Saturday 11 February 2012

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

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


Unbundling peer review: A happier ending to Mike Taylor's Parable

Posted: 11 Feb 2012 06:38 AM PST

 
Unbundling peer review: A happier ending to Mike Taylor's Parable
www.guardian.co.uk
Mike Taylor's allegory is brilliant. But its pessimistic ending is not inevitable.... The institutions and funders of the "farmers" (researchers) need to mandate (require) that their quality-controlled produce (peer-reviewed final drafts of their articles -- not yet "packaged" by the distributor) must be "teleported" (deposited in their institutional repositories, free for all online) by their employees and fundees, immediately upon being certified as having met the quality control standards of the distributor (i.e., upon acceptance by the journal). This way the full cost of the essential quality control (as well as the obsolete packaging and distribution) is still being paid for in full (by the institutions that can still afford the journal subscriptions), but no one is going hungry, because teleportation makes the quality-controlled food accessible free for all ("open access"). Then, if and when institutions decide that they no longer need or want the obsolete products and services still co-bundled with the quality control, they can cancel their subscriptions. And if and when institutional cancelations make subscriptions unsustainable as the means of covering their costs, the (former) distributors can cut the obsolete costs (per journal) of packaging and distribution, offloading them onto teleportation (the global network of mandated institution repositories), leaving just the essential service of managing and certifying the quality control, which the institutions can then pay (per outgoing article) out of a fraction of their annual subscription cancelation savings.
Posted by stevanharnad (who is an author) to peer.review oa.new on Sat Feb 11 2012 at 14:38 UTC | info | related

NeuroDojo: When scientists’ and publishers’ motivations align

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 02:55 PM PST

 
NeuroDojo: When scientists’ and publishers’ motivations align
neurodojo.blogspot.com
“Continuing with the theme of the similarity between game publishing and academic publishing... This analysis is good. (Here’s another.) It takes apart the question if creatives need middlemen like publishers any more. But this bit made me stop and think about scientific publishing: ‘Are you trying to get famous or rich? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, then it’s my opinion that you’ll still need a publisher. Why? Because your motivations are clearly aligned...’ This is one reason why I don’t know if the calls to boycott Elsevier (say) can be sustained. There are a lot of scientists who are trying to get famous. (Probably not so many trying to get rich.)... For many scientists, their goals remain aligned with the goals of academic publishers. Clearly some of that desire for “fame” is not actually a desire to be in the public eye, but scientific fame enough to yield job security. How do we break this?...”

American Anthropological Association joins the dark side of the force

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 02:44 PM PST

 
American Anthropological Association joins the dark side of the force
Michael E. Smith
Publishing Archaeology, (01 Feb 2012)
“Check out Daniel Lende's post on Neuroanthopology, "American Anthropological Association takes public stand against open access." This concerns an open letter submitted by AAA Executive Director William Davis to the White House call for public comment on public access to scholarly publications. Wow, it looks like the AAA has lined up with the commercial publishers, not with scholars and researchers... This development makes me glad that I resigned from the American Anthropological Association last year...”

Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - Elsevier, FooBar and Content-mining – yet another Digital Land Grab – wake up academia and fight. Or surrender for ever « petermr's blog

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 02:25 PM PST

 
Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - Elsevier, FooBar and Content-mining – yet another Digital Land Grab – wake up academia and fight. Or surrender for ever « petermr's blog
blogs.ch.cam.ac.uk
“I have just discovered Elsevier’s content mining document. For those who don’t know I have been trying to get permission to text-mine Elsevier content for two years and have been treated as a second-class citizen and ultimately come away with nothing... The analysis in this post will centre round Elsevier but also applies to another major publisher (FooBar, who I will reveal in later posts if my informant agrees). And I suspect it applies to a large proportion the rest of the publishing community... Read [the Esevier Content Mining Policy] before you read my critique. Consider the implications. Then I’ll indicate why we have been so badly let down by academic libraries or their purchasing agents who have given away more of our crown jewels without a fight... If you want to know why I am so angry with University Libraries read the bottom of the post as well... I’ll go through and annotate it – Like a peer-reviewer. Because after all that’s why we pay Elsevier isn’t it? – because without them we’d be incapable of organising peer-review...”

Wider den Harnadianischen Wahn: Fakten aus den Niederlanden zu den IRs

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 02:24 PM PST

A census of Open Access repositories in the Netherlands

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 01:05 PM PST

 
A census of Open Access repositories in the Netherlands
WoW! Wouter on the Web, (10 Feb 2012)
Posted by Klausgraf to oa.new on Fri Feb 10 2012 at 21:05 UTC | info | related

Open Access Legislation is Active

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 12:54 PM PST

 
Open Access Legislation is Active
Jason Kramer
NYS Higher Education Initiative, (02 Feb 2012)
"The “taxpayer access to publically funded research act” (TAPFR) is now active in the New York State Legislature. TAPFR is supported by the New York State Higher Education Initiative (NYSHEI) and sponsored by Assemblyman Andrew Hevesi (D-Queens) – pictured above. TAPFR establishes that the published results of publically funded research be openly and electronically accessible to all members of the public. “The academic and research libraries of New York applaud the vision of Assemblyman Hevesi,” said NYSHEI Executive Director Jason Kramer. “Mr. Hevesi understands that taxpayers deserve access to the research results they paid for.” ...TAPFR was inspired by HR 5037, the federal research public access act (FRPAA), and the open access success of the National Institutes of Health embodied in the development of PubMed Central. If enacted, New York would become the first state to adopt a measure to ensure open access to publically funded research. The State of New York spends around $50 million annually in direct research support, the majority of which flows through the state Department of Health in support of stem cell research...."

OA for NY-funded research

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 12:51 PM PST

 
OA for NY-funded research
assembly.state.ny.us
A new bill introduced into the NY state legislature by Andrew Hevesi: "Establishes the taxpayer access to publicly funded research act requiring any state agency, commission or authority that funds direct research to establish a public access policy that would provide access to certain published works that were funded by the state."

Open source announcements and new FLOSSBOK initiative | DEJAN SEO

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 10:33 AM PST

 
Open source announcements and new FLOSSBOK initiative | DEJAN SEO
dejanseo.com.au
"Among the three announcements...made [by Simon Phipps, a director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI)] was one which I found both interesting and important for the research, science and academic sector, called the FLOSSBOK initiative. It is a new initiative that OSI is hosting to create a “a “Body of Knowledge” to support academic curriculum development....The goal of this project according to OSI Board Member Professor TonyWasserman is to outline the topics important for anyone studying FLOSS, and to work toward defining learning objectives for various classes related to FLOSS. They expressed the hope that people, who are involved in the development and delivery of FLOSS educational material will contribute to the outline, which can then be used by others to create their own classes and curricula...."

Mozilla Open Badges

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 10:28 AM PST

 
Mozilla Open Badges
openbadges.org
"Learning today happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements that happen outside of school. Mozilla's Open Badges project is working to solve that problem, making it easy for anyone to issue, earn and display badges across the web -- through a shared infrastructure that's free and open to all. The result: helping learners everywhere display 21st century skills, unlock career and educational opportunities, and level up in their life and work...."

How research goes viral

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 08:00 AM PST

 
How research goes viral
Peter Dizikes
MIT News, (10 Jan 2012)
Extract: The researchers focused on materials held by the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), an institution in Manassas, Va., and the largest such resource center in the world. Stern and Furman looked at what happened when materials pertaining to 108 published articles were suddenly transferred from other, less accessible collections into the ATCC, and then compared the ensuing citation rates for those papers with a control set of 108 similar articles employing materials whose accessibility did not change during that period. The citation rates for the papers whose materials were transferred to the ATCC rose by 57 to 135 percent after the biological matter was made available for wider scientific scrutiny. The effect was more pronounced for papers that had not previously enjoyed especially wide audiences. There was a 70 percent gain in citations of articles published in leading biology journals, but a 116 percent gain in citations of articles published in lesser-known journals, perhaps indicating that access to the materials behind the lesser-known results led to a more pronounced boost in confidence in those findings. “When things become more open, it’s not simply that you get more research, but you get more diverse research,” Stern notes.
Posted by stevehit to oa.impact oa.new on Fri Feb 10 2012 at 16:00 UTC | info | related

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