Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items) |
- Living Labs Global Award 2012 – Two Open Knowledge Foundation Projects Nominated
- Gold in the text?
- Open Access and Scholarly Publishing: Opportunities and Challenges to Nigerian Researchers
- SAS Open Journals: final project report
- Batch Ingesting into EPrints Digital Repository Software
- The New Ambiguity of 'Open Government' by Harlan Yu, David Robinson :: SSRN
- 3Qs: Reading more into open access
- Linked Open Data as explained by Europeana
- Guest Editorial by Clifford Lynch
- President’s Message: Open Access/Open Data
- Information Technology and Libraries
- In ‘Open Government Data,’ What’s Really Open? - Miller-McCune
- Episode 14: The Elsevier Boycott
- An efficient journal
- Improving The Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship (Dagstuhl Perspectives Workshop 11331)
- Authors' Groups Seek Fair-Use Motion in HathiTrust Lawsuit - PageView - The Chronicle of Higher Education
| Living Labs Global Award 2012 – Two Open Knowledge Foundation Projects Nominated Posted: 08 Mar 2012 06:28 AM PST Open Knowledge Foundation Blog, (08 Mar 2012) "wo projects of the Open Knowledge Foundation have been nominated for the Living Labs Global Award 2012: OpenSpending.mobi – Participatory budgeting through augmented reality and CityData – Making Cities Smarter – A central entry point to all your city’s data. Out of nearly 700 submitted showcases, about 15% have been selected to submit an extended version of the showcase. The Winning Showcases will be presented during the Rio Summit on Service Innovation in Rio de Janeiro on 2-3 May, 2012...." |
| Posted: 08 Mar 2012 05:47 AM PST Nature 483 (7388), 124 (08 Mar 2012) “Publishers and scientists should do more to foster the mining of research literature by computer. Whether from the petabytes of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider, or the hundreds of millions of bases in the human genome, much scientific analysis nowadays relies on computers to pull out meaning from swathes of data. But one vast store of information, the research literature, has so far seemed immune to computer analysis. By and large, articles exist only in formats designed for humans to read — such as this paragraph. Text-mining aims to break down this barrier. Using natural-language-processing concepts honed over the past 30 years, computer programs are starting to pull out information from plain text, including patents and research articles. Right now, the software requires highly skilled operators, but in the next decade it might transform the way scientists read the literature. Text-miners hope to make scientific discoveries by scouring hundreds of research papers for associations and connections (such as between drugs and side effects, or genes and disease pathways) that humans reading each paper individually might not notice... But academics are struggling to even run experiments — because publishing licences do not let them text-mine research papers, and publishers are slow to respond to text-mining requests. Fed up after two years of negotiations, one team of researchers is launching a public website to log publishers' responses (see page 134)... But the question is how to make progress today, when much research lies behind subscription firewalls and even 'open' content does not always come with a text-mining licence (including 83% of the 'free' research in the PubMedCentral online archive). Publishers should agree that scientists who have already paid for access to research papers may text-mine content at no extra cost and publish their findings — as long as their doing so does not breach the original firewall. Publishers can have no claim on the data in articles, only on the way in which the articles have been edited and formatted. They should make their text-mining policies clear and consider following the example of the journal Heredity, which says it is ‘seeking to encourage text-mining experiments’... On the other hand, text-miners need to make a better case for their technology... Casey Bergman at the University of Manchester, UK, is chronicling projects that have tried to text-mine the available PubMedCentral content (see go.nature.com/2pqp8g) and finds very few examples — suggesting that text-miners are reluctant even to mine the corpus of free content. Publishers point out that they receive few text-mining requests, so the field can't be very hot. So unless text-miners start to make full use of the content that is available, and request more access to published content — while always being clear about how their project will benefit science — the unsatisfactory impasse will continue.” |
| Open Access and Scholarly Publishing: Opportunities and Challenges to Nigerian Researchers Posted: 08 Mar 2012 01:36 AM PST Chinese Librarianship: an International Electronic Journal, 33, (Jun 2012) Abstract: The study examined the extent of researchers’ appreciation of open access scholarly publishing. It discussed the opportunities and the benefits of open access to scholars worldwide. Challenges of OA were discussed and solutions suggested. Four research questions were raised. The population of this study was 140 lecturers from the University of Benin, Nigeria. The study revealed that the respondents had cited open access journals articles and that the major benefit derived from using open access journals is that it provides free online access to the literature necessary for research. |
| SAS Open Journals: final project report Posted: 08 Mar 2012 01:14 AM PST SAS-Space, School of Advanced Study, University of London, (28 Feb 2012) From the Project Summary: Part of the publishing programme of the School of Advanced Study is SAS-Space, the institutional repository for the School. SAS-Space contains research outputs from across the Institutes; but also works in partnership with learned societies and other scholarly bodies with which the School has many and longstanding links, to provide an open access publishing option. The culture of open access journal publishing is not yet well established amongst the smaller arts and humanities journals which we intend to engage in this project in the longer term. However, as the business model for this type of small self-published journal comes under increasing pressure, SAS Open Journals now offers a low-cost solution. The project developed a re-usable overlay journal interface, using Amicus Curiae as the exemplar, thus completing the transition of that journal from print to web. This system is now available, at minimal cost, to journals produced within the School, and to publications by cognate learned societies. The system will greatly increase open access publishing capacity in the humanities and social sciences. To date, two further journals have committed themselves to using SAS Open Journals. |
| Batch Ingesting into EPrints Digital Repository Software Posted: 08 Mar 2012 01:02 AM PST Information Technology and Libraries 31 (1), (Mar 2012) Abstract: This paper describes the batch importing strategy and workflow used for the import of theses metadata and PDF documents into the EPrints digital repository software. A two-step strategy of importing metadata in MARC format followed by attachment of PDF documents is described in detail, including Perl source code for scripts used. The processes described were used in the ingestion of 6,000 theses metadata and PDFs into an EPrints institutional repository. |
| The New Ambiguity of 'Open Government' by Harlan Yu, David Robinson :: SSRN Posted: 07 Mar 2012 04:58 PM PST papers.ssrn.com [A new article available for download as a pdf from SSRN] “Abstract: ‘Open government’ used to carry a hard political edge: it referred to politically sensitive disclosures of government information. The phrase was first used in the 1950s, in the debates leading up to passage of the Freedom of Information Act. But over the last few years, that traditional meaning has blurred, and has shifted toward technology. Open technologies involve sharing data over the Internet, and all kinds of governments can use them, for all kinds of reasons. Recent public policies have stretched the label ‘open government’ to reach any public sector use of these technologies. Thus, ‘open government data’ might refer to data that makes the government as a whole more open (that is, more transparent), but might equally well refer to politically neutral public sector disclosures that are easy to reuse, but that may have nothing to do with public accountability. Today a regime can call itself ‘open’ if it builds the right kind of web site — even if it does not become more accountable or transparent. This shift in vocabulary makes it harder for policymakers and activists to articulate clear priorities and make cogent demands. This essay proposes a more useful way for participants on all sides to frame the debate: We separate the politics of open government from the technologies of open data. Technology can make public information more adaptable, empowering third parties to contribute in exciting new ways across many aspects of civic life. But technological enhancements will not resolve debates about the best priorities for civic life, and enhancements to government services are no substitute for public accountability.” |
| 3Qs: Reading more into open access Posted: 07 Mar 2012 01:41 PM PST www.northeastern.edu For many years, the traditional method to access researchers’ scholarly works, particularly in the sciences and social sciences, has been through paid subscriptions to journals. But in recent years, a movement toward “open access” has grown, providing free access to such material online. The issue has also drawn national attention this year, with thousands of researchers supporting a boycott of a leading scientific journal publisher, while competing bills before Congress tackle the issue of requiring open access to publicly funded research. We asked Will Wakeling, dean of University Libraries at Northeastern, to discuss what open access is all about and what this trend means for the research community. |
| Linked Open Data as explained by Europeana Posted: 07 Mar 2012 10:54 AM PST Open bibliography and Open Bibliographic Data, (01 Mar 2012) "Antoine Isaac recently sent an e-mail around the List to let us know that Europeana has published its first dataset, comprising 2.4 million objects, under CC0. Furthermore, the new Data Exchange Agreement, which data suppliers are required to sign in order to publish on Europeana (and already signed by national libraries, national museums and content providers for entire countries), comes into effect on 1 July 2012, after which all metadata in Europeana will be available as Open Data to the Public Domain! This is brilliant news in itself, but what I found particularly enchanting was the animated video that Europeana created in support of this announcement...." |
| Guest Editorial by Clifford Lynch Posted: 07 Mar 2012 10:48 AM PST Guest Editorial Information Technology and Libraries 31 (1), (03 Mar 2012) "Congratulations LITA and Information Technology and Libraries. Since the early days of the Internet, I’ve been continually struck by the incredible opportunities that it offers organizations concerned with the creation, organization, and dissemination of knowledge to advance their core missions in new and more effective ways. Libraries and librarians were consistently early and aggressive in recognizing, seizing, and advocating for these opportunities, though they’ve faced —and continue to face— enormous obstacles ranging from copyright laws to the amazing inertia of academic traditions in scholarly communication. Yet the library profession has been slow to open up access to the publications of its own professional societies, to take advantage of the greater reach and impact that such policies can offer. Making these changes is not easy: there are real financial implications that suddenly seem very serious when you are a member of a board of directors, charged with a fiduciary duty to your association, and you have to push through plans to realign its finances, organizational mission, and goals in the new world of networked information. So, as a long-time LITA member, I find it a great pleasure to see LITA finally reach this milestone with Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL) moving to fully open-access electronic distribution, and I congratulate the LITA leadership for the persistence and courage to make this happen. It’s a decision that will, I believe, make the journal much more visible, and a more attractive venue for authors; it will also make it easier to use in educational settings, and to further the interactions between librarians, information scientists, computer scientists, and members of other disciplines. On a broader ALA-wide level, ITAL now joins ACRL’s College & Research Libraries as part of the American Library Association’s portfolio of open-access journals. Supporting ITAL as an open-access journal is a very good reason indeed to be a member of LITA...." |
| President’s Message: Open Access/Open Data Posted: 07 Mar 2012 10:45 AM PST Information Technology and Libraries 31 (1), (03 Mar 2012) "I [Colleen Cuddy] am very excited to write this column. This issue of Information Technology and Libraries (ITAL) marks the beginning of a new era for the journal. ITAL is now an open-access, electronic-only journal. There are many people to thank for this transition. The LITA Publications Committee led by Kristen Antelman did a thorough analysis of publishing options and presented a thoughtful proposal to the LITA Board; the LITA Board had the foresight to push for an open-access journal even if it might mean a temporary revenue loss for the division; Bob Gerrity, ITAL editor, has enthusiastically supported this transition and did the heavy lifting to make it happen; and the LITA office staff worked tirelessly for the past year to help shepherd this project. I am proud to be leading the organization during this time. To see ITAL go open access in my presidential year is extremely gratifying...." |
| Information Technology and Libraries Posted: 07 Mar 2012 10:42 AM PST ejournals.bc.edu Information Technology and Libraries converted to OA. |
| In ‘Open Government Data,’ What’s Really Open? - Miller-McCune Posted: 07 Mar 2012 10:41 AM PST www.miller-mccune.com “In parsing the meaning of ‘open government,’ citizens weigh the availability of information against the transparency of creating it. It’s a rare grammar debate that affects the course of democracy. In the fall, the United States joined seven other countries — with hopefully more to come — in forming the Open Government Partnership, an international initiative designed to hold countries on a global stage to a commitment to open government and its close relative, ‘open government data.’ These terms, though, have created a bit of philosophical and grammatical confusion. ‘Eventually it became clear to us that it was really the word ‘open’ that caused problems,’ said Harlan Yu, a doctoral candidate in computer science at Princeton University, who has written a new working paper on the topic with Yale law student David G. Robinson... Put another way, are we talking about real-time transit information (data collected by a government and freely given to the public), or White House visitor logs (data about government itself that creates true transparency)? ... Robinson said... ‘If ‘open government’ is a bigger tent that encompasses a lot of these different beneficial things, it’s easier for people to get behind it. But the price you pay for that, we would argue — the price that is inherent in that merger — is that it gets harder to talk about the traditional open government stuff.’ That is, the stuff of accountability and transparency. Amid this confusion, governments with no real designs on transparency may don the mantle of ‘open government’ ... Yu and Robinson cite the Hungarian city of Budapest, which releases web-based, machine-readable public-transit schedules that enable apps like Google Maps to plot route information. This undoubtedly improves life for anyone who lives in Budapest... But Hungary hardly has an open government in the traditional sense. It may, in fact, be reverting to authoritarianism. Yu and Robinson argue that we’ve begun to confuse the politics of open government with the technologies of open data. Technology is making that real-time transit data more accessible... But open government is not really about making information that was always public easier to access. It’s about making information that was never previously open — those White House visitor logs, for instance — public for the first time... Yu and Robinson trace the history of the concept back to World War II. The American Society of Newspaper Editors commissioned a report in 1953 that includes what may be the first mention of ‘the public stake in open government.’ Their advocacy led in 1966 to the federal Freedom of Information Act, and for the next several decades the idea of ‘open government’ referred unambiguously to the disclosure of previously locked-up information... The rise of technology started to change this in the 1990s... The federal government embraced this in 1995 when it created THOMAS, the web portal that tracks legislation in Congress. That information, though, was never secret... More recently, the Obama administration has broadly embraced both open government and open data, but it has also, the authors suggest, done much to confuse the two. Plenty of recent initiatives reflect both principles. But it’s also possible to embrace one without the other, to release, for example, new lobbying data in a format watchdog groups can’t easily sort, or old government mapping data that has nothing to do with accountability. ‘Data that the government itself already collects is ‘government data’ because it’s government-collected,’ Yu said. ‘But a lot of this data which is really useful for citizens isn’t necessarily about the inner workings of the government itself. It’s not necessarily going to expose corruption or make government processes become more accountable.’ Yu and Robinson propose clearing this up by assessing open government and open data initiatives along two related axes: a question of technology — how easy is the data for outside groups to reuse? And a question of transparency — to what extent does it help produce public accountability? Using this more nuanced framework, ideas can be plotted on a two-dimensional map that acknowledges there’s such a thing as open data that doesn’t open governments, and open-government revelations that don’t come in easily used databases... ‘It’s a great problem to have, and we’re thrilled to find ourselves here, given where we were four years ago, or 10 years ago,’ Robinson said. ‘This is about a midcourse adjustment. But fundamentally, we’re steering in roughly some good directions, and we’ve got a significant amount of momentum.’” [Yu, Harlan and Robinson, David G., The New Ambiguity of 'Open Government' (February 28, 2012). Princeton CITP / Yale ISP Working Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2012489] |
| Episode 14: The Elsevier Boycott Posted: 07 Mar 2012 10:34 AM PST |
| Posted: 07 Mar 2012 10:14 AM PST The Occasional Pamphlet, (06 Mar 2012) "Aficionados of open access should know about the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), an open-access journal in my own research field of artificial intelligence....JMLR was founded when most of the editorial board of the Kluwer journal Machine Learning (now a Springer journal) resigned to establish JMLR, Inc., a nonprofit to develop and publish the new journal on an open access model....Almost immediately, the journal was appreciated as being of top quality. The number of articles it published increased quickly over the first few years, its illustrious editorial team serving to convince prospective authors of its seriousness. Its first year in ISI’s rankings, it had the highest Impact Factor of any journal in its Web of Science subject category....The journal does not charge any submission or publication fees and has never done so. It has never taken any advertising. Indeed, it has never had any direct revenue at all....Of course, there are costs, but they are all provided through in-kind support. By far the largest costs are the labor required for peer reviewing and its management by the editorial board, but this is all volunteer effort as in most all scholarly journals. The primary people involved, the editor-in-chief, managing editor, and production editor, are all unpaid, contra Anderson’s conjecture....As for the typesetting of articles, computer science authors typically use the open-source LaTeX typesetting system for writing their articles, a system designed for beautiful typesetting of mathematical material and far better for mathematical typesetting than the typical systems publishers are accustomed to. The process of retypesetting that many journals have historically performed inevitably introduces errors, leading to a product inferior to that computer science authors typically provide. JMLR used an approach where authors submit camera-ready copy based on a publisher-supplied LaTeX style file. By dropping the retypesetting with an inferior system, errors in the process are eliminated and the quality of typesetting improved....JMLR has always appeared both free online and by subscription in print....The print edition of the first four volumes was published by MIT Press....JMLR received no revenue from the print edition and paid no subvention to MIT Press.... From the fifth volume on, the print edition was taken over by Microtome Publishing under the same zero-zero arrangement. Under Microtome Publishing’s approach, which leverages important aspects of the print editions specific to open-access journals, the subscription cost decreased dramatically over the next few volumes, settling at a steady state of 8 cents per page for the last several volumes. Adding it all up, a reasonable imputed estimate for JMLR’s total direct costs other than the volunteered labor (that is, tax accountant, web hosting, domain names, clerical work, etc.) is less than $10,000, covering the almost 1,000 articles the journal has published since its founding — about $10 per article....How do I know all this about JMLR? Because (full disclosure alert) I am Microtome Publishing...." |
| Posted: 07 Mar 2012 07:58 AM PST Abstract: The dissemination of knowledge derived from research and scholarship has a fundamental impact on the ways in which society develops and progresses, and at the same time it feeds back to improve subsequent research and scholarship. Here, as in so many other areas of human activity, the internet is changing the way things work; two decades of emergent and increasingly pervasive information technology have demonstrated the potential for far more effective scholarly communication. But the use of this technology remains limited. Force11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. This document highlights the findings of the Force11 workshop on the Future of Research Communication held at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, in August 2011: it summarizes a number of key problems facing scholarly publishing today, and presents a vision that addresses these problems, proposing concrete steps that key stakeholders can take to improve the state of scholarly publishing. |
| Posted: 07 Mar 2012 07:32 AM PST chronicle.com "The Authors Guild and other plaintiffs in a lawsuit over mass digitization of books have asked the judge in the case to rule on the other side’s fair-use claim. The authors’ groups brought suit last year against the HathiTrust digital repository and the universities of Michigan, California, Wisconsin, Indiana, and Cornell. At issue is the fate of millions of scanned works, many of them under copyright. The defendants have said their activities are protected by the First Amendment and by relevant sections of U.S. copyright law. In yesterday’s filing, the plaintiffs asked the court “to hold that defendants’ mass book digitization and orphan works projects are not protected by any defense recognized by copyright law.” “This is the first motion that squarely places before a court the question of whether the unauthorized mass digitization of library books is a fair use under U.S. law,” the guild’s statement said...." |
| 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