Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items) |
- Open access as a matter of academic ethics: The right thing to do
- We should aim for open refereeing of academic articles in the information age
- Open Education in the Liberal Arts: A NITLE Working Paper
- Announcements and Articles | Medical Heritage Library
- Survey: The International Use and Impact of Institutional Repositories on Parent Academic Institutions
- Batch Ingesting into EPrints Digital Repository Software
- Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking
- Open Access Publishing: What Authors Want
- Usage and Impact of Controlled Vocabularies in a Subject Repository for Indexing and Retrieval
- Fostering New Roles for Librarians: Skills Set for Repository Managers -- Results of a Survey in Italy
- Will An Institutional Repository Hurt my SSRN Ranking: Calming the faculty fear
- Subject librarians' perceptions of institutional repositories as an information resource
- Public sector saves £28 million through open access, but much greater rewards to come, says report
- A universal digital library is within reach - latimes.com
- Podcast with Nick Shockey: Open Access and Psychology Students
- Getting Your Digital Work to Count - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education
- Open, free access to academic research? This will be a seismic shift
- Three more co-sponsors for FRPAA
- Open-Access Courses: How They Compare - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education
- Open Education's Wide World of Possibilities - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education
- On Open Access Broth and Cooks
- The Access principle revisited: open access and the Knowledge Commons
- OA Ideology vs. OA Pragmatics
- Coping With the Terrible Twins | Periodicals Price Survey 2012
- 20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing
- The weak prescriptions in Harvard’s open-access letter and how I’d fix them
- Prestige and open sources - The Daily Princetonian
- Why not open-access journals?
- Interagency Public Access Coordination: A Report to Congress on the Coordination of Policies Related to the Dissemination and Long-Term Stewardship of the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research
- Medical Library Awarded NEH Grant for Digitization of Historical Medical Journals
- The Virtues of Blogging as Scholarly Activity - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education
- Open access to science helps us all
- Princeton, Penn and Michigan join the MOOC party | Inside Higher Ed
- The Parachute: OA not just for institutionalised scientists
- Who’s Passionate About #OpenAccess? Interactive Map of 1000+ Twitterers Using The Hashtag
- Federal Research Public Access Act: Physicians must have free access to medical research - baltimoresun.com
- Government and Library Open Data using Creative Commons tools - Creative Commons
- SV-POW! is now (finally!) open access
- Times Higher Education - Harvard backs open access in face of ‘prohibitive’ journal costs
- Harvard pushes back against academic publishers’ pricing, encourages open access - The Boston Globe
- Akademy Keynote: Dr. Mathias Klang - Freedom of Expression | KDE.news
- Harvard vs. Yale: Open-Access Publishing Edition - Atlantic Mobile
- We are pleased to announce that Open Access India has joined our new partner.
- Eyeballing data: The future standard of publishing?
- 6 ways to improve your dspace
- Open access and media coverage of science
- Harvard, after spending $3.7M on academic journals, pushes for open source | eCampus News
- Canadian students pay too much for textbooks
| Open access as a matter of academic ethics: The right thing to do Posted: 03 May 2012 06:42 AM PDT Omega Alpha | Open Access, (03 May 2012) |
| We should aim for open refereeing of academic articles in the information age Posted: 02 May 2012 12:55 PM PDT Impact of Social Sciences, (01 May 2012) “My recent article (Hartley, 2012) on ‘Refereeing articles in the information age’ appears to have attracted some attention. I began by summarising some of the research on peer reviewing carried out before the advent of new technology (such as Scholar One)... I then continued to list the pros and cons of this new technology – for authors, editors and publishers. I showed, wit |
| Open Education in the Liberal Arts: A NITLE Working Paper Posted: 02 May 2012 12:52 PM PDT open-ed.nitle.org Use the link above to access the full text of the paper from the National Institute for Technlogy in Liberal Education (NITLE). The Executive Summary for the paper reads as follows: “Open education has grown into a potentially transformative force for higher education. The growing amount and quality of open content, the emergence of new forms of online learning, and the maturity of open source tools combine to present liberal education with institutional challenges and pedagogical opportunities. Liberal arts colleges and universities are now engaging with open education in diverse ways, usually at the level of pilots and early adoption. Some campuses encourage the production of open content through textbooks, social media, or entire courses. Others focus on consuming externally created and supported open materials, exploring resultant pedagogical and curricular opportunities. The rationale for doing so recalls reasons for using open source software: reduced financial costs, greater flexibility in usage. Such reasons also echo the rationale for open access scholarship: reaching a broader audience, contributing to the commonweal, raising personal or institutional profile. But perhaps the most compelling reason to explore open education is the opportunity to improve learning by sharing educational resources that can then be built upon, making innovative pedagogical approaches more visible, enhancing students’ information fluency, developing new learning models, and enlarging access to educational opportunities. Challenges include building faculty awareness, identifying and creating more content appropriate to the liberal arts curriculum, addressing concerns about quality and developing appropriate economic models to support and sustain open education. Open education also offers opportunities beyond the campus. Inter-institutional use of open content, sometimes mediated through open platforms and open source technology, has opened new venues for collaboration and learning. As populations increasingly socialize and learn digitally, open education articulates new ways of shaping and supporting online instruction. While individuals on campus may follow these routes on their own, institutions can grapple with openness by taking strategic steps. These include: launching and assessing pilot programs; recognizing open work by faculty, staff, and students; exploring new business models or changes to current ones; and adopting a stance of willing yet critical experimentation.” |
| Announcements and Articles | Medical Heritage Library Posted: 02 May 2012 12:50 PM PDT www.medicalheritage.org “The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), through the Open Knowledge Commons (OKC), has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a two-year project to digitize and preserve historical American medical journals. The digitized journals will be made freely available to researchers through the Medical Heritage Library collection in the Internet Archive. ‘These journals and transactions provide a rich resource of data on matters relating to everything from local history to legal history, from housing to welfare policy. And, of course, they remain the basic and indispensable source for the internal history of the medical profession, its intellectual and (not unrelated) social development,’ explains Professor Charles Rosenberg, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, a member of the MHL Scholarly Advisory Committee. ‘In my own work, I have always found the articles, editorials, letters, and transcriptions of society debates to be fundamental. And only a handful of American libraries have a comprehensive collection of such materials. The publications of sectarian groups and local medical societies are particularly elusive—yet often provide the most circumstantial documentation of medical practice and debate ‘on the ground.’ The grant, from NEH’s Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program, will support the digitization of approximately 1,723,036 pages, an estimated 200 journal titles published between 1797 and 1923, nearly 6,000 journal volumes. The project’s goal is to make broadly available complete runs of the nation’s earliest medical journals. Journals will be digitized from the collections of the medical libraries of Columbia, Harvard, and Yale Universities and The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The National Library of Medicine and other MHL collaborators will assist by providing journal volumes that the four participants do not hold. The digitized journals will join the more than 33,000 monographs, serials, pamphlets, and films currently available in the MHL..." |
| Posted: 02 May 2012 12:48 PM PDT groups.google.com [Forwarded from the SPARC OA Forum] “If you are an administrator of a U.S. academic institutional repository or supervise the management of an U.S. academic institutional repository, please consider filling out this short 15-question survey. This survey is part of a study examining the international usage and impact that institutional repositories might have on their academic parent institutions. We are attempting to determine the scope of the international use of IR resources as well as study other possible implications that might be a result of IR international traffic. Survey: <https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FTHCH79> This survey has been approved by Valparaiso University's IRB and responses will be anonymous. This survey will remain open until June 15, 2012. If you have any suggestions or questions, please feel free to ask either of us. Thank you for your participation and help. [1] Jonathan Bull
Research Services Librarian, Assistant Professor of Library Services, Valparaiso University, Email: jon.b...@valpo.edu [2] Lauren Fralinger, Library Associate in Research Services, Valparaiso University Email: lauren.fralin...@valpo.edu” |
| Batch Ingesting into EPrints Digital Repository Software Posted: 02 May 2012 12:47 PM PDT ejournals.bc.edu Use the link above to access the full text article in the current issue of Information Technology and Libraries, “a publication of the Library and Information Technology Association, a division of the American Library Association.” The abstract reads as follows: “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.” |
| Positioning Open Access Journals in a LIS Journal Ranking Posted: 02 May 2012 12:42 PM PDT College & Research Libraries 73 (2), (01 Mar 2012) Use the link above to access the full text article published in the current issue of College & Research Libraries. The abstract reads as follows: “This research uses the h-index to rank the quality of library and information science journals between 2004 and 2008. Selected open access (OA) journals are included in the ranking to assess current OA development in support of scholarly communication. It is found that OA journals have gained momentum supporting high-quality research and publication, and some OA journals have been ranked as high as the best traditional print journals. The findings will help convince scholars to make more contributions to OA journal publications, and also encourage librarians and information professionals to make continuous efforts for library publishing.” |
| Open Access Publishing: What Authors Want Posted: 02 May 2012 12:39 PM PDT College & Research Libraries 73 (2), (01 Mar 2012) Use the link above to access the full text article published in the current issue of College & Research Libraries. The abstract reads as follows: “Campus-based open access author funds are being considered by many academic libraries as a way to support authors publishing in open access journals. Article processing fees for open access have been introduced recently by publishers and have not yet been widely accepted by authors. Few studies have surveyed authors on their reasons for publishing open access and their perceptions of open access journals. The present study was designed to gauge the uptake of library support for author funding and author satisfaction with open access publishing. Results indicate that York University authors are increasingly publishing in open access journals and are appreciative of library funding initiatives. The wider implications of open access are discussed along with specific recommendations for publishers.” |
| Usage and Impact of Controlled Vocabularies in a Subject Repository for Indexing and Retrieval Posted: 02 May 2012 12:37 PM PDT liber.library.uu.nl Use the link above to access the full text article published in LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of European Research Libraries the journal of the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER). The abstract reads as follows: “Since 2009, the German National Library for Economics (ZBW) supports both indexing and retrieval of Open Access scientific publications like working papers, postprint articles and conference papers by means of a terminology web service. This web service is based on concepts organized as a ‘Standard Thesaurus for Economics’ (STW), which is modelled and regularly published as Linked Open Data. Moreover, it is integrated into the institution’s subject repository for automatically suggesting appropriate key words while indexing and retrieving documents, and for automatically expanding search queries on demand to gain better search results. While this approach looks promising to augment ‘off the shelf’ repository software systems in a lightweight manner with a disciplinary profile, there is still significant uncertainty about the effective usage and impact of controlled terms in the realm of these systems. To cope with this, we analyze the repository’s logfiles to get evidence of search behaviour which is potentially influenced by auto suggestion and expansion of scientific terms derived from a discipline’s literature.” |
| Posted: 02 May 2012 12:36 PM PDT liber.library.uu.nl Use the link above to access the full text article published in LIBER Quarterly: The Journal of European Research Libraries the journal of the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER). The abstract reads as follows: “The open access movement in scholarly communication has grown considerably over the last ten years and it has driven an increase in the number of institutional repositories (IRs). New professional roles and skills had to be developed to secure effective IR management. Collection developmente expertise and metadata curation are regarded as strategic roles for repositories and therefore it is only logical for the library and information community to take on the responsibility for managing these digital archives. However, it has become clear that traditional librarian skills do not suffice anymore to run successful repositories. A richer set of skills is needed, including management and communication skills, technical skills, and expertise with regard to access rights and preservation of digital content. Referring to the work carried out by the SHERPA Project in the UK with regard to the skills set for repository staff, the authors performed a survey among repository managers in Italy to assess the educational and professional background of the repository managers and the skills set required to implement successful institutional repositories. The survey findings show that the professional profile of the repository manager is a multiform and complex one. It requires cross-functional and highly specialised competencies. Italian repository managers are of the opinion that the skills required to promote the repository within the institution and those required to deal with copyright issues as the most essential skills repository managers should acquire and be trained for. Collection development and metadata expertise, familiarity with project management and expertise in repository workflow design are also highly rated. Technical skills are needed to deal with interoperability standards and protocols. In Italy academic curricula do not meet the repository managers’ educational needs. Academic programmes should be developed to include communication, project management and team work skills and pay more attention to copyright issues. Until that time repository managers will have to spend a considerable part of their working lives on professional training and self-directed learning.” |
| Will An Institutional Repository Hurt my SSRN Ranking: Calming the faculty fear Posted: 02 May 2012 12:34 PM PDT www.aallnet.org Use the link above to access the full text article published in AALL Spectrum, “a monthly magazine distributed free of charge to [American Association of Law Libraries] AALL members.” |
| Subject librarians' perceptions of institutional repositories as an information resource Posted: 02 May 2012 12:32 PM PDT Online Information Review 36 (2), (13 Apr 2012) Use the link above to access the abstract for the article and pay per view options. The article is published by Emerald in the journal Online Information Review. The abstract reads as follows: “Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to report on a research project aimed at gaining an understanding of subject librarians' perceptions and promotion of institutional repositories as an information resource for their clients... Design/methodology/approach – The researchers used the five attributes of innovations and the change agent concept, both drawn from Rogers' diffusion of innovations theory, as the basis of semi-structured interviews with nine librarians, spread equally across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences at three universities.... Findings – The researchers found that subject librarians have varying levels of knowledge about institutional repositories as an information resource and hold both positive and negative perceptions. The librarians perceived institutional repositories to be still underdeveloped, with greatest value for humanities clients and least value for science clients, offering little value to undergraduates, but a good resource for accessing theses... Research limitations/implications – Due to their current perceptions of the value of institutional repositories, subject librarians are not yet promoting them as an information resource. If institutional repositories are to be successful, library managers must not only ensure that content is being input into the repositories, but also that they are being promoted to library clients as valuable information resources, so that the content is being accessed and used...Originality/value – While there has been much research in recent years about institutional repositories, the focus has been predominantly on issues related to motivating individuals to input content into them. This research shows that institutional repositories are not yet being perceived or promoted as a valuable information resource by academic subject librarians, who view them as having varying value to their clients.” |
| Public sector saves £28 million through open access, but much greater rewards to come, says report Posted: 02 May 2012 12:22 PM PDT “Open Access to published scholarly research offers significant benefits to the UK, according to two reports released today by the UK Open Access Implementation Group. The UK public sector already saves £28.6 million by using open access. The reports make it clear that both the public sector and the voluntary sector would see further direct and indirect benefits from increased access to UK higher education research publications. Already, more Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations use open access than pay for subscriptions, despite the fact that subscription journals make up the vast majority of journals on offer. The UK public sector spends £135 million a year, made up of subscriptions and time spent trying to find articles, accessing the journal papers it needs to perform effectively. Each extra 5% of journal papers accessed via open access on the web would save the public purse £1.7 million, even if no subscription fees were to be saved. The UK's valuable voluntary and charitable sector would also benefit from open access to academic research. For survey respondents, the two most frequently mentioned barriers to accessing research were cost (80%) and lack of time (46%). Professor Martin Hall, vice-chancellor at the University of Salford and chair of the OAIG, says, ‘These findings mark a turning point in the quiet revolution of open access. There are many good reasons for making research available on an open access basis, and the reports are clear that one reason is because open access makes economic sense. The UK Open Access Implementation Group is committed to helping the public, private and academic sectors benefit from UK research and I am proud that these reports further that cause.’ Making more research free at the point of access, and easier to search across could produce significant savings, but could also lead to better decisions based on all the available evidence. As one senior scientific officer in a specialist scientific unit of large department of state observes ‘Open access would allow a lot more speculative reading and reading around the subject which is really useful for a holistic and high quality view to be developed.’ This, in turn, offers benefits back to researchers, boosting the impact of their research by increasing its reach outside the academy. These findings are borne out across all three reports in this series, and this body of new, quantitative work provides compelling evidence that increasing open access to research articles will have direct financial and practical benefits for the UK as a whole, benefits that are especially valuable in a time of austerity. The reports make a number of recommendations around increasing awareness of open access in these two important sectors. These include promoting the value of the information produced as a result of public research funding and exploring ways of improving relationships between academic researchers and workers [in] other sectors who rely on their research to do their jobs well. |
| A universal digital library is within reach - latimes.com Posted: 02 May 2012 12:21 PM PDT www.latimes.com “Since 2002, at first in secret and later with great fanfare, Google has been working to create a digital collection of all the world's books, a library that it hopes will last forever and make knowledge far more universally accessible. But from the beginning, there has been an obstacle even more daunting than the project's many technical challenges: copyright law. Ideally, a digital library would provide access not only to books free from copyright constraints (those published before 1923), but also to the tens of millions of books that are still in copyright but no longer in print. Copyright law makes it risky to digitize these books without permission from copyright owners, and clearing the rights can be prohibitively expensive (costing on average, according to estimates, about $1,000 per book). Even if the money wasn't a problem, hundreds of thousands — and probably millions — of books are likely to be ‘orphan works’ whose rights-holders are unknown or can't be found. Google bumped up against copyright law in 2005, when lawsuits were filed by the Authors Guild and by a group of five publishers alleging that Google's scanning of books from major research library collections constituted copyright infringement. Google argued that scanning books to index their contents and make snippets available online was fair use, not infringement. But with its potential liability running into the billions or even trillions of dollars, Google was understandably receptive to overtures from the Authors Guild and publishers to settle instead of litigate. A settlement announced in October 2008 would have given Google a license to keep scanning books and to help re-commercialize those that were out of print by running ads next to search results, selling books to consumers, and licensing digitized out-of-print books to libraries and other institutions. Google could have also displayed up to 20% of a book's contents in search queries. But the proposed settlement fell apart in March 2011 when the judge overseeing the case ruled that it was unfair to the authors and publishers on whose behalf it had been negotiated, and that it would give Google ‘a de facto monopoly over unclaimed works.’ The proposal went far beyond the issues in litigation, he concluded, addressing matters ‘more appropriately decided by Congress’ than through litigation. But the dream of a universal digital library lives on. Now a coalition of libraries and archives has come together to create a Digital Public Library of America to fulfill the original vision of a digital library for all. It could well be that an effort without commerce in the mix will have an easier time of it. A broad consensus already exists to remove copyright obstacles to orphan works. There is also growing interest in mass digitization of out-of-print works. The arguments for increased access are compelling: These books aren't producing any revenue for copyright owners, and most of them are unlikely to be reprinted. Libraries already own copies of many of them and want to make them available digitally to their communities. And rights holders can always opt out of a library mass-digitization project. The U.S. Copyright Office recognizes that barriers to mass digitization need to be overcome. It proposed a partial legislative fix, which became the Orphan Works Act of 2008. The bill passed in the Senate, but then stalled in the House. Maria Pallante, who heads the Copyright Office, recently announced her interest in renewing this legislative initiative at a Berkeley Law conference on orphan works. Meanwhile, the European Union is also working on a legal framework to allow greater access to orphan works. France has adopted legislation permitting libraries to mass-digitize books that aren't in print but are still in copyright. Germany is considering a similar proposal. Japan and Norway have authorized national libraries to undertake mass-digitization projects that even include in-copyright works. The U.S. should not lag behind. Digital libraries containing millions of out-of-print and public domain works would vastly expand the scope of research and education worldwide, extending access to millions of people in undeveloped countries who don't have it now. It would also open up amazing opportunities for discovery of new knowledge. Being able to conduct searches over a corpus of millions of books allows researchers to learn things never before possible. There are three promising strategies for removing barriers to a universal digital library: First, it should be considered ‘fair use’ in copyright law for nonprofit libraries to circulate orphan works for their patrons for noncommercial purposes. Second, Congress should pass legislation to limit damages and injunctions for other reuses of orphan works. Third, the Copyright Office should explore a collective licensing program under which all in-copyright but out-of-print works could be made available, as some countries are now trying. Workable solutions exist to fulfill the dream of a universal digital library. Do we really want to tell our grandchildren that we could have achieved this goal but lacked the will to do so? |
| Podcast with Nick Shockey: Open Access and Psychology Students Posted: 02 May 2012 12:19 PM PDT Podcast with Nick Shockey Open Access and Psychology Students JEPS Bulletin, (30 Apr 2012) Use the link above to aceess the Podcast described as follows: “Nick Shockey, the Director of the Right to Research Coalition which EFPSA joined in 2011, hosted a workshop for psychology students attending the annual [European Federation of Psychology Studesnts’ Associations] EFPSA Congress in Denmark last week. The workshop was attended by over 30 congress participants including the newly elected EFPSA President, Dalya Samur. It covered topics ranging from what Open Access is to how students can get involved in advocating Open Access at their universities and national and international organizations. Since the workshop provoked great interest among the participants of the congress, we decided to make an interview* with Nick on the topic of open access journals and advocacy of open access, and what does all that mean to psychology students.” [“The Right to Research Coalition was founded by students in the summer of 2009 to promote an open scholarly publishing system based on the belief that no student should be denied access to the articles they need because their institution cannot afford the often high cost of access. Since its launch, the Coalition has grown to represent nearly 7 million students internationally and counts among its members the largest student organizations in both the United States and Canada. While the Coalition currently has a strong base in North America, it is by no means solely a North American organization and is expanding to incorporate student organizations from around the world...” “EFPSA, the European Federation of Psychology Student’s Association, is established in 1987 with the first International Congress of Psychology Students in Portugal and now consists of 28 psychology students’ organisations of 28 European countries. Stimulated by its mission, vision and values, EFPSA attracts more and more students every year, with the number of its members increasing and so far represents approximately 300.000 psychology students across Europe... Our mission is to represent the needs and interests of psychology students of Europe. We are dedicated in promoting scientific cooperation, cultural exchange between psychology students which will enhance their mobility...” “The JEPS Bulletin is a blog about scientific writing and publishing. We wish to create a unique platform for learning experience, inspiration and acquisition of skills in the technical and challenging art of writing and publishing good scientific articles primarily in the field of psychology. The editors of this blog are psychology students as well as the Editorial Team of the Journal of European Psychology Students (JEPS).”] |
| Getting Your Digital Work to Count - ProfHacker - The Chronicle of Higher Education Posted: 02 May 2012 12:16 PM PDT chronicle.com “Here at ProfHacker, we regularly write about the stages of professional life in academia. One of the most important–and therefore the most stressful–is preparing for promotion and tenure... ProfHackers also tend to like digital tools, both in our teaching and research, and such digital scholarship ends up being a challenge when it comes time for the tenure and promotion process. How do you talk about blogging in your tenure documents? Will the committee accept your co-authored essay in a open access journal? What about the code that you shared on GitHub? These are important questions but hard to answer–both for individual faculty and the departments who hire them. Last week, however, saw the appearance of something that might help us all out. The Modern Language Association released a set of Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media. The guidelines represent the MLA’s awareness that the evaluation of digital work is problematic at present and will hopefully help departments and individuals know what their responsibilities are when engaging with this work. Specifically, departments are encouraged to make clear how digital work will be counted; to engage qualified reviewers during the tenure and promotion process; examine digital scholarship in its original form; and remain aware of accessibility affordances. It’s not just the institutions that need to accommodate new digital work, however. According to these guidelines, individual faculty members should ask about and negotiate for clear guidelines for how their work will be evaluated; understand what support they will have from the department; and be prepared to document and explain their work and their role within collaborations to T&P committees. It falls on the faculty member, then, to ‘sho[w] the relevance of their work in terms of the traditional areas of teaching, research, and service.’ The MLA naturally has no power to enforce these guidelines on different departments. Still, these guidelines will hopefully assist departments looking for assistance in crafting policies to better count the digital work done by their faculty. And even if you don’t belong to a field that studies modern languages or literatures, you might be able to start a conversation in your own discipline by referring to this work. Will the MLA’s Guidelines help as you prepare for promotion and tenure? Do you think they go too far or not far enough? Let us know..” |
| Open, free access to academic research? This will be a seismic shift Posted: 02 May 2012 12:13 PM PDT www.guardian.co.uk “My department spends about £5bn each year funding academic research – and it is because we believe in the fundamental importance of this research that we have protected the science budget for the whole of this parliament. We fund this research because it furthers human knowledge and drives intellectual, social and economic progress. In line with our commitment to open information, tomorrow I will be announcing at the Publishers Association annual meeting that we will make publicly funded research accessible free of charge to readers. Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the forefront of open research. The challenge is how we get there without ruining the value added by academic publishers. The controversy about the status and reliability of reviews on TripAdvisor is a reminder of how precious genuine, objective peer review is. We still need to pay for such functions, which is why one attractive model – known as gold – has the funders of research covering the costs. Another approach, known as green, includes a closed period before wider release during which journals can earn revenues. While opening up the fruits of research is a seismic shift for academic publishing, it is not a leap into the unknown. There are many good examples in medicine. For instance, the Wellcome Trust requires all the research it funds to be made freely available online. A report this year from the U.S. Committee for Economic Development has concluded that the US National Institute of Health's policy of open access has accelerated the transition from basic research to commercialisation, generated more follow-on research and reduced duplicate or dead-end lines of inquiry – so increasing the US government's return on its investment in research. And the researcher Philip Davis has found that, when publishers randomly make articles open access on journal websites, readership increases by up to 250%. Moving from an era in which taxpayer-funded academic articles are stuck behind paywalls for much of their life to one in which they are available free of charge will not be easy. There are clear trade-offs. If those funding research pay open-access journals in advance, where will this leave individual researchers who can't cover the cost? If we improve the world's access to British research, what might we get in response? Does a preference for open access mean different incentives for different disciplines? These questions explain why I have asked Dame Janet Finch, one of the UK's most experienced and respected academics, to produce a report setting out the steps needed to fulfil our radical ambition. She is working with all interested parties and her report will appear before the summer. It is expected to chart a course towards a world where academic articles are freely and openly available at or around the time of publication. Twenty years ago it would have been impossible to imagine an encyclopedia written by millions, openly and freely collaborating via the internet. Today, Wikipedia is an important part of our lives and its co-founder, Jimmy Wales, will be advising us on the common standards that will have to be agreed and adopted for open access to be a success, and also helping to make sure that the new government-funded portal for accessing research really promotes collaboration and engagement. We want to harness new technologies to enable people to comment and rate published papers in ways that were not possible before, and we want to develop new online channels that enable researchers from around the world to collaborate and share data and build new research partnerships. With Jimmy Wales's help, I'm confident that we can achieve all this and much more. Our commitment to open up access to academic research will help strengthen this information revolution, and put more data and power in the hands of people. It's proof that there are still dividing lines in British politics – and that we are firmly on the side of openness.” |
| Three more co-sponsors for FRPAA Posted: 02 May 2012 12:09 PM PDT plus.google.com "[C]o-sponsors were added to the bill in both the House and Senate. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) is the latest to co-sponsor FRPAA in the Senate (S. 2096), while on the House side, Reps. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) and Cory Gardner (R-CO) added their names to the growing roster for lawmakers who support the bill (H.R. 4004)...." Subtotal : That makes a total of 33 FRPAA co-sponsors: 4 in the Senate (2 Republicans, 2 Democrats) and 29 in the House (12 Republicans, 17 Democrats). For the complete list of FRPAA co-sponsors and other info on the bill, see the FRPAA page at the Harvard Open Access Project. http://bit.ly/hoap-frpaa” |
| Open-Access Courses: How They Compare - The Digital Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education Posted: 02 May 2012 12:08 PM PDT chronicle.com Use the link above to access the chart described in the following caption: “For millions of students worldwide, free, open courseware provides a window, if not a front-row seat, to top university classes. The formats are as varied as the people who tune in. Some consist mainly of lectures recorded on iTunes, while other courses seek to replicate a classroom experience by offering study groups, computer-graded tests, and weekly assignments. And while you might get a badge or certificate showing you mastered the material, you generally won't get direct interaction with the professor, who may have recorded the lectures a few years ago. Here is a look at five introductory economics classes: four through open courseware and one in a traditional classroom.” |
| Posted: 02 May 2012 12:07 PM PDT chronicle.com [From the Chronicle of Higher Education] “In the four years that his modern-poetry course has been offered free online, Langdon Hammer, a professor of English at Yale University, has gotten a kick out of the e-mails he has received from students around the world...” |
| On Open Access Broth and Cooks Posted: 02 May 2012 06:02 AM PDT Open Access Archivangelism, (02 May 2012) The UK government has engaged Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia to help make UK tax-payer-funded research available online for all. Open Access to peer-reviewed research (OA) is an important, timely and even urgent goal, and the UK's commitment to providing OA is extremely welcome and commendable. But turning to Jimmy Wales to help make it happen makes almost as little sense as turning to Rupert Murdoch. Wikipedia is based on the antithesis of peer review. Asking JW to help make sure peer-reviewed research is available to all is like asking McDonalds to help the UK Food Standards Agency make sure that wholesome food is available to all. |
| The Access principle revisited: open access and the Knowledge Commons Posted: 02 May 2012 02:27 AM PDT @ccess, (02 May 2012) scientists should not monopolize science (in answer to Stevan Harnad) |
| Posted: 01 May 2012 10:23 PM PDT mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk What is a credible, viable way to accelerate the growth of OA to 100% before this generation of OA advocates reaches its dotage? |
| Coping With the Terrible Twins | Periodicals Price Survey 2012 Posted: 01 May 2012 01:01 PM PDT Library Journal, (30 Apr 2012) [Use the link above for access to the full text and the charts provided by the authors.] “Stuck between the rock (stagnant budgets)and the hard place (steady serials price increases), every year libraries are forced to come up with creative ways to meet the ever-growing needs of their users. But inventiveness has limits, and many libraries are nearing the end of their ability to leverage shrinking buying power. The bad news: the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO) tempers optimism about the economy with some hard facts in its Fiscal Survey of States, Fall 2011. The report notes that while fiscal conditions are improving generally, state budgets remain constrained by the lack of a strong national economic recovery and the withdrawal of federal stimulus funds provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA): 29 states anticipate lower spending in FY12, compared with prerecession levels. A 2011 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities(CBPP) echoes the NASBO findings, predicting that state budget cuts in 2012 will hit education, health care, and other services harder this year than in any year since 2008. Decreases in public funding mean bad news for library budgets. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the Association for Research Libraries show that over the past 25 years funding for libraries in higher education has shrunk dramatically as a percentage of total expenditures. Expenditures for libraries as a percentage of all university expenses have dropped from a high of 3.7 percent in 1982 to less than two percent in 2008. This may not sound like a large decrease, but if spending had remained at 3.7 percent, libraries in higher education would have had another $3 billion to spend. That’s a lot of serials! In response to the 2012 EBSCO Library Collections and Budgeting Trends Survey, conducted in February 2012 (in which 395 predominantly academic libraries participated), 69 percent of libraries reported that their current-year budgets had remained flat or decreased, 52 percent indicated that they expect their budgets for the upcoming year to remain flat, and 22 percent expect their budgets to decrease. In response to these pressures, most libraries reported that they were likely to decrease spending for print journals (80 percent), print-plus-online journals (63 percent), and print books (55 percent). The library marketplace for information resources has not yet arrived at a ‘new normal,’ though we posit that in 2012 public budgets will finally bottom out after a four-year downward spiral. Nonetheless, after a four-year downward spiral, predictions regarding public funding for libraries remain dismal—and, unfortunately, serials pricing continues to cast a large shadow over our collections’ future. While state and library budgets continue to decrease, research indicates that serials prices are increasing—at a rate that also seems to be escalating (see Table 4: Cost History by Library of Congress Subject). Data from the ISI indexes shows an increase in prices, from a five percent increase in 2011 to six percent in 2012... The Consumer Price Index, on the other hand, advanced 2.9 percent for 2011, which means serials inflation continues to far exceed general inflationary pressures... This year we continue to examine titles in the combined ISI Arts and Humanities, Science Citation, and Social Sciences Citation indexes, which offer published online subscription rates, and were able to obtain standard pricing for approximately half of the covered titles... As was the case in 2011, half of the titles in the combined indexes are from five major publishers—Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and SAGE. Also as noted last year, all five publishers offer Big Deal packages with increases in the cost of the package dictated by contracts, which may differ from market rates for print. Compared with last year’s data, this set of online titles increased in price by 4.5 percent, slightly lower than that for print titles. An analysis of the more than 18,000 e-journal packages handled by EBSCO in 2011 reflected increases in the three percent to six percent range, with the average being 5.1 percent... Prices for science, technology, and medical (STM) serials remain the highest, compared with prices for serials in other subject areas... Chemistry has historically seen the highest average serials prices, and that has not changed: recent reports show that the average price for chemistry journals hovers around $4000 annually... Per the 2012 EBSCO survey, serials cancellations and reductions in monographic purchases remain the primary tools used to control costs. Other approaches, though to a much smaller degree, are changing or dropping journal packages and using pay-per-view (PPV) instead of subscriptions as a purchase mechanism. Faced with the Terrible Twins and their equally fierce sister, Relentless Change, libraries, publishers, and vendors are implementing creative strategies. Here are some of the current trends affecting the information landscape and tactics for navigating its challenging terrain... Some libraries have dropped or altered select journal packages, but publishers overall reported they are still seeing increases in their e-journal package business... Seventy-five percent of library respondents to the 2012 EBSCO survey indicated they plan either to make no changes or increase journal packages in 2012... Discussions about the future of the subscription business model as the core means for acquiring serials have surfaced on the LibLicense-L discussion forum, in Against the Grain, and on The Scholarly Kitchen blog. Some say that selling serials only through subscriptions is not a sustainable model. Pricing and budget data appear to support this claim... Sometimes referred to as the Little Deal, PPV access has been offered as an alternative to Big Deal e-journal package access... the majority of librarians responding to EBSCO’s survey indicate that their institutions do not currently offer this service, nor do they plan to do so in 2013. Detractors have pointed out that wholesale shifts to business models based on single-article delivery would probably lead publishers to raise per article costs to fairly high levels to compensate for a loss of subscription revenue, but the option of PPV access to content is here to stay... As funds and revenues tighten, smaller publishers will continue to be bought by larger ones, so consolidation in the industry will continue... Publishers also continue to offer expanded package content to capture market share: examples include the expansion of JSTOR Current Scholarship and Project MUSE and the creation of the Independent Scholarly Publishers Group (ISPG). Another continuing trend is that of commercial publishers acquiring open access publishers, as in the case of De Gruyter, which recently purchased Berkeley Electronic Press and Versita... Open access (OA) continues to evolve, with an estimated four OA journals being added to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) per week. Sixty-seven percent of librarians responding to the 2012 EBSCO survey indicated that they were likely to seek OA content as a strategy to achieve budget goals. In a 2011 study conducted by the Study of Open Access Publishing (SOAP), researchers rated ‘accessibility of content to readers, perceived quality of the journal, the journal’s Impact Factor, and the absence of fees’ as the four most important factors for publishing in an OA journal. Reporting on research about OA journal-processing charges, David Solomon and Bo-Christer Björk reveal that in their 2010 study of 1370 journals, article-processing fees range from $8 to $3900 per article, with the average charge being $906 per article. Biomedical titles had the highest charges per discipline. Six OA titles are included in the merged ISI indexes set for 2012, and the average 2012 cost for a health sciences title in the merged indexes is $1,593. Unfortunately, not all OA journals adhere to the principles of the movement. Jeffrey Beall of the University of Colorado at Denver maintains a list of what he calls ‘predatory’ publishers and journals on his Scholarly Open Access blog... Discussions about alternative pricing models continued in 2011... While there was not a wholesale movement to tiered pricing (pricing based upon institutional size, concentration in specific disciplines, or usage for the previous year) for 2012 orders, a number of publishers report considering it for 2013... Librarians and publishers find common ground on usage... With Google and library discovery platforms driving the use of electronic resources, both groups seek to document the value of content through usage statistics. In the recent EBSCO surveys, 98 percent of librarians listed usage as the most important variable in content acquisition or retention decisions, rating it above historical price increases; 87 percent of publishers rank increasing usage as a goal, second only to increasing sales... Recently, academia has experienced a wave of revolutionary activity, dubbed the ‘Academic Spring’ ... as Elsevier became the target of a boycott by academicians... Among the criticisms leveled at the publisher were its high prices and business practices that sold content in bundles, in addition to its support for efforts like the Stop Online Piracy Act, the Protect IP Act, and the Research Works Act... The Elsevier boycott clearly indicates the frustration with the current publishing model associated with academic scholarly communications... But as long as the promotion and tenure systems in academia place a high value on journals perceived as having the highest impacts in their fields, significant change is unlikely... The explosion of social media will affect how information is discovered and used. The digital delivery of serials started the process of disintegrating the journal as the primary ‘wrapper’ for articles, as direct linking from DOIs and URL resolvers bypass the journal to get to article-level content. Current discovery systems rely on users actively searching for information, but social networks could very well change this process and increase the rate of erosion for traditional information containers... But with the explosive growth of the web, content has become ubiquitous. Flat bibliographic metadata is no longer sufficient to ensure that users can find good content. Context has now become an important part of discovery and brings it to the attention of users: Who has reviewed/recommended/liked/tweeted/bought content? Is it being cited? A lot of web content allows users to create context immediately by recommending content to Google groups, ‘liking’ it on Facebook, forwarding it via email, sending out tweets, etc. When this content is purchased or used, that fact is then used to push it to other users. These developments will continue to shift the focus of information consumers away from the containers to the actual content. Articles, not journals, tend to be the recommended items. As article-level usage data becomes more accessible, a pattern of small numbers of articles attracting the most use will emerge... Mobile devices are becoming more important to serials delivery, with 73 percent of publishers that responded to the 2012 EBSCO survey indicating that they plan to increase access to content via mobile apps. But apps are not yet a transformative serials platform, except among trade and consumer publications... Some believe app creation is a great way to make targeted content available on mobile devices, while others suggest that the evolution of web design from advances like HTML5 will negate the need for numerous apps. While separate apps for individual resources may drive usage, they are not an attractive option for libraries... Along with cost inflation and revenue stagnation, changes in technology, user expectation, and the library environment require librarians to be both vigilant and agile... Serials pricing is a complex mosaic of variables, all of which are almost constantly in motion. Any number of factors can impact price changes, including the overall health of the world’s economy, rates for currency exchange, publishing industry trends, and subscription cancellations. Prices are currently trending up. The average price increase dropped to 4.2 percent in 2010, the lowest percentage increase in decades, but by 2012, it was six percent. Next year, it is likely to be in the six to seven percent range. It is only May, and the market kaleidoscope is likely to change a number of times before prices are firmly established for 2013.” |
| Posted: 01 May 2012 12:31 PM PDT it is NOT junk, (01 May 2012) “When Harvard University says it can not afford something, people notice. So it was last month when a faculty committee examining the future of the university’s libraries declared that the continued growth of journal subscription fees was unsustainable, even for them. The accompanying calls for faculty action are being hailed as a major challenge to the traditional publishers of scholarly journals. Would that it were so. Rather than being a watershed event in the movement to reform scholarly publishing, the tepidness of the committee’s recommendations, and the silence of the university’s administration, are just the latest manifestation of the toothless response of American universities to the ‘serials crisis’ that has plagued libraries for decades... The solutions have always been clear. Universities should have stopped paying for subscriptions, forcing publishers to adopt alternative economic models. And they should have started to reshape the criteria for hiring, promotion and tenure, so that current and aspiring faculty did not feel compelled to publish in journals that were bankrupting the system. But they did neither, choosing instead to let the problem fester. And even as cries from the library community intensify, our universities continue to shovel billions of dollars a year to publishers while they repeatedly fail to take the simple steps that could fix the problem overnight. Virtually all of the problems in scholarly publishing stem from the simple act, repeated millions of times a year, of a scholar signing over copyright in their work to the journal in which their work is to appear. When they do this they hand publishers a weapon that enables them to extract almost unlimited amounts of money from libraries at the same research institutions that produced the work in the first place. The problem arises because research libraries are charged with obtaining for scholars at their institution access to the entire scholarly output of their colleagues. Not just the most important stuff. Not just the most interesting stuff. Not just the most affordable stuff. ALL OF IT. And publishers know this. So they raise prices on their existing journals. And they launch new titles. And then they raise their prices. What can libraries do? They have to subscribe to these journals. Their clientele wants them – indeed, they need them to do their work. They can’t cancel their subscription to Journal X in favor of the cheaper Journal Y, because the contents of X are only available in X. Every publisher is a monopoly selling an essential commodity. No wonder things have gotten out of control... Expenditures on scholarly journals at American research libraries quadrupled from 1986 to 2005, increasing at over three times the rate of inflation. This despite a massive reduction in costs due to a major shift towards electronic dissemination. These rates of growth continue nearly unabated, even in a terrible economy. (For those interested in more details, I point you to SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, who tracks journal pricing and revenues)... Just as the serials crisis was hitting its stride in the mid-1990′s, fate handed universities an out – the internet... This radical transformation in how scholarly works were disseminated should have been accompanied by a corresponding radical shift in the economics of journal publishing. But it barely made a dent. Publishers, who were now primarily shipping electrons instead of ink on paper, kept raising their subscription prices as if nothing had happened. And universities let them get away with it. By failing to show even a hint of creativity or initiative in seizing the opportunity presented by the internet to reshape the system of scholarly communication in a productive way, the leaders of American universities condemned themselves to 15 more years (and counting) of rising costs, and decreasing value. Their inaction also cost them the chance to reclaim the primary role they once held (through their university presses) in communicating the output of their scholars... A new economic model, which came to be known as ‘open access’, emerged as an alternative to the subscription journals. Under open access the costs of publishing would be bourn up front by research sponsors, with the finished product freely available to all. In addition to the obvious good greatly expanding the reach of the scholarly literature, open access was largely free of the economic inefficiencies that created the serials crisis in the first place, and enjoyed very strong support from university libraries across the country. But despite its manifold advantages, universities as a whole did little to help it succeed... The biggest obstacle to the rise of open access journals was (and to a large extent still is) the major role that journal titles play in how universities evaluate candidates for jobs and promotions. In most academic disciplines, careers are built by publishing papers in prestigious journals... Almost everyone I know thinks that simply looking at journal titles is a stupid way to decide who is or is not a good researcher, and yet it remains. There are many reasons why this system persists, but the most important is that universities like it. Administrators love having something like an objective standard that can be applied to all of the candidates for a job, promotion, etc… that might allow them to compare not only candidates for one job to each other, but all candidates for any honor across the university. This is perhaps why no university that I know of has taken a forceful stand against the use of journal titles as a major factor in hiring and promotion decisions. And it is, I believe, a major reason why they are unwilling to cut off the flow of money to these journals... Although their record is pretty bad, universities could still play a major role in making scholarly publishing work better – and save themselves money in the process – with two simple actions: [1] Stop the flow of money to subscription journals. Universities should not renew ANY subscriptions. They should, instead, approach them with a new deal – they’ll maintain payments at current levels for 3 more years if the journal(s) commit to being fully open access at the end of that time. [2] Introduce – and heavily promote – new criteria for hiring and promotion that actively discourage the use of journal titles in evaluating candidates. These ideas are not new. Indeed, the basic outlines appear in a fantastic essay from the Association of Research Librarians published in March 1998, describing the serials crisis and their solutions to fix it: ‘The question inevitably asked is, “Who goes first?” Which major universities and which scholarly societies have the will, confidence, and financial resources to get the process started? ... Our answer is simple and to the point. It is time for the presidents of the nation’s major research universities to fish or cut bait. Collectively, they have both opportunity and motive—and, in the Association of American Universities, they have an organization with the capacity to convene the necessary negotiations.’ It’s amazing that essentially nobody took them up on the challenge the first time. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another 15 years.” |
| The weak prescriptions in Harvard’s open-access letter and how I’d fix them Posted: 01 May 2012 12:31 PM PDT it is NOT junk, (25 Apr 2012) “Much is being made of a recent letter from Harvard’s Faculty Advisory Council on the Library to the campus community announcing their conclusion that: ‘major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable...’ Judging from many of the responses, people seem to think this is some kind of major turning point in the push for universal open access. But librarians have been warning about the ‘serials crisis’ for years (see, for example, this prescient 1998 report from the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable). I’ve seen dozens of letters to faculty from librarians urging them to abandon subscription journals. But they have little effect. I think this is at least in part due to the mismatch between the strength of their argument, and the weakness of their proposed solutions – a pattern repeated in the Harvard letter. So I thought I would try to help by editing the provided list of things to consider demands: ‘Since the Library now must change its subscriptions and since faculty and graduate students are chief users, please consider immediately implementthe following options open to faculty and students (F) and the Library (L), state other options you think viable, and 1. Make sure that all of your own papers are accessible by submitting them to DASH in accordance with the faculty-initiated open-access policies (F).[NOTE: Harvard's open access policy provides an opt-out provision for faculty - this is not acceptable] 2. Consider submitting Submit all of your articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs; move prestige to open access (F). 3. If on the editorial board of a journal involved, determine if it can be published as open access material, or independently from publishers that practice pricing described above. If not, consider resigning resign (F). 4. Contact professional organizations to raise these issues demand that they immediately support universal open access (F). 5. Encourage Demand that professional associations to take control of scholarly literature in their field or shift the management of their e-journals to library-friendly organizations (F). 6. Encourage colleagues to consider and to discuss these or other options Tell your colleagues to stop being wimps (F). 7. Sign contracts that unbundle subscriptions and concentrate on higher-use journals Do not sign any contracts to access subscription-only journals (L). 8. Immediately move all journals to a sustainable pay per use system, open access model (L). 9. Insist on subscription contracts in which the terms can be made public (L). 10. Require that all works produced by university faculty be distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License, no matter where they are published.” |
| Prestige and open sources - The Daily Princetonian Posted: 01 May 2012 09:31 AM PDT www.dailyprincetonian.com “Describing journal subscriptions as ‘fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive,’ the Faculty Advisory Council of the Harvard Library is now formally encouraging members of the Harvard community to resist the stranglehold of academic publishers. In one of several recommendations, the Council suggests that Harvard faculty eschew financially prohibitive journals in favor of free or low-cost alternatives. The effect, they say, would ‘move prestige to open access.’ That sentence, lurking inconspicuously in the middle of a university-sanctioned press release, should bring shudders to academic publishers. With a few words, the guardians of Harvard’s library have made it clear beyond the last profiteering doubt that Harvard and her peers can overcome the publishers. Not to say that doing so will be straightforward. The journals have become structurally embedded in the academic world. As Yale Librarian Susan Gibbons has noted, ‘You get tenure by, in part, publishing in the best journals. And until those journals are interested in an open-access model, which really takes away their revenue stream, we have this tension going on.’ Journals, which publishers can sell individually for as much as $40,000 per year, facilitate academic discourse... Because publishing in a top journal is essential for any researcher looking to make a name for herself or at least spread her contributions to the most relevant minds, the journals possess exclusive access to some of the most significant academic literature. Although librarians may be willing to reconsider their relationship with the journals, junior faculty members are in a far less convenient position to do so. Since universities grade the quality of their personnel partly with respect to the influence of their work, non-tenured members of the faculty are unlikely to favor a less-renowned, open-access journal in the name of a moral claim against journal publishers. Traditional journals are in the business of distributing prestige as much as quality research. And the strange politics of prestige in academia has sustained their dominance. But if the politics of prestige should change — which I believe is inevitable — the parasitism of the journals may lose its grip. That is why the Harvard librarians’ statement, ‘move prestige to open access,’ is so interesting. To that effort, it has been suggested that the Harvard community publish in open-access journals or at least, when possible, avoid any affiliation with journals associated with unfair pricing policies. If members of the Harvard community start publishing en masse in these open-access journals, these alternative journals may very well see a boost in status. Princeton, for its part, instituted a formal policy early this year that authorizes University faculty to publish their work in open-access areas, such as open-access journals, other freely available archives and personal web sites... Open access makes it possible to find a piece of literature that you’re looking for. But discovering research, which the top journals excel at, is the key to an engaged discourse. As long as the top journals filter the best research, they will prove a necessary burden. And if they lower their prices, which could happen if enough universities join Harvard’s protest, they may prove a lasting one too. For the sake of the academic community, I hope that this confrontation amounts to more than just playing out negotiations in public. Unfair pricing is just the wedge for a larger issue. Stewart Brand, of ‘Whole Earth Catalog’ fame... once said that information wants to be free. Brand’s idea suggests that as the cost of producing information decreases over time, its availability will increase. While I agree with this claim as a historically grounded observation, the issue here isn’t simply about being on the right side of history — though as it happens, Harvard’s librarians likely are. At stake here is a greater ideal: Knowledge should be free. Academic research should be free, or at least free in the sense of universal accessibility, which does not preclude information from having a price; it merely demands an accessible one.” |
| Posted: 01 May 2012 09:30 AM PDT On Line Opinion - Latest Articles, (01 May 2012) “Knowledge should be free and available to everyone. The free flow of knowledge in society underpins long-term development of all aspects of humanity. Having conducted research in higher education institutions in South East Asia and Australia, I have come to question the amount of money we continuously pay to subscribe to journals of big publishing companies and the value we get in return. It is us, taxpayers, who cover the costs of research (and researchers) in the public education system so why do we also need to pay for these companies to publish the outputs of 'our' research? There is a growing clamour against exclusive approaches to research and scholarship, especially when much of it is funded by taxpayers. Internet-based peer-reviewed journals, available to all readers with neither restriction nor charge, or ‘open-access journals’, offer an alternative for academics of various disciplines to disseminate ideas and evidence to a wide audience. Open-access journals, with costs covered by publication fees, sponsorships, in-kind contributions, or other sources of support, challenge the traditional subscription model. More than 4,200 open access journals, in a variety of fields, are listed in the directory of open access journals (DOAJ: www.doaj.org). Last week, The Australian reported that ‘Harvard University, The world's richest university - and second richest not-for-profit organisation in the world after the Catholic Church - has told staff it can no longer afford to pay for journal subscriptions and they should publish in open access alternatives...’ Open-access journals following vigorous academic process can be among the most potent sources of knowledge. Journal impact factors are an important consideration. Some open-access journals have received impact factors from Thomson Reuters Scientific (or ISI). The number of open access journals with listed impact factors has increased from 239 in 2004 to almost 400 in 2010. It is expected that the impact of open-access journal can be stronger than traditional journals because of the internet-based nature and, therefore, potential for high citation rates... One specific condition is crucial. Most open-access journals charge publication fees to academics who submit their papers for potential publication. Some may argue articles can be published in open-access journals with ease by paying the required fee... A thorough search of DOAJ shows an interesting trend among open access-journals in science and social sciences. Most are now operated by universities in non-English speaking countries. These journals are run by different groups of academics who, as a result of their intense interest in their respective disciplines, do not charge publication fees. This provides hope to researchers worldwide, no matter what their financial resources, for unimpeded dissemination of their research findings. The culture of knowledge dissemination was initially pioneered by the non-academic sector... A good example is the site www.onlineopinion.com.au which long has been run for free, notwithstanding financial donations from readers. Or the new way to amalgamate resources among universities and create a forum such as www.conversation.edu.au is vigorous and achievable. Is this not a model which could be adopted by the editorial teams of open-access journals... One of the key missions among academics is to publish... Publications in the traditional international journals can (and will) lead you to where you want to be. In Australia, the Australian Research Council (ARC) asks grant applicants to rank their 10 best publications when applying for an ARC research grant. In an interview by The Australian, the ARC CEO, Margaret Sheil, confirmed she did not consider open access appropriate at this time. Critics of ARC's stance point to its ‘lack of understanding of core issues’. All traditional academic journals have long been controlled by major publishing companies such as Wiley, Sage, Blackwell, Emerald, Elsevier, Kluwer etc. The power they hold is incredible and it does not seem to me that academics have done enough to challenge their power. We need to act in order to change the way we disseminate our academic outputs to the public. Copy right is a factor that contributes to the power of major publishing companies. In the traditional publication culture, authors transfer the copy right of their research papers to the publisher. Most open-access journals, on the other hand, will not ask the author to transfer copy right or intellectual property to the publisher. Australia needs a system and leadership which promotes equitable ways we can share more technical and financial resources among public institutions (including universities) nationally to create more open-access journals that are of high quality and become impactful in various academic disciplines. This approach will change the culture of research and publication not only in Australia but globally.” |
| Posted: 01 May 2012 09:29 AM PDT www.whitehouse.gov Use the link above to access the full text of the report. The introduction to the report reads as follows: “The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (ACRA; Public Law 111-358), signed into law by President Obama in 2011, calls for the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to establish a working group under the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) with the responsibility to coordinate Federal science agency research and policies related to the dissemination and long-term stewardship of the results of unclassified research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications, supported wholly or in part by funding from the Federal science agencies. This report to Congress—submitted in fulfillment of Section 103 of ACRA (Appendix VI of this document)—details progress toward the coordination of policies related to these goals. The Administration has long recognized the importance of improving the management of and access to the results of federally funded scientific research including digital data and peer-reviewed publications. Since 2008, OSTP has been working to coordinate with agencies to develop policies that assure widespread public access to and long-term stewardship of the results of federally funded unclassified research. In 2009, the Interagency Working Group on Digital Data (IWGDD) under the NSTC Committee on Science (CoS) issued a report, entitled Harnessing the Power of Digital Data for Science and Society, which called for improved management of digital data resulting from federally funded research to better leverage taxpayer investment in scientific research and development. That same year, OSTP issued an initial Request for Information (RFI) on access to scholarly publications resulting from research conducted with Federal funding to explore the need for and potential methods for increasing access to peer-reviewed scientific publications describing the results of federally funded research. That RFI showed broad support for increasing public access to scientific publications but disagreement on how best to achieve increased access.” |
| Medical Library Awarded NEH Grant for Digitization of Historical Medical Journals Posted: 01 May 2012 09:28 AM PDT groups.google.com [Forwarded from the SPARC OA Forum] “The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library will digitize early American medical journals as a part of a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded project awarded to the Medical Heritage Library <http://www.medicalheritage.org/> (MHL) through the Open Knowledge Commons
(OKC). The Medical Library, a founding partner of the MHL, will contribute
digitized journals to the Medical Heritage Library collection in the
Internet Archive <http://archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary> where
they will be freely available to researchers. ‘These journals and transactions provide a rich resource of data on matters relating to everything from local history to legal history, from housing to welfare policy. And, of course, they remain the basic and indispensable source for the internal history of the medical profession, its intellectual and (not unrelated) social development,’ explains Professor Charles Rosenberg, Ernest E. Monrad Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, a member of the MHL Scholarly Advisory Committee. ‘In my own work, I have always found the articles, editorials, letters, and transcriptions of
society debates to be fundamental. And only a handful of American libraries have a comprehensive collection of such materials. The publications of sectarian groups and local medical societies are particularly elusive yet often provide the most circumstantial
documentation of medical practice and debate on the ground.’ The grant, from NEH¹s Humanities Collections and Reference Resources program, will support the digitization of approximately 1,723,036 pages, an estimated 200 journal titles published between 1797 and 1923, nearly 6,000 journal volumes. The project¹s goal is to make broadly available complete runs of the nation¹s earliest medical journals. Journals will be
digitized from the collections of the medical libraries of Columbia, Harvard, and Yale Universities and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The National Library of Medicine and other MHL collaborators will assist by providing journal volumes that the four participants do not hold. The digitized journals will join the more than 33,000 monographs, serials, pamphlets, and films currently available in the MHL. As part of
the project, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library will digitize approximately 430,000 pages of rare journals, some of which exist in only a handful of libraries nationwide...” |
| Posted: 30 Apr 2012 09:57 AM PDT chronicle.com “I have been an active blogger since 2006, and I often say that becoming one was the best decision I have ever made in my academic life. In terms of intellectual fulfillment, creativity, networking, impact, productivity, and overall benefit to my scholarly life, blogging wins hands down. I have written books, produced online courses, led research efforts, and directed a number of university projects. While these have all been fulfilling, blogging tops the list because of its room for experimentation and potential to connect to timely intelligent debate... My academic identity—I'm a professor of educational technology at the Open University in the United Kingdom—is strongly allied with my blog. Increasingly we find that our academic identities are distributed. There was a time when you could have pointed to a list of publications as a neat proxy for your academic life, but now you might want to reference not only your publications, but also a set of videos, presentations, blog posts, curated collections, and maybe even your social network. All of these combine to represent the modern academic. My blog sits at the heart of these... This is not to argue that a blog should play the same role for everyone. A key aspect of the digital revolution is not the direct replacement of one form of scholarly activity with another, but rather the addition of alternatives to existing forms. In his book From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet (Quercus, 2012), my colleague John Naughton argues that this is a lesson we should learn. ‘Looking back on the history,’ he writes, ‘one clear trend stands out: Each new technology increased the complexity of the ecosystem.’ This trend is evident in academic practice. Previously if I wanted to convey an idea or a research finding, my choices were limited to a conference paper or journal article or, if I could work it up, a book. These choices still remain, but in addition I can create a video, podcast, blog post, slidecast, and more. It may be that a combination of these is ideal—a blog post gets immediate reaction and can then be worked into a conference presentation, shared through SlideShare, or turned into a paper that is submitted to a journal. In each case the blog or social network becomes a key route for sharing and disseminating the findings. One recent study suggests that use of Twitter, for instance, can both boost and predict citations of journal articles. So blogging works for me, but it might not work for you. Maybe you're more of a YouTube person, or a podcaster, or maybe your skill really lies in acting as a filter and a curator, using a tool such as Scoop.it, which allows you to curate and share resources on a particular topic. It's clear, though, that our academic ecosystem is a more complex one now. This raises two difficult questions for academics who are expected to do research: First, do these new types of activity count as scholarship? And, if so, how do we recognize and reward them? In my book The Digital Scholar: How Technology Is Transforming Scholarly Practice (Bloomsbury USA, 2011; free online), I argue that if you look across all scholarly activities, the use of new technology has the potential to change practice. For example, those who teach now have access to abundant, free, online content, while in the past teaching resources were often scarce and expensive. An example I like to cite is that of my colleague Tony Hirst, who blogs at OUseful.Info. He likes to play with open data, visualization tools, and mashups. On any one day an idea may occur to him, such as, 'I wonder how the people who tweet a particular link are connected? And who are they connected to?’ In a short space of time, he will have experimented with data and tools to provide an answer, and blogged his results. None of this requires research funds or a peer-review filter, and it takes place over a much shorter time period than traditional research. Yet it would be difficult to argue that the blog does not constitute widely accepted definitions of scholarly research. So I would argue that the answer to the first question above, as to whether new approaches such as blogging constitute scholarly activity, is an emphatic yes. Which leads us to a more problematic question: How should we recognize it? This is where the issue of increased complexity really begins to cause friction. When it comes to tenure and promotion, the three factors generally considered are teaching, service, and research. The first two are easily understood by tenure committees. The last, and often most heavily weighted one for scholars expected to do research, is that of scholarship. Here tenure committees have increasingly come to rely upon journal-impact factors to act as a proxy for research quality. In short, we know what a good publication record looks like. But these criteria begin to creak and groan when we apply them to blogs and other online media... It's a difficult problem, but one that many institutions are beginning to come to terms with. Combining the rich data available online that can reveal a scholar's impact with forms of peer assessment gives an indication of reputation. Universities know this is a game they need to play—that having a good online reputation is more important in recruiting students than a glossy prospectus. And groups that sponsor research are after good online impact as well as presentations at conferences and journal papers. Institutional reputation is largely created through the faculty's online identity, and many institutions are now making it a priority to develop, recognize, and encourage practices such as blogging. For institutions and individuals alike, these practices are moving from specialist hobby to the mainstream. This is not without its risks, but as James Boyle, author of the book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press, 2008), argues, we tend to overstate the dangers of open approaches and overlook the benefits, while the converse holds true for the closed system. For instance, I've found that since becoming a blogger, I publish fewer journal articles, so it has had a ‘negative’ impact on that aspect of my academic life. However, it has led to so many other unpredictable benefits—such as the establishment of a global peer network that helps me stay up to date with my topic, increased research collaboration, and more invitations to give talks—that it's been worth the trade-off. Blogging may not be recognized formally, it may be a pain at times, and I may spend parts of my weekend deleting spam, but I have no doubts that becoming a blogger was a wise career choice.” |
| Open access to science helps us all Posted: 30 Apr 2012 09:53 AM PDT www.newstatesman.com “Every year, governments and charities invest billions of pounds supporting scientific research with the aim of advancing discovery and its application for economic and societal benefit. The primary mechanism through which scientists disseminate the results of this research is through publication in peer-reviewed journals, with access to this content typically being managed though library subscriptions. However, in recent years there has been a growing recognition that the traditional subscription-based access models are not serving the best interests of the research community, and a growing movement to support open-access publishing – in which research papers are freely available to all at the point of use. To cover publication costs, open access journals typically levy an up-front payment, which is usually met by the research funder. As a global charitable foundation dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health, the Wellcome Trust is dedicated to ensuring that the outputs of the research we fund are made widely available in a manner that maximises the resulting health benefit. Our support for open access publishing was a natural progression of our involvement in the international Human Genome Project during the 1990s and early 2000s, where the decision to place the human genetic sequence in the public domain immediately as it was generated helped to ensure this key research resource could be used by scientists the world over. A recent study estimated that a $3.8 billion investment in the project had achieved an economic impact worth $796 billion, a clear indication of the power of open access to scientific information. SME’s also benefit from unrestricted access to research findings. A study published in Nature Biotechnology laments the poor access biotech companies have to the published literature. In one case, a company suffered a six-month setback to a drug development programme because a paper was missed in a subscription journal. Other research (pdf) has shown how companies could benefit from reduced costs and shortened development cycles by having greater access to UK research outputs, which, in turn would generate around £100m worth of economic activity for the UK economy. Since 2005, the Wellcome Trust has required that research papers that arise through the research we support be made freely available as soon as possible, and in any event within six months of publication. We view the cost of dissemination as an integral part of funding research, and provide dedicated funds to the institutions we support for the payment of author fees associated with open access publication... At present, only around 55 per cent of research papers we support comply with our policy. For this reason, we have recently decided to strengthen the manner in which we enforce our policy. We will also ensure that where we pay an open access fee, the content is freely available for all types of re-use (including commercial re-use). This is in line with a recent draft policy published by the UK Research Councils, which we strongly support. We are also working in partnership with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Max Planck Society to develop eLife, a new top-tier and fully open access online-only journal, which we will launch later this year. eLife will make ground-breaking research freely available to all, and develop cutting–edge approaches and tools to enhance accessibility and use of on-line, open access content. We hope that in doing so it will spark change in the wider publishing sector and accelerate the transition towards a world where open access is the norm. We believe that this is a pivotal moment in the open access debate, and political will is growing in the UK and internationally. Here, the UK Government has highlighted (pdf) the potential of open data to stimulate innovation and economic growth. Access to research publications has been recognised as a key element in this, and the Finch Group, which was established by David Willets to look at ways to enhance access to published scientific information, will report in the Summer. Meanwhile, in the US, the failure of the Research Works Act – which sought to row back the current policy of the US National Institutes of Health to require that publicly-funded research articles be made freely available – demonstrated that the current course towards open access is now irreversible. We all have a fundamental obligation to ensure that scientific research which is funded by taxpayers and through charitable funding delivers the greatest possible return to society, and open access publication is key to achieving this goal. We therefore call on all those involved in the supporting science and innovation to help make open access a reality.” |
| Princeton, Penn and Michigan join the MOOC party | Inside Higher Ed Posted: 30 Apr 2012 09:47 AM PDT www.insidehighered.com “Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor have teamed up with a for-profit company to offer free versions of their coveted courses this year to online audiences. By doing so, they join a growing group of top-tier universities that are embracing massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as the logical extension of elite higher education in an increasingly online, global landscape. Princeton, Penn and Michigan will join Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley as partners of Coursera, a company founded earlier this year by the Stanford engineering professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. Using Coursera’s platform, the universities will produce free, online versions of their courses that anyone can take. The move is perhaps the most coordinated foray into online learning by high-profile education institutions since early last decade, when Fathom (a Columbia University-led for-profit venture into online education that also involved the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago, and Michigan) and AllLearn (a nonprofit collaboration between Oxford University, Yale University, Princeton and Stanford) became casualties in what was then a relatively underdeveloped online learning sector. Online education, and the technology universities are using in that medium, has matured significantly since then. And brand-name elites, this time with little or no emphasis on making profit or even breaking even, are making a new push toward finding their place in the constellation of Web-based higher education. There are ‘100 wrong ways’ to do online education, and Penn has been ‘looking for years’ for the right way, Amy Gutmann, Penn's president, said in an interview. Gutmann said she doesn’t care if Penn eventually makes money from its MOOC experiment, noting that the cost for Penn of taking its courses online with Coursera -- which is buoyed by $16 million in venture capital -- has so far amounted to ‘a rounding error in my budget.’ The Penn president also said faculty have leaped at the opportunity to teach MOOCs, even without major incentives (participating professors may get some summer release time to create courses, she said). Faculty at traditional colleges have occasionally struggled to persuade professors to cooperate with administration-led online initiatives, occasionally to the peril of those initiatives. But the prospect of teaching tens or hundreds of thousands of students at once seems to have piqued the interest of certain faculty members at Penn, which is currently scheduled to put 12 courses online through Coursera over the next year. The Coursera courses -- which total 39 across all the universities -- will be interactive, with perhaps hundreds of thousands of students completing exams and assigned work that will be graded, either by intelligent software or by their peers. The universities will own the courses. These include six courses in the humanities and social sciences, including History of the World Since 1300, Introduction to Sociology, and Modern & Contemporary American Poetry. That is uncharted territory for the new breed of MOOC -- which focuses on scale, assessment and certification -- thatemerged last fall at Stanford and has since taken hold at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So far, the high-profile MOOCs being offered through Udacity, another Stanford-born company, and at MITx, MIT’s new nonprofit subsidiary, have focused on courses where student work can be more easily quantified and scored by machines, such as engineering, math and computer science. Koller, an artificial intelligence specialist who has taught computer science at Stanford since getting her Ph.D. there at age 25, said that the challenge of assessing student work in humanities-oriented MOOCs could be addressed through a system of ‘calibrated peer review.’ Human readers, plucked from the ranks of the course registrants, could read short essays written by their peers and rate them according to a rubric developed by the professor. A critical mass of deputized students should be able to evaluate an essay ‘at least as [well] as a pretty good [teaching assistant],’ Koller said in an interview. Mitchell Duneier, a sociology professor at Princeton, said he is planning to give students in his Introduction to Sociology MOOC the opportunity to participate in small group discussions with him and his students at Princeton via Google Hangouts, a videoconferencing application... None of the universities will offer formal credit through the courses they put online through Coursera. However, several might give students the opportunity to earn certificates bearing the names of both the universities and the company. There is no formal credentialing mechanism currently in place, but some university officials indicated that tangibly recognizing the achievements of non-enrolled learners is a goal... ‘Since the venture is just starting, cost and certificates may be determined in the future, based on appropriate market analysis and metrics after the courses have had some time to get off the ground,’ said Steve MacCarthy, vice president for university communications at Penn. ‘There are no definite plans yet for what courses, if any, might have certificates and, if they exist, how much might be charged for them,’ wrote MacCarthy via e-mail... Ng, one of the Coursera founders, said ‘no firm decisions have been made yet’ on how the company’s university partners might recognize the achievement of their non-enrolled students. ‘We've had informal discussions with the partner universities about different certificate options, but the final decision will be made on a per-university and per-course basis,’ Ng wrote via e-mail. Princeton, for one, said that certificates for successful MOOC participants are out of the equation... If some of Coursera’s university partners do end up authorizing credentials that bear their seal, it will be a step forward in contributions of elite universities to the open educational resources (OER) and ‘alternative credentialing’ movements. MIT, Berkeley and Yale University for years have offered free course materials and video-recorded lectures via ‘open courseware’ clearinghouses, but never gave those who learned from the materials the opportunity to prove their chops and earn tangible recognition for their diligence. Last fall, when Koller, Ng and several colleagues began broadcasting their computer science courses and accepting machine-gradable submissions from hundreds of thousands of online auditors, Stanford permitted the professors to send “statements of accomplishment” to the far-flung learners on the condition that the documents thoroughly disclaimed any implication of a Stanford endorsement. When MITx inaugurated its first MOOC earlier this year, it enrolled 20 MIT undergraduates in the course to work through the material and scan for glitches ahead of the 100,000 auditors, with the understanding that their MITx coursework would count as credit toward their MIT degrees. But by arranging for the tuition-paying undergrads to attend weekly, face-to-face ‘recitation’ sessions with MIT professors, university officials squelched any suggestion that succeeding in an MITx course should be enough to earn formal course credit from MIT. The idea, MIT officials told Inside Higher Ed earlier this month, is not to make MOOCs as good as the classroom experience; but to use MOOCs to make the classroom experience even better... The Penn president added that she expects one of the prime benefits of expanding its courses beyond the university walls will be giving faculty occasion to improve their own literacy in technology tools that could help them better serve tuition-paying students...” |
| The Parachute: OA not just for institutionalised scientists Posted: 30 Apr 2012 09:46 AM PDT theparachute.blogspot.co.uk “On the Global Open Access List, an email list, a thread has developed on 'Open Access Priorities: Peer Access and Public Access'. Of course, true open access means access both for peers (meaning fellow-scientists, in this case, not just members of the UK House of Lords) and for the general public at large, so the discussion is really about what is more important and what is the more persuasive argument to get research scientists to make their publications available with open access. And should that argument mainly be quasi-legal, in the form of institutional mandates... My view is this: Is it not so that when there is no wide cultural or societal support for whatever law or mandate, more effort is generally being spent on evasion than on compliance and enforcement turns out to be like mopping up with the tap still running? If one should be taking examples from US politics, the 'war on drugs' is the one to look at. Forcing scientists into open access via mandates and the like is only ever likely to be truly successful if it is rooted in an already changing culture. An academic culture with an expectation that research results are openly available to all. By the shame that researchers will be made to feel in the lab, at dinner parties, or in the pub, if their results are not published with open access. Of course that will still be mainly peer-pressure, but changing hearts and minds of peers is greatly helped if there were a societal substrate in which the open culture can grow. Mandates or not, OA will never happen if scientists aren't convinced from within. An appeal to them as human beings and members of society is more likely to achieve that than mandates, in my view. The latter should back up a general change of heart, not be a substitute for it. What is 'the general public' should not be misunderstood and be construed to be only those interested in medical literature. It includes all those interested in the other 999 areas as well. Ex scientists, retired scientists, start-ups and SMEs, scientists interested in another discipline or cross-discipline topics, students, lawyers, reporters, teachers, even hobbyists. Einstein wasn't an institutionalised scientist when he worked on his most important work; he was a patent clerk. Of course, those OA evangelists who wish to pursue mandates should be pursuing mandates. I encourage them to keep doing just that. But to narrow the efforts of OA evangelism to what is stubbornly being called ‘the quickest route’, in spite of it being no more than a hypothesis which certainly over the last decade and a half hasn't proved itself to be as effective as first thought, is a mistake. By all means where there are opportunities to promote mandates let us do that, but not at the expense of making the moral and societal responsibility case for OA.” |
| Who’s Passionate About #OpenAccess? Interactive Map of 1000+ Twitterers Using The Hashtag Posted: 30 Apr 2012 09:45 AM PDT Who8217s Passionate About OpenAccess Interactive Map of 1000 Twitterers Using The Hashtag Biotechnology and Life Science Marketing Consulting: Comprendia, (29 Apr 2012) [Use the link above to see the graphics discussed in this blog post from Comprendia Bioscience Consulting Group. ] “Our map of Science Communicators based on utilization of the #scicomm hashtag was very popular and we’ve been asked to create maps for more hashtags. We decided that a map of Twitterers using #openaccess would be useful, as the movement to free research publication access is gaining momentum, with the associated #academicspring hashtag also being used. These maps show trends regarding the location and interests of the Twitterers, and perhaps more importantly they help people to connect with others in their geographic region. Since May 30th 2011, when we started tracking the #openaccess hashtag 11 months ago, it has been used almost 43,000 times by 12,000 Twitterers. Google Maps limits the number of items on each map to 1,000, so we chose to show the top users, corresponding to those who have used the #openaccess hashtag 4 or more times in this 11 month period... We did a quick check of the overlap between the top 1000 #scicomm users and the top 1000 using #openaccess. We were surprised that the overlap is low, only 67/1000, or 6.7% use both hashtags regularly. We have still not perfected our method of geographic analysis so we will provide our initial thoughts on eyeball comparisons of the two maps (you can, too, by looking at each on Google in browser tabs:#openaccess #scicomm). There appear to be more people using the #openaccess in Japan and South America than #scicomm, and the reverse is true in Australia. Perhaps the topic is more important in these areas due to sensitivity to subscription costs? Again, we’d love it if a GIS expert wants to play with the KML files and provide more than an anecdotal analysis, both are accessible as a link found near the top of the Google Map. We were curious as to the identity of these Twitterers, especially with the low overlap with #scicomm, so we did a word cloud based on their Twitter Bios (not their Tweets) and it is seen below. The top five words are research, university, science, access, and library. Not surprisingly, many work in these areas, and librarians are passionate about the topic. Some also use the hashtag #oa which we did not track as it is too short and will have a lot of noise from other topics. This map is meant as a starting resource, not a complete list of everyone involved in the movement, and we hope it sparks more connections, analysis, and advancement of the initiative. While creating global maps of Twitterers using Google maps is limited, we can create maps restricted to a geographic area, or ones with more data which can be read by programs like Google Earth (or any program that can read XML files). Let us know what you’d like us to map, contact us or leave a comment below.” |
| Posted: 30 Apr 2012 09:44 AM PDT www.baltimoresun.com “In a small, rural, rust-belt town there sits a nondescript office building not far from the town square. The building is an unassuming amalgam of storefronts, offices and vacancies. Near one of the offices, there hangs a shingle: ‘Psychiatrist's Office.’ Patients arrive faithfully, dutifully awaiting the chance to receive comprehensive, compassionate care and the most appropriate medicine for their maladies. My mother runs this clinic, striving to provide the best and most cost-effective medicine possible. She must avoid extraneous expenses so that her patients are able to access quality care despite the depressed economy. Without the resources to purchase all the necessary but expensive journal subscriptions, many of which cost hundreds to thousands of dollars per year, she is unable to access the most recent medical discoveries that would benefit her patients. At times, she has had to call upon me — a medical student at Johns Hopkins not yet in clinical practice — to seek out current studies and provide synopses of the most recent science. She should not have to resort to such convoluted means to obtain information that is so vital for her patients' well-being. In our outdated system of disseminating research papers, the information vital to human medicine sits locked behind paywalls. If you've ever tried to open the full text of a journal article, you've likely faced a prompt demanding $15-$32 per article reader fee. Two of the largest scholarly publishers, Elsevier and the American Publishing Association, have invested untold sums to push for industry-friendly legislation that would keep this lifesaving information from the hands of the physicians charged with caring for our country's injured and ill. Yet, in 2008, physicians and the American people won a great victory. Congress moved to allow the National Institutes of HealthPublic Access Policy to provide free access to the results of the approximately 90,000 governmentally funded studies published each year... However, not all scientific information is publicly accessible — and what is available has been the target of a recent industry-sponsored attack... The so-called Research Works Act, introduced by Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, and Carolyn Maloney, a New York Democrat, would have rolled back the NIH's Public Access Policy, including PubMed Central, a free database that more than 500,000 online users access on a daily basis. This bill, and its many iterations, was designed by the Netherlands-based behemoth, Elsevier, to serve the profit margins (greater than 35 percent) of the print industry and the coffers of politicians, no matter the expense to the public. Due to public outcry, a boycott of Elsevier and politicians' shift in focus to the upcoming elections, the RWA was shelved. Even though the Research Works Act is effectively dead, the threat of heightened access restrictions remains. Recently, Rep. Mike Doyle, a Pennsylvania Democrat, reintroduced an alternative bill, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA)... FRRPA is the antithesis of the RWA. The bill is now awaiting committee votes in both the House and Senate; if passed, it would require major recipients of federal money to submit an electronic copy of research that's been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. This bill would ensure that the information is preserved in a digital repository, permitting free public access and long-term safeguarding. It would require that each taxpayer-funded research paper be made available to the public free of charge no later than six months after its official publication date. Thanks to the diligence of so many students, scientists, clinicians and public supporters of free and open access to research, FRPAA has been reintroduced, and the RWA has been thwarted, at least for now. These proponents of open access refused to accept that in this digital age, clinicians should be so removed from the data providing the foundation for evidence-based practice. FRPAA will grant clinicians like my mother the ability to use this information that is so crucial for the appropriate treatment of their patients. Our voice has been heard, but the fight rages on. FRPAA has to traverse the harrowing political environment of the House and Senate to succeed. We must use our voices and our votes to support free and open access to publicly funded research, and thereby improve the health care provided to the American people.” |
| Government and Library Open Data using Creative Commons tools - Creative Commons Posted: 30 Apr 2012 09:43 AM PDT creativecommons.org “The last few months has seen a growth in open data, particularly from governments and libraries. Among the more recent open data adopters are the Austrian government, Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, Italian Chamber of Deputies, and Harvard Library. The Austrian government has launched an open data portal with much of its data available under CC BY. The portal’s terms of use states that CC BY is recommended for open data, and that such data will be indicated as CC BY in the data description. The Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research launched its Open Data Portal under CC BY, publishing the data of Italian schools (such as address, phone number, web site, administrative code), students (number, gender, performance), and teachers (number, gender, retirement, etc.). The Ministry aims to make all of its data eventually available and open for reuse, in order to improve transparency, aid in the understanding of the Italian scholastic system, and promote the creation of new tools and services for students, teachers and families. The Italian Chamber of Deputies has also developed a platform for publishing linked open data under CC BY-SA. Lastly, Harvard Library in the U.S. has released 12 million catalog records into the public domain using the CC0 public domain dedication tool. The move is in accordance with Harvard Library’s Open Metadata Policy. The policy’s FAQ states, ‘With the CC0 public domain designation, Harvard waives any copyright and related rights it holds in the metadata. We believe that this will help foster wide use and yield developments that will benefit the library community and the public.’ Harvard’s press release cites additional motivations for opening its data, John Palfrey, Chair of the DPLA, said, ‘With this major contribution, developers will be able to start experimenting with building innovative applications that put to use the vital national resource that consists of our local public and research libraries, museums, archives and cultural collections.’ He added that he hoped that this would encourage other institutions to make their own collection metadata publicly available. We are excited that CC tools are being used for open data. For questions related to CC and data, see our FAQ about data, which also links to many more governments, libraries, and organizations that have opened their data.” |
| SV-POW! is now (finally!) open access Posted: 28 Apr 2012 03:11 PM PDT Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week #AcademicSpring, (28 Apr 2012) “Given the huge amount we’ve written about open access on this blog, it may come as a surprise to realise that the blog itself has not been open access until today. It’s been free to read, of course, but in the absence of an explicit licence statement, the default ‘all rights reserved’ has applied, which has meant that technically you’re not supposed to do things like, for example, using SV-POW! material in course notes. It was never our intention to be so restrictive, of course. We always wanted what we write to be as widely useful as possible; but like most bloggers, we just didn’t think about what that entailed. So now, belatedly, we are placing SV-POW! under the Creative Commons Attribution licence. This means that you can do anything with our content, subject only to giving us credit. Go nuts. We want our work to be useful. (Our use of this licence is indicated by the CC BY button at top right of all the pages.) Note that SV-POW! is now compliant with the Budapest Open Access Initiative’s definition of open access — the only definition that matters, really, since it’s where the term “open access” was first coined. That definition is rather noble and striking: ‘By ‘open access’ to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.’ We are applying this licence restrospectively to all the original content on the site — not just what we write from now on....” |
| Times Higher Education - Harvard backs open access in face of ‘prohibitive’ journal costs Posted: 28 Apr 2012 03:10 PM PDT www.timeshighereducation.co.uk “In an email sent to all Harvard faculty members last week, Harvard’s Faculty Advisory Council to the Library complains that ‘many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive’. Specific publishers are not mentioned by name, but those the committee has in mind are likely to include Elsevier, which attracted criticism earlier this year by initially backing a US bill that would have outlawed open access mandates. More than 10,000 academics have since pledged to boycott the company. ‘Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35 per cent and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles,’ the council’s email says. The value of Harvard’s endowment is currently around $32 billion (£19.7 billion). But, in consultation with senior librarians, the committee has concluded that contracts with ‘at least two major providers’ cannot be renewed ‘on the basis identical with past agreements’ since costs are now ‘prohibitive’. The email invites faculty to comment on the feasibility of various options, including submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ‘ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs’. The council hopes this will “move prestige” to open access journals. Harvard faculty on the editorial board of journals published by the offending companies are also urged to investigate whether they can be made open access or published independently. If not, they should consider resigning, the email says. Stephen Curry, professor of structural biology at Imperial College London and an open access advocate, says on his blog: ‘If one of the most prestigious and richest institutions in the world cannot afford its journal subscriptions, then there is a serious problem in academic publishing.’ A government-convened committee chaired by Dame Janet Finch, a former vice-chancellor of Keele University, is currently considering the feasibility of the UK moving to open access. It is expected to report next month.” |
| Harvard pushes back against academic publishers’ pricing, encourages open access - The Boston Globe Posted: 28 Apr 2012 03:09 PM PDT www.boston.com “Harvard may be the world’s wealthiest university, but fees for its academic journal subscriptions have gotten so steep - some as much as $40,000 a year - that an advisory council is encouraging faculty to submit their work to ‘open access’ online journals that are available for free. The council also asked Harvard faculty to consider resigning from the editorial boards of the high-priced subscription publications and to urge professional associations to ‘take control’ of scholarly literature in their fields. In a memo sent to faculty last week, the council called the rising prices of journals, which connect researchers with cutting-edge ideas and findings, ‘untenable,’ ‘fiscally unsustainable,’ and ‘academically restrictive.’ It is a sentiment being aired by scholars and universities around the world as academic libraries struggle with rising costs. ‘The escalation is simply spectacular and it’s inflicting serious damage,’ said Robert Darnton, a university professor and chairman of the council. The memo states that in 2010, a fifth of the library’s entire expenditures on subscriptions went to certain unnamed publishers that bundle together journals and raise prices. This year, the memo said, the library is spending about $3.75 million on journals from just those publishers. The memo does not mention publishers by name, but says that the price of online content from two providers increased by 145 percent during six years, and that journals can cost tens of thousands of dollars each per year. Darnton said that even when university libraries nationwide have been suffering because of the recession, subscription fees have risen. In 2008 when Harvard library expenditures were cut 10 percent, some journals raised their prices 10 percent, he said. Meanwhile, the memo notes that some publishing houses are making significant profits - as much as 35 percent. The most visible target of academia’s wrath worldwide has been Elsevier, an Amsterdam-based publisher of scientific and medical journals, that reported an operating profit of $1.12 billion in 2010. More than 10,000 people have signed an online petition vowing not to publish in, or review papers, or do editorial work for its journals, including more than 60 people affiliated with Harvard, ranging from scientists to humanities scholars. A spokesman for Elsevier, Tom Reller, said in a statement the company had a good relationship with Harvard. ‘We do not believe that the facts in the letter which relate to price increases pertain to Elsevier. Elsevier’s average print list price increases have consistently been among the lowest in the industry for the past several years, averaging around 5%,’ Reller wrote. ‘In addition, we believe Harvard will continue to see the value in publishing in Elsevier journals, which include a range of access options, and contributing as editors.’ The issue is also a hot topic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where at least 45 researchers have signed the petition. A group of MIT faculty formed an Open Access Working Group this spring to examine journals’ responses to the university’s policy that its faculty’s work be made freely available, but it will also likely examine publishers’ pricing practices, said its chairman, philosophy professor Richard Holton. An analysis published online earlier this month by two mathematicians, including one from MIT, reported that between 1986 and 2009, MIT’s spending on journals increased by 426 percent, while the number of journals purchased decreased by 16 percent. The idea that research should be freely available is easy to support in theory, but it is a transition that will require a shift in how research journals are financed. Rather than billing subscribers to support their work, open-access journals typically ask authors to pay fees to have their work published. Universities such as Harvard and MIT have made funds available so that researchers who want to publish in open access journals will not be deterred. Still, that payment model concerns Dr. Clifford Saper, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He said that it can cost $1,500 or more to get a paper reviewed, edited, and posted online in the right format. In fields where researchers may be publishing many papers each year, that can add up - and it essentially hands that information to corporations and pharmaceutical companies at the expense of researchers or their institutions. ‘This basically takes the cost of disseminating scientific information - it gives industry a free ride,’ Saper said. ‘And the people doing science have to work harder to get more grants, so they can afford to publish their papers.’ But the biggest hurdle to surmount may be the cultural biases built into fields, where a person’s career can depend on getting papers into the very best journals, which are not traditionally the open access ones. A new biomedical research journal, eLife, being launched by top research organizations in three countries - the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Wellcome Trust, and the Max Planck Society - is an effort to change that, by creating a peer-reviewed journal that is on par with the most elite publications and that is also freely accessible. On Monday, at a faculty meeting at the Harvard School of Public Health, scientists had a thoughtful discussion of the issues that could arise, according to those who attended. ‘On the one hand, if it’s just me and where I publish and should I refuse to review articles for a particular journal because it’s predatory, that’s one thing,’ said Joseph Brain, professor of environmental physiology at the school. ‘But if my graduate student or post-doc sits down in my office and says, ‘Where should I publish this article,’ there’s really only one answer - and that’s the journal where it will help your career, particularly in these competitive times.’’’ |
| Akademy Keynote: Dr. Mathias Klang - Freedom of Expression | KDE.news Posted: 28 Apr 2012 03:08 PM PDT news.kde.org [Use the link above to access the full text of the interview provided in advance of Akademy 2012. “Akademy is the annual world summit of KDE, one of the largest Free Software communities in the world. It is a free, non-commercial event organized by the KDE Community.” “KDE is an international team co-operating on development and distribution of Free, Open Source Software for desktop and portable computing. Our community has developed a wide variety of applications for communication, work, education and entertainment.] The interview opens with the following introduction: “Dr. Mathias Klang is a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of Göteborg in Sweden. His research revolves within the field of legal informatics with particular interest in copyright, democracy, human rights, free expression, censorship, open access and ethics. He holds Master of Laws and Ph.D. degrees. Dr. Klang will deliver one of the keynote talks at Akademy 2012 in Tallinn, Estonia...” |
| Harvard vs. Yale: Open-Access Publishing Edition - Atlantic Mobile Posted: 28 Apr 2012 03:07 PM PDT m.theatlantic.com “Earlier this month, a special council to the Harvard library system sent a note to the school's entire faculty encouraging a broad range of measures to support open access journals, which are free and freely available. ‘Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive,’ they wrote. Perhaps the strongest recommendation was that faculty should ‘consider submitting articles to open-access journals, or to ones that have reasonable, sustainable subscription costs.’ This would, in effect, ‘move prestige to open access,’ and away from the traditional, paid publications. Earlier this week, Yale university student, Emmanuel Quartey, posted a video interview with the school's librarian, Susan Gibbons, in which he asked her about open-access publishing. Her response was far more ambivalent than the Harvard faculty council's. Though she noted that open-access journals are more accessible, she worried that asking younger faculty to publish in open-access (presumably less prestigious) journals could jeopardize their chances to attain tenure. In essence, prestige would stay put but tenure would move away from younger Yale professors. So, the library would continue to support both open and closed-access journals. You can read her full answer below or check out the video interview above. Earlier this week, Yale university student, Emmanuel Quartey, posted a video interview with the school's librarian, Susan Gibbons, in which he asked her about open-access publishing. Her response was far more ambivalent than the Harvard faculty council's. Though she noted that open-access journals are more accessible, she worried that asking younger faculty to publish in open-access (presumably less prestigious) journals could jeopardize their chances to attain tenure. In essence, prestige would stay put but tenure would move away from younger Yale professors. So, the library would continue to support both open and closed-access journals. You can read her full answer below or check out the video interview above. ‘Open access is a very complicated topic. On the one hand, from a faculty member or researcher's perspective, they go through all this work to make a discovery, to write about it. You'd want the broadest possible audience for your article or your book. You want people to read what it is you've discovered. So on the one hand, you want the greatest possible audience. On the other hand, if you think about the tenure process, how do you get tenure? You get tenure by, in part, publishing in the best journals. And until those journals are interested in an open access model, which really takes away their revenue stream, we have this tension going on... So, sometimes what you'll see is some of the junior faculty who are less inclined to publish in open access journals because they are focused on the career path and tenure track process. But once they get tenure, they feel like they have more freedom in participating in the open access movements going around. So it's not just a scholarship issue. It's not just an issue between libraries and publishers. There is a whole other element to it that often people forget about: which is that the tenure process is tightly intertwined with the promotion process and publishing. Until that gets settled out, it isn't clear what is the best way to go... So from the library's perspective, we support both kinds of journals. We subscribe to those that still require payment but if there are open access journals, we'll make sure they are in the Orbis catalog as well. We don't have the mechanisms to preserve those open access journals that are out there on the web unless we downloaded every article, printed it, and bound the journal we don't have that archival copy, which is something that we're also very concerned about. There are a lot of issues at play here. I think too often people think of this in the dichotomy of pro-open access or against it. I think there are subtleties in the middle that need to be explored more.” |
| We are pleased to announce that Open Access India has joined our new partner. Posted: 28 Apr 2012 03:06 PM PDT MyOpenArchive Blog, (26 Apr 2012) “We are pleased to announce that Open Access India has joined our new partner. The ‘Open Access India‘ is a advocacy group formed in India for advocating open access to publicly funded research in India. This group while sharing success stories of open access movement in the world and India would be working for influencing the policy makers, managers, researchers, scholarly societies to adopt open access policy for their research and to take forward the open access movement in India. Sridhar Gutam, Senior Scientist of Central Institute for Subtropical Horticulture, is managing Open Access India. He created the big Open Access community on the Facebook page. This group has about 2,000 people, and provides many news regarding Open Access every day. Members of Open Access India are starting to sign up and post. We hope that today’s announcement will provide the academic research community with a powerful new way to leverage our research contents. If you would like any further information regarding our partnership, please do not hesitate to contact us... About MyOpenArchive ... MyOpenArchive, founded in September 2007, is an international Non-Profit Organization that advocates Open Access for never-before-published research papers on the web and provides Self-Archiving platform to enable better knowledge sharing in a way that’s easy to publish...” |
| Eyeballing data: The future standard of publishing? Posted: 28 Apr 2012 03:05 PM PDT figshare.com [Use the link above to view the screenshots of the new features added to figshare as described in the following blog post.] “At figshare, one of the things we are looking to create, is a place where as much research data as possible can be visualised in the browser, regardless of the file format. It is often the case with traditional publishers, that you can only upload your research in a strict number of formats. This is something that figshare aims to fix... this week we updated the platform with a range of updates focussed around visualising data. Increasingly research is being produced in new formats which traditional publishers do not support. Heather Piwowar raised this point in her response to the US government's Request for Information: 'Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research', when she stated ‘A public science funder has both a right and a responsibility to communicate its findings in the most generative form it can. Projects funded with public money must be conducted under this premise.‘ For this reason, datasets, videos, code and text files should not be demoted to the supplemental data sections of papers where they exist as downloadable links. Researchers need to have a look at the file before assessing whether the information is present with the file. We have also added the filesizes in the right sidebar, as had been requested by users... As well as providing in browser support for an ever expanding list of file formats, we also introduced the interactive pop-up viewer to explore the research in greater detail. The example below shows csv data which can be sorted by column within the browser. The raw data can be copied and pasted directly out of the page, or eyeballed before choosing to download the paper... The pop up browser is also a great way to browse through filesets, as can be seen below. In order to cater for the growing need for a life science preprint paper , we have added functionality in terms of reading the pdfs in the browser. The pop up browser is also a great way to browse through filesets, as can be seen below. In order to cater for the growing need for a life science preprint paper , we have added functionality in terms of reading the pdfs in the browser... As noted previously on this blog, by referencing the datasets hosted on figshare the content that can be addressed in a single paper becomes unlimited, whilst also helping aid the discovery of the research. This can also be done as a way of archiving research connected to papers that are already in print that would otherwise never see the light of day... As always we would love to hear your feedback, comments and suggestions to make figshare better for you! Ideas are welcomed at info@figshare.com or via twitter, facebook or google+.” |
| Posted: 27 Apr 2012 01:41 PM PDT atmire.com “With the academic year coming to a close and students having fled the library, summer is a great time to polish up your DSpace... No matter whether you are rolling up your own sleeves, engaging student workers, or teaming up with a service provider, here are 6 manageable initiatives to work on: [1] Institutional Look and Feel ... The lowest threshold in this area is customization of the header and footer area of the interface. Those zones on top and bottom of the page are identical across the repository. Updating them involves very little technical work: it can be as easy as replacing a file. If you are using graphics, make sure the aspect ratios are appropriate so the images don't appear stretched. Going a step further, armed with the knowledge of HTML color codes, you can dive into the stylesheet to make sure that all interface colors match those of your institutional website. In the XML User Interface it is also supported to do such changes on a per collection or per community basis. Going beyond this, attempting to change the structure of the pages itself, potentially adding whole new elements, really brings you in the realm of in-depth customization. Great things can be achieved here but make sure your changes are modular so they won't hinder your next DSpace upgrade. [2] Hunt for fresh content ... Given that summer has arrived, some of them are bound to be more receptive to your pleas. Knock on those doors and find out what they can give you. Browsing their webpages, Google Scholar Citations pages or publisher databases can also bear fruitful results. [3] Batch item imports ... If you are running a DSpace 1.6 or newer, item metadata can be added in batch by means of uploading a spreadsheet. So as long as you're able to get the data into a spreadsheet, you will be able to save a lot of time not having to go through the manual submission steps for each item. Working with spreadsheets also gives you an easy way to split up work between different student workers... [4] Improving your metadata quality ... The consistency of author names, affiliations or keywords are just some of the examples in which you can improve your metadata. The aforementioned Spreadsheet tool also allows you to download metadata for all items in a collection in one file, after which you can make changes and re-upload. Instead of just doing the edits in a spreadsheet editor, take a shot at doing these cleaning operations in Google refine. @mire offers a Metadata Quality add-on module for DSpace that highly increases the efficiency of batch edits and helps you to deal with duplicates as well... [5] Prepare a Dspace upgrade ... [6] Perform your Dspace upgrade ...” |
| Open access and media coverage of science Posted: 27 Apr 2012 01:40 PM PDT The Carbon Brief “Even at some of Britain's largest research universities, academics can struggle to access the scientific research they need because of the costs imposed by scientific journals, according to speakers at the European Geosciences Union (EGU)'s biggest conference of the year. It's a live topic. Giant academic publisher Elsevier is currently the subject of a rebellion, with more than 10,000 academics so far signing a pledge to boycott it as a result of high fees to access academic literature. Astrophysicist Peter Coles last week called Elsevier one of the ‘worst offenders’, but blames the entire ‘academic journal racket’ for high access prices. And just a few days ago, Harvard University announced it's started encouraging its faculty members to make their research freely available, labelling the ‘scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive’ in a memo. On Wednesday, a packed session at the annual general meeting of the EGU discussed "Open science and the future of publishing" (video recording here). A new generation of open access academic publishers make papers freely available afgter publication - and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, Copernicus.org and PloS One were all on the panel, as well as major publishers including Oxford University Press and Elsevier. Erik Merkel-Sobotta ofSpringer, another major academic publisher... described Springer as initially "neutral" on open access publishing. Despite this, in 2008, Springer - which is the world's second largest publisher of commercial science, technology and medicine journals -acquired BioMed Central, becoming at a stroke the largest open access publisher in the world. Springer allows authors to decide the publishing model for their work after it's been through the peer review process. Merkel-Sobotta said some powerful scientific institutions view open access as a threat as well as an opportunity. Scientific societies are apparently particularly reluctant to embrace free access to journals and, according to the panel, they're also some of the main drivers behind the rising prices for journal subscriptions (there's an interesting editorial on this here that you won't have to pay for)... From our observation, papers published for free on the internet are more likely to be picked up - sometimes months after they appeared in the original academic journal... Merkel-Sobotta described the current process of identifying which papers are highlighted in the media as an 'imperfect system'. According to his account, researchers or press offices alert journal publishers to the fact that a paper may attract public interest, and the publisher will then give it media 'treatment' - including a press release. Interestingly, when a paper is given treatment, Springer will make that paper available on request to anyone who is interested (something our more technically minded readers may want to bear in mind). He also said Springer's aware that some 'controversial' researchers maintain their own relationship with the media. Despite the struggle over access that appears to be going on within various institutions, the overwhelming feeling from the session was that the shift towards more open publishing is an inevitable process that the research community welcomes... Another session on Thursday called " Communicate your science" attracted at least 70 participants. And a few of them had interesting stories to tell of being suddenly pitched into the middle of a media storm after their work attracted public attention. Questions of data privacy, use of social media and support from press offices were among the issues on the table. Despite the obvious challenges - and the daunting prospect of eliciting a tide of hostile coverage - there was still a feeling of optimism about the move toward more openness and engagement, particularly from a younger generation of scientists accustomed to using social media.” |
| Harvard, after spending $3.7M on academic journals, pushes for open source | eCampus News Posted: 27 Apr 2012 01:39 PM PDT www.ecampusnews.com “Harvard faculty members were told this month that spending millions every year on scholarly journals ‘cannot be sustained,’ and they were implored to publish their work in an open-access format while encouraging others to do the same. The campus’s Faculty Advisory Council sentthe bluntly-worded message April 17, sounding an alarm about the ‘untenable’ model of buying and subscribing to journals that can cost as much as $40,000 annually. Two providers of scholarly material have more than doubled their annual prices for online content since 2005, while Harvard spent more than $3.7 million for its collection of academic journals in 2011. The Faculty Advisory Council said that research funding given to the university has not compensated for the massive and consistent price increases in journal costs... Continuing with the current academic journal model, the council charged, ‘would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised.’ The letter addressed to faculty members included nine suggestions for how they can help the school slash its spending on academic journals. Among the suggestions: Publishing research in respected open-access journals, freely accessible online. ‘Move prestige to open access,’ the letter said. Other suggestions included publishing research in journals with a more reasonable pay-per-use system, contacting organizations to raise the issue of affordable or open-access journals, and helping ‘library-friendly’ groups gain control of scholarly literature. The letter was made public just a week before Harvard, on April 24, put bibliographic information for all 12 million of its libraries’ works into the public record. Information from all of the university’s audio recordings, videos, manuscripts, maps, and books—housed in 73 libraries—was made available under the Creative Commons public domain license. Harvard’s concerns about the cost of academic journals signal just how serious the problem of expensive journal subscriptions has become in higher education, observers said...” |
| Canadian students pay too much for textbooks Posted: 27 Apr 2012 01:39 PM PDT Macleans OnCampus, (26 Apr 2012) “You don’t hear much about the cost of post-secondary education dropping, but here’s one area where students should be spending less money than ever: texts. I’d say textbooks, but that’s just it–the costly hardcover textbook’s day is all but done. Ditto the cumbersome photocopied course pack. A slew of cheap and free options are available to a professor assembling a syllabus. There’s Open Access, a growing international movement to forego the price-gouging of the academic publishers and publish peer-reviewed scholarly works as freely available material. There’s the ever-expanding public domain. There are millions of high quality essays and articles freely and legitimately posted online. There are affordable subscription-based databases and collections. There’s Google Scholar to sort through it all. And there are fair dealing exceptions to Copyright, which will be extended to educational uses as soon as this summer. Add it up, and students should be enjoying some much needed relief when it comes to the cost of study materials. But instead, they’ll likely be paying more than ever. The Association of Universities and Colleges Canada, representing dozens of our top schools, have just signed the most expensive copyright licensing deal ever offered to them by the collection group Access Copyright. My colleague Luke Simcoe wrote about the deal last month, when the University of Toronto and Western took it. He described Access Copyright as a private entity of questionable value to our post-secondary institutions; a group that ridiculously claims the ability to license the act of hyperlinking, which it bafflingly equates to photocopying, and a group that has chosen to suddenly raise their fees by 800 per cent. Users who appear to be Access Copyright’s board members attacked Luke and his article in the comments section, in several cases without stating their affiliations. Luke’s characterization of the group remains accurate, and I’ll add this to it: although Access Copyright exists to remunerate copyright holders, last year 30 per cent of its income went to “administrative expenses.” They spent $2 million on failed lobbying efforts against fair dealing exceptions for educational materials. The writing is on the wall, free for all to read: scholarly works are more ubiquitous and inexpensive than ever, hallelujah. A long-overdue disruption to exploitative practices in academic publishing is well underway. Even Harvard University, one of the best-resourced schools in the world, is pushing back hard against journal publishers’ fees and asking its professors to go the Open Access route from now on. Here in Canada, 34 schools have already opted-out of Access Copyright completely, including the University of British Columbia, Queens, Dalhousie and Concordia. So why is the AUCC doubling-down in the opposite direction and signing the worst deal Access Copyright has ever offered? Easy–it’s not their money. Buried in the tuition fees of Canadian students next year will be tens of millions of dollars in licensing fees that nobody really had to pay. On a per-student basis, it won’t cost much, but overall, it will constitute a massive transfer of wealth from a nation’s debt-ridden youth to a private industry and the collective that represents it.” |
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