Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items) |
- Scholarly Open Access
- Apple Amends iBooks Author EULA, Doesn't Claim to Own Content | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
- The Parachute: Collaborate, don't frustrate
- The Parachute: Publishers are not evil
- 2017: RIP, OER?
- The Exciting World of Research Information | Library Connect
- Sunlight Foundation: Bulk Data at the House Legislative Data Conference
- You are Elsevier: time to overcome our fears and kill subscription journals
- The Tree of Life: Scary and funny: functional researcher Peter Uhnemann on OMICS group Editorial Board #JournalSPAM
- Oxford University Press to publish open access title Journal of Radiation Research
- occupy publishing: scientific journals in the e-publishing age
- A Review of: “Open Access: What you Need to Know Now. Crawford, Walt.”
- Sustained Growth of the Impact Factors of MDPI Open Access Journals
- A Techonomic Revolution is Brewing in Scientific Publishing - Forbes
- Scientists Fight For Open Access For Research | Care2 Causes
- Kiwis join global journal boycott - NZweek
- Why Stop with Elsevier?
- Scientists and scholars boycott Elsevier over bad business practices and copyright maximalism - Boing Boing
- Academic E-Books: Innovation and Transition
- Tyler Neylon on what Elesevier should do
- Man with defibrillator demands access to his own heart’s information
- Open Access, AAA and the dilemma of scholarly communication in a digital world
- American Anthropological Association keeps it from the people | john hawks weblog
- Why this #AAAfail is Epic- How the American Anthropology Association is throwing the public under the bus and killing books for no good reason!
- How do we mobilize anthropologists to support open access?
- Anthropology Blogs Respond to AAA on Open Access
- Is open science feasible with human subjects? | The Incidental Economist
- Zum Elsevier-Boykott
- Zum Elsevier-Boykott
- The impact of open access on research and scholarship
- The impact of open access on research and scholarship
- "Ich beabsichtige auch, diesen Artikel sowie meine weiteren auf Phaidra hochzuladen"
- American Anthropological Association Changes Opposition to Open Access – Plus a Proposal to Do More | Neuroanthropology
- Hiding the costs of information
- Scientists sign petition to boycott academic publisher Elsevier
- http://kotakoski.fi/ On academic publishing, open access, and Elsevier
- COMMUNIA policy paper on proposed amendments to PSI Directive
- European Commission Slip Reveals Censorship In ACTA - Falkvinge on Infopolicy
- Science in the Open » Blog Archive » The Research Works Act and the breakdown of mutual incomprehension
| Posted: 06 Feb 2012 06:53 AM PST scholarlyoa.com A new blog from Jeffrey Beall devoted to unearthing questionable practices by OA journals and OA publishers. |
| Apple Amends iBooks Author EULA, Doesn't Claim to Own Content | News & Opinion | PCMag.com Posted: 06 Feb 2012 06:45 AM PST mobile.pcmag.com "Someone in Cupertino appears to have noticed the outcry over the user agreement for Apple's iBooks Author software. The company has updated its iBooks End-User License Agreement (EULA) to clarify that Apple is not laying claim to content that's produced using the application...." |
| The Parachute: Collaborate, don't frustrate Posted: 06 Feb 2012 06:43 AM PST theparachute.blogspot.com "We have seen a fair amount of activity on the web in the last few weeks with regard to protests, even boycotts, aimed at prominent publishers. Most of it seems to be about money. When money is tight, it leads to a fight....So the solution is introducing competition. ‘Gold’ Open Access publishing does just that, albeit perhaps in a fairly primitive way, so far. It’s typically a game of new entrants. But in order to be truly successful, the scientific community at large has to buy in to it. Literally ‘buy’ into it. Publishers can lead the horse to the Open Access water, but they can’t make it drink. I won’t hold my breath. And there is so much else in science publishing, besides money matters, that needs to be improved. Just one example: fragmentation. Fragmentation is a big, frustrating problem. Particularly for the efficient and effective ingestion of information. But it need not be so bad. Although science publishers are bound by antitrust rules, there are areas of a pre-competitive nature where they are allowed to collaborate. Think standards, think CrossRef. Those forms of collaboration, for the benefit of science, could be expanded. Other standards could be introduced, to do with data linking, for instance, with data representation, computer-readability, interoperability. Things like structured abstracts. Perhaps even ontologies and agreed vocabularies for scientific concepts, analogous to biological and chemical nomenclature. User licences could be standardized, pre-competitively. Et cetera....And it is not just in pre-competitive areas where fragmentation could be remedied...." |
| The Parachute: Publishers are not evil Posted: 06 Feb 2012 06:39 AM PST theparachute.blogspot.com "Commercial publishers, as a class, are not evil. To think so is wrong. They have just been doing what the scientific community can't or won't do by itself. And like most businesses, they charge what they can get away with. It’s known as ‘the market’....Lesson: if you leave it to outsiders to provide your essential services, because you can’t, or won’t, truly assimilate and embed those outsiders, and provide the services from within your own circles, you risk losing control and you cannot blame the outsiders for taking the opportunities you give them...." |
| Posted: 06 Feb 2012 06:35 AM PST iterating toward openness, (03 Feb 2012) "Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers. To the best of my knowledge there is no one really working on next gen OER – OER that are interactive, simulative, really rich with multimedia AND combined with OAR [Open Assessment Resources] that drive diagnosis, remediation, and adaptation. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER. And believe me – if it took $100M to get the field to where it currently stands in terms of relatively static openly licensed content, it will take at least that much investment again over the next decade for the field to do something truly next gen...." |
| The Exciting World of Research Information | Library Connect Posted: 06 Feb 2012 06:32 AM PST libraryconnect.elsevier.com "Library Connect brings you a special guest blog post (first posted on the Liblicense listserv) from Elsevier’s Chrysanne Lowe, VP Global Marketing Communications, regarding the recently published website thecostofknowledge.com...." |
| Sunlight Foundation: Bulk Data at the House Legislative Data Conference Posted: 06 Feb 2012 05:30 AM PST Sunlight Foundation Transparency Ecosystem, (02 Feb 2012) "Many of us from Sunlight have been at the House's legislative data conference today, as Daniel has noted on the blog. The conference organizers have done a fantastic job -- the day has been like an all day committee hearing, where the House's tech officials are the witnesses, and the public gets to ask the questions. This is exactly the sort of good faith attempt to take responsibility for data policy that we wrote about in 2007 with the Open House Project report. It's extraordinary for the leading providers of third party legislative information systems to sit as peers among the administrators, staff, and politicians responsible for how the House shares it work with the public. If that praise seems effusive, it should be; the House is setting an example for how to work with NGOs on data availability. That's not to say everything we're hearing is good news...." |
| You are Elsevier: time to overcome our fears and kill subscription journals Posted: 05 Feb 2012 06:33 PM PST it is NOT junk, (03 Feb 2012) "Having spent a decade fighting the scientific publishing establishment, the last few weeks have been kind of fun. Elsevier, the Dutch publishing conglomerate that has long served as the poster child for all that is wrong with the industry, has come under withering criticism for pushing legislation that would prevent the US government from making the results of taxpayer funded research available to the public. Scores of scientists (myself included) have slammed the hypocrisy of the bill. Prominent publishers, fearing a backlash against Elsevier’s overreach, have come out in favor of government public access policies. Even the editors of The Lancet, one of Elsevier’s prized possessions, called the bill a “damaging threat to science“. But amidst all this richly deserved opprobrium, we must not forget that Elsevier are in a position to behave so poorly because we let them. Publishers control the paywalls that restrict access to the scientific literature. But individual researchers control the fate of their own papers. And the only reason a paywall ever stands between anyone and a paper they want to read is because its authors chose to put it there....The [Gowers-Neylon] boycott isn’t perfect. I wish they hadn’t focused exclusively on Elsevier – they are hardly the only bad actors in the field. And it’s crucial that the focus be on papers. Nobody views turning town invitations to review to be a big sacrifice – and publishers will just find someone else. Same thing with editors. But papers are their lifeblood....We do have a historical precedent. In late 2000 my postdoctoral mentor Pat Brown, frustrated with the refusal of most publishers to participate in the newly launched PubMed Central, began circulating a letter in which scientists pledged to exclusively publish in, review for and serve as editors of journals that placed their contents in PMC with no more than a 6 month delay. The letter quickly received a list of prominent signatures, including many Nobel Prize winners, leading us to go public with a new site to gather public support for building an “online public library of science” (from whence the name PLoS derives). Within a year 30,o00 people had signed the letter. But, when push came to shove, few followed through on their pledge....Nevermind that this widely and deeply held belief – that success in science requires publishing in high impact journals – is incorrect. When push came to shove, most signers of the open letter abandoned this effort to fix a broken system, and continued sending their papers to non-OA, non-PMC journals...." |
| Posted: 05 Feb 2012 06:22 PM PST phylogenomics.blogspot.com "Many out there know there are journals out there that border on SPAM....But this one takes the cake. There is a journal called "Molecular Biology" from the OMICS Publishing Group.... I recommend everyone check out their Editorial Board. In addition to listing Peter Deusberg (the controversial HIV denialist) there is an amazing person on their Board - Peter Uhnemann. He is listed as being from the "Department of Oximology at Daniel-Duesentrieb Institute, Germany". Sounds a bit strange right? Well check out his Bio...It is pretty wacky right? Well it turns out, as some might have guessed - it is made up...." |
| Oxford University Press to publish open access title Journal of Radiation Research Posted: 05 Feb 2012 06:06 PM PST www.physorg.com "Oxford University Press (OUP) is pleased to announce that it will be publishing Japan's pre-eminent title in radiation science from next year. The Journal of Radiation Research (JRR) is the official journal of The Japan Radiation Research Society (JRRS) and the Japanese Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (JASTRO). Since its launch in 1960 as the official journal of the JRRS, the journal has published scientific articles on radiation science in biology, chemistry, physics, epidemiology, and environmental sciences. JRR broadened its scope to include oncology in 2009, when JASTRO partnered with the JRRS to publish the journal. JRR has been self-published as a free-access journal since its inception. The title's move to Oxford University Press will see it adopt OUP's fully open access publishing model, with discounted author charges sponsored by JRRS and JASTRO. There will also be an option for subscribers to purchase print copies...." |
| occupy publishing: scientific journals in the e-publishing age Posted: 05 Feb 2012 06:00 PM PST occupypublishing.blogspot.com.au "As print fades into history, there is no reason why scientists cannot have a system where their so-called pre-publications (e.g. on arXiv.org, a current source for many of these) can be reviewed, and with revisions acceptable to a peer community be qualified as being designated as published. Proposal: arXiv.org continues as it is and some group creates arXiv-Review.org (completely independent of arXiv.org) that accomplishes the intended goal of reviewing the articles of arXiv.org. When an article on arXiv.org gets a pass from the arXiv-Review.org scientific peer community, it's designated as published....What would be the result? A free and open article submission and access system as it exists now (arXiv.org) and a independent review system (arXiv-Review.org)....Looks like the site has been created...." |
| A Review of: “Open Access: What you Need to Know Now. Crawford, Walt.” Posted: 05 Feb 2012 12:32 PM PST Medical Reference Services Quarterly 31 (1), 121 (2012) Not even the whole first paragraph of this review is OA. The review seems to be positive. |
| Sustained Growth of the Impact Factors of MDPI Open Access Journals Posted: 05 Feb 2012 12:29 PM PST Molecules 17 (2), 1354 (2012) Abstract: Following the tradition established during the past two years [1,2], we are pleased to report the newly released Impact Factors of MDPI open access journals by the means of an editorial. This year’s edition of the Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which is published annually by Thomson Reuters, includes seven journals published by MDPI, including three that received their first official Impact Factors – Energies, Entropy, and more surprisingly Viruses – the latest with citation data from 2009 only. We are pleased to announce that the continued growth in Impact Factors reported during the past two years has been sustained, and Impact Factors of MDPI journals continue on a growth path. Table 1 reports the latest Impact Factors for 2010. Figure 1 graphically depicts the evolution of the Impact Factors for the four MDPI open access journals that have received Impact Factors in the past. Table 2 reports the ranking of the MDPI journals within the subject categories of the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE). |
| A Techonomic Revolution is Brewing in Scientific Publishing - Forbes Posted: 05 Feb 2012 11:21 AM PST www.forbes.com Two weeks ago, we pointed you to reports that Dutch scientific publisher Elsevier had helped induce two U.S. Representatives to introduce legislation in Congress that would shut down open access to taxpayer-funded scientific research. Now, in protest, more than 3,400 scientists have signed on to a boycott of the company, which publishes around 2,000 journals including well known titles Cell and The Lancet... The campaign supports predictions David Kirkpatrick made in a Forbes cover story last September, ‘Social Power and the Coming Corporate Revolution...’ A story, ‘The Price of Information: Academics Are Starting to Boycott a Big Publisher of Journals,’ in the February 4 print edition of the Economist, reports how a blog post by prize-winning mathematician Timothy Gowers incited a fellow mathematician to create the online protest that is capturing signatures like wildfire...” |
| Scientists Fight For Open Access For Research | Care2 Causes Posted: 05 Feb 2012 11:01 AM PST www.care2.com “Researchers around the world have expressed concern and alarm about HR 3699, the Research Works Act, which endangers the public’s access to federally-funded research — to research funded by taxpayers’ own contributions. A number of scientists and mathematicians have signed an online pledge at the Cost of Knowledge saying that they will not publish or do any editorial work for Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of scientific journals, which has declared its support for HR 3699. A January 21st blog post by Timothy Gowers, a University of Cambridge mathematician who has won the Fields Medal, math’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize, voiced the views of many about Elsevier... The National Institutes of Health made all federally-funded research publications openly accessible in 2008. But HR 3699, which is sponsored by by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Committee member Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), proposes to limit access, based not on who has funded the research (the public or private sector), but by defining research as ‘private-sector work’ based on the ‘intent’ of an author, i.e., the researchers. The American Association of Publishers – self-described ‘private-sector research publishers’ — support HR 3699, on the grounds of seeking ‘regulatory interference’ about the research they publish... Currently, scientists, mathematicians and others strive to publish in certain highly regarded peer-reviewed journals... Elsevier publishes over 2,000 scientific journals including two that are very prestigious, The Cell and The Lancet. Scientists must be familiar with and cite research published in such journals; for researchers who are junior faculty at universities or in post-doctoral positions, getting research published in these journals can make their careers... I commend these researchers’ intentions and efforts. I’m an academic at a small, chronically under-funded urban college. We don’t have access to a number of publications because the subscription costs are just too high. My college is not a research institution but the more research that is available via open access, the more our students — the more that anyone — can benefit.” |
| Kiwis join global journal boycott - NZweek Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:59 AM PST www.nzweek.com “At least nine New Zealanders have joined a global boycott of Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific journal publisher... Employees of the universities of Auckland, Lincoln and Otago have signed the pledge as well as one staff member at NIWA... Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant professor of genetics at the USA’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told the Chronicle [of Higher Education], ‘The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and we give it away to private entities. Then they charge us to read it.” Mr Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after reading about it on Facebook...’ most recently, Elsevier has supported a proposed US law that could prevent agencies like the US National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by grant recipients freely available. However Elsevier rejects the complaints saying, globally, the amount of research that is published is going up every year but library budgets are not keeping pace. |
| Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:57 AM PST Annoyed Librarian, (01 Feb 2012) ... “As reported in numerous sources, including LJ, there’s now a petition being signed by academics to refuse to publish, referee, or do any editorial work for Elsevier journals,,, It should make some librarians feel better that a mere 14 years after the foundation of SPARC the people who matter are finally paying attention to the problems in scholarly publishing... Maybe the inability to change a model where they get all their content and editorial work for free and then sell it back to universities for a hefty and frequently non-negotiable fee explains the comments by an Elsevier vice-president, quoted in the LJ article: ‘Access to published content is greater and at its lowest cost per use than ever. This is a direct result of the investments publishers have made to digitize and disseminate content. The reality is that the introduction of optional packages have added enormous access at fractions of the list prices; and resulted in reduced cost per use.’ That’s a notable quote, notable especially for the way it avoids discussing the three main charges the petition levels against Elsevier... Neither does the argument of another vice president that Elsevier allows authors to post eprints of their work in arXiv. Elsevier still charges very high prices and makes it almost impossible for libraries to negotiate lower prices by unbundling the journals... Another vice president says, ‘Our business is based on people using the journals that we publish and ensuring access to such titles is absolutely core to what we do,’ and mentions their ‘exchange of data with arXiv’ as a supporting example... But by supporting the Research Works Act, which they don’t mention, they’re trying to restrict access to publicly funded research, period... The question I have is, why Elsevier?... It’s not as if Springer, Sage, and a host of others don’t act in exactly the same way... “ |
| Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:55 AM PST boingboing.net “Over 1,000 academics and scholars have signed a petition against science-publishing titan Elsevier, taking issue with the company's exploitative and abusive dealings with its writers, and with its support of laws that hinder good scientific collaboration, like SOPA and the Research Works Act. The signatories vow to withhold their work from Elsevier journals ‘unless they radically change how they operate...’” |
| Academic E-Books: Innovation and Transition Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:53 AM PST www.publishersweekly.com “There is a growing crisis in the academic monograph marketplace. College and university libraries are experiencing budget cuts; there are too many presses publishing too many titles; there’s growing pressure to figure out open access (OA) solutions, particularly in the face of the outrageous Research Works Act... Organizations are rallying to devise solutions, however. Libraries, presses, and scholars are pressing forward with several interesting proposals (Clifford Lynch of CNI wrote a prescient overview of the options in 2010). And I just attended an investigatory meeting, held at the Radcliffe Institute, at Harvard for one of the most promising new efforts: the development of a Global Library Constortium (GLC), the brainchild of Frances Pinter, former publisher of Bloomsbury Academic in the UK, and founder of EIFL, an international library consortium of consortia supporting greater access to information... Pinter’s proposal is worth considering in depth because its creativity sheds light on many of the issues testing academic publishing (an early description can be found in a YouTube video)... The GLC is loosely modeled on an existing academic venture called SCOAP3, which was born out of the small, highly internetworked high-energy physics (HEP) community... The GLC proposal would operate on a similar basis, with libraries pooling together into a membership coalition that purchases the rights to titles offered by participating publishers. Those books would then be made available on an open access basis, perhaps with Creative Commons license terms. Libraries would place bids for each offered title into a pool, in a fashion similar to the way Groupon works; if there was sufficient interest to hit the price trigger point, the publisher would release the title into the open access pool with costs apportioned among participating institutions. Once made open access, titles would be publicly readable through a web browser interface, but downloadable PDFs or EPUBs would only be freely available to GLC members....” |
| Tyler Neylon on what Elesevier should do Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:52 AM PST Corante Boston “Yesterday I published an entry around "The Cost of Knowledge" petition organized by Neylon. In the entry I noted that the petition did not call for specific action on Elsevier's part...Neylon very kindly responded in comments... and [I] would like to draw attention both to it and to what it links to, which includes a link to a blog entry by Tim Gowers on what to do next... But it misses points... What do you expect Elsevier to do? For example, asking them to join the forces opposing the abomination that is ACTA... How do you expect a move to publication in electronic journals to impact the all-important tenure and promotion cases that academics must make? I believe it's the tight binding of sci/tech publications to these key career steps that gives companies like Elsevier extraordinary leverage...” |
| Man with defibrillator demands access to his own heart’s information Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:49 AM PST www.sacbee.com “Hugo Campos has a small computer buried in his chest to help keep him alive. But he has no idea what it says about his faulty heart. All the raw data it collects, especially any erratic rhythms it controls with shocks, goes directly to the manufacturer. And some of it later gets sent to his doctor. But Campos had to step onto a national stage in his fight to see the data his body produces. His David-and-Goliath campaign puts him on the leading edge of what's called the ‘e-patient movement’ - ‘engaged, equipped and enabled’ - that seeks to harness data so patients can learn more about their bodies... Federal law entitles patients to easy access to their health records, including X-rays and pathology reports. But implanted defibrillator data is different. The information stays with manufacturers, who use it to monitor and improve their products. And it comes in a format that is not easily understood. Patients can get only interpreted data, not the raw data... Calls and emails deluged him after an online video of last November's TEDxCambridge speech went viral. He has also testified before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and been featured on National Public Radio. He's started a blog, founded an online ‘Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillators (ICD) User Group’ and embraced a new world of patient advocacy through social media...” |
| Open Access, AAA and the dilemma of scholarly communication in a digital world Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:43 AM PST the Anthropologist in the Stacks, (02 Feb 2012) “So, this is happening, and lots of organizations are replying to the Request for Information (RFI, if you need an acronym) from the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy. My own professional organization, the American Anthropological Association, submitted this reply, and it is being widely interpreted by vocal members of the discipline as towing the publishing industry's rather conservative and print-journal-centric line about Open Access, and other less centralized models of scholarly publication and communication. I do think it's a conservative reply, and I don't really agree with the principles embedded in the letter... I encourage those of you interested in this to really mine the responses to the RFI. I'm at a UNC, so I'm not supposed to say this, but I think that the response from the Duke University Libraries is an especially good one. It strikes me as constructive not just because I agree with its stance on OA (pro), but because it's clearly written by people (librarians!) who have an idea of what kind of information structures would allow us to get there... AAA just finished a long journey towards a new code of Ethics, and presented it at our annual meetings last Fall. To do this, they gathered a committee of a variety of different anthropological practitioners, and they started not by asking "what do you want in a code of ethics," but, "what do you do to practice anthropology ethically?" ... think that something similar might be done with a publishing model. How are anthropologists getting information about their field now? What does that look like? What kinds of scholarly communications are they producing? What forms does that communication take, how are they disseminating the information and analysis they produce? What parts are digital? Which are analog? How much takes place in face-to-face interactions? Why?...” |
| American Anthropological Association keeps it from the people | john hawks weblog Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:42 AM PST johnhawks.net “Last month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy solicited comments concerning open access publication policies for federally funded research. I submitted a comment to a related solicitation, concerning open access to data from federally funded research (‘Public interests in data from federally funded research’). But the open access publication comments are also interesting to me, and the OSTP has just released the full list of comments to the public (‘Public Access to Scholarly Publications: Public Comment’). Included in the list is a comment written on behalf of the American Anthropological Association by its executive director, William E. Davis, III (PDF of comment). The letter is a defense of closed-access journal policies, and includes many statements that I view as disputable. For example, Davis addressed the embargo period for open access to journal articles. The NIH access policy allows this embargo period for journals to restrict exclusive access to subscribers for 12 months after publication. First, after twelve months much of the content in many STM fields is old news. An embargo period of 12 months often has little effect on the financial models upon which publishing in STM fields is based. In anthropology, however, where over 90 percent of downloads occur after 12 months from the date of publication and the cited half-life of our quarterly journals is over 10 years, a 12 month embargo period does nothing to hep protect our subscriptions. May I offer an alternative view of this problem? I suggest that the closed access policy has contributed to the irrelevance of AAA journals. Nobody outside the AAA membership notices when papers of note are published there. The AAA journals, including American Anthropologist have effectively cut themselves off from the rest of the academic world. The "half-life" is high not because new papers are steadily building more citations, but instead because their impact is anommalously slight compared to papers from 50 years ago... The American Anthropological Association over the past several years has shaped policies that keep peer-reviewed AAA publications accessible only by members and large institutional subscribers. Past and ongoing journal issues are walled within the Association's ‘AnthroSource’ archive, available with association membership or to institutional subscribers for a hefty fee. In 2007, when the AAA more than doubled the institutional subscription prices for its flagship journals, I ran some numbers on open access publication. Even using high-end price schemes, it was clear that open access electronic journals could be provided free worldwide for an annual cost of $10 per AAA member...” |
| Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:39 AM PST Doug's Archaeology, (01 Feb 2012) “Now that it is no longer mid-night and I have had a few hours of sleep I will better articulate why the American Anthropology Association AAA coming out in favor of a Research Works Act concept is an epic FAIL(internet slang) (my previous post was more emotion and less facts). Of course there is the basic argument that the Research Works Act is an attempt by commercial publishers to keep US tax payers from accessing the results of research they paid for and is wrong. To be fair, the AAA does present a case, in their full response scholarly-pubs-(#282) davis, as to why they are against taxpayers accessing the research they pay for. As pointed out by Daniel... It gets worse, in the defense of not letting the public view research they paid for they say, ‘One final note: in anthropology and in the humanities, book-length publications is still a meaningful publication unit. Journals play a critical role in the success of these works be reviewing the books and publications. In 2010, AAA’s journals published 411 book reviews. If the AAA journal publishing program cannot be sustained, it may be that university presses and other scholarly publishers of book-length works could also be irreparably damaged.’ The real irony is that by defending journals the AAA is actually killing books. The prices of journals are increasing above inflation (estimated at 6-8% for 2012) and have so for decades. In the 1990′s when prices of journals were going up by 10% a year most library switch from spending 40% of their budgets on books to 30% while journals went form 60% to 70%. In 2002 “the ratio was roughly 83:17 serials to books” for universities in Australia. In 2007 the Southern Illinois University Carbondale only spent 10% of their library budget (all budgets are for acquisition and not total library budgets) on books and were worried that a raise in periodical prices would wipe out their book budget...” |
| How do we mobilize anthropologists to support open access? Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:36 AM PST Savage Minds, (01 Feb 2012) “We’ve tried to explain why it is important. We’ve written a lot about it. But nothing seems to have changed...” |
| Anthropology Blogs Respond to AAA on Open Access Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:35 AM PST Anthropology Report, (01 Feb 2012) oa.new oa.comment oa.anthropology oa.advocacy oa.rwa oa.legislation oa.nih oa.copyright oa.negative oa.usa oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.societies |
| Is open science feasible with human subjects? | The Incidental Economist Posted: 05 Feb 2012 10:33 AM PST theincidentaleconomist.com “... I haven’t been able to get this question out of my mind since attending a session on open notebook laboratory science at the ScienceOnline 2012 conference last week at N.C. State University. Is there something of use from open science techniques that could be brought to the health policy/health economics work that we do?...Open science is the practice of immediately making all results of the research enterprise publicly available, while open notebook is the practice of making a lesser amount of data publicly available, with other information withheld for a variety of reasons... The idea is that immediate disclosure of results increases transparency and allows for the possibility of feedback along the way in a research project (Open Science Federation, @openscience are advocates of the general approach)... My initial reaction upon hearing an example at the conference... was to say this doesn’t apply to what I do, since most of my work is based on human subject data that we collect, or on secondary data (like Medicare claims); in both cases, access to the data is expressly limited by legally binding data use agreements and IRB restrictions... I am thinking of trying an experiment of sorts and taking a specific paper from a grant, and blogging (on a new blog, not here) a few times a week about the conduct of the research process for that paper. I will tell the IRB ahead of time, and ensure I don’t violate any restrictions. This will really be blogging about how we are thinking about answering a question. Here are the papers we have reviewed, have we missed some? Here is how we are dealing with missing value issues with the explanatory variables. These are the regression models being considered, anyone got a better idea, etc. Does anyone have experience with this type of approach in health policy research, or other work using human subjects data?” |
| Posted: 05 Feb 2012 09:38 AM PST |
| Posted: 05 Feb 2012 07:52 AM PST |
| The impact of open access on research and scholarship Posted: 05 Feb 2012 06:38 AM PST College & Research Libraries News 73 (2), (01 Feb 2012) "The recent Berlin 9 Open Access Conference1 presented a striking reflection of the evolution of the scholarly community’s attitude towards open access. No debate, no controversy—this meeting of high-level research funders, policy makers, university administrators, librarians, publishers, and scholars focused squarely on the impact that open access can have on each phase of the research process. Hosted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and sponsored by a broad spectrum of organizations from the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Marine Biological Laboratory to SPARC, the meeting underscored the central role that open access now plays as part of the research infrastructure in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in the hard sciences...." |
| The impact of open access on research and scholarship Posted: 05 Feb 2012 06:15 AM PST College & Research Libraries News 73 (2), (01 Feb 2012) |
| "Ich beabsichtige auch, diesen Artikel sowie meine weiteren auf Phaidra hochzuladen" Posted: 05 Feb 2012 05:38 AM PST Archivalia, (05 Feb 2012) |
| Posted: 05 Feb 2012 04:57 AM PST blogs.plos.org "The American Anthropological Association, responding to controversy over a January 12th letter sent to the White House opposing further federal support for open access, has issued a new statement that removes that opposition and embraces a diversity of publishing models moving forward....'[T]he AAA opposes any Congressional legislation which, if it were enacted, imposes a blanket prohibition against open access publishing policies by all federal agencies.' In an equally welcome move, the AAA’s Committee for the Future of Electronic and Print Publishing (CFPEP), the executive committee in charge of making recommendations on how the AAA publishing program should move forward, issued an invitation for commentary...." |
| Hiding the costs of information Posted: 03 Feb 2012 01:03 PM PST the Undergraduate Science Librarian, (02 Feb 2012) The other day, as I was trying to find a journal article, I noticed that the link to the full text of the article was labeled “Free to you.” This amused and frustrated me, because I knew exactly how much the library was paying for access to this journal. It was most definitely not free, but the costs had already been paid. In this case, the publisher was doing a great job of hiding the cost of this item from the end users.Hiding the true cost of information resources won't do us any good. As I thought about this, I realized that libraries have largely been complicit in this campaign to shield end users from the real costs of information... For example, most libraries don’t actively talk to faculty about the costs of the journals they subscribe to... Librarians have been talking about a “serials Crisis” for 30 years, but just last week an online petition to boycott Elsevier has gained momentum... At my institution, we promote interlibrary loan as a way to fill in the gaps in our journal coverage, but we never tell patrons (faculty or students) what it costs for us to acquire these materials... We sometimes pay fees to lending libraries, and we often have to pay copyright clearance fees if we borrow too many articles from the same publication... Go read this excellent post about why interlibrary loan can’t fill in our access problems long term. Likewise, not all libraries fully engage their users when it comes to making difficult decisions about cuts to subscriptions... Along the same lines, we need to do a better job of showing faculty the things we do to preserve their access to information sources. Things like cutting the number of student worker positions, cutting the travel and professional development budgets and forgoing (sometimes badly needed) renovations. As a result of this lack-of-transparency, most faculty don’t see the real need to explore alternatives to the big for profit (and nonprofit-that-acts-like-for-profit) publishers – green and gold open access, alternative publishing models, etc...” |
| Scientists sign petition to boycott academic publisher Elsevier Posted: 03 Feb 2012 01:01 PM PST Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk, (02 Feb 2012) “More than 3,000 academics, including several Fields medal-winning mathematicians, have put their names to a petition declaring their intention to boycott the academic publisher Elsevier... The ‘Cost of Knowledge’ petition claims Elsevier charges ‘exorbitantly high’ prices for its journals and criticises its practice of selling journals in ‘bundles’ so libraries ‘must buy a large set with many unwanted journals, or none at all’. It says the publisher makes ‘huge profits by exploiting their essential titles, at the expense of other journals’. The petition also criticises Elsevier's support for the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), PIPA and the US Research Works Act, which it says are an attempt to ‘restrict the free exchange of information’... Elsevier has disputed the claims, saying that its average list price per article is $10 (£6.50), which is ‘bang on the industry mean’, and that volume-based discounts bring the effective price per article down to $2, which is ‘slightly below the industry average’. It said the claim about bundles was ‘absolutely false’. ‘Elsevier allows you to buy articles at the level of the individual article, to buy a single journal, any combination of any number of journals and everything we have,’ said Dr Nick Fowler, director of global academic relations at Elsevier. ‘There are benefits that come from taking more, which is a very standard practice, but that doesn't mean you don't have the choice [not to] – but then you can't expect a discount.’...He added that Elsevier would be discussing the issues with academics who have signed the petition... he added that there were at least 7m researchers globally, which put the 3,000 petitioners ‘in perspective in terms of volume’... [Gowers wrote], ‘What many people would like, including me, would be to get rid of journals altogether and instead have free-floating editorial boards that provide a stamp of approval to certain papers that would themselves appear in places such as the arXiv’... ‘But it may be – and this seems more likely to me – that what is needed is a variety of less dramatic measures: the setting up of open-access alternatives...’” |
| http://kotakoski.fi/ On academic publishing, open access, and Elsevier Posted: 03 Feb 2012 12:58 PM PST kotakoski.fi “I was recently approached by an editor of a well-known academic journal—published by Elsevier—asking me to review a submitted manuscript. Although I have occasionally published in their journals, reviewed for them, and even participated in conferences organized by them, a recent flow of negative press regarding Elsevier's actions caused me to decline carrying out any free work for them. Specifically, I cited the following articles published by the Guardian: [1] ‘The danger of drugs ... and data’(9 May 2009, by Ben Goldacre) [2]’Academic publishers have become the enemies of science’(16 January 2012, by Mike Taylor)... Clearly, I'm by far not the only one to have refused to work for Elsevier recently. In fact, already 1441 researchers have signed a pledge at The Cost of Knowledge refusing to publish in, refereeing for, and/or doing editorial work for Elsevier. There is also a pledge called Research Without Walls—at the moment signed by 432 researches... Apparently Elsevier is taking this movement relatively seriously since I received a response signed by Rob van Daalen. To provide their view on the topic I quote his reply below in full...” |
| COMMUNIA policy paper on proposed amendments to PSI Directive Posted: 03 Feb 2012 12:53 PM PST International Communia Association, (22 Jan 2012) The Communia International Association’s “mission is to educate about, advocate for, offer expertise and research about the public domain in the digital age within society and with policy-makers.” Communia recently released a new policy paper. “Today the COMMUNIA International Association presents its second policy paper. The paper is a reaction to the European Commission’s proposal to amend the Directive on re-use of public sector information (2003/98/EC). COMMUNIA is supportive of the Commission’s suggested changes to the PSI Directive — most notably the decision to include cultural heritage institutions into the scope of the amended Directive. Access to and re-use of public sector information (PSI) has been one of the issues that has featured prominently in the work of COMMUNIA. The EC proposal to amend the PSI Directive is aligned with one of COMMUNIA’s January 2011 policy recommendations (#13)... The policy paper draws attention to two issues where the proposal to amend the Directive should be improved. The first one concerns the conditions for re-use of public sector information that falls within the scope of the Directive and the second one deals with public domain content that is held by libraries, museums and archives...From the perspective of COMMUNIA the way the amended Directive addresses licensing of public sector content remains underdeveloped and as such has the potential to create diverging and potentially incompatible implementations among the Member states... COMMUNIA supports the decision to include cultural heritage institutions under the purview of the PSI Directive, as such a move will improve citizens’ access to our shared knowledge and culture... While the amended Directive makes it clear that documents held by cultural heritage institutions in which there are no third party intellectual property rights shall be re-usable for commercial or noncommercial purposes, it does not address the largest category of works held by cultural heritage institutions — those that are not covered by intellectual property rights because they are in the public domain...” |
| European Commission Slip Reveals Censorship In ACTA - Falkvinge on Infopolicy Posted: 03 Feb 2012 12:45 PM PST falkvinge.net “The European Commission, which is sort of the Administration in the EU, published a rebuttal to “rumors on the net about ACTA” and tries to set the record straight. Note the two first points: “ACTA ensures people everywhere can continue to share non-pirated material and information on the web. ACTA does not restrict freedom of the internet. ACTA will not censor or shut down websites.” There is one word on their web page that stands out and reveals so much more about the nature of ACTA: ‘Non-pirated’ ...We have always been able to send whatever we like, and possibly answer for it afterwards...what it says here is that the net will only be usable for government-approved communications; the government takes itself the right to determine what the net is usable for and what it isn’t usable for... And this is serious for the deepest of democratic reasons: Any communications technology must be compatible with dissent... Another objection here would be that the language requiring ISPs to police the net was taken out of ACTA. That is… not quite so. The specific phrase requiring that was taken out in one revision, yes. But in the same revision, the same thing was re-inserted in another place. Specifically, this text was inserted: ‘Desiring to promote cooperation between service providers and rights holders to address relevant infringements in the digital environment...’” |
| Posted: 03 Feb 2012 12:43 PM PST cameronneylon.net “When the history of the Research Works Act, and the reaction against it, is written that history... will detail two utterly incompatible world views of scholarly communication... The publisher world view places them as the owner and guardian of scholarly communications... Crucial to this world view is a belief that research communication, the process of writing and publishing papers, is separate to the research itself... The researcher’s perspective is entirely different. Researchers view their outputs as their own property, both the ideas, the physical outputs, and the communications... So the environment that set the scene for the Research Works Act revolt was a combination of simmering resentment amongst researchers for the cost of accessing the literature, combined with a lack of understanding of what it is publishers actually do... But it is of course the funder perspective that we haven’t yet discussed and looking forward, in my view it is the action of funders that will render both the publisher and researcher perspective incomprehensible in ten years time. The NIH view, similar to that of the Wellcome Trust, and indeed every funder I have spoken to, is that research communication is an intrinsic part of the research they fund. Funders take a close interest in the outputs that their research generates. One might say a proprietorial interest...” |
| You are subscribed to email updates from Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment