Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items) |
- Otwarty Mandat
- Could the University of Iowa Libraries save $2 million with a full flip to open access?
- Infographic: contribution and revenue for a typical scholarly paper
- Open education resources and the liberal arts: this season’s research initiative
- Today’s “Hey girl. I like the library too.” features Ryan Gosling promoting open access!
- Act now to support public access to federally funded research - Creative Commons
- Duke Scholars Join Boycott Against Elsevier | Duke Today
- Your research should be in a repository
- The Open Access Irony Awards: Naming and shaming
- Prime Time for Public Access (SPARC)
- Springer to publish open access journal with Korea Concrete Institute
- Open Access on a String – Cut It and It Will Grow Back
- New open access journal: Clinical and Translational Immunology
- Anvil Academic aims to provide platform for digital scholarship | Inside Higher Ed
- Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper - First Page
- How you can help the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) become law | Michael Nielsen
- Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) of 2012
- Improving Digital Preservation and Reducing Costs: Ryan Busch Interview with DuraSpace CEO Michele Kimpton | DuraSpace
- Science in the Open » Blog Archive » On the 10th Anniversary of the Budapest Declaration
- HOUSE OF COMMONS SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE INQUIRY: IMPROVING THE COMMERCIALISATION OF RESEARCH A RESPONSE FROM THE PUBLISHERS ASSOCIATION
- A window of opportunity for Elsevier
- Going public the next frontier for scientists
- Ten Years of Open Access – and how to celebrate the wiki way
- Effectopedia – An Open Data Project for Collaborative Scientific Research, with the aim of reducing Animal Testing
- The World Of Open Textbooks Just Became A Little More Crowded -- And A Little More Open | Techdirt
- Researchers Boycott Elsevier Journal Publisher - NYTimes.com
- Open Access publishing in Lithuania and Serbia: Case studies | EIFL
- Web freedoms fuel 'academic spring' journal protest - science-in-society - 13 February 2012 - New Scientist
- BBC News - MIT launches free online 'fully automated' course
- Could Backlash to Research Works Act Boost FRPAA’s Odds of Passage?
| Posted: 18 Feb 2012 05:03 AM PST |
| Could the University of Iowa Libraries save $2 million with a full flip to open access? Posted: 17 Feb 2012 07:07 PM PST Could the University of Iowa Libraries save over 2 million from their subscriptions budget with a flip to open access The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, (17 Feb 2012) Suggests that U of Iowa Libraries could save lots of $ from their subscriptions budgets with a full flip to open access at reasonable per-article costs such as those of PLoS ONE or the modest support needed by most OJS journals. |
| Infographic: contribution and revenue for a typical scholarly paper Posted: 17 Feb 2012 02:48 PM PST Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week #AcademicSpring, (15 Feb 2012) The bloggers provide a graphic representation of their own perception of the current state of scholarly publishing, noting that the, “exact percentages are made up. But based on a true story.” The blogger ‘s caption reads, “why we’re angry.” |
| Open education resources and the liberal arts: this season’s research initiative Posted: 17 Feb 2012 02:43 PM PST New Learning Resources, a NITLE initiative, (15 Feb 2012) How are liberal arts campuses making use of open education resources? That’s the focus of a NITLE research project led by Lisa Spiro and Bryan Alexander.It has several parts: [1] A survey: we’re asking campus leaders about how their institutions are using OER, as well as for their reflections on the movement. Chief Information Officers (CIOs) from the NITLE Network are our first targets. [2] Interviews: we are having conversations with people involved in interesting OER projects. [3] A white paper: to be presented to the April NITLE Summit. [3] Social bookmarks: we are continuing to add resources to this Diigo group…and ongoing conversations all over the place, from social media to email to in-person... We’re looking for both producing and consuming digital resources intended for open use, along with: open source learning management systems...” |
| Today’s “Hey girl. I like the library too.” features Ryan Gosling promoting open access! Posted: 17 Feb 2012 01:43 PM PST Omega Alpha | Open Access, (17 Feb 2012) |
| Act now to support public access to federally funded research - Creative Commons Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:23 PM PST creativecommons.org “Last week the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) was reintroduced with bipartisan support in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. According to SPARC, the bill would ‘require federal agencies to provide the public with online access to articles reporting on the results of the United States’ $60 billion in publicly funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.’ If passed, the legislation would extend the current NIH Public Access Policy (with a shorter embargo) to other US government-funded research, including agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, Department of Energy, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and others... Unlike the Research Works Act, FRPAA would ensure that the public has access to the important scientific and scholarly research that it pays for. Creative Commons recently wrote to the White House asking that taxpayer funded research be made available online to the public immediately, free-of-cost, and ideally under an open license that communicates broad downstream use rights, such as CC BY... SPARC has issued an action alert, and there are several specific actions you can take in support of FRPAA. On this10th anniversary of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, please voice your support that the public needs and deserves access to the research it paid for and upon which its education depends...” |
| Duke Scholars Join Boycott Against Elsevier | Duke Today Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:22 PM PST today.duke.edu “One of Duke's most prominent scientists has joined a protest against a leading academic publisher, adding her name to a growing list on campus and at universities elsewhere. Mathematician Ingrid Daubechies says she will no longer publish, referee or do editorial work for the Amsterdam-based academic publisher Elsevier. She joins biologists Laryssa Baldridge and Eric Butter, mathematician Mark Iwen, economist E. R. Weintraub and other Duke faculty members in publicly boycotting the publisher. They and nearly 6,000 other scholars around the world seek to draw attention to what they consider Elsevier's unfair business model and restrictions on the free exchange of information. Daubechies, who heads the International Mathematical Union (IMU) and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, said too many mathematicians and other scientists are ‘utterly frustrated by the enormous prices libraries are being charged for journals, when the content, the peer review that ensures quality and the scientific part of the administration are all provided by our community itself, completely or mostly on a volunteer basis...’ She recently joined The Cost of Knowledge protest in the mathematics and science community launched Jan. 21 by Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge... Kevin Smith, director of scholarly communications at Duke's Perkins Library and a copyright lawyer, said Daubechies and the other mathematicians and Duke faculty have joined a fight that has been under way in various academic fields for more than a decade. These efforts, he added, may accelerate the transition to new publishing solutions ranging from open-access journals such as the Public Library of Science to entirely new systems for peer reviewing and publishing digital work. The new systems would benefit not only the academic community but also the public, which pays for most of this research in the first place, Smith said. The main issue, aside from cost, is copyright, or who owns the work. Authors of academic papers have long been expected to turn over copyright of their work to a publishing company for it to be printed and circulated, Smith said. They only receive limited rights to the material, sometimes leaving them unable to publish their findings on their own or on their institution's websites.‘A graduate student, for example, might publish a paper in a journal, use that information in her thesis, but then have to remove sections related to the published work in the library's open-access record of her dissertation,’ Smith said...” |
| Your research should be in a repository Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:21 PM PST figshare.com “A recent report from the Committee of Economic Development called "The Future of Taxpayer-Funded Research: Who Will Control Access to the Results?" details the importance of getting research out to the masses quickly... We have previously talked about researchers uploading their data to YouTube, Flickr or onto blogs - which can be a brilliant way for researchers to disseminate their research data using existing web based technology... So why is there a problem with this? A recent study by the Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group [reports:] ‘In conclusion, after only one year more than 10% of the media that we thought we have stored for future generations was gone. If the decay continued at the same rate and if we didn't do anything to preserve this digital heritage of the revolution in less than 10 years there will be no story to tell for the future generations and we will lose these magnificent collections that can show what thousands of books couldn't convey...’ So this is why we need repositories like figshare, that offer a security, back-ups and persistence of the research data, whilst making it publicly citable and discoverable. The University of Cambridge offers more reasons why you should be uploading your research to repositories: Many researchers hold on to an old computer from a decade or two ago because it is the only way to access their old files, created in formats that are now obsolete. Once these computers break, the files are essentially lost. Many repositories store and back up your treasured research products and will, if appropriate file formats are used, attempt to move the data into new file formats as the original formats become obsolete. So long as the repository exists, your materials will remain readable and usable. BMC have set up a fantastic list of repositories where researchers can store their data, including figshare...” |
| The Open Access Irony Awards: Naming and shaming Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:18 PM PST O'Really?, (15 Feb 2012) “Open Access (OA) publishing aims to make the results of scientific research available to the widest possible audience. Scientific papers that are published in Open Access journals are freely available for crucial data mining and for anyone to read, wherever they may be.In the last ten years, the Open Access movement has made huge progress... But there is still a long way to go yet, as much of the world’s scientific knowledge remains locked up behind publisher’s paywalls, unavailable for re-use by text-mining software and inaccessible to the public, who often funded the research through taxation... Ironically, some of the papers that are inaccessible discuss or even champion the very Open Access movement itself... Sometimes the best way to make a serious point is to have a laugh and joke about it. This is what the Open Access Irony Awards...To get the ball rolling, here is are some examples: [1] The Lancet owned by Elsevier, recently published a paper on “the case for open data” [2] (please login to access article). Perhaps Elsevier are using an ironically different definition of the word “open” to everyone else? [2] Serial offender and über-journal Science has an article by Elias Zerhouni on the NIH public access policy [3] (Subscribe/Join AAAS to View Full Text), another on “making data maximally available” [4] (Subscribe/Join AAAS to View Full Text) and another on a high profile advocate of open science[5] (Buy Access to This Article to View Full Text - Irony of ironies)... If you would like to nominate a paper for an Open Access Irony Award, simply post it to the group on Citeulike or group on Mendeley...” |
| Prime Time for Public Access (SPARC) Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:17 PM PST www.arl.org “Over the past several months, a remarkable series of events have conspired to bring the issue of access to publicly funded research squarely to the forefront of the public consciousness. In November, the White House signaled its continuing deep interest, with the Office of Science and Technology Policy issuing a detailed request for public input (RFI) on the potential impact of establishing a national policy framework to ensure public access to the results of federally funded scientific research... The RFI generated hundreds of thoughtful responses that examined the potential impact that a properly implemented public access policy could have on democratizing access and accelerating scientific progress. Just as critically, the discussions delved deeply into an exploration of how such access might benefit businesses... It was against this backdrop that a new piece of legislation, H.R. 3699, The Research Works Act (RWA), was quietly introduced in mid-December by Reps. Issa (R-CA) and Maloney (D-NY). With no fanfare and no public press release, the bill, which would prohibit U.S. science agencies from requiring public access to their funded research, could have very easily slipped past the public’s radar... But perhaps of most note was the surge of protest that arose directly from the scientific community. Researchers whose freedom to share their research papers is directly threatened by the RWA, stepped up to the plate and began speaking out... A remarkable thing occurred; instead of simply voicing concern and moving on, researchers pushed for action. While the American Association of Publisher endorsed the bill, ten of its member organizations have since issued public statements opposing the bill. Major publishers - including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), publisher of the journal Science, and the Nature Publishing Group – went on the record opposing the RWA, and for the first time, stated their public support for the NIH Public Access policy... Providing yet another platform for disaffected scientists, Fields Medalist Tim Gowers called on his colleagues to stop publishing in or providing editorial review for journals published by Elsevier, the RWA’s staunchest supporter. A public petition site was quickly established... The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)– a bipartisan bill introduced today into the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives – presents a crucial opportunity for... action. The bill builds on the successful NIH Public Access policy and would ensure that all articles resulting from U.S. federal science funds are made available, online, to the public within a reasonable time after publication in a peer reviewed journal. Expressing support for this legislation will build on the momentum generated by the White House-sponsored RFI discussion, and keep the academic and research communities squarely at the forefront of helping to construct a positive, collaborative policy solution to an issue that speaks to the core of how knowledge is shared. This is a unique moment in time when the spotlight is shining directly on the need for greater public access to taxpayer funder research. Take action now. For a list of suggested actions you can take, please take a moment to visit our Call to Action page." |
| Springer to publish open access journal with Korea Concrete Institute Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:14 PM PST www.physorg.com "Beginning in 2012, Springer and the Korea Concrete Institute (KCI) will partner to publish the International Journal of Concrete Structures and Materials (IJCSM). As a fully sponsored open access journal, it will be part of the SpringerOpen portfolio... The International Journal of Concrete Structures and Materials is the official journal of the KCI. It covers the various aspects of concrete, including material research, construction, structure analysis and design, manufacturing methods, repair and strengthening, and the latest analytical and modeling methods. Published twice a year, the goal of this interdisciplinary journal is to serve as a forum providing state-of-the-art information on concrete-related subjects. The international editorial board, made up of experts and scholars from over 15 countries, guarantees the high academic quality of the articles... As an open access journal, all research results from IJCSM will be freely available online. SpringerOpen journals (http://www.springeropen.com) are published under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which facilitates the open distribution of copyrighted work. According to this license, Springer will not reserve any exclusive commercial rights." |
| Open Access on a String – Cut It and It Will Grow Back Posted: 16 Feb 2012 02:08 PM PST InTechWeb Blog, (16 Feb 2012) The Federal Research Public Access Act was introduced to the White House on February, 9 by representatives Doyle, Yoder, and and Lacy Clay. Exactly what Research Works Act wanted to prohibit, the FRPAA would require, or the open access policies that RWA aimed to eliminate, FRPAA would expand on... Basically, FRPAA would make free online public access to publicly funded research mandatory... the FRPAA wouldn’t specify the OA repository in which authors must deposit their manuscripts, the way the NIH specifies PubMed Central, and it mandates deposits in OA repositories, not submission to OA journals, and as such it focuses on green Open Access and does not provide funds for publication fees at fee-based OA journals (it ignores the Gold OA). FRPAA applies to the version approved by peer review but not yet copy-edited and it permits embargoes up to six months. Finally, it does not tell any kind of journals what their access policies or business models ought to be, it regulates grantees, not publishers. All these reminders about the past experience of the introduction of a similar bill, are explained through Harvard Open Access Project page, managed by Peter Suber... ‘Open access legislation like FRPAA doesn’t just happen in a vacuum,’ Michael Nielsen reminds us. ‘The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) is a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that works to promote open access policies within the US Government.’ Find your way to support them, here.” |
| New open access journal: Clinical and Translational Immunology Posted: 16 Feb 2012 10:04 AM PST STM Publishing, (14 Feb 2012) “Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the Australasian Society for Immunology (ASI) today announce a partnership to publish a new open access journal from December 2012. Clinical and Translational Immunology (CTI) will be a companion title to Immunology and Cell Biology, established in 1924 and currently published by NPG in partnership with the ASI. CTI will be hosted on nature.com and will begin accepting submissions in the second half of 2012. CTI will publish the latest advances in biomedical research for scientists and physicians. The journal will focus on fields such as cancer biology, cardiovascular research, gene therapy, immunology, vaccine development and disease pathogenesis and therapy at the earliest phases of investigation. CTI will publish articles on basic, translational, and clinical studies in all aspects of human immunology, including experimental models specific to human diseases. There will also be reviews of timely topics in basic immunology, case reports, and letters to the editor... All content will be open access and will be freely available to researchers worldwide through the nature.com platform. An article-processing charge (APC) will be levied per article accepted for publication, and authors will have a choice of two Creative Commons licenses...” |
| Anvil Academic aims to provide platform for digital scholarship | Inside Higher Ed Posted: 16 Feb 2012 10:01 AM PST www.insidehighered.com “Academics who specialize in using technology to conduct and enable new kinds of humanities research are in high demand. At the same time, the current ecosystem of scholarly publishing can be inhospitable to their often-idiosyncratic research projects. Two well-known organizations are teaming up with a handful of colleges and universities to try to change that by building a flexible platform where digital humanists could have their research published and certified that the work has passed through well-respected editorial gantlets. The platform, called Anvil Academic, is a joint project by the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE) and the Council for Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Anvil aims to make it easier for digital humanists to publish nontraditional scholarly work under the auspices of traditional outlets, such as university presses. ‘Increasingly, research in the humanities is dependent on large data sets and involves sophisticated algorithms and visualizations in the execution of that research and in the construction of the products of scholarship,’ said Chuck Henry, the president of CLIR, in a statement. ‘Anvil will capture the environment in which this research is conducted: a linked ecology of scholarly expression, data, and tools of analysis that will over time become itself a place for new knowledge discovery.’ The idea is that visitors could log in to the Anvil online gateway — he says whether Anvil will be subscription-based or open-access is yet to be determined — and browse through various digital research ‘objects,’ such as searchable archives, game-based simulations and interactive maps of historical environments. Ideally, visitors will also be able to view the underlying data, media files and algorithms upon which the project is built, he says. These ingredients could be filed in a registry that other scholars could search and borrow from, Henry says. One of Anvil’s goals is to build a peer-review infrastructure for research that cannot be easily represented in text. While the digital humanities are widely considered an important frontier, tenure and promotion committees still have trouble evaluating the work of digital humanists because the format is often so unfamiliar...” |
| Gulf Times – Qatar’s top-selling English daily newspaper - First Page Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:59 AM PST www.gulf-times.com “Work is progressing on the Qatar unified imaging project (QUIP), a path-breaking initiative spearheaded by a team at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, to advance knowledge of the country’s history, traditions and culture. ‘QUIP will identify and map the dispersed collections of primary source materials in Qatar, India, Britain, and Denmark and distribute selected results of the research from an open-access digital repository,’ lead principle investigator Tammi Moe told Gulf Times... QUIP envisages setting up a digital online database of up to 10,000 objects by 2014... One of the things obvious to Moe as an archivist was the difficulty at accessing primary source materials in Qatar... The breakthrough came at a symposium in February 2007 on preservation of cultural heritage. The three-day event featured all the work that the Qataris had done in the area... Moe subsequently got in touch with Hamad al-Mohannadi, the director of the Department of Heritage at the Ministry of Culture, Arts and Heritage, and one of the main players in the effort to preserve cultural heritage in Qatar. One of the co-principle investigators, Dr James Onley (director, Gulf Studies Programme, Exeter University, UK), is documenting all the materials in the UK and India archives while Moe is covering Qatar and Denmark. Since Danish archaeologists came to Qatar in the 1950s to document the Bedouins, Denmark has a large holding about Qatar...Another co-principle investigator, Dr Sohair Wastawy, a former chief librarian at the Alexandria Library and presently the dean of libraries at the University of Illinois, will work with steering committee to develop a collection policy for the digital archiving and select up to 10,000 objects...‘This database could tell to the world the story of Qatar from an internal perspective and not from a colonialist perspective,’ Moe said... |
| How you can help the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) become law | Michael Nielsen Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:57 AM PST michaelnielsen.org “As many of you no doubt know, the Federal Research Public Access Act; (FRPAA, pronounced fur-pa) was introduced into the US Congress a few days past... Open access legislation like FRPAA doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. The Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA) is a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that works to promote open access policies within the US Government. The ATA worked with Congress (and many other organizations) to help pass the NIH public access policyin 2008, and have been working for the past several years with members of Congress on FRPAA. In this post, I interview Heather Joseph, the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), which convenes the ATA, and ask her about the bill, about next steps, and about how people can help...” |
| Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) of 2012 Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:54 AM PST Association of Research Libraries (ARL) - Full Feed, (14 Feb 2012) “On February 9, 2012, Sens. Cornyn (R-TX), Wyden (D-OR), and Hutchinson (R-TX) and Reps. Doyle (D-PA), Yoder (R-KS), and Clay (D-MO) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA, S. 2096 and H.R. 4004), companion bills that would ensure free, timely, online access to the published results of research funded by 11 US federal agencies. FRPAA would require those agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from such funding no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The bill gives individual agencies flexibility in choosing the location of the digital repository to house this content, as long as the repositories meet conditions for interoperability and public accessibility, and have provisions for long-term archiving. The legislation seeks to extend and expand access to these federally funded research resources and importantly, spur and accelerate scientific discovery. Finally, FRPAA reflects the growing trend by funders and campuses alike of adopting and implementing public access policies relating to federally funded research... It is expected that non-classified research from investigators funded by the following agencies would be affected: the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Transportation, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation... Each agency must: [1] Require each researcher—funded totally or partially by the agency—to submit to the agency an electronic copy of the final, electronic manuscript that has been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. [2] Ensure that the manuscript is preserved in a stable, digital repository maintained by that agency or in another suitable repository that permits free public access, interoperability, and long-term preservation. [3] Require that free, online access to each manuscript be available as soon as possible, and no later than six months after the article has been published in a peer-reviewed journal..." |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:51 AM PST duraspace.org “Michele Kimpton, DuraSpace CEO, recently spoke with Ryan Busch, Today's Campus, about how the DuraSpace non-profit organization contributes to the management and preservation of digital content—particularly created by the academic community—with an open source technology portfolio that includes DSpace, Fedora and DuraCloud. DuraSpace software and services are used worldwide as solutions for open access, institutional repositories, digital libraries, digital archives, data curation, virtual research environments. See the interview here... Both DSpace, the easy-to-use repository application, and Fedora, the flexible framework for building digital repositories, were founded more than ten years ago as the importance of preserving the digital record of culture and science was recognized... The DuraSpace organization was founded in 2009 when DSpace and Fedora joined their organizations to pursue a common mission. Since that time DuraSpace has added value to the community by establishing community programs and continuing to provide strategic leadership for DSpace, Fedora and DuraCloud—a new service offering that makes it easy and cost effective to manage and preserve content in the cloud...” |
| Science in the Open » Blog Archive » On the 10th Anniversary of the Budapest Declaration Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:49 AM PST cameronneylon.net “Ten years ago today, the Budapest Declaration was published... BioMedCentral had been publishing for a year or so, PLoS existed as an open letter, Creative Commons was still focussed on building a commons and hadn’t yet released its first licences... and it was to be another year before Tim O’Reilly popularised the term “Web 2.0” arguably marking the real emergence of the social web. In that context the text of the declaration is strikingly prescient... But at the same time, and again remember this is at the very beginning of the development of the user-generated web, the argument is laid out to support a networked research and discovery environment... But for me, the core of the declaration lies in its definition... Core to this definition are three things. Access to the text... a limitation on restrictions and a limitation on the use of copyright to only support the integrity and attribution of the work – which I interpret in retrospect to mean the only acceptable licences are those that require attribution only. But the core forward looking element lies in the middle of the definition, focussing as it does on specific uses; crawling, passing to software as data... In limiting the scope of acceptable restrictions and in focussing on the power of automated systems, the authors of the Budapest declaration recognised precisely the requirements of information resources that we have more recently come to understand as requirements for effective networked information. Ten years ago... the core characteristics were identified that would enable research outputs to be accessed and read, but above all integrated, mined, aggregated and used in ways that their creators did not, could not, expect...” |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:47 AM PST www.publishers.org.uk On December 15, 2011 the Science and Technology Committee (Commons), UK Parliament requested written submissions on “the difficulty of translating research into commercial application, particularly the lack of funding—the so-called ‘valley of death’. The Committee has therefore agreed to conduct an inquiry into how the Government and other organisations can improve the commercialisation of research.” The Publishers Association, UK submitted the response posted here, detailing their perspective on a range of issues including the value of the publisher to scholarly communication, open access, data mining, and more. |
| A window of opportunity for Elsevier Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:41 AM PST Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week #AcademicSpring, (13 Feb 2012) “The Elsevier boycott at The Cost Of Knowledge is the most visible sign of the recent uprising against exploitative publishing practices, but it’s far from the only one. Anyone who’s been keeping an eye on the developing shift in attitudes will hardly have been able to miss: [1] the increasingly voluminous coverage of these issues in the general press, [2] the avalanche of blog posts, [3] the way publisher-friendly blogs like The Scholarly Kitchen are being flooded with comments from outraged researchers, or [4] the emergence of satirical accounts like @FakeElsevier and @FakePLoS on Twitter... What we’re seeing is a spontaneous response — catalysed by the Research Works Act, yes, but not caused by it. The roots run much deeper... And there are encouraging moments when it seems that the publishers are truly starting to Get It. Elsevier’s most recent formal response to the boycott says: ‘We pay close attention to the voices of the research community we serve, including those who have responded to an online petition that is putting forward some serious negative judgments about Elsevier...’ there is a real window of opportunity here for Elsevier to radically reposition themselves... Elsevier should repudiate the RWA and throw themselves behind the Federal Research Public Access Act...” |
| Going public the next frontier for scientists Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:39 AM PST www.vancouversun.com “Climate change scientist Andrew Weaver has paid a price for bringing his research to the public. His University of Victoria office contains a Wall of Hate, filled with the "vitriolic diatribes" of people who can-not accept the overwhelming conclusion of the scientific community that burning fossil fuels is responsible for global warming... He adds that whether you are researching the mating habits of an insect or something more contentious - "climate physics, environ-mental monitoring, genetically modified foods, or even evolution" - there is one constant.That is the importance of having people see your research. ‘Scientists have a duty and responsibility to convey the outcomes of their research to those who ultimately fund it, which is the public.’ Thousands of scientists gathering this week at the Vancouver Convention Centre for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science know full well that doing the research is only the first step. Getting your results accepted as public policy can be a much greater challenge... Weaver said the role of science is not to prescribe policy outcomes but to inform policy discussions... Weaver said scientists get upset when their work is manipulated to support a purely ideological agenda, something he accuses the federal government of doing on the issue of climate change...” |
| Ten Years of Open Access – and how to celebrate the wiki way Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:38 AM PST Wikimedian in Residence, (14 Feb 2012) “Ten years ago, the Budapest Open Access Initiative went public by inviting individuals and organizations to sign a statement in support of Open Access to the scholarly literature... As of today, 5567 individuals and 604 organizations have added their names to the declaration... In essence, the declaration recommends to put scholarly communications under a Creative Commons Attribution License by default, except that such licenses didn’t exist at the time. It is an explicit statement that restrictions like Share-Alike, Non-Commercialor Non-Derivative are not to be considered Open Access (contrary to the marketing speak of a number of publishers), as they raise legal barriers that limit reuse... The original motivation behind the quest for Open Access... was to provide researchers with access to the research literature... the implementation of the Budapest principles by publishers like BioMed Central, PLoS, Hindawi, Frontiers, Copernicus, Pensoft and a growing number of others brought about a wealth of instances of scholarly communication that can be used for other purposes... Today and tomorrow, leaders of the Open Access movement are meeting in Budapest ...to hash out, for the next decade of Open Access, recommendations... The wiki way of celebrating is to join WikiProject Open Access (recently started by Blue Rasberry)... as well as exploring the reuse of Open Access materials. One way of doing this is via the Open Access File of the Day... another by reusing entire Open-Access articles, for which Wikimedia Germanyapproved a pilot project yesterday.” |
| Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:36 AM PST Open Knowledge Foundation Blog, (14 Feb 2012) “One of the key problems in natural science research is the lack of effective collaboration. A lot of research is conducted by scientists from different disciplines, yet cross-discipline collaboration is rare. Even within a discipline, research is often duplicated, which wastes resources and valuable scientific potential. Furthermore, without a common framework and context, research that involves animal testing often becomes phenomenological and little or no general knowledge can be gained from it. The peer reviewed publishing process is also not very effective in stimulating scientific collaboration, mainly due to the loss of an underlying machine readable structure for the data and the duration of the process itself. If research results were more effectively shared and re-used by a wider scientific community – including scientists with different disciplinary backgrounds – many of these problems could be addressed. We could hope to see a more efficient use of resources, an accelerated rate of academic publications, and, ultimately, a reduction in animal testing... Effectopedia is a project of the International QSAR Foundation. Effectopedia itself is an open knowledge aggregation and collaboration tool that provides a means of describing adverse outcome pathways (AOPs)1 in an encyclopedic manner... Using automated notifications when researchers create causal linkage between parts of the pathways, they can simultaneously create a valuable contact with a fellow researcher interested in the same topic who might have a different background or perspective towards the subject. Effectopedia allows creation of live scientific documents which are instantly open for focused discussions and feedback whilst giving credit to the original authors and reviewers involved. The review process is never closed and if new evidence arises it can be presented immediately... The type of knowledge needed in Effectopedia requires a paradigm shift in the way research is conducted: from phenomenological to more hypothesis driven. Instead of testing an individual chemical with results often applicable only in the context of the specific experimental design, Effectopedia is targeted at defining the conditions under which certain knowledge can be transferred to other species, levels of biological organization, exposure routes, exposure durations, chemicals and so on... Many universities in the developing world and in transitional economies are not able to pay the full subscription fees to access published work, which keeps them out of the mainstream up-to-date scientific discussions... The simplest way Effectopedia is envisioned to help in the reduction of unnecessary animal testing is by providing a centralized repository for open, easily searchable access to the existing knowledge... If you come from the chemical, pharmaceutical, flavoring, cosmetics or many other industries, the products your company creates are often subject to regulations. A system like Effectopedia could dramatically reduce the cost for development and registration of new products without compromising your competitive edge... " |
| The World Of Open Textbooks Just Became A Little More Crowded -- And A Little More Open | Techdirt Posted: 16 Feb 2012 09:35 AM PST www.techdirt.com “Open e-textbooks are hardly new: Techdirt has been reporting on the pioneer in this market, Flat World Knowledge, for several years now. But a new entrant called OpenStax College isnoteworthy for a number of reasons: ‘OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Our free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course. Through our partnerships with companies and foundations committed to reducing costs for students, OpenStax College is working to improve access to higher education for all. OpenStax College is an initiative of Rice University and is made possible through the generous support of several philanthropic foundations...’ Although MIT is known as a pioneer of sharing its courses freely online through its OpenCourseWare project, arguably Rice University went even further with its highly-modular Connexions program, which offers what it calls ‘frictionless remixing’. Still, that's a step beyond Flat World Knowledge, which allows textbooks to be modified, but under the more restrictive cc by-nc-sa license. Even though OpenStax College is a non-profit, and Flat World Knowledge a company, both adopt the same business model: the e-textbooks are given away, while printed copies and supplementary materials require payment -- a classic example of using abundance to make money from associated scarcities.” |
| Researchers Boycott Elsevier Journal Publisher - NYTimes.com Posted: 14 Feb 2012 07:23 PM PST www.nytimes.com “More than 5,700 researchers have joined a boycott of Elsevier, a leading publisher of science journals, in a growing furor over open access to the fruits of scientific research. The protest grew out of a provocativeblog post by the mathematician Timothy Gowers of Cambridge University, who announced on Jan. 21 that he would no longer publish papers in any of Elsevier’s journals or serve as a referee or editor for them. Last week 34 mathematicians issued astatement denouncing “a system in which commercial publishers make profits based on the free labor of mathematicians and subscription fees from their institutions’ libraries, for a service that has become largely unnecessary...’ The statement was also signed by Ingrid Daubechies, president of the International Mathematical Union, who then resigned as one of the unpaid editors in chief at the Elsevier journal Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis... The defecting scientists represent a small fraction of the roughly 600,000 authors Elsevier says it publishes. In an open letter responding to some of the grievances, Elsevier said it was “proud of the way we have been able to work in partnership with the research community to make real and sustainable contributions to science.” Still, David Clark, the senior vice president in charge of Elsevier’s mathematics journals, acknowledged that the boycott had drawn attention... For 2010, Elsevier reported a 36 percent profit on revenues of $3.2 billion. “It’s a secure, viable business, which is a good thing,” Mr. Clark said. The most recent flashpoint in the dispute was the Research Works Act, a bill introduced in Congress in December that would prohibit federal agencies from requiring open access to research, even if it is financed by taxpayers. On Thursday, a competing bill, the Federal Research Public Access Act, first drafted in 2006, was reintroduced in Congress.Dr. Daubechies said she was contacted by Mr. Clark and was willing to talk, but did not want the company to think, “now we have vented and now we have calmed down...” |
| Open Access publishing in Lithuania and Serbia: Case studies | EIFL Posted: 14 Feb 2012 07:21 PM PST www.eifl.net “EIFL [Electronic Information for Libraries] has provided small grants to support Open Access publishing initiatives in Lithuania and Serbia and now Eleonora Dagiene, Chair of the Council at The Association of Lithuanian Serials, and Pero Šipka, CEON/CEES, describe the results. Promoting Open Access through Implementation of Open Journal Systems (OJS) in Lithuanian Research Journals: A Case Study from Lithuania: Key achievements: [1] Over 130 participants involved in publishing attended training events and learnt about OJS and on-line publishing. Seminar materials are available from the website of the Association. [2] Lithuanian OJS version and guidelines for journal editors and publishers have been released and disseminated. [3] 22 OJS installations (and counting) implemented at seven research institutions... Supporting Serbian Journals Publishers to Switch to Article Processing Charges OA Model: A case study from Serbia: Key achievements: [1] Serbian Open Access (OA) journal publishers were provided with software and organizational ‘know how’ to collect article processing charges (APCs) from the authors or their affiliated institutions. [2] A partnership with publishers was established based on a public call followed by an internet survey, and with an in-depth CEON/CEES analysis of the journals potentials of switching to the new model. More than 40 representatives of publishers and editorial boards have been trained to practice APCs. [3] An immediate result of this project is that five journals switched to the new business practice... [4] The project provides a new model for Serbian journals publishers, which will lead to their long-term economic independence...” |
| Posted: 14 Feb 2012 07:19 PM PST www.newscientist.com “Inspired by a University of Cambridge mathematician, over 5000 academics have agreed to boycott publishers Elsevier, vowing not to peer-review or submit papers for any of its scientific journals. The protest comes at a time when mathematicians in particular are embracing new ways of working online, with some using web tools such as blogs and wikis both to solve proofs collectively and to distribute the results to their peers. The protest began last month when Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, wrote a blog post objecting to what he called Elsevier's ‘very high’ prices and its practice of ‘bundling’ journals, which he says prompts university libraries to spend money on titles that they may not want... Other mathematicians joined the cause, creating the website thecostofknowledge.com to declare they would no longer support Elsevier. Since then academics from other disciplines have joined the protest, and earlier this week 34 mathematicians, including Gowers, published a more formal statement explaining the reasons behind the boycott... In response to the protest, Elsevier has produced its own statement... Elsevier has also defended its support for the RWA, emphasising that there are costs to publishing research, in addition to doing the research... Although there are already other alternatives to traditional journal publishing, these suffer from their own problems. Open-access journal publishers, such as the Public Library of Science, allow anyone to read papers for free, but the costs of publishing fall to the authors. This may prevent cash-strapped academics from sharing their work. Other paper repositories, such as the physics preprint server arXiv, let users read and publish for free, but don't provide any form of peer review... Whatever the fallout from the boycott, it is clear that mathematicians are on the march...” |
| BBC News - MIT launches free online 'fully automated' course Posted: 14 Feb 2012 07:15 PM PST www.bbc.co.uk “Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), one of the world's top-rated universities, has announced its first free course which can be studied and assessed completely online. An electronics course, beginning in March, will be the first prototype of an online project, known as MITx. The interactive course is designed to be fully automated, with successful students receiving a certificate... This ground-breaking scheme represents a significant step forward in the use of technology to deliver higher education... MIT, along with many other leading universities, makes its course material available online, but the MITx scheme takes this a step further by creating an accredited course specifically for online students... The main difference is that the MITx version has been designed for online students, with a virtual laboratory, e-textbooks, online discussions and videos that are the equivalent of a lecture. It is expected to take 10 hours per week and will run until June...” |
| Could Backlash to Research Works Act Boost FRPAA’s Odds of Passage? Posted: 14 Feb 2012 07:13 PM PST www.publishersweekly.com “Congress last week introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2012 (FRPAA), a bill that would mandate free public online access to taxpayer-funded research for all federal agencies with extramural research budgets over $100 million. The bill was introduced in identical versions in both the House and the Senate, staking out a position counter to the publisher-backed Research Works Act (RWA), a bill that would bar federal agencies from requiring public access as a condition of funding. It is the third time FRPAA has been introduced since 2006. But this time, amid backlash to the RWA, does FRPAA have a shot at passage? ... “Realistically, any legislation will have an uphill battle in an election year,” observed Heather Joseph, executive director of SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). And, she notes, FRPAA has an added challenge: it has been referred to the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government, the committee chaired by the sponsor of the Research Works Act, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). Still, public access advocates like Joseph sense an opening and are preparing to push hard to advance FRPAA... Joseph notes, with the public and the research community engaged with the issue on an unprecedented level, from editorials in major publications, to recognition of the issue by public advocacy groups, and even a petition drive among scientific researchers in which nearly 5600 signatories thus far have pledged not to publish with, referee, or do editorial work for leading STM publisher Elsevier, partly due to its support of the RWA. ‘One thing is for sure,’ Joseph told PW, ‘the nature of the conversation on the [public access] issue has changed. The RWA debacle has helped to engage researchers on this issue in droves, so we’re seeing a more substantive discussion of how opening up access to this information helps scientists do their work...’” |
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