Wednesday 8 February 2012

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

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


Open and Shut?: Elsevier’s Alicia Wise on the RWA, the West Wing, and Universal Access

Posted: 08 Feb 2012 06:22 AM PST

 
Open and Shut?: Elsevier’s Alicia Wise on the RWA, the West Wing, and Universal Access
poynder.blogspot.com
"[T]he boycott has at least got Elsevier’s attention. Conscious of the potential harm that it could have on its business were it to escalate, Elsevier has been stung into responding to the campaign of vilification. In early January, for instance, Elsevier’s vice president of global corporate relations Tom Reller posted several rebuttals on Eisen’s blog, and Elsevier’s director of universal access Alicia Wise posted a defence of the company on the Liblicense mailing list. And as the mainstream media has begun to take notice of the boycott, Reller has been compelled to respond not only on mailing lists and blogs (e.g. the Scholarly Kitchen), but in the pages of prestigious print publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education. Meanwhile, Elsevier’s director of global academic relations Nick Fowler has found himself having to defend the company’s pricing policy in the Economist, and the company’s senior vice president for physical sciences David Clark has had to do the same in The Scientist. Elsewhere, Chrysanne Lowe, Elsevier’s VP global marketing communications, has been helping in the pushback on Liblicense. In short, Elsevier now appears to understand that it needs to talk to the world....As I suggested recently, the challenge for Elsevier is that this new willingness to engage with the outside world may prove to be too little too late — a point I made to Reller and Alicia Wise when I met them in London earlier this year. To their credit, they acknowledged my point, and promised to arrange for me to do a formal interview with Alicia...."

The Rise Of Open Access Scientific Publishing

Posted: 08 Feb 2012 05:09 AM PST

 
The Rise Of Open Access Scientific Publishing
An intro to OA, and the RWA controversy, focusing on amateur scientists.

Joint AAU and APLU statement against the Research Works Act

Posted: 07 Feb 2012 07:03 PM PST

 
Joint AAU and APLU statement against the Research Works Act
www.webcitation.org
"On behalf of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), whose combined memberships include most of the major public and private research universities in the United States, I [Hunter Rawlings III, President of the AAU] write to express our strong opposition to H.R. 3699, the Research Works Act. This legislation would prohibit all federal research funding agencies from establishing public access policies providing free access to scientific and scholarly journal articles arising from federally funded research. In prohibiting such agency policies, H.R. 3699 would repeal the highly effective Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)...There is increasing recognition of the importance of establishing such federal agency research repositories to provide both access to the public and a rich store of interoperable research information for the scientific community. Currently, eleven federal agencies provide $100 million or more in research funding to universities and other non-profit research institutions. If these agencies all build and interconnect public access repositories of the peer-reviewed articles developed from the research they fund, the peer-reviewed articles arising from the federal government’s $33 billion annual investment in university research could be freely accessed by the public and would provide an extraordinarily valuable, interoperable database of research findings for use by scientists and scholars across all disciplines....Both the 12-month embargo period and the required submission of the final accepted manuscript rather than the final published version of the paper recognize the appropriate domain of private sector publishing and the need for subscription journal publishers to recover their very real costs of publishing. However, H.R. 3699 would extend far beyond these accommodations of publishers’ needs to preclude any feasible federal public access policies. Both the public interest and the interests of science and scholarship would be diminished. This legislation also runs counter to the substance and spirit of Sec. 103 of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act (P.L 111-358)....Because H.R. 3699 would move federal research policy backward rather than forward, we urge you to oppose this legislation and instead support balanced federal public access policies that promote the public interest and advance science and scholarship."

Academics boycott publisher Elsevier

Posted: 07 Feb 2012 01:46 PM PST

 
Academics boycott publisher Elsevier
www.theaustralian.com.au
"DON'T expect to see Julie Clutterbuck's name again in the Journal of Differential Equations. Or in any other journal owned by Elsevier, the Amsterdam-based behemoth of scholarly publishing. Clutterbuck, a mathematician at the Australian National University, has joined a global protest against Elsevier. At last count, more than 4300 academics had put their names to a website, The Cost of Knowledge....[I]n 2010 Elsevier made pound stg. 724 million ($1.06 billion), representing an operating-profit margin of 36 per cent. "Academics are heroic complainers and not always well disposed to profit-maximising businesses," The Economist says. It is true that for some boycotters the grievance is nothing less than the commodification of knowledge. For others, it's more specific to Elsevier...."

Opening Up the Politics of Knowledge and Power in Bioscience

Posted: 07 Feb 2012 10:09 AM PST

 
Opening Up the Politics of Knowledge and Power in Bioscience
Andy Stirling, Claire Marris, and Nikolas Rose
PLoS Biology 10 (1), e1001233 (2012)
" Finally, normative approaches are not primarily concerned with outcomes at all—neither as ends nor means—but with the participatory processes themselves. These value such qualities as independence, openness, accessibility, legitimacy, and accountability....

Science in the Open » Blog Archive » Network Enabled Research: Maximise scale and connectivity, minimise friction

Posted: 07 Feb 2012 07:39 AM PST

 
Science in the Open » Blog Archive » Network Enabled Research: Maximise scale and connectivity, minimise friction
cameronneylon.net
“Prior to all the nonsense with the Research Works Act, I had been having a discussion with Heather Morrison about licenses and Open Access and peripherally the principle of requiring specific licenses of authors... The path that leads me here is one built on a technical understanding of how networks functional and what their capacity can be. This builds heavily on the ideas I have taken from (in no particular order) Jon Udell, Jonathan Zittrain, Michael Nielsen, Clay Shirky, Tim O’Reilly, Danah Boyd, and John Wilbanks among many others... Ultimately the wider global public is for the most part convinced that research is something worth investing in, but in turn they expect to see outcomes of that research, jobs, economic activity, excitement, prestige, better public health, improved standards of living. The wider public are remarkably sophisticated when it comes to understanding that research may take a long time to bear fruit. But they are not particularly interested in papers... We ignore that at our peril... So why are we having this conversation? And why now? What is it about today’s world that is so different? The answer, of course, is the internet... But there are a group of people who are starting to be interested in rocking the boat. The funders, the patient groups, that global public who want to see outcomes. The thought process hasn’t worked through yet, but when it does they will all be asking one question. “How are you building networks to enable research”... As service providers, all of those who work in this industry – and I mean all, from the researchers to the administrators, to the publishers to the librarians – will need to have an answer. The suprising thing is that it’s actually very easy. The web makes building and exploiting networks easier than it has ever been because it is a network infrastructure. It has scale... The problem arises with the systems we have in place to get material online... Currently we take raw science and through a collaborative process between researchers and publishers we generate a communication product, generally a research paper, that is what most of the community holds as the standard means by which they wish to receive information. Because the publishers receive no direct recompense for their contribution they need to recover those costs by other means. They do this by artificially introducing friction and then charging to remove it. This is a bad idea on several levels... If we care about taking advantage of the web and internet for research then we must tackle the building of scholarly communication networks...”

Internet Evolution - George Taylor - The Web Could Transform Science (If Allowed to Do So)

Posted: 07 Feb 2012 07:37 AM PST

 
Internet Evolution - George Taylor - The Web Could Transform Science (If Allowed to Do So)
www.internetevolution.com
... “The Web offers the possibility of great leaps in scientific progress through collaboration and open access. But... the business of accumulating, verifying, and publishing the fruits of research -- remains firmly in the steam age... But under the banner of open access to scientific knowledge, a new mode of collaborative scientific enterprise based on Internet connectivity and availability is challenging the traditional model... In publishing, for instance, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) posts peer-reviewed papers online, with free access to all. Similarly, arXiv.org is an online, open access archive of nearly three-quarters of a million articles on physics, mathematics, biology, computer science, and other disciplines... Online science itself departs from traditional models... On sites such as MathOverflow or Galaxy Zoo, individual contributors work together on projects and problem solving in mathematics and astronomy. Social networking also meets science at ResearchGate, a networking site exclusively set up for scientists to exchange information and ideas. The site now boasts 1.3 million members. ScienceOnline 2012, the sixth annual conference (or "unconference") dedicated to open access for scientists, students, and a range of other collaborators, was held in North Carolina last month... The obstacles to scientific open access are not trivial. Peer-reviewed publication is typically required for grant awards and as part of scientists’ tenure requirements, and there is no alternative yet visible. The publishing companies, such as Elsevier, make big profits, which they are in no hurry to give up. Since 2006, a proposed Federal Research Public Access Act, which would legally enshrine the principle of open access to publicly funded research, has been struggling through the legislative process and is tied up in committee. It is now threatened by the Research Works Act, which is brutal in its determination to place access to publicly funded research firmly in the hands of the publishers ...”

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