Thursday 2 February 2012

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

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


Results of the EC public consultation on scientific information in the digital age | LIBER

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:38 PM PST

 
Results of the EC public consultation on scientific information in the digital age | LIBER
www.libereurope.eu
"The public consultation on scientific information in the digital age, which was recently undertaken by the European Commission, spurred great interest among a variety of stakeholders, with 1140 responses received from 42 countries. Respondents identified a strong need for better access to scientific publications and scientific data in Europe. 90 % of respondents supported the idea that publications resulting from publicly funded research should as a matter of principle be in open access (OA) mode and that data from publicly funded research should be available for reuse free of charge on the internet. Furthermore, 83 % called for policy formulation at the EU level and 86 % agreed on the development of an EU network of repositories. Asked about barriers to accessing scientific publications the high price of journals/subscriptions (89%) and the limited budget of libraries (85 %) were identified as key issues. The main barriers to access research data were identified as lack of funding to develop and maintain the necessary infrastructures (80 %); the insufficient credit given to researchers for making research data available (80 %); insufficient national/regional strategies/policies (79 %) as well as the lack of incentives for researchers (76.4%). Self-archiving (‘green OA’) or a combination of self-archiving and OA publishing (‘gold OA’) were identified as the preferred ways for increasing the number and share of scientific publications available in OA mode. The majority (56% of respondents) prefer an embargo period (that is the period of time during which a publication is not yet open access) of 6 months...."

ALA Press Release | American Library Association

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:35 PM PST

 
ALA Press Release | American Library Association
ala.org
"In a resolution adopted by the Council of the American Library Association (ALA), it has been resolved that the ALA: ...Opposes any discriminatory policies of publishers and distributors which adversely impact access to content by library users....According to the resolution, adopted on Jan. 24 at the association's Midwinter Meeting in Dallas, "An increasing number of publishers and distributors have adopted policies that negatively impact the ability of libraries to provide content in formats needed by their patrons." It adds, "The limitations imposed by publishers and distributors have not been clearly defined nor has a rationale for those limitations been provided." ..."

Ceci n'est pas un hamburger: modelling and representing the scholarly article

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:33 PM PST

 
Ceci n'est pas un hamburger: modelling and representing the scholarly article
S Pettifer et al.
Learned Publishing 24 (3), 207 (2011)
Abstract: Current approaches to publishing scholarly work are falling behind the growing demands of modern readers, who need easy access to the underlying data, as well as the ability to consume content on an ever-growing variety of electronic devices. The pros and cons of the various formats for representing the scholarly article are hotly contested, but as yet these debates have had little tangible impact on the publishing world where, in spite of its apparent limitations, the PDF remains the dominant form of distribution. We discuss fundamental philosophical differences between a scholarly work and its representation, and describe Utopia Documents, which realizes those differences in software, aiming to resolve many of the current issues in this area.

Business | Data.gov Communities

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:30 PM PST

 
Business | Data.gov Communities
www.data.gov
"American businesses need to be equipped with the best tools and information available to support innovation and job growth. This site is your front door to the data, apps, and tools the government has to offer your business...."

First build released

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:29 PM PST

 
First build released
DPLA Dev, (01 Feb 2012)
"The first and highly tentative build [of the DPLA platform] is up and ready for you to poke at. Our plan is to simultaneously and incrementally build out a reference API and a technical specification, letting them inform each other, while being guided by your participation, experience, and expertise...."

As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:18 PM PST

 
As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices
chronicle.com
"A protest against Elsevier, the world's largest scientific journal publisher, is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's journals, including refereeing papers. The boycott is growing so quickly—it had about 1,800 signers on Monday—that Elsevier officials on Tuesday broke their official silence to respond to protesters' accusations that they charge too much and support laws that will keep research findings bottled up behind a company paywall. "Over the past 10 years, our prices have been in the lowest quartile in the publishing industry," said Alicia Wise, Elsevier's director of universal access. "Last year our prices were lower than our competitors'. I'm not sure why we are the focus of this boycott, but I'm very concerned about one dissatisfied scientist, and I'm concerned about 2,000." ...According to the boycotters, Elsevier, which publishes over 2,000 journals including the prestigious Cell and The Lancet, is abusing academic researchers in three areas. First there are the prices. Then the company 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, Elsevier has supported a proposed federal law, the Research Works Act (HR 3699), that could prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by grant recipients freely available....That could signal real problems for Elsevier, says Kevin Smith, director of scholarly communications at Duke University Libraries. "Librarians have long complained about prices and bundling journals together, and nothing has changed," he says. "Now it's not just the customers who are complaining. It's the suppliers." ..."

Open Access, UKPMC and PubMed: how are we doing?

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:15 PM PST

 
Open Access, UKPMC and PubMed: how are we doing?
Alison Henning
UK PubMed Central Blog, (24 Jan 2012)
"For articles published in 2010, using the ~925K articles in PubMed published in 2010 as 100%, UKPMC is about 18% of the size of PubMed, with [libre] Open Access articles around 7%. A key factor to maintain this growth will be for the research community to improve compliance with the UKPMC Funder mandates, to ensure all articles resulting from those funds can be found in UKPMC...."

Opening the Door to Closeted Science | e-Patients.net

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:11 PM PST

U. of T. and Western Capitulate to Access Copyright

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:08 PM PST

 
U. of T. and Western Capitulate to Access Copyright
Howard Knopf
EXCESS COPYRIGHT, (31 Jan 2012)
"In an astonishing development that has caught all but a handful by surprise, U. of T. and Western have signed copyright deals with Access Copyright that appear to be an early and complete capitulation to an important battle over the costs and parameters of access to knowledge in Canadian post-secondary institutions...."

Informing public access to peer reviewed scholarly publications and data resulting from publicly funded research

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:07 PM PST

 
Informing public access to peer reviewed scholarly publications and data resulting from publicly funded research
cottage labs, (06 Jan 2012)
"The case of publicly funded scholarly output is further complicated by the fact that accessibility is inherent to desirability – the point is to build on what we learn, and we cannot do that if we cannot access it. Achieving anything with these artefacts – discovering, sharing, learning, communicating, archiving, profiting – is best done in the ideal environment where they are easy to find, copy, distribute – and are not poisonous. We need open access, not restricted access...."

Researchers boycott publisher; will they embrace instant publishing?

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 07:01 PM PST

 
Researchers boycott publisher; will they embrace instant publishing?
arstechnica.com
"Many scientists were miffed by the introduction of the Research Works Act, which would roll back the US government's open access policy for research it funds. Some of that annoyance was directed toward the commercial publishers that were supporting the bill. That, combined with a series of grievances about the pricing policies of one publisher, Elsevier, has now led a number of scientists to start a boycott—they won't publish in or review for journals from that publisher....Now, Faculty of 1000 is launching F1000 research, which is a different twist on academic publishing. When a manuscript is submitted to F1000R, an editor will provide a basic sanity check and, if it passes, the paper will immediately be published under a Creative Commons license. Only after it's online will the journal arrange for reviewers to perform peer review on it. Reviewers' scope will be limited to the scientific validity of the results and won't include an evaluation of the paper's significance. Other researchers will be able to attach comments to the paper that will act a bit like informal reviews. F1000R will also host any large datasets associated with the publications....A number of people commenting online have compared this service to the arXiv...."

The advent of online dissemination techniques allow academics to focus just on developing great ideas, without needlessly trying to play the system.

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 06:54 PM PST

 
The advent of online dissemination techniques allow academics to focus just on developing great ideas, without needlessly trying to play the system.
Blog Admin
Impact of Social Sciences, (30 Jan 2012)
"It’s clear that the public are against a societal system that produces a top 1 per cent of income distribution and won’t tolerate the same hierarchy of ideas in academia either. Danny Quah argues that a more level playing field is desirable, and possible through increased online scholarly activity...."

Why boycott Elsevier?

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 06:51 PM PST

 
Why boycott Elsevier?
Kevin Smith, J.D.
Scholarly Communications @ Duke, (31 Jan 2012)
"The snowballing petition on which scholars pledge to boycott Elsevier is gaining a good deal of attention. There is an article in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education, and this more general article about the future of Elsevier’s business model from Forbes. As of today the boycott pledge has over 2100 signatures....While I agree that all of these things are significant problems in the current scholarly communications environment, I have to say that Elsevier is not the only “sinner” guilty of these infractions, or necessarily even the most culpable among commercial publishers. This does not mean I am particularly sympathetic to Elsevier, and I am glad to see the petition for a couple of reasons. First, the boycott movement is coming from scholars themselves....Second, when framed as a divergence of values it is much easier to see that the core issue in this movement is who will control the the changing course of scholarly communications and the scholarly record....Instead [of abolishing copyright], scholars will seek new ways to use the rights that vest in them (not their publishers) to control their works in ways that best serve their own needs and the interests of their particular discipline. Boycotting Elsevier may not bring about that revolution by itself, but it is a step toward demanding that the rights and concerns of scholarly authors themselves actually drive decisions about how scholarship is shared in the digital environment."

CKAN to power new EC portal

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 12:04 PM PST

 
CKAN to power new EC portal
Mark Wainwright
CKAN - the Open Source Data Portal Software, (30 Jan 2012)
CKAN describes itself as “the open-source data portal software...developed by the non-profit Open Knowledge Foundation in 2007...” “CKAN will form the heart of a new data portal for open data released by the European Commission (EC), the executive body of the EU. The EC portal will go live in June 2012. As well a CKAN-driven catalogue developed by OKF, the site will include data visualisations developed by the Institute for Computer Science (InfAI) at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Project management will be by the Belgian company TenForce...”

Misunderstanding ArXiv

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 11:55 AM PST

 
Misunderstanding ArXiv
Christina Pikas
Christina's LIS Rant, (30 Jan 2012)
“The physics, astro, CS, math and related fields e-print server, ArXiv, is often misunderstood and misrepresented. Specifically, it's often represented as a place anyone can send any article in any state...”

Transit transparency: Open data in action ~ Policy by the Numbers

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 11:37 AM PST

 
Transit transparency: Open data in action ~ Policy by the Numbers
policybythenumbers.blogspot.com
“A much talked about innovation in public policy recently has been the push to achieve greater transparency and accountability through open government strategies, where the public has access to government information and can participate in co-producing public services. At the Transparency Policy Project we have been investigating the dynamics behind one of the most successful implementations of open government: the disclosure of data by transit agencies in the United States. In just a few years, a rich community has developed around this data, with visionary champions for disclosure inside transit agencies collaborating with eager software developers to deliver multiple ways for riders to access real-time information about transit... Recognizing the need for access to this information on-the-go and in digital format, Bibiana McHugh of Portland’s TriMet agency worked with Google in 2006 to integrate timetable data into Google Maps, eventually becoming Google Transit. McHugh went further, publicly releasing TriMet’s operations data: first the static timetables, and eventually real-time, dynamic data feeds of vehicle locations and arrival predictions. Local programmers have responded with great ingenuity, building 44 different consumer-facing applications for the TriMet system, at no cost to the agency...”

The NIH public access policy (February 2012)

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 09:23 AM PST

 
The NIH public access policy (February 2012)
publicaccess.nih.gov
The NIH released a new (February 2012) document summarizing its public access policy. "WHAT IS AT STAKE UNDER THE PUBLIC ACCESS POLICY: Opening up to the public 90,000 new scientific articles each year reporting research that U.S. taxpayers have funded through NIH’s annual 32 billion dollar investment in biomedical research....HOW IT WORKS: The NIH policy honors, and is consistent with, U.S. copyright law. The author, as the creator of the work, holds the copyright in the original paper. The author gives NIH a non-exclusive right to distribute the paper in PMC and may transfer to the publisher the balance of his rights, including an exclusive copyright for the final published version of the paper....SUPPORT FROM PUBLISHERS:...Publishers representing about 1000 journals voluntarily submit the full content of their journals to PMC, regardless of whether the issue contains an article subject to the NIH Public Access Policy....NO HARM TO PUBLISHERS IS EVIDENT:...The Public Access requirement took effect in 2008. While the U.S. economy has suffered a downturn during the time period 2007 to 2011, scientific publishing has grown: [1] The number of journals dedicated to publishing biological sciences/agriculture articles and medicine/health articles increased 15% and 19%, respectively. [2] The average subscription prices of biology journals and health sciences journals increased 26% and 23%, respectively. [3] Publishers forecast increases to the rate of growth of the medical journal market, from 4.5% in 2011 to 6.3% in 2014...."

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