Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items) |
- Does open access publishing increase citation or download rates?
- Open and Shut?: Open Access: The People’s Petition
- Rutgers University Senate Open Access Initiative
- Why Open Data isn’t enough.
- Marine Institute Open Access Repository Attracts Worldwide Audience to Marine Research in Ireland
- One idea to help make Open Access the norm
- Southampton professors to co-direct the world's first Open Data Institute
- ACCG and Open Access
- Proposals to open access to research - Comment - News - nebusiness.co.uk
- Science Publishing and the Dual Use Dilemma | Speaking of Medicine
- Open-Science Geeks Invite Obama Onto Roller Coaster | Wired Science | Wired.com
- Reddit's Alexis Ohanian And Activists Aim To Build A 'Bat-Signal For The Internet' - Forbes
- Journal of Public Interest IP
- UCSF enacts policy mandating open-access research, and a related complaint from me
- The Publishers Association is hallucinating
- White House petitioned to make research free to access : Nature News & Comment
- Sir Tim Berners-Lee to help start-ups with 'open data'
- del-fi • Time For A Beer
- Startups Root for Cheaper Peeks at Scientific Papers
- Open Access and Copyright Issues Related to Knowledge Translation and Transfer for the OMAFRA-UofG Partnership
- Confessions of an Open Access Agnostic
- Open Access: Is it open season on traditional scientific publishing
- Every (source) you wanted to know about (Open Science) but were afraid to (compile yourself)
- The Academic Publishing Empire Strikes Back
- The Academic Empire Strikes Back
- Nature News Blog: Argentine legislators approve open-access law : Nature News Blog
- Attacking publishers will not make open access more sustainable
- Storm Clouds in Academic Publishing
- Presentation of #da12data initiative in the Open Data Week, Nantes
- What can research data repositories learn from open access? Part 1
- Open Sesame
- Horizon 2020: A €80 Billion Battlefield for Open Access
- Ten reasons for an open access scientific publishing policy in EU’s Horizon 2020
- The triumph of fake open access
- Questions on open access and open licensing in EU scientific research
- A Working Definition of “Open Government” | Global Integrity
- Duraspace 2012 Community Sponsorship Program
- Using Open Data, 19 - 20 June 2012, Brussels
- Does It Pay To Sue Libraries? | Peer to Peer Review
- Open Access Movement Finds New Ally in University of California, San Francisco
| Does open access publishing increase citation or download rates? Posted: 29 May 2012 07:18 AM PDT Research Trends (28), (May 2012) The effect of "Open Access" (OA) on the visibility or impact of scientific publications is one of the most important issues in the fields of bibliometrics and information science. During the past 10 years numerous empirical studies have been published that examine this issue using various methodologies and viewpoints. Comprehensive reviews and bibliographies are given amongst others by OPCIT, Davis and Walters and Craig et al. The aim of this article is not to replicate nor update these thorough reviews. Rather, it aims to presents the two main methodologies that were applied in these OA-related studies and discusses their potentialities and limitations. The first method is based on citation analyses; the second on usage analyses. |
| Open and Shut?: Open Access: The People’s Petition Posted: 28 May 2012 03:36 PM PDT poynder.blogspot.co.uk Use the link to access the interview with OA advocate John Wilbanks, senior fellow in entrepreneurship at the Ewing Kauffman Foundation. The introduction to the interview reads as follows: “Earlier this month a group of Open Access (OA) advocates flew to Washington to attend a meeting with the US Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP). Their objective was to convince OSTP that it is vital the US government ensures that all publicly-funded research is made freely available on the Internet. The omens seemed good: at the end of last year the OSTP had issued an RFI on Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting from Federally Funded Research, and the Obama Administration has been making positive noises about OA for a while now... the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) — had been introduced in both US houses that would have the reverse effect of the RWA. If passed, it would propagate the NIH policy to a dozen or so other US federal agencies, and reduce the current NIH embargo from 12 months to six... To cap it all, says John Wilbanks, a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at the Ewing Kauffman Foundation, and one of the group that travelled to Washington, the meeting appeared to go well. ‘They listened to us, they clearly had studied the issues...’ Flying home to the West Coast on a redeye, however, Wilbanks began to experience a nagging feeling that their job was not complete... ‘And it hit me — us, because I was with Mike Carroll, Mike Rossner, and Heather Joseph — that the redeyes and the meetings and the arguing were not carrying the day,’ Wilbanks explained on this blog. ‘We needed to do something else.’ That something else became an initiative called Access2Research. The objective was to engage the public in the discussions about OA. The best way of engaging the people, it was decided, was to launch a petition on the ‘We the People’ site — which was introduced on whitehouse.gov by the US government last September — and invite the public to sign it. The petition — which went live on the night of 20th May... In order to receive a response from the US government the petition must attract 25,000 signatures within 30 days (i.e. 19th June). But here too the omens are good: within the first two and a half days the petition had attracted half the number of signatures necessary, with roughly 200 being added every hour. At the time of writing the number stands at 16,443, two thirds of the way there, yet with 24 days still to run... In fact, calling on people to make a public statement in support of OA is a long-standing tradition within the movement... In 2001, for instance, the Budapest Open Access Initiative attracted over 5,600 signatures... The previous year (2000) an initiative called the Public Library of Science (PLoS) had garnered 34,000 signatures in support of OA... Collecting signatures in support of OA came back with a vengeance earlier this year, when researchers were asked to boycott Elsevier for its support of the RWA by signing a pledge at the Cost of Knowledge site... the number of scientists signing up has continued to grow, and currently stands at 11,857... Other petitions have fared less well. A January petition against the RWA, for instance, failed to reach its target 10,000 signatures... However, the petition most similar to Access2Research was one organised in 2007 that called on the European Commission to, “guarantee public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication.” This collected 18,500 signatures in three weeks (although subsequently the number grew to 28,000), and both startled and impressed European politicians. ‘The EU petition was very influential, and helped to persuade the Commission to mandate OA for EU-funded research,’ explains Alma Swan, director of European advocacy programmes at SPARC, who project managed the petition... “The White House petition is like the EU petition, agrees Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist at Université du Québec à Montréal. ‘It is citizens asking their government to mandate OA...’ But will the Access2Research petition manage to steel the resolve of US lawmakers in the way the 2007 petition emboldened European politicians to act, particularly as publishers step up their lobbying against OA? Peter Suber, OA advocate and faculty fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, believes it might. Indeed, he thinks it could prove even more successful than earlier petitions — for four reasons. ‘First, there is superb coordination behind it. Many of us were prepared on Day One to publicise it. Second, there is the lack of cost for the signatories. The petition doesn't ask people to change their practices for publishing, editing, or refereeing. It merely asks them to approve an idea and call for action.’ Third,’ adds Suber, ‘there is the specific goal. Getting 25k signatures in 30 days is an identifiable target. It's not just "more and more and more’. We can tell when we we're closing in, and we can tell how quickly we're closing in.’ ‘Finally,’ Suber says, ‘there’s the payoff. Getting 25k signatures in 30 days triggers an official response from the Obama administration. That matters in itself. In addition, this administration has twice solicited public comments on federal OA policy. It may not take much to elicit a major public statement or policy initiative.‘ What may also help is that the OA movement has learned that calling for “public access” to publicly-funded research can be a more effective strategy than demanding ‘open access’ for researchers... Explains Harnad, ‘Public pressure on governments to mandate OA based on the slogan of public access to publicly funded research has been very successful; the slogan is appealing to both voters and politicians. The EU petition was instrumental in inducing the EU to mandate OA for EU-funded research. It is likely that the White House petition will have a similar effect on US-funded research.’ But whatever the outcome of the current petition, OA advocates are confident that it is only a matter of time. In an online environment, they maintain, OA is both inevitable and optimal... As Wilbanks puts it, ‘It takes time to change a hidebound industry. There's a lot of money to be made in selling scholarly journals, and a long history of resistance to change. I think the movement's gone pretty quickly actually viewed in that light.’ Those wishing to sign the petition can do so here. It is not necessary to be a US citizen to do so. For further background, SPARC has produced a video explaining the case for public access. As noted earlier, the deadline for signing is June 19th. Below I publish a short Q&A with John Wilbanks.” |
| Rutgers University Senate Open Access Initiative Posted: 28 May 2012 03:35 PM PDT nbfc.rutgers.edu Use the link to access the presentation made by Jane Otto, Media and Music Metadata Librarian, Rutgers University Libraries and Laura Bowering Mullen, RUL Committee on Scholarly Communication and Behavioral Sciences Librarian. Jane Otto is the Chair and Laura Bowering Mullen the Co-Chair of the Open Access Subcommittee of the Research & Graduate & Professional Education Committee, Rutgers University Senate. The presentation was made on May 11, 2012 to the New Brunswick Faculty Council. More information on the Rutgers University Senate Open Access Initiative can be found here under the heading “Reports, Recommendations and Resolutions.” |
| Posted: 28 May 2012 03:34 PM PDT Open Knowledge Foundation Blog, (28 May 2012) “The debate around data in our community has been densely concentrated around the question of openness... Software, text, photos, videos, music are all creative works under the law, all carrying the powerful, relatively internationalized protections of copyright, and this very power allows creators to invert that power using free / libre copyright licenses. That reality has led to a set of definitions of freedom for software, for cultural works, and for knowledge, all of which are very centered on the intellectual property regimes surrounding digital objects. And that’s carried over into the debate around data. We ask, ‘is it open data?’ of the world. But I spend a lot of time around data people for whom open is an afterthought... They’re worried about whether we should leverage machine learning or domain experts, not openness. Or it’s Social Data. They’re worried about privacy policies and selling the data to as many vendors as possible. It’s Blue Button, and Green Button. They’re worried about getting data into people’s hands. It’s Quantified Self. They’re worried about getting their own data into their own hands. In Washington and other capitals large and small it’s on Government Data. Open is almost never mentioned. And I think that’s because we’re so focused on intellectual property, on share alike and attribution and public domain, that we lose the bigger context. Creative works came online in a cultural and technical context that allowed us to focus on freedom, and intellectual property... Data is entering the world at a rate that is so fast it’s almost incomprehensible to human brains. It’s like trying to comprehend geologic time. The cost of generating data is so low in so many spaces, and dropping like a stone in so many others, that the real challenge is to do interesting things with it. The gulf between those who can do something with data and those who can’t is a serious new case of digital divide, and licensing is just a tiny part of that gulf. Important, to be sure, but tiny. There’s a people gulf – 190,000 machine learning experts and 1,500,000 managers in the US alone that don’t exist, but need to, to take advantage of data. That gap is worse in the developing world, and will only accelerate in coming years. But perhaps most important is a cultural gulf – we live in a world right now that (implicitly in most cases, but increasingly explicitly) accepts the natural state of data as transactional. We trade our data, rather than our cash, for services like Facebook, Google, apps, and more. We don’t get a copy of it. We don’t know who does. We’re on the outside of the black box, but our data’s on the inside. So my argument is that we as an ‘open’ movement need to understand and integrate our concerns over property rights into the broader debate. We need to talk about citizen’s rights. We need to talk about the right to understand how our web searches are returned. We need to talk about how our privacy rights may be negatively impacted by more openness. Because unlike the web, and the internet, which grew quietly in obscure corners of the world, allowing open designs to flourish, data has already drawn attention, money, and closed business models. We’re in active competition against powerful, rich opponents to create an open ecosystem at the core of data, one that TCP/IP and HTML didn’t have to fight. Here’s hoping we can bridge the gaps before other, closed systems can do so for us. The good news is that open systems have a lovely little history of outcompeting closed ones, given time, freedom to compete, and even a small group of committed people.” |
| Marine Institute Open Access Repository Attracts Worldwide Audience to Marine Research in Ireland Posted: 28 May 2012 03:33 PM PDT www.central-solutions.com “The Marine Institute is the agency responsible for Marine Research, Technology Development and Innovation (RTDI) in Ireland. Their aim is to examine and realise the economic potential of Ireland's marine resources, to protect Ireland’s marine environment through research and environmental monitoring, and to promote the sustainable development of the marine industry through strategic funding programmes and essential scientific services. The Marine Institute produces an extensive range of quality research such as postgraduate theses, journal articles, reports and conference proceedings. In the past, their research was stored in many formats and locations, which created challenges when trying to gain access to such research. Since January 2008 the European Research Council requires that all peer reviewed publications from ERC funded research projects be accessible through an institutional repository and meet the requirements set out by the EU’s FP7 mandate. Following on from this, since late 2008 the HEA, SFI, IRCSET and HRB have specified an Open Access mandate for any research they fund. Central Solutions helped in designing and implementing the Marine Institute’s Open Access Repository (OAR), translating their precise requirements into a fully functional solution. Central Solutions identified DSpace software as the platform best suited to satisfy the needs of the Marine Institute while facilitating compliance with openaccess standards such as OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE. DSpace is a freely available, open source, digital repository software product jointly developed by MIT and HP... The success of the Marine Institute’s OAR is evident as the repository now holds over 650 publications and is continuing to grow. A significant feature of the repository is that performance statistics for each publication are now available enabling you to see where in the world people are viewing each publication, and how often it is viewed/downloaded. The Marine Institute has had over 9,000 visits from more than 124 countries around the world since its recent launch, thereby helping the Marine Institute to achieve its’ aim of showcasing research to an international audience...” |
| One idea to help make Open Access the norm Posted: 28 May 2012 03:32 PM PDT genegeek.ca, (28 May 2012) “... We are in the middle of the Academic Spring, a movement promoting open access to scientific research. Open Access (OA) journals (e.g. PLoS) do not charge online readers for their articles and allow unrestricted reuse. This contrasts with many of the traditional journals where the publishers own the rights to their articles and people have to pay to access or reuse them. I am not able to share some of my early work because the copyright stays with the publisher! Changes are happening. There is now a Directory of the Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Plus, traditional publishers are responding (the response has a lot of info on the fight for Open Access). In the US, there is a White House petition to require free access over the internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research. You should sign the petition – go ahead, I’ll wait – signed? OK, back to my idea. I think we should: SEED THE NEXT GENERATION... I run an outreach program for teens and they constantly amaze me. One unwelcome surprise was the idea that science should be interpreted. One student commented that unrestricted access would be useless unless there was someone available to tell them what was important. This saddened me. Unfortunately, students can often memorize lots of information without thinking about it and do well on tests. In this model, what is important is often determined by the teacher. Note: our program is trying to increase scientific literacy, critical thinking, and creativity to build the scientists and inventors of tomorrow. I hoped they would be thrilled with the access to new research in Open Access journals but many were nervous. We want students to start evaluating the ideas by the weight of evidence, not by an external measure. So, why am I talking about this outreach program? Next year, returning students will start independent research! Not only will they have to evaluate ideas but they’ll ask – and hopefully answer – their own questions. The students will use Open Notebook Science to record their research. This will not be promoted as new and exciting but just ‘as the way it is’. I’m hoping this immersion will lead to more scientists providing their data freely and openly. Am I being naive? Do you think indoctrinating the next generation of scientists will help lead to significant change? Is that too slow?” |
| Southampton professors to co-direct the world's first Open Data Institute Posted: 28 May 2012 01:41 PM PDT phys.org “The UK Government has announced plans to establish the world's first Open Data Institute, which will be co-directed by University of Southampton Professors Nigel Shadbolt and Sir Tim Berners-Lee, to support growth of new businesses on the back of Government data. Based in Shoreditch in East London's Tech City, the world-leading Open Data Institute (ODI) will become the 'go to' venue for those seeking to create new products, entrepreneurial opportunities and economic growth from open data. Initially the ODI will incubate, nurture and mentor new businesses that exploit open data to create new products and business opportunities to help drive economic growth. Further activities planned for the institute include 'appathons' or 'hackathons', to support work on newly-released data sets and to develop new use cases for open data. It will promote innovation driven by the Government's Open Data policy, helping the public sector use its own data more effectively and developing the capability of UK businesses to exploit the commercial value of open data. Co-director of the ODI Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and Chair of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, says: ‘One of the reasons the Web worked was because people reused each other's content in ways never imagined by those who created it. The same will be true of Open Data. The Institute will allow us to provide the tools, skills and methods to support the creation of new value using Open Government Data.’ Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Head of the Web and Internet Science Group at the University of Southampton and co-director of the ODI, adds: ‘Data is the new raw material of the 21st century and the UK is world-leading in the release of Open Government Data. The ODI will be a place that develops the very best UK talents in Open Data. It will be a focal point where current and future entrepreneurs and developers, technologists and creatives meet, share ideas, make things happen and drive growth.’ The Government is to commit up to £10m over five years to support the Open Data Institute through the Technology Strategy Board in an unprecedented, match funded collaboration with industry and academic centres.” |
| Posted: 28 May 2012 01:39 PM PDT Doug's Archaeology, (25 May 2012) “Edit- this situation has resolved itself amicably. The ACCG has/are in the process of changing their statement and we are having a very interesting discussion about laws regarding the importing of antiquities. Overall, it has been a busier weekend then what I would have liked but one that has been well worth the time. I am learning lots. All webpages have been returned to their normal appearance.” [Use the link to access the comment section, providing thoughtful responses to the above blog post.] |
| Proposals to open access to research - Comment - News - nebusiness.co.uk Posted: 28 May 2012 01:38 PM PDT www.nebusiness.co.uk “OPEN, free access to academic research is being planned by the Government. The implications of these proposals are huge. Universities spend around £200m a year accessing research published in journals and databases... I believe opening up academic research to be read freely by anyone is a positive move that will boost progress, strengthen links between higher education and businesses, and help even the smallest spin-out companies access research which can help them grow... It will, of course, affect the publishing industry, which currently charges for access to research papers in journals... The subject is highly emotive – it led to a campaign from researchers, nicknamed the ‘academic spring’, which saw them boycotting research publications which did not allow information to be freely shared... Crowdsourcing takes the concept of worldwide access to knowledge a step further. In most crowdsourcing projects an organisation posts a problem on a crowdsourcing platform and invites solutions. The crowd – that’s anyone who has access to the platform – votes on the ideas, and the best one is rewarded by the organisation which owns all the responses to its posted problem. A rapidly growing number of companies, universities and governments worldwide are adopting crowdsourcing methods to unlock access to information, find new ideas, and manage the results. People are creating their own crowds and when social networks and crowdsourcing overlap, a powerful new way of finding information and knowledge results. Information is available instantly and is the collective view of thousands of individuals. It gives a whole new dimension to brainstorming.” |
| Science Publishing and the Dual Use Dilemma | Speaking of Medicine Posted: 28 May 2012 01:37 PM PDT blogs.plos.org “You may be familiar with the controversy over recent research conducted on H5N1 influenza... The studies that started the debate, submitted by Ron Fouchier of Erasmus MS and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of UW-Madison, were flagged by the journals Science and Nature as having the potential for ‘Dual Use’ – research that can potentially be used for both legitimate or ill intended means – and were remanded by the journals to a US governmental biosecurity advisory board called the NSABB. It’s not often that science journals find themselves in the position of contacting a governmental body for this kind of advice, and it begs the hard question of where responsibility should fall for decisions relating to whether to publish controversial papers, and under what restrictions. Particularly, what role should science publishers play? This was also new ground for the NSABB because it was created to provide advice on policies relating to dual use research as opposed to dictating the scientific content of specific manuscripts after scientific peer review. Thus, controversy was generated when the NSABB recommended for the first time to redact key methodological details and results from the two papers, which were judged to potentially enable duplication ‘by those who would seek to do harm’. The idea of redaction- trying to keep certain results secret by only sharing them with the ‘most qualified’ scientists- presents editors of scientific journals with a genuine dilemma... Here at PLoS, it raises both philosophical questions in addition to the obvious practical ones. As an Open Access publisher, PLoS is committed to the widespread dissemination of research while also being sensitive to issues of publication ethics and public safety. From our perspective, it’s difficult to understand how selective redaction of data, which would be shared amongst only a select few, could be a viable option within the context of either Open Access or the strictures of freedom of information. Ultimately the redaction idea was scrapped and the NSABB decided to recommend publication in full, following on a similar decision from an advisory body constituted by the World Health Organization. However, Science found itself in the middle of the fray once more in April when the Dutch government moved to block Fouchier from publishing his work by invoking laws intended to prevent the export of Dual Use technology. Fouchier protested the need for an export control permit and considered resubmitting to Science without one. Although Fouchier could have faced up to six years in jail if he had followed through and the Dutch government had elected to prosecute the case, Science wasn’t legally obligated to withhold publication at all. This put the journal in a delicate spot, pitted in the middle of an author and his government. In the end, Fouchier agreed to apply for his permit and it was granted. We can expect to see his H5N1 paper appear soon, and Kawaoka’s related study has just been published... It’s clear that a new precedent has emerged. At the end of March the Obama administration announced new oversight on funding research with the potential for Dual Use, focusing on a list of fifteen Select Agents and certain categories of experiments. The US government hasn’t previously involved itself in mandating Dual Use policies to this extent, and exactly how this new policy develops will be of considerable interest... To provide guidance to all PLoS journals, we have formed an internal advisory committee to help navigate these tough decisions. We will also soon be instating a related Dual Use policy to assist in the evaluation and processing of manuscripts that raise the kinds of concerns that the two H5N1 manuscripts did at Science and Nature. Our philosophy is that we will continue to publish the highest quality science, using the top standards of peer review, while being sensitive to the evolving standards of what is considered Dual Use science that could potentially be dangerous to public health. We welcome continued discussions...” |
| Open-Science Geeks Invite Obama Onto Roller Coaster | Wired Science | Wired.com Posted: 28 May 2012 12:04 PM PDT www.wired.com “... Now open-access advocates have created a petition at the WhiteHouse.gov site that could, like many peitions, mean nothing — but might prompt action that could transform the open-access debate. The short, concise petition, filed by a loose, ad-hoc group of advocates, Access2Research, addresses just one aspect of the complex open-science agenda — but it’s perhaps the most important aspect from either a substantive or a political perspective: The petition asks the White House to make all papers that draw on federally funded research ‘open-access’ — that is, free to all readers... The petition essentially calls for an expansion of an existing NIH policy that requires some, but not all, papers from federally funded research to be made open-access after six months. It would seem the sort of message Obama is generally friendly to; but according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the petition was filed after advocates met with the White House’s top science adviser and sensed less enthusiasm than they would have liked to: John Wilbanks, a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, decided to try a petition after he and other open-access proponents met recently with John Holdren, science adviser to President Obama. ‘It was a nice meeting, but everyone’s always very noncommittal, and it was sort of the same old same old,’ Mr. Wilbanks said. ‘Something had to change the conversation.’ Three other champions of open access joined Mr. Wilbanks in creating the petition: Michael W. Carroll, a professor of law at American University’s Washington College of Law; Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc; and Mike Rossner, executive director of Rockefeller University Press... The public is responding: In just 5 days, the petition has gathered over two-thirds of the 25,000 signatures it must get within 30 days of its posting to compel a White House response. I’m sticking my neck out and betting it will pass... But how will the White House respond? First, I’ll take a wild-ass guess and say there’s, oh, a 40% chance the WHite House will respond with something really meaningful — an extension of the current open-access policy, say, such as sharply reducing or eliminating the open-access wait period or expanding the policy to all federally funded research rather than mainly the NIH. More likely (the 60% chance, I’m guessing) Obama will make some nice sounds, tweak a few knobs, and call it done for now. If that’s the case, I don’t see it destroying the open-access movement; but it’ll be a chance missed. However, if the White House puts its shoulder behind this idea to push, whether through directly making sharp policy changes or pressing hard in the press and in Congress, it could give another huge boost to a movement that has gained tremendously in visibility and effect over the last 12 months. The gravity is there either way. But if Obama climbs aboard, the roller coaster could speed up sharply.” |
| Reddit's Alexis Ohanian And Activists Aim To Build A 'Bat-Signal For The Internet' - Forbes Posted: 28 May 2012 12:03 PM PDT www.forbes.com “The ‘blackout’ of Web sites to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in January was an unprecedented show of Internet solidarity against bad legislation. But with new net-threatening measures like ACTA and CISPA popping out of Congress on a practically monthly basis, one online entrepreneur and a group of net activists want to enable regular SOPA-style mass protests at the push of a button. Alexis Ohanian, the 29-year old founder of social news site Reddit, has partnered with the online advocacy group Fight for the Future to create what they’re calling the ‘Internet Defense League.’ Ohanian describes the project, which they plan to officially launch next month, as a ‘Bat-Signal for the Internet.’ Any website owner can sign up on the group’s website to add a bit of code to his or her site–or receive that code by email at the time of a certain campaign–that can be triggered in the case of a political crisis like SOPA, adding an activist call-to-action to all the sites involved, such as a widget or banner asking users to sign petitions, call lawmakers, or boycott companies. ‘People who wish to be tapped can see, oh look, the Bat-Signal is up. Time to do something,’ says Ohanian. ‘Whatever website you own, this is a way for you to be notified if something comes up and take some basic actions…If we aggregate everyone that’s doing it, the numbers start exploding.’ The embedded code on participating sites might do more than just display a mere banner ad, says Tiffiny Cheng, co-director of Internet-focused political advocacy group Fight for the Future, and could even go as far as the blackout technique that Web activists used to successfully turn the tide against SOPA. ‘We’ll invent something at the time, and it will be some really unified and shocking action,’ she says, hinting at techniques that would temporarily take over the entire appearance of willing sites. ‘We’re creating the tools and the forms of protest that allow for viral organizing...’ So far, Cheng says Reddit, imaging hosting site Imgur, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, viral content company Cheezburger Network, Mozilla and the non-profit Public Knowledge have all signed up. The group hopes that eventually thousands of sites–including those as small as a single user’s Tumblr page–will join the project. Fight for the Future and Ohanian have both been focused most recently on defeating CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protect Act. The bill, originally designed to allow sharing of information between the private sector and government agencies like the National Security Agency for cybersecurity purposes, was amended just before being passed in the House last month to allow companies to hand over any user data they wish to the government without regard for existing privacy laws, for reasons as vague as preventing computer ‘crime,’ or ‘the protection of individuals from the danger of death or serious bodily harm.’ One of two Senate versions of the bill is expected to come up for a vote in early June. Fight for the Future last week launched an anti-CISPA site, Privacy is Awesome, asking users to call their senators and demand meetings to discuss the bill. And Ohanian has spoken out against the legislation as well, asking investors not to buy shares of Facebook’s newly-public stock to protest the company’s support for CISPA. But CISPA protests have yet to match the fever pitch of anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA protests in January that led to boycotts of SOPA-supporting Web host GoDaddy, attacks by Anonymous against the Recording Industry of Association of America and the Motion Picture Assocation of America, and the blackout protests that included sites as popular as Reddit and Wikipedia. Most of Silicon Valley continues to support CISPA, including Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Oracle and Symantec, with Google refusing to take a stand on either side of the issue...” |
| Posted: 28 May 2012 08:06 AM PDT www.piipajournal.org The Journal of Public Interest Intellectual Property is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by the non-profit Public Interest Intellectual Property Advisors (PIPPA). |
| UCSF enacts policy mandating open-access research, and a related complaint from me Posted: 27 May 2012 07:26 AM PDT Why Evolution Is True, (25 May 2012) “The chickens are finally coming home to roost. The price-gouging practices of many academic journals, a practice I’ve often decried here, have driven one large and important university to take action. According to the webpage of the University of California at San Franciso (UCSF), that university will henceforth constrain all of its faculty and academic employees to publish in journals whose contents are freely and immediately available to anyone... ‘Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals,’ said Richard A. Schneider, PhD, chair of the UCSF Academic Senate Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, who spearheaded the initiative at UCSF... ‘UCSF is the nation’s largest public recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), receiving 1,056 grants last year, valued at $532.8 million. Research from those and other grants leads to more than 4,500 scientific papers each year... but the majority of those papers are only available to subscribers who pay ever-increasing fees to the journals. The 10-campus University of California (UC) system spends close to $40 million each year to buy access to journals . . . The new policy requires UCSF faculty to make each of their articles freely available immediately through an open-access repository, and thus accessible to the public through search engines such as Google Scholar. Articles will be deposited in a UC repository, other national open-access repositories such as the NIH-sponsored PubMed Central, or published as open-access publications. They will then be available to be read, downloaded, mined, or distributed without barriers.‘ There does, however, seem to be one loophole ... ‘Researchers are able to “opt out” if they want to publish in a certain journal but find that the publisher is unwilling to comply with the UCSF policy.’ So much for forcing Science or Nature to stop charging exorbitant sums to view their papers! I have another complaint not addressed by this policy: some journals allow scientists to withhold the raw data analyzed in their papers for long periods (over a year) so that other researchers can’t ‘mine’ it and use that data to generate their own papers. The idea is that one’s data is proprietary, and one should have exclusive use of it for a long period of time. This, too, I find unconscionable. The essence of science is that other workers must be able to repeat your results before those results become credible in the research community. You can’t do that if someone publishes an analysis and then refuses to give you the data on which that analysis is based. The selfish desire to ‘own’ datasets, so you can generate lots of papers from them without other scientists being able to peek at the data, is inimical to the progress of science. In my view, every bit of data on which a published paper is based must be available immediately to any scientist who wants to see it.” |
| The Publishers Association is hallucinating Posted: 27 May 2012 07:25 AM PDT Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week #AcademicSpring, (25 May 2012) “Today’s Guardian has a piece by Graham Taylor, director of academic, educational and professional publishing at the Publishers Association, entitled Attacking publishers will not make open access any more sustainable. It’s such a crock that I felt compelled to respond point-by-point in the comments. I did, but because my response was too long for the Guardian‘s comment field, I had to break it into three parts [part 1, part 2, part 3]. Here is the whole thing... As we discuss the access crisis and Academic Spring, it’s great that the Guardian is allowing a platform to representatives of the academic publishing industry. It gives them a chance to demonstrate how utterly bankrupt their position is, and it’s kind of Graham Taylor to oblige. His article is a catalogue of distortions and mispresentations from start to finish...” |
| White House petitioned to make research free to access : Nature News & Comment Posted: 27 May 2012 07:24 AM PDT www.nature.com “More than 17,000 people have signed an online petition urging US President Barack Obama to require all scientific journal articles resulting from US taxpayer-funded research to be made freely available online. The signatures, obtained within a week of the petition's launch after an active social media campaign, put it over two-thirds of the way towards the threshold that will require an official response from the White House. It comes as the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) — one of the largest biomedical institutions in the United States — becomes the latest institution to require its researchers to make their articles freely available in an open-access repository. However, they can opt out if it brings them into conflict with publishers. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and various Harvard University schools are amongst those with similar policies in place. The petition, on the White House website, was launched by Access2Research, a group of four open-access advocates who were frustrated by the lack of progress on the issue and so are trying a new tack. The petition urges the president to ‘act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research’. ‘We know the NIH policy works to provide public access and there have been no data presented that it hurts publishers’ revenues, so we are asking for that policy to be extended,’ says John Wilbanks, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, and one of the four people spearheading the petition. The proposed extension would see open-access polices cover all 12 federal-science agencies, including the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture. The petition does not stipulate a time period within which articles should be deposited or a particular repository, to give agencies flexibility, Wilbanks says. The agencies together receive about US$60 billion in federal research dollars each year, with about half going to the NIH, so the number of papers available annually could double under the proposal, says Heather Joseph, another petition leader and executive director of the pro-open access Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, based in Washington DC. Assuming the petition tops 25,000 signatures before 19 June, there must be an official response from the administration. ‘[It] at least puts the issue in front of the president's staff for consideration. The response could be as weak as a simple acknowledgement, or as strong as a policy statement or directive’, such as an executive order telling agencies to expand the NIH policy, Joseph adds. The timing of the petition is no accident. A bipartisan bill — the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) 2012 — that advocates extending the NIH policy to other federal agencies, and shortening the time frame in which papers must be deposited from 12 months to 6, is making its way through Congress. The White House is also currently reviewing its open-access policies. ‘We want the White House to state its position because it could get the ball rolling with agencies, and we want FRPAA because it is much harder to overturn,’ says Joseph. But the petition has received a cool response from both traditional publishers and some open-access campaigners. ‘I love this is happening, but it is a compromise,’ says Michael Eisen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and a co-founder of open-access publisher the Public Library of Science. Eisen adds that implementation of public access policies like the NIH's at other federal agencies would mean delayed rather than immediate access along with a curtailed ability for data mining. Publishers have been ‘working hard to advance the public-access issue’, says Andi Sporkin, a spokeswoman for the Association of American Publishers, headquartered in Washington DC. ‘But] we oppose government mandates on research publications and believe... it is unworkable to make the NIH policy serve as a one-size-fits-all rule.’ Meanwhile, UCSF will become the first University of California campus in the system to mandate deposition, although the goal is to pass a similar policy for all 10 of its campuses...” |
| Sir Tim Berners-Lee to help start-ups with 'open data' Posted: 27 May 2012 07:23 AM PDT Your Business, (22 May 2012) “The Open Data Institute, which is due to open in September, will focus on ‘incubating’ start-ups that believe they can harness open data as well as providing training for individuals on how public data can be analysed, published and commercialised. Led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Prof Nigel Shadbolt of the University of Southampton, the Institute has been funded with an initial £10m over five years by the government ‘innovation agency’, the Technology Strategy Board. It has been set up as a private company limited by guarantee and is in talks to secure funding from private sources including a number of FTSE 100 companies. Prof Shadbolt said: ‘We can help start-ups build viable companies and help them understand what data is there and what they can do with it.’ He said tools could be developed to provide a spotlight on regional procurement spending, for example, ‘which would help people in the supply chain and could even be sold back to local authorities’. Start-ups who pass a competitive process are likely to be given subsidised rents, resources and facilities at the Institute’s base in Shoreditch, east London, near the 'Silicon Roundabout' tech hub which has been supported by the Government. ‘Success will be chucking out 12 companies a year who have open data credentials who can fly the nest and will be at the stage to make a pitch [for funding].’ Cabinet office minister Francis Maude said the Government’s aim was make ‘to make the UK an international role model in exploiting the potential of open data to generate new businesses and stimulate growth’. Universities minister David Willetts added: ‘Data on areas like procurement, the quality of care homes and crime rates are already being used to provide innovative new services. Now, the Open Data institute will support businesses that want to use data in imaginative new ways for everyone’s benefit. This will release commercial potential, driving new forms of economic growth and new benefits to individuals.’ The Technology Strategy Board said the Institute, which is being supported by the University of Southampton, “will draw on complementary sources and users of data – businesses, the public sector, academia and overseas interests’”. |
| Posted: 26 May 2012 11:44 AM PDT del-fi.org “The Access2Research We The People petition has been a far greater success in its first week than I at least dared hope ... We’ve crossed 17,000 signatories from late Sunday night to mid-day Friday of the first week, measuring in US Pacific time. Signing is tailing off significantly, as we expected - we’re heading into the weekend, which is a long holiday weekend here in the United States for Memorial Day. I would have been thrilled with 10,000 this week, honestly. So we’re set up well for the next big push to the summit. Everyone who signed, who recruited, who tweeted, who blogged, who shared - thank you. I am going to celebrate with a nice beer tonight and take a break from constant monitoring of the stream for a day or two... Before that though…some color commentary on the campaign that came out of nowhere. We have received a plausible batch of criticism, from not going far enough in the petition (asking for liberal copyright licensing on articles, or specifying a maximum embargo) to not having enough detail about the petition on the website. These are good points. We looked at them, and chose not to go after them. Here’s my view on why we chose that - the others may have different views of course. The petition is simple because of two reasons. One, you only get 800 characters to work with... Second, it’s simple because we want a positive response from the Administration, and by staying simple we allow a little bit of flexibility to them as they respond. Sometimes detail doesn’t help; we believe this to be one of those cases... The website is simple for similar reasons. We’re not creating an effort to educate the public about open access, or public access, or taxpayer access. We’re trying to influence executive policy by getting a certain number of people to sign a short petition. Those people often have to suffer a miserable user experience on the petition website (horror stories of failed registration and browser crashes are commonplace enough to make me think we’d easily have passed 25K if the White House knew about OAuth). They have to fill out email addresses, solve captchas, wait for an email confirmation, and then sign. Again, our belief was that simplicity makes that action easier than detail... None of this matters much in the end. We’ll get our 25,000 by June 19 even if we have to drag the twitterverse screaming across the finish line. Hopefully long before then. What matters now is what the Administration does in response. The total number of people who care about this issue has radically expanded in the past week. Wikimedia’s endorsement means we’re only starting to see the impact of that expansion. If the White House wants us to take We the People seriously, this is a great chance to make us believe...” |
| Startups Root for Cheaper Peeks at Scientific Papers Posted: 26 May 2012 11:43 AM PDT www.livescience.com “We are in the middle of what activists are calling an "Academic Spring," in which scientists are revolting against the companies that publish their research. The scientists say the prices being charged for subscriptions and copies of academic papers based on taxpayer-funded research are exorbitant. Thousands of scientists around the world have signed petitions and staged boycotts. The latest petition, posted on the White House's "We the People" site, has garnered more than 14,000 signatures over the past four days. Meanwhile, a group of important stakeholders in the dispute tends to be overlooked: startups and small businesses. Small biomedical and energy companies, for example, read many academic papers. Here at InnovationNewsDaily, we wondered how the new petition is viewed by startups and how it would affect innovative ideas. While publishers maintain that the prices they charge reflect the work they do in selecting the best research and editing it, the small-company founders we interviewed agreed that they would benefit from freer access... ‘Obviously we have to keep up on the latest science out there,’ said Brian Glaister, CEO of a Seattle-based startup called Cadence Biomedical. His company is working on a spring-powered device that people with weak legs can wear to help them walk. ‘It's a pain in the butt if we can't get access’ to a paper, Glaister said. He goes to a University of Washington library, where the papers can be read for free, to look up studies he really needs, but that can take too much time, he said. He pays per article if he's in a crunch. He says his company, which plans to launch its first commercial product in a few weeks, cannot afford the small-company subscription deals that publishers offer: He needs access to so many journals by so many publishers, the total cost would be prohibitive. Glaister said he supports academic researchers who have refused to publish in subscription-based journals. Some of the best papers in his field have appeared in ‘open access’ journals that let readers see their papers for free, he said. Examples include the Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation and PLoS ONE. The ‘We the People’ petition asks for all research funded by U.S. government agencies – such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – to appear for free within a year of publication. That policy already applies to National Institutes of Health-funded research. ‘I think it would be very helpful,’ Glaister said. ‘A surprisingly large amount of medical research these days is funded by the Department of Defense, and it'd be good to get quicker access to that research...’ Not every demand of Academic Spring proponents is opposed by subscription-based journals. When asked about the new petition, a communications officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science responded that the AAAS already makes articles published in its journals, including Science, free after a year. Rockefeller University Press, which publishes the Journal of Cell Biology and other journals, explicitly supports the petition. Rockefeller articles are already free after six months under a Creative Commons license. On the other hand, the Association of American Publishers, a trade group representing 300 companies, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Rockefeller University Press, opposes the petition's aims. ‘We oppose government mandates on research publications and believe – along with the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable, the Association of American Universities and many others – it is unworkable to make the NIH policy serve as a one-size-fits-all rule across all agencies and all disciplines,’ Andi Sporkin, a spokeswoman for the publishing association, wrote in an email. Rossner and his colleagues' petition would need 25,000 signatures in 30 days to receive a response from the Obama administration. That response could be as simple as a written reply, acknowledged Heather Joseph, one of Rossner's colleagues in SPARC, a trade group for libraries. At the other end of the spectrum, the White House could issue directives in line with the petition's stance. Meanwhile, bills similar to the petition are sitting in committee in the House and Senate. Though activists have long worked for this issue, this is the first time they've gotten such widespread attention from researchers both in the ivory tower and in industry. Subscription-based publishers may soon need to face some forced change and innovation.” |
| Posted: 26 May 2012 11:42 AM PDT poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca “This post notes some reflections from a recent meeting of the Community of Practice of the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) / University of Guelph's Knowledge Translation and Transfer (KTT) group. My role in this group is that of open access consultant. The OMAFRA / KTT group is doing some very interesting work in the area of developing intellectual property practices to support innovation, including both open access and patenting. Researchers include academics and also grower groups. One of the projects involves growing the Ontario vegetable crop research repository in the University of Guelph's ATRIUM repository. The University of Guelph's Ontario Agricultural College produces a lot of agricultural research, much of which has world level impact, particularly in the areas of corn, fusarium, and pesticides. Much of this knowledge is currently available only in unpublished research reports stuck in filing cabinets. If these reports were digitized and made available through ATRIUM, the research would be useful to many people - including Ministry staff for developing policy and local farmers and gardeners... One of the challenges to developing the repository is dealing with rights issues. Much of this research is owned by growers' groups, who conducted the research for their own community. As agricultural entrepreneurs, the growers will want to retain an edge for competition and so are likely to want to retain commercial rights. Similarly, faculty members at Guelph own their own IP and may want to retain the rights for commercialization when applicable. Strategies to address these issues could include such tactics as defensive publishing... Engaging the growers' groups in open access is a strategy that I would highly recommend in this situation. Don't just ask for the license to their works, rather do some workshops or provide information to link people to some of the many open access resources that are already available to them. A message of people everywhere are sharing their work; won't you join us? strikes me as a message that is a little bit easier to listen to than won't you share your work? Include open access peer-reviewed journals on agriculture, of course - but don't neglect to mention some of the high-quality magazines written largely by people similar to the growers' groups, such as BC Grasslands. Focus on agriculture for sure, but not necessarily just agriculture - farmers and their families are people too, and are as likely as anyone to benefit from all the freely available health information or enjoy the many free texts, movies, and music available from the Internet Archive. Flickr can be a good resource for developing marketing materials, and open government resources can be useful, too. One challenge for farmers in this area is that many still rely on dial-up access. This suggests to me another avenue for illustrating the benefits of open approaches. It can be difficult for people in rural communities to get the rest of us to pay attention to their issues (such as lack of broadband) and hence to gain political support. This is one area where the internet creates the possibility for a more level playing field... Some potential venues for information sharing include practioners' peer-reviewed journals using tools such as Open Journal Systems- although the growers' groups might be more interested in using social networking tools like ning. Our Community of Practice is just getting started! Watch for further posts on this topic.” |
| Confessions of an Open Access Agnostic Posted: 26 May 2012 11:39 AM PDT Mola mola, (25 May 2012) “... I don't like being told where I can and can't publish. I distrust zealots, including well-resourced single-issue campaign groups which will hear no alternative views, which present shades of grey as simple black/white dichotomies, and which (a pet hate) bandy around variants on that tabloid favourite 'tax-payers' money' (when they mean 'public money'). I worry about people being pressurised into publishing in inappropriate journals, or - if they decide to stick with a non-AO journal, for whatever reason - not receiving the quality of review they deserve because of misguided boycotts. I don't appreciate non-scientists in the media wading in with their 'aren't you silly, you've been doing this all wrong for decades' line. And I'm wary of the creeping sense - by no means restricted to science - that content should always be free, regardless of the costs involved in producing it. I'm not comfortable with the big publishers making huge profits from the outputs of science, but I also recognise that good publishers (and their employees) have done, and continue to do a terrific job to ensure the effective communication of science. Of course, there is a more nuanced debate going on underneath the bluster. From what I see on Twitter, today's debate at Imperial seems to be a good example (#OAdebate). Some very clever and thoughtful people have weighed things up and come down on the side of OA. And I'm not even sure that I don't agree with them. Certainly, I am all in favour of the broader Open Science agenda - opening up the data we produce, and the tools we use to access and analyse it. But I remain to be convinced that access to primary research papers is such a big issue that it should be pushed above all else (partly because, with a bit of effort or an email or two, it's usually possible to access most recent papers), and that all of this energy should be focused on it (whilst overlooking the interesting and potentially profound financial and sociological implications for scientists and their institutions). My beef is not at all with OA, but rather in the way that the debate has been framed in terms of good and evil, right and wrong... Subscription-based (reader pays) publication of publicly-funded research costs public money, and has pros and cons. OA (author pays) publication of publicly funded-research costs public money, and has pros and cons. A shift to OA will not (I'm pretty certain) be accompanied by an injection of new cash, but will rather see a shift from funding infrastructure (especially libraries) to funding individuals (e.g. through research grants). And the debate should be on how best we spend limited public money to communicate the outputs of research in the most effective way. It could be that making all primary research available to everyone is the way to do this... It could be that we'd be better advised to concentrate on more effective communication of key results in other formats, or in making other products of our research (especially data) more widely available. Even if we hold OA as something to aspire to, I feel that blindly pushing it as a top priority risks sidelining more important debates about opening up science.” |
| Open Access: Is it open season on traditional scientific publishing Posted: 26 May 2012 11:38 AM PDT www3.imperial.ac.uk A debate on the prices of Elsevier journals and why thousands of academics have pledged to boycott them... What is the cost of knowledge? That’s the question asked by thousands of academics (thecostofknowledge.com) who have pledged to boycott Elsevier journals in a stand against ‘exorbitantly high prices’. They want science to be open access: if science is funded by the public, it should be freely available to the public. No more frustrating links to a $30 PDF? Great! But don’t publishers provide a service? The Editor in Chief of Nature thinks the shift is ‘inevitable’. Is he right? And who will pick up the tab? Come and join us for lunch at 12pm on 25th May when Alice Bell (Imperial College) will be talking about the practicalities, the potential and the pitfalls...” |
| Every (source) you wanted to know about (Open Science) but were afraid to (compile yourself) Posted: 26 May 2012 11:36 AM PDT scienceintelligence.wordpress.com Use the link to access the Table of Contents for the article Open Science and Crowd Science: Selected Sites and Resources. A citation and a link to the article are also provided as follows: Dawson, Diane. Open Science and Crowd Science: Selected Sites and Resources. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship. Spring 2012. Available from: http://www.istl.org/12-spring/internet2.html [Accessed 23 May 2012]. |
| The Academic Publishing Empire Strikes Back Posted: 26 May 2012 11:34 AM PDT In the Dark, (25 May 2012) “There’s an article in this morning’s Grauniad in which a representative of the academic publishing industry, by the name of Graham Taylor, tries to counter the vociferous criticism that has been aimed at this sector in recent months... Mr Taylor actually claims that the publishing industry is all for open access. Perhaps this is true, but if that’s the case it’s because they’ve been forced to that point by pressure from external agencies. The latest sign of this pressure is a petition in the US to force taxpayer-funded research out into the open... However, the main thrust of Mr Taylor’s argument is that we must ensure that any new model of academic publishing is ‘sustainable’. What he means by that is that he wants academic publishers to be able to sustain their healthy profit margins at the expense of the taxpayer. I disagree with his arguments in almost every respect, so much so that it actually made me rather angry to read the piece. Here’s an example: ‘The publishing process involves: soliciting and managing submissions; managing peer review; editing and preparing scripts; producing the articles; publishing and disseminating journals; and of course archiving.’ This description bears very little relation to what happens in my field. Journals do not “solicit” manuscripts – they just wait for submissions to arrive. ‘Managing peer review’ merely involves farming the job out to unpaid external referees. All journals I deal with require authors to typeset and copy edit their own papers. ‘Producing the articles’ is done by the authors! Moreover, everyone in my field also publishes their work for free on the arXiv. Articles can be disseminated over the internet at negligible cost via a number of routes as well as the arXiv... Another particularly specious bit of argument is the following: ‘Scholarly publishers support 10,000 jobs in the UK and we are significant net revenue earners for the UK. The members of the Publishers Association pay more in taxes to the UK exchequer than all UK universities collectively pay to all publishers globally for access to their journals.’ This may be the case, but the problem is that the money that underwrites this thriving export industry is taken from a budget that was intended to be spent on research... Can you imagine the outcry if taxpayer’s money were used to support other private publishing interests, perhaps even the porn industry? And consider this: ‘However, in 2010 – the last year for which Society of College, National and University Libraries data are available – UK universities had access to 2.42m journal subscriptions, an increase of 93% over 2006. The price paid for these subscriptions, £134m, increased by only 31% over the same period, so the price paid per journal accessed actually fell by 32%.’ The real scandal is that the cost of journal subscriptions has gone up at all when the real cost of digital publishing has plummeted over the same period. Returning to the subject of Open Access, Mr Taylor argues for a model in which scholarly publishers can continue to fleece the research sector but in a way that’s different from their current racket. They want authors to pay a huge fee up-front (a ‘paper management fee’ perhaps £2000) to have their paper published. Such a system would have the merit of making research available free of charge to anyone who is interested in it, but in terms of its function as a scam it is just as ludicrous as the current racket. Since authors do all the work anyway, there’s no reason to charge an amount anything like this. It simply does not cost £2000 to publish papers on the internet! Any fee of this magnitude would just be fed to the parasites. The activities of academic publishing industry are no longer relevant when it comes to dissemination of research results; academics can do that for ourselves. You have done very well for yourselves at our expense, but you’ve been rumbled. Time to face the music.” |
| The Academic Empire Strikes Back Posted: 26 May 2012 11:33 AM PDT telescoper.wordpress.com “There’s an article in this morning’s Grauniad in which a representative of the academic publishing industry, by the name of Graham Taylor, tries to counter the vociferous criticism that has been aimed at this sector in recent months... Mr Taylor actually claims that the publishing industry is all for open access. Perhaps this is true, but if that’s the case it’s because they’ve been forced to that point by pressure from external agencies. The latest sign of this pressure is a petition in the US to force taxpayer-funded research out into the open... However, the main thrust of Mr Taylor’s argument is that we must ensure that any new model of academic publishing is ‘sustainable’. What he means by that is that he wants academic publishers to be able to sustain their healthy profit margins at the expense of the taxpayer. I disagree with his arguments in almost every respect, so much so that it actually made me rather angry to read the piece. Here’s an example: ‘The publishing process involves: soliciting and managing submissions; managing peer review; editing and preparing scripts; producing the articles; publishing and disseminating journals; and of course archiving.’ This description bears very little relation to what happens in my field. Journals do not “solicit” manuscripts – they just wait for submissions to arrive. ‘Managing peer review’ merely involves farming the job out to unpaid external referees. All journals I deal with require authors to typeset and copy edit their own papers. ‘Producing the articles’ is done by the authors! Moreover, everyone in my field also publishes their work for free on the arXiv. Articles can be disseminated over the internet at negligible cost via a number of routes as well as the arXiv... Another particularly specious bit of argument is the following: ‘Scholarly publishers support 10,000 jobs in the UK and we are significant net revenue earners for the UK. The members of the Publishers Association pay more in taxes to the UK exchequer than all UK universities collectively pay to all publishers globally for access to their journals.’ This may be the case, but the problem is that the money that underwrites this thriving export industry is taken from a budget that was intended to be spent on research... Can you imagine the outcry if taxpayer’s money were used to support other private publishing interests, perhaps even the porn industry? And consider this: ‘However, in 2010 – the last year for which Society of College, National and University Libraries data are available – UK universities had access to 2.42m journal subscriptions, an increase of 93% over 2006. The price paid for these subscriptions, £134m, increased by only 31% over the same period, so the price paid per journal accessed actually fell by 32%.’ The real scandal is that the cost of journal subscriptions has gone up at all when the real cost of digital publishing has plummeted over the same period. Returning to the subject of Open Access, Mr Taylor argues for a model in which scholarly publishers can continue to fleece the research sector but in a way that’s different from their current racket. They want authors to pay a huge fee up-front (a ‘paper management fee’ perhaps £2000) to have their paper published. Such a system would have the merit of making research available free of charge to anyone who is interested in it, but in terms of its function as a scam it is just as ludicrous as the current racket. Since authors do all the work anyway, there’s no reason to charge an amount anything like this. It simply does not cost £2000 to publish papers on the internet! Any fee of this magnitude would just be fed to the parasites. The activities of academic publishing industry are no longer relevant when it comes to dissemination of research results; academics can do that for ourselves. You have done very well for yourselves at our expense, but you’ve been rumbled. Time to face the music.” |
| Nature News Blog: Argentine legislators approve open-access law : Nature News Blog Posted: 26 May 2012 11:32 AM PDT blogs.nature.com “Argentina is nationalizing its science output, following last month’s nationalization of energy company YPF. This time, the benefits should be international. On 23 May the House of Representatives, Argentina’s lower house, approved a bill that would require the results of all scientific research conducted at or funded by the Argentina’s National System for Science and Research to be made freely available in an online depository. The bill would also require publication of primary data from such studies within five years. The country’s National Digital Repository System, founded in 2009, will create a common system for accessing all data and publications subject to the law. The bill must now pass in Argentina’s senate and executive branch. Such legislation is still uncommon at a national level, but some governments, including in the United Kingdom, have begun making plans for requiring open-access publishing of science they fund, as Nature reported earlier this month (see ‘Key questions in the UK’s shift to open-access research‘). UK science minister David Willetts told the Publisher’s Association in London that ‘We need to have far more research material freely available.’ In the United States, whose National Institutes of Health already requires researchers to deposit their research papers in an open repository within six months of publication, people are petitioning the White House to expand the programme to include other taxpayer-funded research. The petition had more than 16,000 signatures after two weeks and a target of 25,000 by mid-June. The European Commission may also be lending its support to open-access publishing, reports the Times Higher Education. Next month, the commission should issue its policy on publishing research funded by its seven-year Horizon 2020 funding programme. With an annual budget of more than €11 billion (US$13.8 billion), Horizon 2020 is one of the largest research funders in the world, and one of the few that operate internationally, so its influence could be important." |
| Attacking publishers will not make open access more sustainable Posted: 26 May 2012 11:31 AM PDT www.guardian.co.uk “... To be clear from the outset, we fully support expanding public access to publicly funded research. One only has to look at what has happened over the past year, especially since the publication of the government's Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth and the convening of theFinch Group to recommend strategy for extending access to global research for UK researchers. This is a process in which publishers have engaged fully and are making great strides to promote enduring, financially sustainable, open access models.We also made a significant announcement on 2 May – on the day that the universities and science minister, David Willetts, came to speak at the Publishers Association AGM – that publishers are exploring fee-waived walk-in access via the public library network. As the minister pointed out, this proposed PA initiative would be a very useful way to extend public access to research outputs currently only available through subscription. These are not merely words: a working group of journal publishers and public librarians is taking this work forward on behalf of the PA. A preliminary technical report should be available by mid-June with the objective of enabling access by the end of the year. This facility is already available through university libraries, although whether these libraries choose to allow walk-in access is a matter for them. Much of the focus of this debate has been on the value of peer review and the role that scholars and researchers play in this process. By implication publishers are perceived as contributing very little, other than simply assembling articles into journals and pushing them onto cash-strapped libraries to make a gargantuan profit. That is a gross distortion of reality. And at a time when we are looking for an export-led recovery, UK-based scholarly publishers account for over £1bn in export sales. Perhaps most important of all, from an access point of view, is the amount publishers have invested in platforms that support researchers in numerous ways. These include investments in article enhancement, visualisation, social networking, and mobile technology; valuable tools such as searchable image databases, navigation, alerts and citation notifications, and reference analysis. Publishers are also working on text-mining tools; linking to the datasets behind journal articles; and research performance measurement tools such as SciVal. But it seems to be much easier to belittle the role of publishers than to have a serious look at what is being provided. The debate about the cost of journals is made difficult by the fact that there are wide variations across the industry, and of course competition issues debar any collaboration. However, in 2010 – the last year for which Society of College, National and University Libraries data are available – UK universities had access to 2.42m journal subscriptions, an increase of 93% over 2006. The price paid for these subscriptions, £134m, increased by only 31% over the same period, so the price paid per journal accessed actually fell by 32%. In 2010, universities spent 0.54% of their total institutional expenditure on subscriptions to journals and 20% of their library budget, which in turn was 2.7% of total institutional expenditure. Journal collections or ‘big deals’, though often criticised, have contributed significantly to this reduction in unit costs by enabling the most popular material to be sold at a lower price with an added extra slice of research material on top. And of course libraries can choose either to subscribe to these broad collections (against substantial discounts) or to purchase individual titles... Unfortunately, publishers seem to be part of a broader backlash against perceived corporate greed and abrogation of social responsibility. But publishers are entitled and need to make a profit. Profits derive from efficiency, profits fund investment and drive innovation, and profits are taxed – which provides the public money to fund research. Scholarly publishers support 10,000 jobs in the UK and we are significant net revenue earners for the UK. The members of the Publishers Association pay more in taxes to the UK exchequer than all UK universities collectively pay to all publishers globally for access to their journals... If we lived in a world where all such services were paid for prior to publication, then all research content could be made freely available. But we do not, or do not yet, live in such a world. A similar point can be made about the transparency of contracts: there is no UK legislation that interferes in commercial contracting between two businesses. Companies are perfectly entitled to negotiate terms and conditions on a case-by-case basis and to negotiate those terms in confidence. To reiterate, scholarly publishers are happy to work with any long-term financially viable business model for publishing services. We are happy to work with models where funding is provided on the author-side or the user-side of the publication process, or hybrids of the two. By contrast, mandated deposit in repositories is not a publishing model, has no associated revenue stream and, worse, threatens to erode the revenues deriving from the subscriptions on which the model depends. Publishers have nevertheless said that we are happy to work with this ‘green’ approach – in combination with viable publishing models such as funded (‘gold’) open access or subscription – provided that the time gap (the ‘embargo period’) between first publication and availability in a repository does not fatally undermine revenue streams. We are ready to work with funding bodies, government agencies, researchers, librarians and other stakeholders of all kinds to expand access in sustainable ways. But that's just it - they need to be viable in the long term. Attacking publishers will not make open access any more sustainable. We all need to work together to achieve this.” |
| Storm Clouds in Academic Publishing Posted: 26 May 2012 11:25 AM PDT PWxyz, (25 May 2012) “Today two different thunderbolts struck in academic publishing, one from an old storm, and the other from a new one... The first story is the imminent closing this summer of the University of Missouri Press, after five decades of operation. MU Press is not the first university press to close, and it certainly won’t be the last. It was receiving a subsidy of $400,000 annually and still not able to obtain a profit from its operations; that is a lot of money, but not exceptional in the realm of university presses. Nor, sadly, is the lack of profitability, which is why we are likely to see more closures on the horizon. Academic publishing, as Michael Eisen remarked to me recently, does not require $1.1 billion in investments – that being Elsevier’s profit from its 2011 fiscal year, never mind its total revenue. Universities are on a mission now to “detox” scholarly publishing of the monies that make the commercial academic marketplace viable: the system where publicly funded research is written and edited by faculty, and then re-sold by publishers back to publicly funded libraries for billions of dollars. That’s why the other thunderbolt today was exceptional only because of its source, as such announcements are taking on an air of inevitability: UCSF, the largest public university recipient of NIH funding in the country, has passed anopen access policy for its faculty. UCSF faculty will be required to make each of their peer-reviewed articles freely available, immediately upon publication, through an open-access repository, thereby making them available to the entire world. A White House petition to require publicly funded research be made freely available is already well on its way to obtaining its signature goal; every supporter should add their own endorsement. What’s remarkable is that new web-based software technology is enabling a revolutionary disruption in the costs of scholarly publishing. Easy to use authoring tools like WordPress have given rise to academically tailored products like Annotum, which in turn are being used to power next generation journals by the Public Library of Science, in PLoS Currents. And recently, the former editor of PLoS One, the “Gold” open access journal of PLoS, has left to help found a new publishing enterprise, PeerJ. PeerJ offers open access publishing in return for a $99 lifetime membership for contributors... Universities could become their own publishing platforms; each academic department can mint its own journal, and every lab its own publication series, should it choose. Given commercial publishers’ barriers to discovery through high-cost portal products and abstract and indexing databases, the accessibility of these new general models, offering a “flat” discovery horizon, will be noticeably superior. Further, open web publishing systems are intrinsically capable of supporting a wide range of peer review options, from open to closed, and all the hybrid models in between. Storm clouds are gathering; monsoon rains are coming. But the wild flowers will be amazing.” |
| Presentation of #da12data initiative in the Open Data Week, Nantes Posted: 26 May 2012 11:23 AM PDT www.slideshare.net Use the link above to access the presentation made during European Open Data Week. The presentation was made by Marc Garriga, of the EC Digital Agenda Assembly and Moderator of Discussion Group 5: Data using the hashtag #da12data. The Discussion Groups provide ... “feedback to prepare the Digital Agenda Assembly 2012 ("DAA12"), on 21-22 June in Brussels, as well as the review of the Digital Agenda for Europe (‘DAE’), planned for adoption in October.” Online discussion takes place at <http://daa.ec.europa.eu/> |
| What can research data repositories learn from open access? Part 1 Posted: 26 May 2012 09:42 AM PDT JISC DataPool Project, (24 May 2012) “Institutional research data repositories follow in the wake of the widespread adoption of open access repositories across UK institutions during the last decade. What can these new repositories learn from the experiences of open access, and what pointers can we find for the development of data repositories? In the first part of this post we will consider factors such as policy, infrastructure, workflow and curation. In part 2 we will extend the analysis to rights and user interfaces... A recent speech by the UK government’s science minister David Willetts prompted renewed excitement over open access, with a forthcoming report to advise on specific actions to be taken to realise more open access. Less remarked on... was the bigger picture view that anticipates stronger integration and linking between research publications, research information for reporting and assessment, and research data for data mining but also for research testing and validation... OA policies focus on the need to expand full-text content collections held in repositories and typically require (mandate) or encourage authors to deposit versions of their published papers... OA mandate policies can increase deposit rates to above 60% of eligible papers from the average of 20%. In this respect, the lack of a suitable policy could be seen to hinder an institutional OA repository. Emerging UK institutional data polices by comparison have focussed on requiring researchers to create data management plans and data records, and emphasise sustainable practices in managing and storing data for the purpose of access, stopping short of requiring open access or of institutional deposit of actual data that would then need to be supported by the institution. This might be because institutions have still to calculate and cost the the storage infrastructure needed, whether managed locally or in the ‘cloud’, because institutions are unclear what value they can bring to data management – or even where the value is in the data they seek to help support, or because there is not yet any consensus on whether data repositories should be subject-based, or institutional, an issue which OA repositories have still not fully resolved. Institutional data policies have in turn been driven and directed by research funders’ data policies, principally RCUK and EPSRC (Jones 2012) setting principles and expectations of institutional compliance within a specified timescale (for EPSRC, by 2015)...” |
| Posted: 26 May 2012 09:41 AM PDT VoxPopuLII, (23 May 2012) “For some time, Open Access has been a sort of gnat in my office, bugging me periodically, but always just on the edge of getting my full attention. Perhaps due in large part to the fact that our journals simply cost much less than those in other disciplines, law librarians have been able to stay mostly on the outside of this discussion. The marketing benefits of building institutional repositories are just as strong for law schools as other disciplines, however, and many law schools are now boarding the train — with librarians conducting. If you’re new to the discussion of Open Access in general, I suggest Peter Suber’s Open Access Overview for an excellent introduction. This piece is meant to briefly summarize the goals, progress, and future of OA as it applies (mostly) to legal scholarship...” |
| Horizon 2020: A €80 Billion Battlefield for Open Access Posted: 26 May 2012 09:40 AM PDT ScienceInsider, (24 May 2012) “As negotiations proceed to shape the next installment of Europe's gargantuan research funding programs, scientists, librarians, and publishers are eagerly awaiting the answer to a critical question: How strong will the new 7-year program, called Horizon 2020, be on Open Access (OA)? The European Commission has said that making the research it funds widely available is one of its priorities... Robert-Jan Smits, said in an interview in the Times Higher Education that open access, which typically involves making research papers freely available within months or a year of publication, ‘will be the norm’ for research funded through Horizon 2020. ‘With our €80 billion we can make one hell of a difference,’ Smits said. What that will mean exactly is still unclear, however, and the topic of much lobbying and speculation. OA advocates say a clear mandate to make all E.U.-funded papers publicly available would be hugely significant, and would be another step in what they hope is a complete transition to OA. ‘We very much welcome’ Smits's comments, says Alma Swan, Director of European Advocacy of SPARC, an international alliance of academic and research libraries promoting open access. Horizon 2020, the successor of the current Framework Programme 7 (FP7), will start in 2014 and run through 2020... The entire program, including the budget, will be voted on by the European Parliament and European science ministers in November. OA was partly mandatory in FP7, which spans the period 2007-2013... FP7 also includes a project called Open Access Infrastructure Research for Europe (OpenAIRE) to help implement the policy, mainly by publishing papers in a central database. A recent estimate by OpenAIRE, based on 26,000 traced FP7 papers, showed that overall, 30% to 37% of those papers are currently freely accessible. More research is needed to determine whether the mandate is the main driving force behind the free access, or whether other factors were in play. But the European Commission currently has no power to enforce compliance from scientists. ‘We hope for a stronger mandate within Horizon 2020 and more budget for the funding of open access fees,’ the charges authors pay to publish in an OA journal, says OpenAIRE project manager, Natalia Manola. It is expected that the European Commission will aim for a combination of both green and gold open access by offering extra funding to pay fees in open access journals and mandating that scientists archive their papers in a central repository. But a key question is how long the publisher will have exclusive rights. ‘We'd like to see the policy strong on the embargo period,’ says Swan of SPARC. ‘Six months is plenty for the sciences.’ But Wim van der Stelt, executive vice president for corporate strategy at German publishing giant Springer, says ‘an embargo of 6 months is clearly too short to cover the expenses related to the publishing.’ Springer, which publishes some 2000 journals, is ‘ready for open access,’ says Van der Stelt, but favors the gold model, and thinks scientists should be allowed to use Horizon grant money to cover publication fees. (The company already has 300 open access journals; 1300 others operate on a ‘hybrid model,’ charging subscription fees but offering authors the option of paying €2000 to make a paper accessible immediately.) ‘We are open to any model, as long as it is sustainable,’ says Alicia Wise, director of universal access at Elsevier. "That means, the health of the journal is okay and the costs that are made are reimbursed. In green open access this is challenging." Elsevier's embargoes for green open access currently range from 12 to 48 months, depending on the journal's so-called half-life, the time after which the number of times a publication is downloaded is halved. As the debate unfolds, all parties are trying to get their voices heard in Brussels. Mathematician and open access advocate Timothy Gowers recently wrote on his blog that ‘Elsevier is lobbying very hard to get all mention of open access removed from the Horizon 2020 documents.’ Wise denied that claim. ‘We have our connections in Brussels and we are trying to secure our position,’ says Springer's Van der Stelt. But Smits says that won't sway the European Commission. ‘We will decide based on what is good for science, and will not be influenced by lobbying.’” |
| Ten reasons for an open access scientific publishing policy in EU’s Horizon 2020 Posted: 26 May 2012 09:39 AM PDT tacd-ip.org [Use the link to access the blog post from the IP Policy Committee of the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD). “The TACD IP Policy Committee is part of the The Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), a forum of US and EU consumer organisations which develops and agrees on joint consumer policy recommendations to the US government and European Union to promote the consumer interest in EU and US policy making.] “The EU should promote the sharing and dissemination of scientific knowledge [1] European taxpayers pay for the research and, therefore the public should have access to the results. [2] Open access will quickly provide professionals and policy makers with crucial health-related and environmental information, without costly pay-walls or strict commercial confidentiality rules. [3] Open access would mean more economic efficiency of EU funded research by speeding research progress and limiting wasteful repetition through greater transparency. [4] Many research funding agencies and universities support open access as they want the research they support to have the greatest possible impact. [5] Scholars and academics do not want to have the circulation of their work restricted by copyright licensing that often awards re-publishing and re-use rights to publishers. [6 ] The high cost of scientific journals stifles the broad sharing and dissemination of scientific knowledge. [7] On-line publishing has drastically reduced costs while profits by publishers remain very high, often above 35%. [8] University and research library budgets are under great financial strain due to the high price of scientific journals. [9] Developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America would greatly benefit from open access publishing because most of the countries of the South cannot afford the purchase of scientific journals. [10] The dominant position of three publishing groups that control nearly half of global scientific publications gives excessive academic and economic power to just a few players. |
| The triumph of fake open access Posted: 26 May 2012 09:38 AM PDT it is NOT junk, (24 May 2012) “It’s been a heady day for “open access”. A petition urging the Obama administration to extend the NIH’s public access policy to other government agencies blew past the halfway point in its goal to gather 25,000 signatures. And the faculty senate at UCSF voted to approve an ‘open access’ policy that would ‘require’ its faculty to make all of their papers freely available. Both of these are important steps in the long-running push for open access. But amidst the giddy triumphalism surrounding these events on blogs and twitter, an important point is being ignored: neither of these are really “open access” policies, and treating them as if they are trivializes their shortcomings in critical areas and risks people declaring premature victory when there is no much more left to be done. I’ll start with the White House petition. I love that this is happening, and that it is gathering signatures rapidly. But the best outcome we can hope for is what the petition calls for – implementation of public access policies like the NIH’s at other federal agencies. This would obviously be a good thing. And having the administration come out in favor of public access establishes an important principle – that the public has a stake in how the results of the research it funds are disseminated. But the NIH policy is very very far from true open access. First, it is not immediate – authors can (and to publish in many journals must) delay free access to their articles for up to a year. And second, it provides access in only the narrowest of senses – the ability to read an article. Most of the articles made available under the NIH policy can not be redistributed, and, more crucially, their availability to the community for use in text mining or other forms of reuse is unclear, and probably limited. And if you don’t think this matters, read this great article in the Guardian today about how the negative consequences of the current roadblocks to data mining the contents of the scientific literature. The newly approved UCSF policy suffers from a different problem. As I’ve written about before, the policy (which is being considered by academic senates at all ten UC campuses) contains an opt out clause: ‘The University of California will waive application of the license for a particular article or delay access for a specified period of time upon express direction by a Faculty member.’ The UC faculty who drafted the policy included this clause because, the claimed (I assume correctly) that the policy would not pass without it. But if a majority of faculty would have voted against this policy without the opt out, then one has to assume that most of them intend to continue publishing in journals that will not allow them to make their work available through a UC archive or the equivalent. So the UCSF policy isn’t an open access mandate. It’s an open access option – an option UCSF faculty already have and of which they largely do not avail themselves. Will a faculty senate resolution change the choices people make about where to publish? Maybe at the margins, but it’s hard to imagine it would have a profound effect. Again, I’m not saying the UCSF vote is a bad thing – it’s great, and I will vote for a similar policy at UCB (although I hope to amend it to strike the opt out clause). So, by all means celebrate the important achievements of the day. But try to refrain from calling it the ‘open access petition’ or the ‘UCSF open access policy’. And make it clear to anyone ... that, as much as you support these two acts, they are both compromises whose limitations must ultimately give way to true open access.” |
| Questions on open access and open licensing in EU scientific research Posted: 26 May 2012 09:37 AM PDT tacd-ip.org [Use the link to access the blog post from the IP Policy Committee of the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD). “The TACD IP Policy Committee is part of the The Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), a forum of US and EU consumer organisations which develops and agrees on joint consumer policy recommendations to the US government and European Union to promote the consumer interest in EU and US policy making.] “Questions for EU policymakers on open access and socially responsible licensing: Should EU funding continue to be awarded without any strings attached with regards to social responsibility or openness? Should market-driven patent monopolies be supported by Horizon 2020 to the detriment of greater access to effective and affordable needs-driven objectives, such as health treatment? Will H2020 encourage the non-exclusive or conditional licensing of patented technologies? How will H2020 generate the highest possible social benefit from publicly funded research? Will H2020 adopt socially responsible licensing and ethical technology transfer rules following the example of other research organizations and universities in the EU and the US? How will H2020 encourage researchers to collaborate and share knowledge within a flexible and open approach to intellectual property rights? How will H2020 promote open access to data financed with EU grants? Will EU financed clinical trial data continue to be shrouded in secrecy and privatized in detriment to efficiency, ethics and scientific excellence? What legal obligations will H2020 adopt to insure open access publishing of results of research financed by the EU? Given the high cost of scientific journals, the efficiency of wide dissemination and importance of sharing knowledge, how will H2020 mandate open access publishing and within what time framework and financial conditions?” |
| A Working Definition of “Open Government” | Global Integrity Posted: 26 May 2012 09:36 AM PDT globalintegrity.org “I’ve been spending a non-trivial amount of time lately watching and pondering the explosive uptake of the term ‘open government.’ This probably isn’t too surprising given Global Integrity’s involvement in the nascent Open Government Partnership(OGP). As excited as I’ve been to witness the growth of OGP, the continued progress of the open data movement, and the emerging norms around citizen participation in government internationally, I’ve also been worrying that the longer we allow ‘open government’ to mean any and everything to anyone, the risk increases that the term melts into a hollow nothingness of rhetoric. My most immediate concern, which I’ve been chronicling of late over on this Tumblr, has been the conflation of ‘open data’ with ‘open government,’ an issue well-explored by Harlan Yu and David Robinson in this paper. I’ve also been publicly concerned about the apparent emphasis put on open data — seemingly at the expense of other open government-related priorities — by the current UK government, which is slated to take over the co-chairmanship of OGP shortly. (An excellent unpacking of those concerns can be found in this letter from leading UK NGOs to the government.) But for all my griping, I’ve yet to put my money where my mouth is and offer up my own definition of what ‘open government’ means. It’s time to fix that. What follows is, at best, a rough working definition of open government that I hope spurs debate and conversation. This is certainly not 100% correct, all-encompassing, or definitive. Nor is it rocket science: this tracks fairly closely with others’ thinking, and I suspect it’s not too far outside of anyone’s mainstream definition (including the Open Government Declaration of September 2011) At its core, ‘open government’ to me means three things: [1] Information Transparency: that the public understands the workings of their government; [2] Public engagement: that the public can influence the workings of their government by engaging in governmental policy processes and service delivery programs; and [3] Accountability: that the public can hold the government to account for its policy and service delivery performance. Into those three buckets we can then deposit many of the ‘open government’ initiatives, programs, and interventions that are often invoked on their own as ‘open government.’ What’s most important here, to me, is that none of these initiatives or interventions in and of themselves constitute ‘open government’ alone. Rather, only when combined with the others do we truly see the potential for ‘open government’ in its most powerful and holistic form...” |
| Duraspace 2012 Community Sponsorship Program Posted: 26 May 2012 09:33 AM PDT atmire.com “Duraspace just launched their 2012 community sponsorship program. This non-for-profit organization is the result of the merger between the Fedora Commons organization and the DSpace Foundation. These organizations joined forces as they were trying to achieve the same goal, to offer open source solutions to increase the online availability of digital resources. Today, Duraspace governs the DSpace and Fedora Commons open source software projects and even introduced a new one, Duracloud. The DSpace community relies a great deal on grassroot efforts across the globe. People not only contribute by writing code but also contribute by providing valuable requirements, use cases, translations, documentation and bug fixes. Duraspace does a fantastic job guiding and channeling these efforts. Without someone at the helm it would become much harder, if not impossible, to follow a time based release schedule and release new versions on a regular basis. The professional and personal lives of many open source contributors often make it very challenging to be involved on a consistent and regular basis. Your sponsorship provides the people in Duraspace with exactly the support they need to be consistently providing support and leadership to get these projects to their next milestone. In this light, Duraspace is really your best bet if you care about continuity and innovation of the DSpace, Fedora Commons and Duracloud projects. As a non commercial entity, Duraspace guards the openness of new innovations in this space. This has created a fertile ground for collaboration, an eco system in which institutions across the globe have benefited from a high quality platform with no annual license fees. It's a true meritocracy in which solid arguments and hard work prevail for the benefit of all. As a commercial player in this eco system, @mire supports Duraspace through the Registered Service Provider program. @mire believes strongly in supporting Duraspace by contributing manpower to the open source development and other areas of DSpace, as well as supporting Duraspace financially by contributing back a portion of the revenues.” |
| Using Open Data, 19 - 20 June 2012, Brussels Posted: 26 May 2012 09:32 AM PDT www.w3.org Use the link to access submission guidelines and registration information for the event sponsored by the W3C and the EC Joint Research Centre - Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (JRC-IPTS). The workshop will be held June 19-20, 2012 at the European Commission Headquarters, Brussels. A brief overview of the event reads as follows: “This workshop asks a simple question: what is all the 'new' government open data being used for? The open data movement continues to gather momentum. Local, national and supranational governments around the world are publishing more and more of their data, the scientific and enterprise communities likewise. Much of this enormous volume of data is available under very open licenses and the push for more data and more openness is relentless. The European Commission's Open Data Strategy is typical of many governments' promotional efforts. In a Q&A press release of 12th December 2011. Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes cites three reasons why open data is seen as being so important: promoting the development of new businesses; promoting government transparency, and increased evidence-based policy making. On this last point in particular, open data allows all stakeholders to monitor government performance (such as the US IT Dashboard); analyze data through modeling and visual analytics tools (such as in OpenSpending.org); increase the quality of the policy discussion and collaboration (such as with the Digital Agenda Scoreboard). But are the claims of huge potential in these areas justified and how can this potential become real? There is evidence of progress in a variety of fields with some impressive demos and visualizations but what more can be achieved? How can we ensure that the effort in publishing open data leads to its effective usage? What are the most inspiring examples in this sense? Is the potential of ‘five star linked data’ being maximized or might it just as well be ‘one star data in any format as long as the license is open?’ How can the Web infrastructure be improved to support the greater use of large data volumes? Are new standards and new research necessary to unlock more of the power of open data? Is the current Crossover Project research roadmap reflecting the most important research challenges? The objective of the W3C Using Open Data Workshop, being run as part of the EU-funded Crossover Project, is to provide a joint discussion forum for developers of applications that make use of open data, and the end users of those applications such as policy makers, journalists and citizens.” |
| Does It Pay To Sue Libraries? | Peer to Peer Review Posted: 26 May 2012 09:31 AM PDT Library Journal, (24 May 2012) “Ever since the George State e-reserves copyright lawsuit was filed in April 2008, the academic library (and faculty who were aware of it) community has been waiting to find out how Judge Orinda Evans would view the provision of digital course readings under fair use. Now we know, based on her May 11 ruling, that she believes this practice is a legitimate and important part of the pedagogical process, as long as it is done within reasonable limits. The judge writes ‘Allowing use of unpaid small excerpts of copyrighted works by students does help spread knowledge, because it reduces the cost of education, thereby broadening the availability of education.’ (p. 83 of the decision) As I write this, we are waiting for the debate to begin over the injunction that the Judge will fashion to address those five infringements that she found among the 75 excerpts from books that she examined. The publisher plaintiffs will suggest wording for such an injunction, and Georgia State will have a chance to respond to that suggestion before Judge Evans issues a final order. But even before we know for sure about an appeal, the central question regarding this case has shifted to ‘does it pay to sue libraries?’ Libraries traditionally have received favored treatment from both Congress and the courts... So why was this case brought, and why does an appeal seem likely? The answer, of course, is the CCC, which presumably makes most of its $215 million gross revenues (in FY 2010) from permission fees (p.24 of the opinion)... In his analysis of the decision, law professor James Grimmelman suggests that the CCC has really been the big winner in this case. From one side he is clearly correct. Publishers now have a much greater incentive to allow the CCC to license all the works they publish, and to include digital options in that licensing... The big question, in my opinion, is whether or not more licensing payments from libraries will actually be driven to the CCC because of this ruling. I can think of three reasons why that might not be the case. First, this is only a District Court ruling... In the short term, at least, colleges and universities—certainly those with policies that are not wildly out-of-line with the judge’s analysis— may decide to wait and see, and especially to wait for an appeal, before they change any policies or budget priorities. We need to remember that an appeal is an unpredictable thing; an appellate court might even hold that the criteria articulated... Second, academic libraries always have the option of simply turning away more requests for e-reserves than they do now. If an institution decided to strictly implement Judge Evans’ standards as they are articulated in the ruling, they could still maintain whatever licensing budget they currently have by simply not using any excerpt that does not conform to the judge’s definition of fair use for the e-reserves context... Finally, let’s imagine a hypothetical library that considers an e-reserve excerpt to be fair use even if it is significantly larger than Judge Evans thought was permissible, but which also pays for permission anytime an excerpt is used subsequent to the first use. If that library decided not to wait, but to put the definition of fair use in this ruling into immediate practice, two things would happen. First, a smaller percentage of a work would be acceptable for unpaid use as a fair use. Second, the library would no longer pay permission fees for a subsequent use of that smaller excerpt, because the judge firmly rejected the “subsequent semester” rule as “an impractical, unnecessary limitation.” Could these two considerations balance each other out, result in no net increase in permission fees? It is certainly possible, especially if our hypothetical library works with its faculty to reduce some of the requested excerpts to within the judge’s standard. My point is that libraries still have a lot of control over their practices and their budgets; this decision does not, in fact, automatically demand that libraries pay more licensing fees. That is something that the plaintiffs and the CCC should take into account as they decide whether the expense and ill-will they have generated with this lawsuit are worth what they can gain from continuing it...” |
| Open Access Movement Finds New Ally in University of California, San Francisco Posted: 26 May 2012 09:30 AM PDT The Digital Shift, (24 May 2012) “The open access movement received another major boost on May 21 when the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), one of the leading public, scientific institutions in the country, adopted an open access policy. The UCSF academic senate voted unanimously to make electronic versions of current and future scientific articles freely available to the public. This is particularly significant because, according to numbers from the university, the UCSF health campus is the country’s largest public recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), receiving 1,056 grants last year valued at $532.8 million. ‘This vote is very, very good news,’ said Karen Butter, UCSF librarian and assistant vice chancellor. ‘I am delighted that UCSF will join leading institutions in changing the model of scientific communications, and that UCSF authors have chosen to take control of their scholarship, providing new audiences with incredible opportunities to translate UCSF’s remarkable research into improving health care.’ UCSF is the first campus in the UC system to adopt such a policy, but the Academic Senate Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (COLASC) worked closely with the System-Wide Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication (UCOLASC) to develop the policy, and it may ultimately be implemented across all ten campuses. As of today, there are 148 such institutional mandates, but UCSF is one of the first public institutions. This was the 36th time that a faculty has voted unanimously for an OA policy, according to the Open Access Directory. Richard A. Schneider, chair of COLSAC, led the initiative at UCSF. In a May 4 letter to the senate, Schneider wrote that ‘The predominant system for scholarly communication has become economically unsustainable, restrictive, and critically limited in its ability to disseminate our research...’ Schneider estimated that systemwide UC spends more than $40 million dollars annually to access scholarly materials, “including the work of UC authors, which we give away, edit, and peer-review for free.” In a presentation, he estimated, for example, that UC authors accounted for 2.2 percent of all Elsevier articles, which resulted in $31 million in revenue for Elsevier and $9.8 million in profit... According to a university statement, the new policy gives the university a nonexclusive license to distribute any peer-reviewed articles that will also be published in scientific or medical journals. The faculty authors notify the publisher of the policy and include a boilerplate addendum, provided by the university, when signing the copyright license or assignment agreement. Copyright ownership would remain with the faculty author. The policy requires UCSF faculty to make each of their articles freely available immediately through an open-access repository, and thus accessible to the public through search engines such as Google Scholar. Articles will be deposited in a UC repository (eScholarship), other national open-access repositories such as the NIH-sponsored PubMed Central, or published as open-access publications... Elsewhere, a petition calling for public access to all federally funded research, which was posted on the White House’s ‘We the People’ website on May 21, already has 14,743 signatures as of this morning. If the petition gets 25,000 signatures by June 19, it will be considered for action by the White House staff.” |
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