monopoly control of the scholarly record.” ..."

Will Academics' Boycott Of Elsevier Be The Tipping Point For Open Access -- Or Another Embarrassing Flop? | Techdirt

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 12:46 PM PST

 
Will Academics' Boycott Of Elsevier Be The Tipping Point For Open Access -- Or Another Embarrassing Flop? | Techdirt
www.techdirt.com
"[L]ike SOPA/PIPA, RWA may have been an intellectual land-grab too far. It has provoked a rebellion by academics that might provide the final push needed to move academic publishing from its current mode, dominated by hugely-profitable corporations that require payment for most of their output, to one based around open access journals, with smaller profits, but whose articles are freely available online to all. Things started when Peter Suber, who is widely regarded as one of the unofficial leaders of the open access movement, pledged on January 7 not to work with any publisher that accepted the Association of American Publishers' position supporting RWA. But it was a blog post two weeks later by the British mathematician and Fields Medallist (think Nobel Prize of mathematics) Tim Gowers that provided the spark for the explosion of anger that followed....Within a couple of days, Tyler Neylon had set up just such a site, "The Cost of Knowledge: Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier", which repeats the three main objections that Gowers raised, and invites people to refrain from working with Elsevier. At the time of writing, nearly 2,000 academics from a wide range of disciplines have pledged their support for the boycott...."

Elsevier editorial boards: The Journal of Academic Librarianship

Posted: 31 Jan 2012 12:38 PM PST

 
Elsevier editorial boards: The Journal of Academic Librarianship
gavialib.com
"A commenter suggested that a useful response to the SOPA and RWA situation is to name folks currently donating labor to Elsevier journals, in hopes that their colleagues can quietly (and politely, please!) hint to them that endorsing Elsevier is a less than wholly well-considered stance just now. Fair enough. Editorial boards are public record...."

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