Tuesday 7 February 2012

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

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


Open Access and Eric Raymond

Posted: 07 Feb 2012 07:41 AM PST

 
Open Access and Eric Raymond
petermr's blog, (05 Feb 2012)
“This blog has been tackling the problem of Open Access, what it’s vision is and how to get a coherent movement. I’ve been excited to get a comment from Eric Raymond (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond )... Here’s his comment in full – I then comment. http://blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk/pmr/2011/12/20/the-open-access-movement-is-disorganized-this-must-not-continue/#comment-102743... [An excerpt from Eric Raymond’s comment states,] ‘I endorse P-MR’s analysis and his conclusions. You need a parallel to our Open Source Definition – an Open Access Definition. And, yes, it cannot allow no-commercial-use restrictions... Some of you in this discussion seem ready to constitute yourselves as an Open Access Initiative and write an Open Access Definition. To which I say; do it! Audacity is required in these situations...’ I’m delighted to get this additional confirmation we are on the right track. We are audacious, we have our own definition (http://opendefinition.org/ )... What we need is a revitalised Open Access Initiative. One that insists on BOAI-compliant, OKD-compliant... Discussion and creativity continues on http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-access ...”

Petition in support of a single European Data License

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 06:59 PM PST

 
Petition in support of a single European Data License
Paul Keller
International Communia Association, (06 Feb 2012)
"In line with an issue raised in our [Communia's] policy paper on the proposed amendments to PSI Directive there is now a Spanish petition that asks the Europeana Commission to propose a single open data license to be used for Public Sector Information across all EU member states...."

Around the Web: Research Works Act & Elsevier boycott

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 06:48 PM PST

 
Around the Web: Research Works Act & Elsevier boycott
Confessions of a Science Librarian, (06 Feb 2012)
"This post has superseded my previous post which focused solely on the Research Works Act. I have added some coverage of the Elsevier boycott which at least partially grew out of opposition to the RWA. I'm not attempting to be as comprehensive in coverage for the boycott as for the RWA...."

Academics Revolt Against Elsevier’s Journal Pricing

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 06:43 PM PST

 
Academics Revolt Against Elsevier’s Journal Pricing
m.paidcontent.org
"Academics are staging a mini-revolt against science and medical journal publisher Elsevier’s terms, and analysts fear the movement could hit parent Reed Elsevier. Over 4,000 researchers have signed a petition against Elsevier practices including charging libraries for bundles of journals rather than individual titles. They also object to Elsevier’s apparent stance on the U.S. bills SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, which critics say would restrict access to taxpayer-funded academic research. The protest is currently small in the context of the world’s large researcher community, but is causing Elsevier’s business model to come under the knife. “We think that investors should ask management of Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) how a PR incident of this kind could happen, why crisis management has been so tentative and what other steps management intends to take the handle the protest,” says Bernstein Research European media analyst Claudio Aspesi, in a note titled “Occupy Elsevier”. “Dropping prices, abandoning the subscription model or the bundles would all impact the economics substantially, at least for some years. So the company can only hope that the controversy will die down in time” Aspesi thinks Elsevier’s Anglo-Dutch owner Reed Elsevier, whose Reed Business Information is still shedding titles after Reed failed to sell RBI during the downturn, should be broken up, and is pessimistic about the company. “Our scepticism is based on the expectation that academic libraries will increasingly push back and request lower price increases than in the past, threatening to abandon ‘Big Deal’ contracts if the company does not lower its expectations for revenue growth,” Aspesi writes."

Elsevier Futures: Exane Paribus

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 06:38 PM PST

 
Elsevier Futures: Exane Paribus
groups.google.com
Summary of a financial report on Elsevier by Sami Kassab at Exane Paribus: "Please find our report on Reed Elsevier released this morning. We argue that: [1] Noise around boycott against Elsevier offers short term trading opportunity. Reed Elsevier was the worst performing media stock last week. We believe this is due to investor concerns on the back of T. Gowers' petition to boycott publishing and refereeing in Elsevier's journals. We believe the share price reaction was overdone and recommend buying the shares. [2] Scientists are boycotting the boycott. Similar petitions in favour of Open Access were organised in 2000 and 2007, with no impact on Elsevier's fundamentals. Our tracking not only shows that this latest petition lags behind the two preceding ones but also suggests that its momentum is slowing. Fewer than 5,000 scientists have signed up, whereas Elsevier works with more than 6m scientists worldwide. The low take-up of this petition is a sign of the scientific community's improving perception of Elsevier. [3] Open Access unlikely to hurt financials in the medium term and is priced in. The proportion of Open Access is growing at less than 1% pa. Elsevier's contract lengths are getting longer and the company's growth efforts are focused on new products rather than pricing. Open Access is unlikely to hurt Elsevier in the next five years and the longer term risk is more than priced in, in our view....We remain buyers of the stock on the current share price weakness...."

A MESSAGE TO THE RESEARCH COMMUNITY: ELSEVIER, ACCESS, AND THE RESEARCH WORKS ACT

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 06:28 PM PST

 
A MESSAGE TO THE RESEARCH COMMUNITY: ELSEVIER, ACCESS, AND THE RESEARCH WORKS ACT
www.elsevier.com
Unsigned and undated (but c. 2/6/12). "Why then do we support this legislation? We are against unwarranted and potentially harmful government laws that could undermine the sustainability of the peer-review publishing system. The RWA’s purpose is simply to ensure that the US government cannot enshrine in law how journal articles or accepted manuscripts are disseminated without involving publishers. We oppose in principle the notion that governments should be able to dictate the terms by which products of private sector investments are distributed, especially if they are to be distributed for free. And private sector means not just commercial publishers like Elsevier, but also not-for-profit and society publishers...."

Arend Küster and Megan Toogood, Open access

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 05:59 PM PST

 
Arend Küster and Megan Toogood, Open access
www.jisc-collections.ac.uk
"Open access publishing has arrived. There are now more than 7000 titles listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and hundreds of thousands of open access articles deposited with institutions, subject specific repositories and published in journals. But these figures don’t represent a mature industry, the revolution is still underway and there’s much potential still to be realised....The full paper is available on the QScience.com website."

About FreeFullPDF

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 12:37 PM PST

 
About FreeFullPDF
www.freefullpdf.com
"The aim of FreeFullPDF.com is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific journals, theses, posters and patents. All scientific subjects are covered and all content are freely available in PDF format...."

Elsevier begins outreach as push-back on publisher threatens to widen - Medical Marketing and Media

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 11:41 AM PST

 
Elsevier begins outreach as push-back on publisher threatens to widen - Medical Marketing and Media
www.mmm-online.com
oa.new oa.comment oa.medicine oa.elsevier oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.journals oa.gold oa.costs oa.fees oa.advocacy oa.boycotts oa.petitions oa.signatures oa.tools oa.libraries

Another World is Possible: Open Folklore as Library-Scholarly Society Partnership

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 11:39 AM PST

 
Another World is Possible: Open Folklore as Library-Scholarly Society Partnership
Jason Baird Jackson
Shreds and Patches, (04 Feb 2012)
In the wake of the SOPA/PIPA protests, debate over the Research Works Act, the growing boycott of Elsevier by scholars in many fields, and more local discussions of the ways that various scholarly societies in my own fields of interest (anthropology, folklore studies) responded to the recent call by the [U.S.] White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for comment on public access to federally funded research, there is a great deal of additional attention being given to the changing nature of the scholarly communications (publishing) system and our hopes for its future. One key issue centers on scholarly society publishing programs... At the 2011 American Anthropological Association meetings I spoke in two different contexts about these issues. I have shared here previously my remarks to the “Future of AAA Publishing” event (Jackson 2011b; for context, see Nichols and Schmid 2011 and Brown 2011). That presentation was on “Green Open Access Practices.” I also spoke in the Digital Anthropologies: Projects and Projections panel organized by Mike and Kim Fortun and sponsored by the Society for Cultural Anthropology. In that event (which has been well documented by Daniel Lende (2011), my goal was to describe the Open Folklore project as both a broader community effort and as a specific digital platform, so as to illustrate a more general point about the fruitful possibilities that can come from direct partnerships between libraries and the library community and scholarly societies... I believe, on the basis of a lot of time spent over the past five years with university librarians around the Midwestern U.S., that the research library community would much rather work with scholarly societies collaboratively in the shared real and digital spaces in which scholars and librarians (and students) already labor together rather than engage antagonistically in a neoliberal marketplace that has been shaped by the business practices pioneered by firms such as Elsevier, Springer and (yes) Wiley-Blackwell. Open Folklore is just one of many university-scholarly society partnerships that are exploring how to make this alternative framework real... The paper below has been edited lightly just to recontextualize the language for a reader not at the original panel”

What’s wrong with electronic journals?

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 11:37 AM PST

 
What’s wrong with electronic journals?
Gowers's Weblog, (29 Jan 2012)
“It probably sounds disingenuous of me to say this, but when I sat down to write a post about Elsevier I wasn’t really trying to start a campaign. My intention was merely to make public, and a little more rigid, a policy that I and many others had already been applying, in my case without much difficulty, for several years. The idea of setting up a website occurred to me as I was writing the post: I considered it (and still consider it) not as a petition to Elsevier to change its ways — since I don’t believe there is any realistic chance of that — but as a simple way to bring out into the open all the private boycotts and semi-boycotts that were going on, and thereby to encourage others to do the same... What next? What I really mean is more like, ‘How much next?’ Do we just let the number of signatures at Tyler Neylon’s website continue to grow at its currently healthy rate and sit back and hope that at some point there will be a phase change? That was something like my original plan — or rather non-plan. But there are reasons to suppose that provoking a phase change will take a bit more effort... I had an exchange of emails with Brian Cody, another member of the Scholastica team, and it became clear that one of their aims was to make it almost effort free for the editors of a journal to do what the editors of Topology did: resign en masse and start again somewhere else with a modified name. Scholastica may well not be the only venture of its kind, and perhaps one can argue about whether it is the best, but what one can say now, with confidence, is that there is a web tool out there that makes the mechanics of starting up a new (but secretly not so new) journal almost trivial... What’s wrong with that, you might ask? I don’t have a good answer, but I do have a bad answer, which is that I, and probably many other people, have an irrational prejudice against them... Recently, however, my prejudice has weakened... However, I do think that kind of prejudice probably still survives to a significant extent, and that it would be good to try to combat it... Let me describe an imaginary new journal that would be close enough to conventional journals not to ruffle too many feathers but different enough that at least some people might find it dynamic, forward-looking, and somewhere one would love to be published... I was quite surprised that the reaction to the idea of a boycott was as positive as it was: I had expected a more divided response. I still wonder whether the true response is more divided. Could it be that the kind of mathematician who participates fully in online discussions on blogs, Mathoverflow etc. is naturally enthusiastic, whereas a more traditionally-minded mathematician just wants to be left alone to continue with a way of doing things that seems perfectly satisfactory? If so, then the apparently strong support could be misleading. I think it is this thought that makes me want to tread carefully after reading Michael Harris’s suggestion. But treading carefully doesn’t necessarily mean not treading at all. I’d be very interested to know what other people think about this: is there some moment that needs to be seized, or should we simply sit back and watch the number of signatures grow?”

SPARC OA Forum: Research shows growing awareness and uptake of Open Access publishing by authors

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 11:36 AM PST

 
SPARC OA Forum: Research shows growing awareness and uptake of Open Access publishing by authors
groups.google.com
An announcement sent to the SPARC OA Forum states, “Today InTech, an Open Access publisher, has published the results of a survey appraising attitudes and awareness of the research community towards the Open Access (OA) business model in scholarly publishing. The InTech white paper: ‘Open Access: Awareness and Attitudes amongst the Author Community, is based on a review of current research and a survey sent to 20,000 STM researchers worldwide. The survey attracted an overall response rate of 1.3%, with 275 participants taking part and 253 (92%) completing it. The majority of respondents were researchers (75%) based at a university (70%). The data was sourced from an independent provider of contact data for the research community (Mardev)... The full results can be downloaded from: http://www.intechweb.org/js/**ckeditor/kcfinder/upload/** files/InTech_WhitePaper_**FutureofOA_Dec11.pdf<http://www.intechweb.org/js/ckeditor/kcfinder/upload/files/InTech_Whi...> “

The widely held notion that high impact publications determines who gets academic jobs, grants, and tenure is wrong. Stop using it as an excuse.

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 11:26 AM PST

 
The widely held notion that high impact publications determines who gets academic jobs, grants, and tenure is wrong. Stop using it as an excuse.
www.michaeleisen.org
... “I want to challenge the key assumption – made by nearly everyone – that choosing not to publish your work in the highest impact factor journal you can convince to accept it is tantamount to career ... Before I explain, I should note that my comments will deal exclusively with science in the United States... I can not deny that there is a very strong correlation between the impact factor of the journals in which someone has published and their success in landing jobs, grants and tenure... But, as we know, correlation does not imply causation. Even if hiring, grant review and tenure committees completely ignored journal titles and focused exclusively on the quality of the science (as they should), we would still expect there to be a strong correlation between success and impact factor... Encouraging the people we train to focus so exclusively on journal titles as the determinant of their success downplays the many other factors that play into these decisions: letters of recommendation, how effectively they communicate in person, and, most importantly, the inherent quality of their science. Sure, reviewers sometimes take shortcuts, but the quality of the underlying science and candidate matter a lot – and in most cases are paramount... My own lab provides several examples that demonstrate this reality...”

Is the Open Science Revolution For Real? | Wired Science | Wired.com

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 11:23 AM PST

 
Is the Open Science Revolution For Real? | Wired Science | Wired.com
m.wired.com
“The researcher rebellion against the closed research-and-publishing system, tallied most explicitly in a petition boycotting publisher Elsevier, continues to expand. (The Economist covers it here, and I covered the complaints last year in a feature.) The big question, of course, is whether this noisy riot will engender something like a real revolution. Will it replace the old regime with a new?... That will be depend on many things, but a key will be the construction of a replacement model for the traditional academic publishing system that so frustrates .  As studious rebels know, a key part of a successful revolution is building an alternate set of institutions and services  — an alternate infrastructure — to offer people as and after you topple the regime... To replace the traditional publishing system, they need to provide alternatives to its main functions. Those functions, as I described in my feature Free Science, One Paper at a Time, are: [1] Editing  & review –  making sure a paper is logical and intelligible; also assessing its value and significance. Review has traditionally been formal peer review... [2] publication/distribution — getting the thing out there where people can read it [3] credit/reputation — ensuring that the author or authors get credit for the work [4]archiving – making the work available to future researchers. In the current system, the journal system bundles all these functions into the paper... What are the rebels offering to replace that system? By casting around the last couple days, I’ve assembled a list of tools created by the open-science community that seek to replace or amend the various parts of the conventional journal system... together they show that the rebels (to indulge my metaphor) have gone a long way to creating the alternate infrastructure... Add that all up, the revolt is looking pretty good. Does this mean they’ll swarm right over the ramparts? Hard to say... But the pressure to change keeps building and is unlikely to stop. Some of the biggest targets are showing signs of the sort of inflexibility that mark the titan ready to fall. One source this week told me, for instance, that in the halls of one major scientific publishing concern, the senior leadership are mystified and the younger middle ranks terrified: a telling combination...”

MIT Faculty Boycott Elsevier Journals

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 11:21 AM PST

 
MIT Faculty Boycott Elsevier Journals
Ellen Duranceau
MIT Libraries News, (27 Jan 2012)
“Nearly twenty members of the MIT community have already signed a newly posted pledge to boycott Elsevier journals by refusing to publish, referee, or do editorial work ‘unless they radically change how they operate.’ The boycott was launched as a result a posting by Fields medal-winning mathematician Timothy Gowers in which he railed against Elsevier’s pricing practices and support of the Research Works Act. He suggested that a public website be created where others could join him in “refus(ing) to have anything to do with Elsevier journals from now on.” Such a website now exists, and lists (as of the time of this writing) eighteen members of the MIT community, including... Professor Kai von Fintel also signed the boycott, and recently made a similar public statement on his web site...”

blog on mathematical journals: More reasons to support the Elsevier boycott

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 11:19 AM PST

 
blog on mathematical journals: More reasons to support the Elsevier boycott
blog.mathunion.org
“Tim Gowers's excellent blog posting focused the long-standing discontent of the research community with Elsevier and nucleated a boycott which may prove to be a historic moment in scholarly publishing. I urge others to join the thousands of researchers who have signed on at the website Tyler Neylon created at thecostofknowledge.com. Recent articles in publications like Forbes and The Economist indicate that Elsevier and the rest of the business community are taking note... The arguments Gowers laid out focus on Elsevier's high prices, their bundling arrangements and subscription agreements, and their support for new laws that seem aimed at increasing publishers' profits at the expense of wide dissemination of scholarly research... However, there is another reason for researchers to disassociate from Elsevier, which I find even more compelling: their many lapses in ethical and quality publishing practices. Here are some examples: [1] The Elsevier journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals published more than 300 papers by the journal's Editor-In-Chief (58 in a single year). That these papers were not subject to peer review was later confirmed... [2] Elsevier journals have repeatedly published plagiarized work and duplicate publications... [3] Elsevier math journals have published a number of papers that make me doubt that they were subject to any peer-review whatever. An egregious example is the 2-page paper "A computer application in mathematics" in Computers and Mathematics with Applications, vol. 59 (2010) pp. 296-297... [4] On several occasions, entire editorial boards have collectively resigned from Elsevier, usually citing discontent with their pricing... [5] From 2000 to 2005 Elsevier published six phony biomedical journals, with titles such as the Australasian Journal of Cardiology, in return for an undisclosed sum from a large pharmaceutical company. The journals' contents were provided by the pharmaceutical company and published without further review, mostly reporting data favorable to their products... [6] In 1998, the Elsevier journal Lancet published one of the most significant examples of fraudulent scientific research in recent times, in which evidence was fabricated to link autism to measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, thereby setting off a health scare that led to deaths and severe injuries and which continues to this day...”

Established journal Evolutionary Applications to publish under open-access model

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 10:28 AM PST

 
Established journal Evolutionary Applications to publish under open-access model
www.eurekalert.org
"Wiley-Blackwell, the scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., today announced that Evolutionary Applications has joined the Wiley Open Access publishing program. All newly published articles in the journal will be open access and free to view, download and share for non-commercial use. Since its launch in 2008, Evolutionary Applications has attracted very high quality submissions and has attained an Impact Factor of 5.145, as well as winning the 2009 ALPSP award for the best new journal...."

Maximizing the visibility of research outputs: COAR call for action

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 09:24 AM PST

 
Maximizing the visibility of research outputs: COAR call for action
Maxie Putlitz
COAR, (06 Feb 2012)
"The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) joins the research community in condemning Elsevier for its recent business practices and lobbying that undermine policies and activities promoting open access to scholarly literature. While many commercial publishers are working to adapt their business models to rising demands for open access, Elsevier has systematically acted to counter progress being made in the scholarly community towards this end. One easy way of achieving open access is through the deposit of articles into online open access repositories. COAR strongly opposes the changes made by Elsevier to its article posting policies. These policies prohibit authors affiliated with institutions or agencies that have open access mandates to deposit copies of their articles into an open access repository unless their institution signs a very restrictive agreement with Elsevier. Despite their public commitment to “universal access”, Elsevier’s policies are greatly limiting access to scholarly literature....COAR is discouraging its members and others from entering into agreements with Elsevier or other publishers that undermine open access mandates and intervene with already established and emerging author practices of article deposit. COAR urges Elsevier to reconsider its prohibitive approach to open access and revise its policies to allow the deposit of research articles with minimum delay....COAR represents over 80 members and partners from 24 countries from throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America...."

The Influence of the National Institutes of Health Public-Access Policy on the Publishing Habits of Principal Investigators

Posted: 06 Feb 2012 08:36 AM PST

 
The Influence of the National Institutes of Health Public-Access Policy on the Publishing Habits of Principal Investigators
groups.google.com
"This dissertation investigated the effect of the NIH public-access policy on the NIH-funded principal investigators’ publishing decisions. Four questions were examined: [1] Which factors motivate the NIH-funded PIs to publish in the PLoS open-access journals? [2] How do NIH-funded PIs perceive the NIH public-access policy? [3] How does the NIH public-access policy influence the PIs’ publishing behavior? [4] How does the NIH public-access policy influence the PIs’ decision to publish in open-access journals? ..."

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