Friday 3 February 2012

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

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


Why publishers should give away ebooks

Posted: 03 Feb 2012 06:58 AM PST

 
Why publishers should give away ebooks
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog, (30 Jan 2012)
“I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don't anymore... But the decisive factor in the transformation of my purchasing behavior, as a marketer would say, wasn't aesthetic. It was the decision by record companies to start giving away a free digital copy of an album when you buy the vinyl version... Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand... publishers have three big imperatives today: (1) protect print sales for as long as possible (in order to fund a longer-term transition to a workable new business model); (2) help keep physical bookstores in business (for the reasons set out in this article by Julie Bosman); and (3) do anything possible to curb the power of Amazon.com, the publishers' arch-frenemy... First, you give people an added incentive to buy a print book... Second, you do something that helps physical bookstores in their own end-of-days battle with Amazon... Third, by offering the ebooks in a standard, non-proprietary format (ePub, say), you make the Kindle, which doesn't handle the ePub format, considerably less attractive...”

NISO and NFAIS Issue Draft for Public Comment of Recommended Practice on Supplemental Materials for Journal Articles - National Information Standards Organization

Posted: 02 Feb 2012 07:25 PM PST

 
NISO and NFAIS Issue Draft for Public Comment of Recommended Practice on Supplemental Materials for Journal Articles - National Information Standards Organization
www.niso.org
"The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the National Federation for Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) have issued a new Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part A: Business Policies and Practices (NISO RP-15-201x) for public comment ending on February 29, 2012. Although supplemental materials are increasingly being added to journal articles, there is no recognized set of practices to guide in the selection, delivery, discovery, or preservation of these materials. To address this gap, NISO and NFAIS jointly sponsored a working group to establish best practices that would provide guidance to publishers and authors for management of supplemental materials and would solve related problems for librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators. The Supplemental Materials project has two groups working in tandem: one to address business practices and one to focus on technical issues. The draft currently available for comment includes the recommendations from the Business Working Group...."

Elsevier tries to block institutional OA mandates

Posted: 02 Feb 2012 06:53 PM PST

 
Elsevier tries to block institutional OA mandates
Open access i Sverige, (31 Jan 2012)
"Elsevier obviously is trying to block institutions from adopting open access mandates by its policy of demanding separate agreements. The kind of agreements with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) proposed by Elsevier represent a huge step backwards concerning author rights....The Steering Committee of the OpenAccess.se in May 2011 made a statement critical to Elsevier’s policy on author rights, which now requires specific agreements with universities or research funders if they have an open access mandate. The committee urged Elsevier to withdraw the new clause and recommended ”that Swedish universities with open access mandates refrain from concluding separate agreements with Elsevier. Instead, this issue should be managed along with negotiations over national license agreements with Elsevier”. The statement was commented by Alicia Wise, Director of Universal Access from Elsevier, to which I responded. You will find our exchange of comments here. Alicia had written ”we are still in test-and-learn mode for institutional agreements.” We also had a number of questions. So when Elsevier proposed a pilot for manuscript posting in Sweden involving a number of institutions we were prepared to take a closer look at it....This proposal has now been discussed by the Steering Committees of the Swedish BIBSAM (licensing) consortium and of the OpenAccess.se. Both steering committees came to the conclusion that we should withdraw from further negotiations on this proposal. In a Response to Elsevier’s OA pilot proposal for Sweden the position of these committees is explained: ”The main objection is that the embargo times – varying from 12 to 48 months – in the proposal will severely restrict and deteriorate the rights of authors to deposit copies of their articles in their institutional repositories....We want researchers at all HEIs – irrespective of their institution having an OA mandate or not – to have the right to post at least the accepted author version of their articles in Elsevier journals in their institutional repository immediately after publication....When other publishers try to adapt their policies to OA mandates Elsevier instead seems to have chosen the alternative of trying to block OA mandates. We do not think this is a wise policy in the long run.” ..."

Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age

Posted: 02 Feb 2012 06:34 PM PST

 
Sharing: Culture and the Economy in the Internet Age
www.sharing-thebook.com
A new book by Philippe Aigrain from Amsterdam University Press, with an OA edition and a priced paperback edition. "On this site, you can access the source code and datasets used in the book, comment on each of the book chapters, run our economic models for the financing of a sharing-compatible culture with your choice of parameters, and run our diversity of attention analysis software on your own datasets. Publisher and US distributor presentations In the past fifteen years, file sharing of digital cultural works between individuals has been at the center of a number of debates on the future of culture itself. To some, sharing constitutes piracy, to be fought against and eradicated. Others see it as unavoidable, and table proposals to compensate for its harmful effects. Meanwhile, little progress has been made towards addressing the real challenges facing culture in a digital world. Sharing starts from a radically different viewpoint, namely that the non-market sharing of digital works is both legitimate and useful. It supports this premise with empirical research, demonstrating that non-market sharing leads to more diversity in the attention given to various works. Taking stock of what we have learnt about the cultural economy in recent years, Sharing sets out the conditions necessary for valuable cultural functions to remain sustainable in this context...."

JISC Managing Research Data Programme

Posted: 02 Feb 2012 06:26 PM PST

 
JISC Managing Research Data Programme
researchdata.jiscinvolve.org
"JISC has today release a Grant Funding Call 01/12. The Call for Proposals comes from JISC’s Digital Infrastructure Team and contains four elements which are part of the Managing Research Data Programm....The deadline for submission is 12.00 noon on 16 March 2012....The specific Calls for Proposals...seek: [1] to encourage the publication of research data, and the integration of research data publication with other components of scholarly communications; and [2] to encourage the development of high quality training materials in research data management, targeted at various important stakeholders...."

Adding peer review to arxiv

Posted: 02 Feb 2012 06:18 PM PST

 
Adding peer review to arxiv
plus.google.com
"In a recent post...John Baez mentioned Andrew Stacey's proposal for a system of overlay boards for the arXiv that would essentially be a form of peer review. Since the arXiv itself works very well, we don't want to mess it up, so a parallel site was mooted. Now that site exists - in principle! Edward O'Callaghan grabbed the domain http://arxiv-review.org/ which at present is plastered with advertising, so don't bother following the link just yet - just remember the URL arxiv-review.org. Now the site needs some guiding principles and a framework. Edward O'Callaghan has offered to host conversation on his blog...to get a 'goals and mission' like the arXiv....To get started, have a read over John Baez's post, and get your thinking hats on! ..."

Scientific publishing: The price of information | The Economist

Posted: 02 Feb 2012 02:41 PM PST

 
Scientific publishing: The price of information | The Economist
www.economist.com
"SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier....It did. More than 2,700 researchers from around the world have so far signed an online pledge set up by Tyler Neylon, a fellow-mathematician who was inspired by Dr Gowers’s post, promising not to submit their work to Elsevier’s journals, or to referee or edit papers appearing in them....This situation has been simmering for years....To many, it is surprising things have taken so long to boil over....Commercial publishers have begun to experiment with open-access ideas, such as charging authors for publication rather than readers for reading. But if the boycott continues to grow, things could become more urgent. After all, publishers need academics more than academics need publishers. And incumbents often look invulnerable until they suddenly fall. Beware, then, the Academic spring."

The Open Access Interviews: Jan Velterop

Posted: 02 Feb 2012 12:10 PM PST

 
The Open Access Interviews: Jan Velterop
Richard Poynder
Open and Shut?, (02 Feb 2012)
"In the world of scholarly publishing, Jan Velterop is a well-regarded “old hand”. But an old hand who has shown himself to be very receptive to new ways of doing things....While at Academic Press in the mid-1990s, Velterop was one of the architects of what was to become known as the Big Deal — an arrangement by which large bundles of electronic journals are sold on multi-year “all you can eat” contracts. While the Big Deal has now fallen into disfavour, it was a revolutionary development in the world of scholarly publishing, and remains a very significant part of the landscape. In 2000, Velterop joined BioMed Central, the first commercial open-access science publisher, and in 2001 he was one of a small group of people who gathered together in Budapest to discuss, “the international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.” It was at that meeting that the Open Access movement was born, along with the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI), and the BOAI statement — “the clearest and most generic of what Open Access means and should mean”, suggests Velterop....It is, therefore, unsurprising that Velterop takes the view that publishers have made a serious error of judgment in pushing for the controversial Research Works Act (RWA) — a new bill introduced into the US House of Representatives at the end of last year that would roll back the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health. “I truly don’t understand how a sophisticated industry could get itself into a PR disaster like the RWA,” he says. More of Velterop’s views on these and other aspects of scholarly publishing can be read in the attached interview...."

Open Access, Self-Archiving, and Long-Term Digital Stewardship for University of North Texas Scholarly Works

Posted: 02 Feb 2012 12:01 PM PST

 
Open Access, Self-Archiving, and Long-Term Digital Stewardship for University of North Texas Scholarly Works
policy.unt.edu
"As a public research university, [the University of North Texas] recognizes and values its responsibility to the larger society. Scholarly products — the innovations, scholarship, and creative endeavors of its faculty, and the education provided to its students — benefit the communities the university serves. By providing access to scholarly works, Federal, State, private, and public support of research and scholarship will be enhanced at UNT. Therefore, UNT is obligated to make its faculty scholarship available to the widest possible audience by adopting an open access mechanism for UNT Community Members’ scholarly products....In support of long-term stewardship and preservation of UNT Community Members’ scholarly works in digital form, UNT Community Members agree to the following:...Each UNT Community Member deposits in the UNT Libraries scholarly works repository a final version of his/her scholarly works to which he or she made intellectual contributions. The determination of what comprises a final version is made by the community member...." (Approved February 1, 2012, and effective on the same date.)

Archivalia: Linked Data der DNB nun Linked Open Data

Posted: 02 Feb 2012 07:58 AM PST

Pogo: Why Are Researchers Yet Again Boycotting Instead of Keystroking?

Posted: 02 Feb 2012 07:24 AM PST

 
Pogo: Why Are Researchers Yet Again Boycotting Instead of Keystroking?
nospam@example.com (Stevan Harnad)
Open Access Archivangelism, (02 Feb 2012)
While the worldwide researcher community is again busy working itself up into an indignant lather with yet another publisher boycott threat, I am still haunted by a "keystroke koan"...
Posted by stevanharnad (who is an author) to oa.green oa.new Boycotts elsevier on Thu Feb 02 2012 at 15:24 UTC | info | related

Academics call for boycott of Elsevier | The Bookseller

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 12:09 PM PST

 
Academics call for boycott of Elsevier | The Bookseller
www.thebookseller.com
“Academics have called for a boycott of publisher Elsevier... Over 2,000 academics and researchers thus far have signed a petition supporting a boycott, on www.thecostofknowledge.com, on the grounds that the publisher charges ‘exorbitantly high prices’ for journals, and adopts the practice of selling journals in bundles, so ‘libraries must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all’... The petition also protests against Elsevier's support of measures such as the Research Works Act that ‘aim to restrict the free exchange of information...’ Tim Worstall, a fellow at London's Adam Smith Institute, writing in a blog on Forbes.com... said the petition, and further blogs on the topic, will ‘lead to some fairly major changes in the way that Elsevier is able to run its journal publishing division. At least, I rather hope so, for the entire cost base and financial structure is outmoded in this internet age’... British mathematician Tim Gowers has stated his plan to boycott the publisher... Gowers argued: “We [academics] have much greater bargaining power than we are wielding at the moment, for the very simple reason that we don’t actually need their service... In a statement, Elsevier said the facts on which the petition was based were not correct. ‘Access to published content is greater and at its lowest cost per use than ever. The reality is that (1) our price increases have actually been among the industry’s lowest for the past ten years, (2) the introduction of optional packages have added enormous access at fractions of the list prices; and (3) Elsevier was the first and largest contributor to the NIH (Pubmed central). We look forward to working further with our communities to advance scientific knowledge together, and we believe this is best achieved without government mandates.’ The statement went on: “We respect the freedom of authors to make their own decisions. We hope the ones who sign the boycott reconsider their position however, and we are keen to engage to discuss their concerns...’”

Publishers invent a whole new form of evil: suing their customers

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 12:07 PM PST

 
Publishers invent a whole new form of evil: suing their customers
Mike Taylor
Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, (27 Jan 2012)
“I know that I’ve tended to be very critical of Elsevier on these pages [peer review, economics, PLoS clone, RWA, profits].  I’ve sometimes wondered whether that’s really fair... I’m not alone in this, of course.  For example, Tyler Neylon’s bare-bones site The Cost Of Knowledge... is a call to boycott Elsevier in particular... So why Elsevier?... As well as the restrictive copyrights, predatory pricing and obligatory bundling that are so ubiquitous, Elsevier is also responsible for the six fake journals that misrepresented sponsored content as legitimate research, involvement in the arms trade, repeated obstruction to the re-use of data, making campaign contributions to representatives to propose the Research Works Act and then feeding those representatives the very words they want them to say in support of it. But a couple of days ago I learned of yet another reason why my attempts to be gentle and kind to Elsevier are doomed.  It’s not been widely publicised yet, because the reporting has been in German, but Elsevier are now filing lawsuits against their own customers... here is a report in the well respected German-language Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung.  Google’s automatic translation is pretty good, but David Marjanovic kindly provided this better translation of the key passage: ‘Almost at the same time, on 19 December 2011, the science publishers Elsevier, Thieme and Springer filed a suit with the Zurich Commercial Court, which is intended to forbid the ETH library [“The ETH-Bibliothek is the largest scientific library in Switzerland and one of the leading scientific and technical libraries in Europe. It is open to the public.”] to continue its document delivery service in its present form. Through this service clients of the ETH library can request the electronic delivery of articles from scientific journals... By their suit, the science publishers want to subvert a provision of Swiss copyright law that explicitly allows the copying of excerpts from periodicals. In comparison e.g. to the situation in Germany, where such copies are forbidden, this provision is an unambiguous advantage for Switzerland as a science site...’”

Why we should publish our data under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) – Canadensys

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 11:53 AM PST

 
Why we should publish our data under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) – Canadensys
www.canadensys.net
“Canadensys, operated from the Université de Montréal Biodiversity Centre, is a Canada-wide effort to unlock the biodiversity information held in biological collections... With the first datasets getting published and more coming soon, the issue comes up under what license we – the Canadensys community and the individual collections – will publish our data. Dealing with the legal stuff can be tedious, which is why we have looked into this issue with the Canadensys Steering Committee & Science and Technology Advisory Board before opening the discussion to the whole community... We recommend Canadensys participants to publish their data under Creative Commons Zero (CC0). With CC0 you waive any copyright you might have over the data(set) and dedicate it to the public domain. Users can copy, use, modify and distribute the data without asking your permission. You cannot be held liable for any (mis)use of the data either... To encourage users to give credit where credit is due, we propose to create Canadensys norms. Norms are not a legal document (see an example here), but a “code of conduct” where we declare how we would like users to use, share and cite our data, and how they can participate..."

Friends Really Don’t Let Friends Publish in Elsevier Journals — Crooked Timber

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 11:51 AM PST

 
Friends Really Don’t Let Friends Publish in Elsevier Journals — Crooked Timber
crookedtimber.org
“A few years ago, I wrote a post explaining that I was no longer going to referee for, or publish in journals published by Elsevier (and that I was likely only to cite Elsevier published articles with an explicit health warning)...”

Testify: The Open-Science Movement Catches Fire | Wired Science | Wired.com

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 11:49 AM PST

 
Testify: The Open-Science Movement Catches Fire | Wired Science | Wired.com
www.wired.com
For years, the open science movement has sought to light a fire about the “closed” journal-publication system. In the last few weeks their efforts seemed to have ignited a broader flame, driven mainly, it seems, by the revelation that one of the most resented publishers, Elsevier, was backing the Research Works Act... scientists are pledging by the hundreds to not cooperate with Elsevier in any way — refusing to publish in its journals, referee its papers, or do the editorial work that researchers have been supplying to journals without charge for decades — and the rebellion is repeatedly reaching the pages of the New York Times and Forbes...”

Is open data under threat?

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 11:46 AM PST

 
Is open data under threat?
www.information-age.com
... “On the face of it, 2011 was a very good year for the open data movement, which argues that certain information, such as non-personal government data, is more valuable when it is shared freely... George Osborne announced that the government is to create an Open Data Institute, chaired by open data advocates Tim Berners-Lee and Nigel Shadbolt. The London-based Institute will receive £10 million funding and its aim is to ‘innovate, exploit and research open data opportunities with business and academia’. The idea is catching on in Brussels, and in December the European Commission announced its own open data strategy. It predicted that making data held by EC bodies available to the public would give a boost to the European economy of €40 billion a year... However, there were also a few developments that threatened to dampen the optimism of open data’s idealistic early proponents. In November, the Audit Commission revealed that spending data that local authorities are obliged to publish online had been used to defraud councils to the tune of £7 million in 2010... More worrying to some of open data’s keenest supporters was the government’s announcement in December that it plans to make anonymised patient data from the NHS available to the UK’s biomedical research industry... Meanwhile, government wrestled with the issue of trading funds –government bodies that earn 50% of their budget by selling data... In his Autumn Statement, Osborne proposed the creation of two more new bodies: the Data Strategy Board (DSB) and the Public Data Group (PDG). The DSB will commission data for free release to the public... The Public Data Group is tasked with looking after the commercial aspects of government data, promoting private sector use of trading fund data and investigating the possibility of trading funds becoming companies. Together, these two organisations will be in charge of finding a balance between the revenue-earning potential of government data and the public’s right to government information...”

The Research Works Act, open access and publisher boycotts « sharmanedit

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 11:35 AM PST

 
The Research Works Act, open access and publisher boycotts « sharmanedit
sharmanedit.wordpress.com
“The open access movement has been around for decades, gradually building up, but this month there seems to have been an acceleration in the pace of change. I will try in this post to summarise the current situation as I see it. The initial driver of this recent change was the Research Works Act (RWA)... The second important event was the decision of Cambridge mathematics professor and Fields Medal winner Timothy Gowers to publish a blog post on 21 January entitled ‘Elsevier — my part in its downfall‘ ... This led mathematician Tyler Neylon to set up ‘The cost of knowledge‘, a page where researchers could publicly declare that they ‘will not support any Elsevier journal unless they radically change how they operate’... In the past week the usual trickle of blog posts about open access and Elsevier has turned into a flood. I’ll pick out a few here... Elsevier and their allies have responded [here]... So, where do I stand? I am a freelance editor, working directly or indirectly for scientists and for publishers, on both open access and closed access journals... I am sympathetic to the open access movement but am not an active advocate of it. I’m not currently in a position to refuse to work for closed access publishers... What I’d like to do is think through what effect a boycott would have on each affected journal... One way the boycott could perhaps be more effective would be if it focused on a few journals in well-defined, small fields where there is a limited pool of potential reviewers... I would hope that those refusing make their reasons clear (as in this example letter) so that in-house staff aren’t left wondering what is going on...”

Internet Evolution - Cloud Clan Editor's Blog - Clouds for Scientific Research Spark Debate

Posted: 01 Feb 2012 11:31 AM PST

 
Internet Evolution - Cloud Clan Editor's Blog - Clouds for Scientific Research Spark Debate
www.internetevolution.com
... “Growing momentum behind scientific collaboration and the use of cloud services for research has fostered a backlash by companies threatened by the trend while exposing fundamental obstacles to online collaboration. Let's start with the argument over Web access to information. As pointed out by Internet Evolution contributor George Taylor in his blog today, there's a movement under way to revise the age-old presentation of research results online. Traditionally, those results have appeared in papers gated by service providers demanding expensive subscriptions. As George notes, scientists and other interested parties are protesting that research results should be provided free, especially since the projects that yielded those results are often publicly funded... Hand-in-glove with the issue of open access to scientific results is the issue of collaborative, cloud-based scientific facilities. After all, if one wants to keep data under expensive lock and key, it follows that there will be resistance to services that open up the research to wider participation and even to crowdsourcing...”

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