Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items) |
- Harvard rejoint les universitaires pour un boycott des éditeurs
- Lobby the White House!
- Version 2.0 of the Utopia Documents now available to download for FREE
- Access, Openness, and Why We Teach | Peer to Peer Review
- World Bank Live Event Report: Open Access Policy and Development - Creative Commons
- BetaKit » Scholrly Launching Search Engine for Academic Research
- UK PubMed Central Blog: Increasing proportion of UKPMC articles are open access
- SOBA: Social Media for Science Outreach -- Thursday, May 24, 2012 from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM (PT)
- OAPEN: OA Monographs in an international perspective
- Research on open access monographs – a short review
- UCSF Implements Policy to Make Research Papers Freely Accessible to Public | www.ucsf.edu
- American Institute of Archaeology Under Fire from Watchdog Groups for Lack of Transparency
- Petition Urges White House to Require Public Access to Federally Financed Research
- » OAPEN-UK: Y1: Initial Focus Groups
- Fae: Monmouth becomes the world's first Wiki Town
- Open Educational Resources. Open Education Initiative.
- Opening Up About the Open Data Institute - Open Enterprise
- access2research - Why Access2Research Matters For Patients
- Text mining: what do publishers have against this hight-tech tool
- Hungarian Version of RoMEO Released
- ALA Press Release | American Library Association
- "The Accessibility Quotient: A New Measure of Open Access" by Mathew A. Willmott, Katharine H. Dunn et al.
- Open Knowledge Pad: OAMonday
- Open Access Thematic Workshop at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)
- Open Access For All #oa12unt
- Harvard University’s 12 million records now in LibraryThing
- Global council aims to coordinate science : Nature News & Comment
- Nerds, Get Excited for New Food Science Journal - New York Restaurants and Dining - Fork in the Road
- Opening up government data: a practical guide
- Data.gov Celebrates Third Anniversary
- Open Science and Crowd Science: Selected Sites and Resources
- Search Engines and Beyond
- ACRL Urges Librarians to Sign Research Access Petition
- Time to change perspective: Hostages, not Orphans | International Communia Association
- To know the importance of providing free access to taxpayer-funded research
- Events - Digital Transformations of Research | Digital Scholarship @ Harvard
- President Obama: Make Publicly Funded Research Freely Available! - YouTube
- International Food Risk Analysis Journal-First Issue Launched
- US petition could tip the scales in favour of open access publishing
- EOL Computable Data Challenge - Encyclopedia of Life
- Big Data Troves Stay Forbidden to Social Scientists - NYTimes.com
- Steelcase captures corporate heritage in DSpace | atmire
- Kick-starting the School of Data!
- FOSE: A framework for open science evaluation
- access2research
| Harvard rejoint les universitaires pour un boycott des éditeurs Posted: 25 May 2012 07:01 AM PDT From Google's English: "The Harvard University in Boston, has joined the fight. It may well be the second non-profit institution the richest in the world, its collection of academic journals leaden as its accounts. The subscription prices for academic publishers him an average annual cost of $ 3.75 million. A note posted on its website and sent to its 2,100 professors and researchers, encouraging them to make available, free, online their research . According to this, increasing their profits - 36% in 2010 to Elsevier for an income of $ 3.2 billion - the largest publishers cause an "unbearable situation" in universities by creating a shared "financially unviable" and "academically restrictive" . Prices for access to online articles from two of the largest publishers have increased by 145% over the last six years, some journals costing nearly 40,000 dollars, the equivalent of one year of schooling. According to that note again, subscriptions are so high that eventually it "will seriously counter the efforts of the scientific collections in many areas " . Libraries are they, invited to make contracts more transparent. For now, they prevent universities from making public the charges they pay to some publishers...." |
| Posted: 24 May 2012 03:32 PM PDT Scholarly Communications @ Duke, (23 May 2012) “Admit it. You seldom get a chance to lobby the White House, do you? ... How often do you really get to bend Barak’s ear? Here is your chance. The White House has a petition program. Anyone can begin a petition... If 25,000 people sign a petition in 30 days, the White House pledges that that petition will be circulated to appropriate officials... and an official response made public... On May 21 a petition went public that asks the White House to act to make the articles that arise from Federally-funded research — that is research you and I pay for — publicly accessible. Here is the text of the petition: ‘We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research. The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.’ As many will recall, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy did a public request for information on this topic... at the end of 2011. A report based on the responses to the RFI has been prepared and is circulating within the White House. This petition is designed to ask the White house to act on that report, which we believe is favorable to the idea of public access. In only two and a half days the petition has collected half of the necessary signatures, but it is important to keep the momentum going; it will be the 24,999th signature that will be hardest to get. The technology blog Slashdot has this to say in support of the petition; ‘You paid for it, you should be able to read the results of publicly funded research. The National Institutes of Health have had a very successful open access mandate requiring that the results of federally funded biomedical research be published in open access journals. Now there is a White House petition to broaden this mandate. This is a jobs issue. Startups and midsize business need access to federally funded technology research. It is a health care issue, patients and community health providers need access, not a few scientists in well funded research institutes, and even wealthy institutions like Harvard are finding the prices of proprietary journals unsustainable.’ Note that this quotation links to the Harvard Library Faculty Advisory Council’s memo to the faculty about journal pricing and suggests that the petition is one way to address the unsustainability of the current journal system... If you are a librarian and believe that the current system of disseminating research and scholarship is unsustainable, I hope you will read this blog post from the ACRL and consider signing this petition... If you are a researcher and want faster, better scientific information and collaboration, I hope you will consider signing this petition... If you signed the “Cost of Knowledge” Elsevier boycott, I hope you will consider signing this petition... If you are a student and want to keep the costs of your education from rising even faster, I hope you will consider signing this petition... If you are a businessman or entrepreneur and want to encourage innovation and job growth, I hope you will consider signing this petition... If you are a taxpayer and believe you should get what you paid for, I hope you will consider signing this petition.” |
| Version 2.0 of the Utopia Documents now available to download for FREE Posted: 24 May 2012 03:28 PM PDT www.stm-publishing.com “Lost Island Labs Ltd (LIL) have, in collaboration with Academic Concept Knowledge Ltd (AQnowledge), released version 2.0 of the Utopia Documents web-enabled PDF-reader for scientific content. It is freely downloadable from http://utopiadocs.com and currently available for Mac and Windows, with a Linux version coming soon. The Utopia Documents PDF-reader bridges the ‘linkability gap’ between HTML and PDF, and makes the latter just as easily linked-in to the Web as the former (as long as you are online, of course). Utopia Documents allows readers, if they so wish, to experience dynamically enriched scientific articles. Utopia Documents is publisher-independent and is providing ‘article-of-the-future-like’ enrichment for any modern PDF (bitmap-only image scans excepted – they can be read with Utopia Documents, but without the enrichment features). ‘Enrichment’ means easy link-outs, directly from highlighted text in the PDF, to an ever-expanding variety of data sources and scientific information and search tools. It means – for articles from participating publishers – the possibility to export any tables into a spreadsheet format, and a ‘toggle’ that converts numerical tables into easy-to-read scatter plots. It means Altmetrics, whenever available, that lets the reader see how articles are doing. It means a comments function that lets researchers (and students) carry out relevant discussions that stay right with the paper, rather than having to go off onto a blog somewhere. It means being able to quickly flick through the images and illustrations in an article. With Utopia Documents, publishers and libraries can offer enriched scientific articles just by encouraging the scientists and students they serve to use the free Utopia Documents PDF-reader, and so make more of the scientific literature at hand. Utopia Documents is truly free – registration is only needed if one uses the comments function (for reasons of maintaining the integrity of scientific discourse, Utopia Documents does not allow anonymous comments). Some journals, such as the Biochemical Journal published by Portland Press, and those published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, provide extra tags in their PDFs that enable Utopia Documents to extend its functionality even further, for instance by rendering pictures of protein structures into dynamic, rotatable, manipulable 3D formats. Publishers who wish to do the same or introduce similar features are encouraged to take up contact with us at info@utopiadocs.com. |
| Access, Openness, and Why We Teach | Peer to Peer Review Posted: 24 May 2012 03:18 PM PDT Library Journal, (24 May 2012) “What with the Elsevier boycott (now closing in on 12,000 signatures) and this week’s White House “We the People” petition to make federally-funded research public (which, as I write this, has surged past the halfway point), it feels as if we’re making serious progress toward open access. What has changed is that many scientists and scholars are finally saying ‘this is a crazy way to do things; we can do better. We need scholarship to be more open, more shared, more public.’ As Winston Hide wrote in theGuardian about his decision to resign as associate editor of the Elsevier journal Genomics, ‘I can no longer work for a system that puts profits over access to research.’ My first exposure to what was then called the ‘serials crisis’ was in 1980 or 1981, when I did a library school project and ended up talking to the head of collection development at the University of Texas Libraries... Three decades and an Internet later, the fact that no library can provide access to all knowledge no matter how much money we spend is finally getting through to those who create the stuff. This isn’t a serials crisis; it’s a knowledge crisis – and an opportunity for change. ... Does Information literacy matter? Though some of these seniors are heading off to graduate school, many are not, and I always wonder how those others will apply what they learned through four years of exposure to an academic library and the discipline of research. I believe that the kind of inquiry we encourage matters, that this aspect of a liberal education has the potential to be liberating. Our graduates should be able to seek information, think independently, question authority, and join the conversations through which we discover new things, settle disputes, and solve problems so that our weary, damaged world will be a little bit better. Libraries were invented for the purpose of sharing knowledge. Knowledge no longer needs to be stored on shelve in libraries to be shared. Yet somewhere along the line, we agreed to curtail sharing and define access in a parochial, stingy way, access that leaves our graduates out. But that may finally be changing. If we academic librarians think information literacy is important, we need to do whatever we can to make knowledge more universally shared, not something that we only share with our immediate community. Because that world out there is where our graduates live. Which reminds me . . . have you signed the petition yet? |
| World Bank Live Event Report: Open Access Policy and Development - Creative Commons Posted: 24 May 2012 03:16 PM PDT creativecommons.org “On Monday, the World Bank hosted an event called What the World Bank’s Open Access Policy Means for Development (you can view the video recording of the event at the link or embedded below). Participants included Peter Suber from Harvard University, Michael Carroll from American University (Mike is on the Board of Directors at Creative Commons), and Cyril Muller and Adam Wagstaff from the World Bank. The discussion was timely given the Bank’s recently-announced Open Access Policy and Open Knowledge Repository. We blogged about the Bank’s announcement of these two great initiatives. The World Bank’s Open Access Policy requires that all research outputs and knowledge products published by the Bank be licensed Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) as a default. The conversation Monday revolved around the impact and potential for World Bank research — and open access in general — for development in countries around the world. For example, how will access and reuse of research under an open access policy create opportunities to solve large global challenges such as climate change and hunger? The panelists jumped in, and stated that an immediate, baseline benefit of the open access policy is that now, World Bank research is aggregated in one place and made available for free to anyone with an internet connection... Mike Carroll noted the importance of addressing copyright concerns in open policies. Even when research is made available for free online, if readers are unclear about the rights available to them, the articles and data will not be as valuable or impactful. This is especially important in developing nations, where republication and moving information from the Internet to an offline environment requires copyright permission. With open licenses such as CC BY chosen by the World Bank, permission to republish and translate articles into other languages is automatically granted. Suber and Muller said that one benefit of an open access policy (especially when combined with open access to the underlying data) is that it can help validate research and work toward consensus on a particular issue, such as climate change. This in turn can help policymakers make better, research-driven decisions. Muller said that open access promotes collaboration between colleagues, even those with different skill sets and backgrounds. With this comes the increased possibility of solving complex research problems in novel ways... This information will help increase the audience for important Bank research and will promote cross-border transfer of information, especially in a south-south direction (as opposed to north-south)... To highlight the dire situation in pricing for traditional journals, the panelists discussed Harvard’s recent announcement about the unsustainable cost of scholarly journal subscriptions. Suber noted that even with a journal budget of $9 million per year, the Harvard University Library realizes it cannot afford the ongoing agreements with commercial journal publishers...” |
| BetaKit » Scholrly Launching Search Engine for Academic Research Posted: 24 May 2012 03:13 PM PDT betakit.com “Every year, there are countless academic papers published in every discipline, and graduate students and professors are constantly trying to tap into academic research from new authors around the world. Atlanta-based startup Scholrly is trying to make searching for and identifying relevant academic research easier with its new search engine for academics. Scholrly, which is launching in early June and is currently being tested by professors at Georgia Tech, allows users to search for academic papers in disciplines including computer science and IT. The purpose of Scholrly is two-fold; it provides a search engine for academic writings, and it lets the online community get to know academics and experts in certain fields... The site then provides the link to where publication can be downloaded or purchased, which eliminates any copyright issues. Scholrly only works as the middle man between the researcher and the publisher, and it plans to monetize by partnering with publishers and authors to promote their works and help sell them. At the moment, the site is entirely self-funded. The site will be open for beta on June 5, and will be free for users... To compete with the other search engines, Scholrly is planning to add a filtering system for searches, sorting for specific networks or groups of authors, and providing contextually relevant content. ‘We want to allow users to choose a team of professors to listen to,’ said Pon. Also, there are 1.5 million articles published per year according to Scholrly, which means the market is a large one to tackle. Ultimately, Pon said Scholrly’s goal is ‘to compete with Google Scholar, or replace it...’ |
| UK PubMed Central Blog: Increasing proportion of UKPMC articles are open access Posted: 24 May 2012 03:11 PM PDT ukpmc.blogspot.co.uk “A previous post on this blog showed how the proportion of open access content in UKPMC was increasing. By open access, we mean ‘free to read AND free to reuse’, at least for non-commercial purposes, although all the content on UKPMC is free to read. At that time the trend reported showed that the proportion of open access content had grown to 33% in 2009. In 2010, the proportion of articles that are open access has risen to 41% of the articles published that year, or almost 70,000 articles in real numbers. The graph below shows the growth of open access articles in UKPMC between 2001 and 2010.” |
| SOBA: Social Media for Science Outreach -- Thursday, May 24, 2012 from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM (PT) Posted: 24 May 2012 03:06 PM PDT socialmediaoutreach.eventbrite.com Use the link above to register for the free event described as follows: “Social media has revolutionized communication, including how scientific methods and results are shared. Today, scientists are blogging, tweeting, and participating in real-time, online dialogs with the public and with each. University labs, publications, and science museums are getting into the act as well, spreading interest in science and engaging with their communities through Facebook and YouTube and other channels. But how do you gain an audience and spread knowledge and enthusiasm for science? What are the pitfalls and opportunities? Join the SOBA community and active social media practitioners in science for a gathering at swissnex San Francisco on how social media can be utilized for science outreach. Speakers Brad Voytek, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist; Amie Wong, Marketing Manager at the California Academy of Sciences; science media personality Kirsten Sanford (“Dr. Kiki”), and others share success stories and lessons learned. Presentations are followed by a panel discussion, audience Q&A, and follow-up conversation at a nearby bar (to be announced at the event)!” |
| OAPEN: OA Monographs in an international perspective Posted: 24 May 2012 03:04 PM PDT www.slideshare.net Use the link to access the slideshare posted by Ronald Snijder, OAPEN Foundation, on May 9, 2012 for a presentation to the DFG (German Research Foundation). A brief description of the presentation from the OAPEN Foundation website reads as follows: “OAPEN presents at the DFG-Workshop ‘Open Access für wissenschaftliche Monografien’ The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) held a workshop on Open Access monographs in the German context. Members of the OAPEN Foundation were also invited, and held two presentations: [1] OA Monographs in an international perspective (by Eelco Ferwerda): http://slidesha.re/JGiuzW [2] Research on Open Access monographs – a short review (by Ronald Snijder): http://slidesha.re/JGiAre” |
| Research on open access monographs – a short review Posted: 24 May 2012 03:01 PM PDT www.slideshare.net Use the link to access the slideshare posted by Ronald Snijder, OAPEN Foundation, on May 9, 2012 for a presentation to the DFG (German Research Foundation). A brief description of the presentation from the OAPEN Foundation website reads as follows: “OAPEN presents at the DFG-Workshop ‘Open Access für wissenschaftliche Monografien’ The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) held a workshop on Open Access monographs in the German context. Members of the OAPEN Foundation were also invited, and held two presentations: [1] OA Monographs in an international perspective (by Eelco Ferwerda): http://slidesha.re/JGiuzW [2] Research on Open Access monographs – a short review (by Ronald Snijder): http://slidesha.re/JGiAre” oa.new oa.presentations oa.books oa.studies oa.oapen oa.doab oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.licensing oa.libraries oa.librarians oa.fees oa.hybrid oa.deposits oa.preservation oa.recommendations oa.reports |
| UCSF Implements Policy to Make Research Papers Freely Accessible to Public | www.ucsf.edu Posted: 24 May 2012 02:57 PM PDT www.ucsf.edu “The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest scientific institution in the nation to adopt an open-access policy and among the first public universities to do so. ‘Our primary motivation is to make our research available to anyone who is interested in it, whether they are members of the general public or scientists without costly subscriptions to journals,’ said Richard A. Schneider, PhD, chair of the UCSF Academic Senate Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, who spearheaded the initiative at UCSF. ‘The decision is a huge step forward in eliminating barriers to scientific research,’ he said. ‘By opening the currently closed system, this policy will fuel innovation and discovery, and give the taxpaying public free access to oversee their investments in research.’ UCSF is the nation’s largest public recipient of funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), receiving 1,056 grants last year, valued at $532.8 million. Research from those and other grants leads to more than 4,500 scientific papers each year in highly regarded, peer-reviewed scientific journals, but the majority of those papers are only available to subscribers who pay ever-increasing fees to the journals. The 10-campus University of California (UC) system spends close to $40 million each year to buy access to journals. The new policy requires UCSF faculty to make each of their articles freely available immediately through an open-access repository, and thus accessible to the public through search engines such as Google Scholar. Articles will be deposited in a UC repository, other national open-access repositories such as the NIH-sponsored PubMed Central, or published as open-access publications. They will then be available to be read, downloaded, mined, or distributed without barriers. Hurdles do remain, Schneider noted. One will be convincing commercial publishers to modify their exclusive publication contracts to accommodate such a policy. UC was at the forefront of the movement to open scientific papers to the public through its libraries, and generated the first major effort to create a policy of this kind in 2006. It was a complex policy, though, requiring faculty to “opt in,” and for a variety of reasons failed to garner enough faculty votes across the UC system, said Schneider... In the past few years, 141 universities worldwide, including Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have learned from UC’s initial missteps and have created very effective blanket policies similar to the one just passed at UCSF, Schneider said... Last year, scientific, technical, and medical journals generated billions of dollars in profits for their publishers, and, for the largest publishers, profit margins were around 30 percent to 40 percent, Schneider said... The UCSF vote was the result of a faculty-led initiative, and makes UCSF the first campus in the UC system to implement such a policy. It has been developed in collaboration with other UC campuses and systemwide committees, especially the UC Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication, with the ultimate goal of implementing the policy across all ten UC campuses. ‘This vote is very, very good news,’ said Karen Butter, UCSF librarian and assistant vice chancellor. ‘I am delighted that UCSF will join leading institutions in changing the model of scientific communications, and that UCSF authors have chosen to take control of their scholarship, providing new audiences with incredible opportunities to translate UCSF’s remarkable research into improving health care...’” |
| American Institute of Archaeology Under Fire from Watchdog Groups for Lack of Transparency Posted: 24 May 2012 02:55 PM PDT www.sacbee.com “On the point of open access, collectors and some archaeologists do find common ground. In response to the American Institute of Archaeology's public stand against open access, the Open Access Archaeology organization has reported that they will be removing all links to AIA materials and will cease actively promoting AIA resources. In an open letter on the AIA web site, president Elizabeth Bartman takes aim at the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2012 introduced in both houses of Congress on February 9th. Bartman says, ‘We at the Archaeological Institute of America, along with our colleagues at the American Anthropological Association and other learned societies, have taken a stand against open access we particularly object to having such a scheme imposed on us from the outside when, in fact, during the AIA's more than 130-year history, we have energetically supported the broad dissemination of knowledge…’ Coin collectors largely disagree and say that the AIA opposition to open access legislation is self-serving and ironic. Although the bill would not even apply to AIA, the organization's vocal condemnation exposes a philosophical stance against public access to taxpayer-funded research. The ‘dissemination of knowledge,’ cited by Professor Bartman, is apparently not so liberal a view as to embrace open public access. Collectors are reminded of George Orwell's words, ‘Who controls the past controls the future.’ Independent scholars, including private collectors of ancient coins and other utilitarian objects, have long complained about a lack of access to archaeological research materials. Many feel that the attitudes and policies of academic archaeology are regressive and purposely repress public knowledge—not unlike the cloistered academia of the Middle Ages. In their scholarly publications, the AIA has for decades restricted research information about artifacts that had not been discovered through sanctioned archaeological excavations. The Ancient Coin Collectors Guild is a ‘grassroots’ non-profit organization that has been waging a legal battle against broad-reaching, AIA-supported, import restrictions that unilaterally target American collectors and the associated trade. Collectors, who widely favor open access, point out that the vast majority of published material about ancient coins is due to the work of private collectors, independent scholars, coin dealers, and auction houses.” |
| Petition Urges White House to Require Public Access to Federally Financed Research Posted: 24 May 2012 02:52 PM PDT Wired Campus, (23 May 2012) “Building off recent momentum behind their cause, a group of public-access advocates has started a petition asking the Obama administration to require that work supported by taxpayer money be accessible online. The petition, from Access2Research, went live on the White House’s We the People public-petition site late Sunday night. Organizers got the word out quickly and broadly via social media (see the Twitter hashtag #OAMonday) and with the help of like-minded groups. By Wednesday afternoon, close to 13,000 people had signed, more than half the goal of 25,000. According to the site’s rules, if a petition gets 25,000 signatures within 30 days, it goes to the president’s chief of staff and will get a response from the White House. Only two paragraphs long, the petition gets to the point quickly: ‘We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.’ John Wilbanks, a senior fellow in entrepreneurship at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, decided to try a petition after he and other open-access proponents met recently with John Holdren, science adviser to President Obama. ‘It was a nice meeting, but everyone’s always very noncommittal, and it was sort of the same old same old,’ Mr. Wilbanks said. ‘Something had to change the conversation.’ Three other champions of open access joined Mr. Wilbanks in creating the petition: Michael W. Carroll, a professor of law at American University’s Washington College of Law; Heather Joseph, executive director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, or Sparc; and Mike Rossner, executive director of Rockefeller University Press. So Mr. Wilbanks et al. decided that ‘we might as well see if we can go direct to the public.’ This may be an auspicious time to get the public to weigh in. Mr. Holdren heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which last fall put out calls for input on public access to scholarly publications and to data. No policies have been issued yet as a result. Meanwhile, recent debates on three bills–the Stop Online Piracy Act, the Protect Intellectual Property Act, and the Research Works Act–called more attention to the issue of online access to information. Those bills failed to move forward, while one favored by open-access champions, the Federal Research Public Access Act, got a boost when the commercial scholarly publisher Elsevier became the target of a boycott by researchers angry over its journal-pricing and access policies. That boycott petition, the Cost of Knowledge, has attracted almost 12,000 signers...” |
| » OAPEN-UK: Y1: Initial Focus Groups Posted: 24 May 2012 02:45 PM PDT oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org [The following is a selection from the project overview provided by the OPEN_UK website: “Our newest ebook project, OAPEN-UK, commenced in October 2010 and is due to run until spring 2015. OAPEN-UK is a collaborative research project gathering evidence to help stakeholders make informed decisions on the future of open access scholarly monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences (HSS). Funded by JISC and the AHRC, OAPEN-UK will partner with publishers, research councils, authors, researchers and institutions in a practical, real time pilot that will gather a range of qualitative and quantitative data. The data will be evaluated to help stakeholders better understand the challenges and developments required to support open access scholarly monographs... The project will commence by consulting with a range of stakeholders to get an understanding of the current monograph publishing environment. Once the consultation stage is completed, the requirements and knowledge gathered will be used to create an invitation to tender.] A status update on the OAPEN-UK project reads as follows: “The initial focus groups are designed to identify the most significant issues and concerns about OA monograph publishing for each group of stakeholders. The focus groups include between 8 – 12 participants who work in groups to discuss and identify the barriers and opportunities and key questions that arise in a move to an open access model. They categorise these into 4 fields – technical, attitudinal, financial and administrative. Participants then agree the top priority issues and discuss these together. You can read the findings from the focus groups below ... The findings will be used to help identify key areas for discussion in the interviews and surveys that will take place as part of a following work package.” |
| Fae: Monmouth becomes the world's first Wiki Town Posted: 24 May 2012 02:41 PM PDT faenwp.blogspot.co.uk “My weekend was spent with a crowd of Wikipedia enthusiasts enjoying the smart town of Monmouth. It enjoys a long history from being the site of what may be the earliest Roman fort in Wales (Blestium), a 10th century Norman castle and the birth place of King Henry V. It has become even smarter as the town Council decided to become the first town in Wales to roll out free wifi, and at the same time ensure there is relevant and fun open knowledge content about their town by partnering with Wikimedia UK to establish a world wide volunteer network (my buzzword is "e-volunteers") to write interesting Wikipedia articles about everything of interest in many, many languages. Around the town, most visible in shop windows and public information and direction signs, there are beautifully made plaques with a name of an attraction and a two dimensional bar code. These can be scanned by anyone with a smart phone or tablet using applications like Google Goggles to whisk them off to a Wikipedia article about the relevant cultural attraction or profession. Thereally clever bit, is that if your mobile device uses a non-English language (such as Welsh, Spanish or Hungarian) then you are automatically directed to an article in your device's preferred language by the free QRpedia service... The Library (who happen to be located in a delightful restored historic building) have quietly have got on with their experiment of adding QRcodes to books and the tops of shelves so that the public can use their mobile devices to read Wikipedia articles on author biographies and topic areas (such as the history of Monmouthshire)... As we always seem to discover when us Wikimedians get a chance to chat with GLAM professionals (that's jargon for Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums), we share the same values and mission to deliver free and open access to the world's knowledge... Another enthusiast was Linda Tomos (director of CyMAL - Museums Archives and Libraries Wales, part of the Welsh Assembly Government), who has responsibility for Welsh cultural programme and funding. She was interested to hear about our progress inside the British Library and The National Archives, and she had some lovely case studies to consider on how open knowledge principles should apply to her projects of 3D digitisation of Welsh historic artefacts and the mapping and documentation of preserved historic buildings. As Linda is heavily involved in the funding side, I suggested we work together on promoting a set of shared values for the access, preservation and openness that might become expected criteria for funding of public projects. It's the sort of thing our on-wiki collaboration works well with, so I have knocked up a stub at Open Knowledge manifesto for Wales for everyone interested to help with creating... My radio interview about Monmouthpedia was put out on the 22nd on the BBC World Service, World Update programme. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00rzzmw @8'40'' (for the next 7 days)> ...” |
| Open Educational Resources. Open Education Initiative. Posted: 24 May 2012 02:36 PM PDT Subject Research Guides Open Educational Resources Open Education Initiative “In the spring semester of 2011, the Provost's Office and the University Libraries launched the Open Education Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. This initiative incentivizes the use of textbook alternatives through ten $1,000 grants to faculty. Using any combination of Open Educational Resources and proprietary Library resources, this initiative aims to bring about new ways of conceptualizing higher education tools, hopefully saving undergraduate students hundreds of dollars each year. Below is a copy of the Open Education Initiative announcement and guidelines. We are currently accepting applications for the third round of Open Education Initiative grants. We will be giving out two grants of $2,500 each to two faculty members who are teaching a Gen Ed course with an enrollment of over 300 students. Please see the announcement below for further information... Additional literature on open educational resources is available at: http://guides.library.umass.edu/oer... Send your proposal by e-mail Carol Barr, Vice Provost for Undergraduate & Continuing Education at cbarr@isenberg.umass.edu. Faculty receiving grants are asked to deploy their alternative textbook option in the fall of 2012 or spring of 2013...” |
| Opening Up About the Open Data Institute - Open Enterprise Posted: 24 May 2012 02:31 PM PDT blogs.computerworlduk.com “As I've noted before, open data is one area where the UK government shines - unlike open source, where it has yet to deliver the goods. One of its bright ideas was the creation of an Open Data Institute (ODI), which I wrote about at the end of last year. It still doesn't exist yet, but it does have a Web site with some interesting further information about its intentions. The most detailed document is entitled "The ODI business plan" [.pdf]... The 60-page business plan fills out these ideas in some detail, as well as describing the organisation's structure and finances. It's well-worth reading, not least because it also includes some interesting case studies of how others have used open data to save and make money. Overall, I'm impressed by the both the scale and completeness of the ambitions here. I think it's absolutely right to seek to engage with business, government and the academic world. They all represent different ways of understanding and using open data, and it's important to include every approach in this field, which is, after all, still being defined...” |
| access2research - Why Access2Research Matters For Patients Posted: 24 May 2012 02:29 PM PDT access2research.org “... There are three good reasons why this petition... matters for patients and their supporters. [1] There is much health research carried out beyond the NIH by other US Federal agencies. A lot of the basic research on biology relevant to disease is funded by the National Science Foundation. Much of the important structural work that underpins drug design and optimisation is carried out at National Laboratories funded by the Department Of Energy. Indeed, the Human Genome Project began in the DoE. And a lot of the most important research lies between these different areas, funded by multiple agencies. A global mandate will ensure that the research critical for the health of you or your family doesn’t slip between the policy cracks between agencies. [2] Patients are the exemplar par excellence of the empowered citizen. If everyone is a patient, everyone is also concerned about the other big issues facing us today that can be informed by access to scientific information: energy; the environment; and the creation of jobs. Patients as a group have an opportunity to show the rest of the community what can be achieved when they are able to engage with high quality research information. [3] Research is a global enterprise. The majority of research relevant to your health is done outside the United Statues. Although the petition is a US action it will greatly help open access advocates to build momentum globally that means better access to all research, regardless of where it was carried out. The UK science minister recently described the need for coordinated global action as a major challenge in expanding access. A strong message from US patient advocates will make it easier to achieve global access. But the real reason the petition is a patient issue is that this is just one round. This action is important for the NIH mandate in two ways. First by taking the policy ratchet one step further we protect the NIH mandate from any future actions that seek to roll it back, such as the Research Works Act. Secondly by demonstrating the power and depth of public opinion we are in a much better position to take the argument for public access to policy makers globally. We won’t win that in this round, but by winning this round we put ourselves in a much stronger position for the next one.” |
| Text mining: what do publishers have against this hight-tech tool Posted: 24 May 2012 02:26 PM PDT www.guardian.co.uk “Professor Peter Murray-Rust was looking for new ways to make better drugs. Dr Heather Piwowar wanted to track how scientific papers were cited and shared by researchers around the world. Dr Casey Bergman wanted to create a way for busy doctors and scientists to quickly navigate the latest research in genetics, to help them treat patients and further their research. All of them needed access to tens of thousands of research papers at once... to look for unseen patterns and associations across the millions of words in the articles. This technique, called text mining, is a vital 21st-century research method. It uses powerful computers to find links between drugs and side effects, or genes and diseases, that are hidden within the vast scientific literature. These are discoveries that a person scouring through papers one by one may never notice. A report published by McKinsey Global Institute last year said that "big data" technologies such as text and data mining had the potential to create €250bn (£200bn) of annual value to Europe's economy, if researchers were allowed to make full use of it. Unfortunately, in most cases, text mining is forbidden. Bergman, Murray-Rust, Piwowar and countless other academics are prevented from using the most modern research techniques because the big publishing companies such as Macmillan, Wiley and Elsevier, which control the distribution of most of the world's academic literature, by default do not allow text mining of the content that sits behind their expensive paywalls. Any such project requires special dispensation from – and time-consuming individual negotiations with – the scores of publishers that may be involved. ‘That's the key fact which is halting progress in this field,’ said Robert Kiley, head of digital services at the Wellcome Trust. Bergman, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Manchester, used text mining to create a tool to help scientists make sense of the ever-growing research literature on genetics. Though genetic sequences of living organisms are publicly available, discussions of what the sequences do and how they interact with each other sits within the text of scientific papers that are mostly behind paywalls. Working with Max Haeussler, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, Bergman came up with Text2genome, which identifies strings of text in thousands of papers that look like the letters of a DNA sequence – a gene, say – and links together all papers that mention or discuss that sequence. Text2genome could allow a clinician or researcher who may not be an expert on a particular gene to access the relevant literature quickly and easily. Haeussler's attempts to scale up Text2genome, however, have hit a wall, and his blog is a litany of the problems in trying to gain permissions from the scores of publishers to download and add papers to the project. ‘If we don't have access to the papers to do this text mining, we can't make those connections,’ says Bergman. Murray-Rust, a chemist at the University of Cambridge, has used text mining to look for ways to make chemical compounds, such as pharmaceuticals, more efficiently. ‘If you have a compound you don't know how to make and it's similar to one you do know how to make, then the machine would be able to suggest a number of methods which would allow you to do it.’ But, although his university subscribes to the journals he needs to do this work, he is forbidden from using the content in what he calls ‘a modern manner using machines’. A member of his research group accidentally tripped the alarms of a publisher's website when he downloaded several dozen papers at once from journals to which the university had already paid subscription fees. The publisher saw it as an attempt to illegally download content and immediately blocked access to its content for the entire university. The UK government supports open access to publicly funded research and the text mining that it would allow. In a report for the Intellectual Property Office last year on intellectual property and growth, Professor Ian Hargreaves proposed that researchers should be allowed to text mine articles to which they had already subscribed – a position supported by science funding organisations such as the Wellcome Trust... The brewing controversy between scientists and publishers over access to scientific information has also caught the attention of investors. In a briefing note on the publishing company Elsevier, Claudio Aspesi of Bernstein Research warned investors that publishers might be on the verge of falling out with scientists. ‘We continue to be baffled by Elsevier's perception that controlling everything (for example by severely restricting text and data mining applications) is essential to protect its economics,’ he wrote...” |
| Hungarian Version of RoMEO Released Posted: 24 May 2012 02:23 PM PDT groups.google.com [From the SPARC OA Forum] “SHERPA is pleased to announce that a new Hungarian language version of its RoMEO database is now available at: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/?la=hu The RoMEO interface has already been translated into Hungarian, and our Hungarian partners HUNOR have started adding RoMEO data directly for Hungarian publishers and journals. Existing RoMEO data for other publishers is in the process of being translated. We are grateful to our colleagues in HUNOR for translating the original English into Hungarian. Portuguese and Spanish versions of RoMEO were released in 2010 and 2011 respectively, and SHERPA is working on further language versions for release in the future. Please contact us if you are interested in any specific languages and would like to help with translations. ...About RoMEO ... RoMEO is the key database of publisher's open access policies, used worldwide by repository administrators and academics to check their rights to self-archive their publications. RoMEO is currently funded by JISC. In addition to our own journals database, journal information is kindly provided by: the British Library's Zetoc service hosted by MIMAS; DOAJ, a service from Lund University Libraries, and Entrez hosted by NCBI... About HUNOR ... The HUNOR (HUNgarian Open Repositories) consortium was established by the libraries of Hungarian higher education institutions and the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences to advance national open access practices (http://www.open-access.hu/).” |
| ALA Press Release | American Library Association Posted: 24 May 2012 02:19 PM PDT www.ala.org “The American Library Association (ALA) today released a new report examining critical issues underlying equitable access to digital content through our nation’s libraries. In the report, titled ‘E-content: The Digital Dialogue,’ authors explore an unprecedented and splintered landscape in which several major publishers refuse to sell e-books to libraries; proprietary platforms fragment our cultural record; and reader privacy is endangered. ‘Broad information access is essential for communities to compete in the global knowledge economy,’ said ALA President Molly Raphael. ‘As more and more content is delivered digitally, we simply cannot afford to lock down books and lock out readers. This timely supplement addresses the need to protect fair and reasonable library access to digital information.’ The report, published as a supplement to American Libraries magazine, explores various licensing models and the state of librarian-publisher relations. Additionally, the report provides an update on the ALA-wide effort to promote access to digital content (co-chaired by Robert Wolven, associate university librarian at Columbia University, and Sari Feldman, executive director of the Cuyahoga County Public Library). The effort includes meeting with publishers, distributors and other important stakeholders; championing public advocacy, and writing position papers that advance practical business models without compromising library values... ‘Publishers, distributors and libraries must accept that new models of lending will not look like the old print model,’ writes Robert C. Maier, director of the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners, and Carrie Russell, director of the ALA Program on Public Access to Information. ‘We are not just trying to solve a library lending problem, although that is the current emergency...’” |
| Posted: 23 May 2012 01:07 PM PDT jlsc-pub.org Use the link to access the full text article published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. The abstract reads as follows: “INTRODUCTION The Accessibility Quotient (AQ), a new measure for assisting authors and librarians in assessing and characterizing the degree of accessibility for a group of papers, is proposed and described. The AQ offers a concise measure that assesses the accessibility of peer-reviewed research produced by an individual or group, by incorporating data on open availability to readers worldwide, the degree of financial barrier to access, and journal quality. The paper reports on the context for developing this measure, how the AQ is calculated, how it can be used in faculty outreach, and why it is a useful lens to use in assessing progress towards more open access to research. METHODS Journal articles published in 2009 and 2010 by faculty members from one department in each of MIT’s five schools were examined. The AQ was calculated using economist Ted Bergstrom’s Relative Price Index to assess affordability and quality, and data from SHERPA/RoMEO to assess the right to share the peer-reviewed version of an article. RESULTS The results show that 2009 and 2010 publications by the Media Lab and Physics have the potential to be more open than those of Sloan (Management), Mechanical Engineering, and Linguistics & Philosophy. DISCUSSION Appropriate interpretation and applications of the AQ are discussed and some limitations of the measure are examined, with suggestions for future studies which may improve the accuracy and relevance of the AQ. CONCLUSION The AQ offers a concise assessment of accessibility for authors, departments, disciplines, or universities who wish to characterize or understand the degree of access to their research output, capturing additional dimensions of accessibility that matter to faculty.” |
| Posted: 23 May 2012 01:06 PM PDT okfnpad.org Use the link to access the list posted publicly by the Open Knowledge Foundation on their Open Knowledge Pad. The list is briefly described as follows: “This is an informal list of institutions publicly endorsing @Access2ResearchFor press coverage, scroll to the bottom. Please add links to public statements or tweets originating from official handles, no RT unless obvious that they are institutional endorsements...” |
| Open Access Thematic Workshop at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Posted: 23 May 2012 01:04 PM PDT COAR, (16 May 2012) “This week’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum in Geneva will include a thematic workshop on Open Access. COAR is a co-sponsor of this event, along with IFLA, EIFL, and SPARC. The workshop will take place on Thursday, 17 May from 16.15-18.00 CST. A live stream of the event will be presented for all interested participants. Details are available from the ITU website: http://groups.itu.int/wsis-forum2012/Home.aspx ... Silvia Nakano, Director of the Science & Technology National Directorate of Physical Resources, Ministry of Science Technology and Productive Innovation (Argentina) will be representing COAR and will be speaking about Argentina’s experiences with Open Access.” |
| Posted: 23 May 2012 01:03 PM PDT TechKNOW Tools, (23 May 2012) “Yesterday, I attended the 3rd Annual Open Access Symposium at UNT (#oa12unt). It was a full day of talking about open data, sharing research and collaborative efforts and examples in #highered. The open access process is not as simple as you think. It was interesting to hear from researchers, academics, librarians, industry partners, and data managers about what it means to be ‘open’ and accessible for others. Here are a few open notes I took and a Storify I curated from the day... These final thoughts left me questioning about how higher education will engage in open access and consider what academic tenure/promotion will look like in the future. The open movement is present in my learning network, among the Social and Open Educators like @courosa and academic contributors who want to End Knowledge Cartels in publication such as @academicdave, There are many open and transparent academics/educators contributing to the open movement – but there needs to be more. And more importantly, academic institutions need to recognize and accept open scholarship. I know the #oa12unt symposium lit the fire for me to finish the layout and publish the first issue of the Learning and Performance Quarterly. This student-lead, open access journal is an open access publication that I am proud to edit and coordinate with a phenomenal group of reviewers and a great editorial team. The inaugural issue was JUST published online today, and is available for your reading and sharing pleasure HERE.” |
| Harvard University’s 12 million records now in LibraryThing Posted: 23 May 2012 01:03 PM PDT The LibraryThing Blog, (15 May 2012) “On April 24 the Harvard Library announced that more than 12 million MARC records from across its 73 libraries would be made available under the library’s Open Metadata policy and a Creative Commons 0 public domain license. The announcement stunned the library world, because Harvard went against the wishes of the shared-cataloging company OCLC, who have long sought to prevent libraries from releasing records in this way. (For background on OCLC’s efforts see past blog posts.) It took a while to process, but we’ve finally completed adding all 12.3 million MARC records (3.1GB of bibliographic goodness!) to LibraryThing. They’ve gone into OverCat, our giant index of library records from around the world—now numbering more than 51 million records! As a result, when searching OverCat under ‘Add books,’ you’ll now see results ‘from Harvard OpenMetadata.’ |
| Global council aims to coordinate science : Nature News & Comment Posted: 23 May 2012 01:01 PM PDT www.nature.com “International research collaborations are multiplying fast, with one-quarter of the world’s science and engineering publications now featuring authors from more than one country. But not all national funding agencies manage their science in the same way — researchers in China win grant funding through very different processes from their European peers, for example — which can hamper projects that span borders. To tackle the problem, a voluntary forum, the Global Research Council (GRC), has been formed to share best practice and encourage common principles. Last week, the leaders of about 50 national research-funding agencies met at the headquarters of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) in Arlington, Virginia, to discuss the GRC’s agenda: issues such as peer review, data sharing, research integrity, open access, career development and ethical conduct in research on humans. As the largest-ever gathering of research agencies, it was a ‘historic moment’, says Suzanne Fortier, president of Canada’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council... NSF director Subra Suresh, who coordinated the meeting, hopes that the GRC will broker international collaborations and co-funding arrangements to boost the globalization of science (see ‘Global science’)... The GRC’s first meeting produced a set of short, uncontroversial statements on common principles for peer review to assess the merit of proposed scientific projects. The principles include transparency, integrity, impartiality and confidentiality, but are not legally binding, serving only as common aspirations... Before the next major GRC meeting — in Berlin in 2013, by which time the council is expected to have almost 100 members — the group will discuss research integrity and open access to scientific data and published research. The basic principles of research integrity have already been laid down in international guidelines such as the Singapore Statement, agreed by researchers and funders in 2010. But Matthias Kleiner, who heads the DFG, Germany’s main research-funding agency, says that the GRC could discuss practical questions such as how to tackle the problem of researchers being sanctioned for misconduct in one country, but continuing their research freely elsewhere. Agreeing on principles for open access will be much tougher, says Kleiner. But it is such an important issue, he adds, that ‘only in a global collaboration could we come to really reliable, practical, sustainable, solutions’. |
| Nerds, Get Excited for New Food Science Journal - New York Restaurants and Dining - Fork in the Road Posted: 23 May 2012 01:00 PM PDT blogs.villagevoice.com “A new, open-access food science journal from Wiley titled Food Science & Nutrition will publish the latest peer-reviewed research related to food and nutrition including original research, reviews, and editorial. The journal will be edited by Dr. Y. Martin Lo, Associate Professor of Food Bioprocess Engineering at the University of Maryland (Lo is also the editor in chief of the Journal of Food Processing and Preservation and previously served as president of the Chinese American Food Society ). The journal is already open for submissions and articles will be made available online under a Creative Commons license.” |
| Opening up government data: a practical guide Posted: 23 May 2012 12:59 PM PDT www.guardian.co.uk “No government can afford to become isolated from the society it serves, otherwise it risks becoming distant and clumsy, trapped by its own, self-referential routines. That was the clear message in last September's report, entitled The civic long tail by UK thinktank Demos. This report on the the willingness of governments to communicate more openly with their citizens, is part of an emerging trend that shows governments all over the world are starting to open up their data vaults for access by all interested parties... ‘as the Demos report states "relationships between government and its citizens (as voters, service users and taxpayers) should become more open, transparent and so more accountable. Government should be able to share much more information with citizens, who should be able to see in much finer detail what decisions government is taking and why. Citizens should in turn be able to contribute their views, ideas and feedback’. Things got moving in the right direction when the US government launched its Data.gov initiative in May 2009 as part of president Barack Obama's Open Government Directive [http://www.whitehouse.gov/open] , which instructs all federal agencies to use technology that makes their activities more transparent and enables them to engage more actively with citizens. Data.gov has become a collective data repository for government data from all agencies with the primary goal of improving access to federal data and expanding the creative use of those data beyond the walls of government. It enables the public to participate in government by providing downloadable federal datasets to build applications, conduct analyses, and perform research. The site provides access to more than 390,000 datasets, over 1,100 government applications and close to 240 citizen-developed apps... Twenty-eight other countries have followed the US example... We feel open data can really have a long tail effect on our society, instigating a shift from a relatively small number of ‘hits’ at the top of the demand curve towards a huge number of niches ‘in the tail’ as the cost of production and distribution continues to drop... I believe an innovation strategy for open data in the public domain should meet five requirements ... “ |
| Data.gov Celebrates Third Anniversary Posted: 23 May 2012 12:58 PM PDT www.gisuser.com “Today marks the third anniversary of the U.S. government’s open data site, Data.gov. The first national open data site, Data.gov led the way in opening government data around the world. Now 30 countries host open data sites and they are key tools in the global open government movement. Growing from 47 datasets in 2009 to nearly 450,000 datasets today, Data.gov reaches across 172 federal agencies to bring data to innovators, developers, analysts and citizens across the nation. The data shows up in smart phone apps, websites, and information that lets people buy smarter, use energy more efficiently, and find better health-care solutions each day. Over the past year alone, Data.gov has not only added more datasets, it has added more opportunities for interaction with them, and more opportunities for collaborating and sharing information both nationwide and around the world. In fact, President Obama’s Open Government U.S. National Action Plan considers Data.gov an important tool to spur innovation in the United States and around the globe. Data.gov has become a gathering spot for those with shared interests through its topic-based communities. Expanding these communities is a key priority of President Obama’s U.S. National Action Plan, which heralds six Data.gov communities: – Education, Health, Law, Energy, Safety, and Research. These communities bring together experts from the public, academia, industry, and government to address the national challenges in energy, health, and law, and this year new communities launched on safety, education, manufacturing, oceans, ethics, developers, and business. From organizing challenges to inspire new innovations to supporting code-a-thons in cities, to building platforms for entrepreneurs to find new technologies and grow their businesses—Data.gov is putting federal data to work for Americans. Join the celebration, discover new information, and find ways to get more from your money, your time, and your business. Visit Data.gov! ...” |
| Open Science and Crowd Science: Selected Sites and Resources Posted: 23 May 2012 12:56 PM PDT www.istl.org Use the link above to access the full text article published in the Spring 2012 issue of Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship. [DOI:10.5062/F48913SM] The introduction reads as follows: ... “New Internet technologies are radically enhancing the speed and ease of scholarly communications, and are providing opportunities for conducting and sharing research in new ways. This webliography explores the emerging ‘open science’ and ‘crowd science’ movements which are making use of these new opportunities to increase collaboration and openness in scientific research. The collaboration of many researchers on a project can enhance the rate of data-collection and analysis, and ignite new ideas. In addition, since there are more eyes to spot any inaccuracies or errors, collaborative research is likely to produce better quality results. Openness early in the research process alerts others to the work resulting in less duplication of efforts. Later on in the process, openness can amplify the visibility and impact of the research results and create more opportunities for future collaborations. An increase in both openness and collaboration has the potential to significantly accelerate the progress of science. The Internet makes these trends possible and allows discussion across space and across disciplines. Indeed, it facilitates connections between scientists and the general public. Although citizen science is not a new phenomenon, the Internet is enabling more science enthusiasts to participate in the discourse than was previously feasible and more scientists are beginning to recognize the valuable contributions collaborations of this kind can make.” |
| Posted: 23 May 2012 12:55 PM PDT www.istl.org Use the link above to access the full text article published in the Spring 2012 issue of Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship. [DOI: 10.5062/F4D21VHZ] The introduction reads as follows: “As many information professionals know, searching the Internet landscape using the Google search engine will find only 20% of the information available on the Internet. Not only are there alternative general search engines beyond Google and Yahoo, there are an abundance of specialized search engines for finding specialized content. Reaching this specialized content requires specific searching skills, knowledge of the structure of the web, and an understanding of how search engines work (Bergman 2001;Cohen 2012; Drake 2008; Fahey 2007; Lederman 2011; Sadeh 2006). Hidden information treasures can be discovered by using specialized search engines that are able to crawl the remaining 80% of the invisible web. ‘The paradox of the Invisible Web is that it's easy to understand why it exists, but it's very hard to actually define in concrete, specific terms,’ say Chris Sherman and Gary Price in their article, The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See (2003). However, they give a simple definition, ‘The Invisible Web: Text pages, files, or other often high-quality authoritative information available via the World Wide Web that general-purpose search engines cannot, due to technical limitations, or will not, due to deliberate choice, add to their indices of Web pages.’ Federated search engines are the tools used to uncover the invisible web. We decided to discover--and organize--resources valuable to science, technology, and engineering (STE) researchers through the use of such search engines. We further described these tools in the Meta-Search and/or Federated Search Engines section. In addition, we categorized and presented a number of freely available authoritative web resources including various databases from government and educational institutions not only from the United States, but from across the world, as well as open access publications, ranking tools, and many others...” |
| ACRL Urges Librarians to Sign Research Access Petition Posted: 23 May 2012 12:54 PM PDT Library Journal, (22 May 2012) “The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has urged librarians and other interested parties to sign a petition calling for public access to all federally funded research, which was posted on the White House’s ‘We the People’ website on May 21. If the petition gets 25,000 signatures within 30 days, it will be considered for action by the White House staff. ‘The Obama Administration has been actively considering the issue of Public Access to the results of Federally Funded research for the past several years,’ Kara Malenfant, ACRL scholarly communications and government relations specialist, wrote in an ACRL Insider post. ‘There is now a brief, critical window of opportunity for librarians, scholars, and taxpayers at large to demonstrate that we firmly believe open access to federally funded research should be a high priority for the Administration to act on right now.’ The open access movement has been gaining momentum in Washington in recent months. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) had co-sponsored theResearch Works Act (RWA), which would have prohibited federal agencies from adopting any policies that would authorize ‘network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher,’ even if that research was financed by federal funds. But, they declined to take further action on the bill after Dutch publishing giant Elsevier, facing harsh criticism and a growing global boycott by scientists, dropped its support in February. By contrast, the third iteration of the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), introduced in February to the House by Reps. Mike Doyle (D-PA), Kevin Yoder (R-KS) and William Lacy Clay (D-MO) and in the Senate by Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), would expand the existing Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health to 11 other federal agencies, requiring publishers to provide free online public access to all peer reviewed manuscripts and other works generated by federally funded research within six months of publication. In March, the bill gained 24 new co-sponsors in the House. ‘The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research,’ the petition reads.” |
| Time to change perspective: Hostages, not Orphans | International Communia Association Posted: 23 May 2012 12:52 PM PDT www.communia-association.org “U.S Law Professor Lydia Loren has just published a draft paper that contains what may be one of the most sensible contributions to the ongoing discussion about the ‘orphan works problem’. In her paper ‘Abandoning the Orphans: An Open Access Approach to Hostage Works‘ she makes a strong argument that the very name that has been attached to this problem may be misleading and lead to false solutions and thus should be reframed as the ‘hostage works problem’. Loren states that the term, which was first introduced in 1999, overlooks the core of the problem: ‘These works are being held hostage by a set of rules that result in an inadvertent lock-up of the expression these works contain... (p.22)’ re surprisingly powerful in understanding the current discussion on the European Union level. As we have pointed out before, the current legislative discussion is likely to make the hostage works problem even worse. This is partly to blame on the framing of the problem as an ‘orphan works’ problem that results in a focus on re-uniting these works with their ‘parent-authors’ and protecting them against inappropriate exploitation. In the second half of her paper, which proposes a solution to the problem, Loren suggests focusing on the role of access facilitators such as libraries, museums and archives (whom, in an somewhat questionable extension of the hostage works metaphor, she refers to as ‘special forces’) and their role in setting hostage works free...” |
| To know the importance of providing free access to taxpayer-funded research Posted: 23 May 2012 12:52 PM PDT InTechWeb Blog, (22 May 2012) “The petition started at the White House homepage this Monday by the Access2Research initiative has already been signed by more than 6000 supporters. It is always a hot topic and especially so in the States, of who has the right to access the results from research funded by the public, for the public. The petition, requiring free access over the Internet to journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research, aims to escalate the issue inside the White House, as 25,000 signatures in 30 days gets an official Administration response. ‘We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.’ This is how the Access2Research petition addresses the public, choosing the approach of a broad public appeal for support, straight to the people. This petition is made possible by the Obama Administration, who have created a web platform to petition the White House directly called We The People. Any petition receiving more than 25,000 digital signatures is placed on the desk of the President’s Chief of Staff and must be integrated into policy and political discussions. In order to qualify, however, the petition must gather the signatures in 30 days. So far, so good. Only two days into the appeal, and the petition is over 6000-strong. People are sharing the news on social networks and relevant websites, making it more likely that the petition will not only make it to the Chief of Staff’s office, but make a substantial impact and potentially change the debate happening right now. It is important to point out that the initiative is by no way limited to US citizens. Any open access supporter is invited to sign the petition, it is only required that they register at the White House page with a valid email.’ |
| Events - Digital Transformations of Research | Digital Scholarship @ Harvard Posted: 22 May 2012 02:24 PM PDT ds.hul.harvard.edu Use the link to for more information about the presentation taking place at Harvard on June 7, 2012 and to RSVP. A brief description reads as follows: “Ralph Schroeder and Eric Meyer of the Oxford Internet Institute will talk about digital transformations of research ... There is a fundamental change taking place in the world of research: digital tools and data shared via electronic networks are having far-reaching effects. From 'big science' physics experiments like the Large Hadron Collider which is using distributed high-performance computing to analyze massive amounts of data to humanities scholars who digitize large volumes of text to uncover changing patterns of language use, networked digital research is having profound effects on the practices of researchers. From the Grid, to the Cloud, to Big Data, research practices are ever more tightly coupled to computing. These changes can be understood on a number of levels, including organizational changes, changes in knowledge production, and in the communication of research. We propose a model for understanding the connections among these. And although these changes take place in different ways in different disciplines, we argue that, like ripples in a pond, the changes add up to a broader transformation of the landscape of research.” |
| President Obama: Make Publicly Funded Research Freely Available! - YouTube Posted: 22 May 2012 02:24 PM PDT www.youtube.com Use the link to access the video published on YouTube on May 22, 2012 by SPARC in support of and explaining the need for the access2research petition. A direct link to sign the petition is also available. |
| International Food Risk Analysis Journal-First Issue Launched Posted: 22 May 2012 01:42 PM PDT www.intechopen.com “InTech Open Access publisher, building on its collection and variety of highly successful scientific journals, announces the first issue of the International Food Risk Analysis Journal (IFRAJ), published under the Open Access model and edited with the support of Health Canada’s Food Directorate and Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ). The journal is also available in French. Dr. Samuel Godefroy, Director General of Health Canada’s Food Directorate, and Dr. Paul Brent, Chief Scientist at FSANZ, address the international scientific community underlining the significance of their newly-established collaboration with InTech as follows, ‘Health Canada's Food Directorate and Food Standards Australia New Zealand are proud to support the publication of the International Food Risk Analysis Journal (IFRAJ). Our ability to publish the outcomes of our risk analysis activities in a peer reviewed open-access journal such as IFRAJ will contribute significantly to achieving our commitment to transparency by making available the scientific underpinnings that guide Canada's and Australia/New-Zealand standard setting decisions. As the Co-Editors in Chief of IFRAJ, we invite all of our peers and colleagues in the field of food regulatory science to submit their work for publication in IFRAJ and further contribute in disseminating the knowledge base supporting food regulatory decisions internationally. ¨The first issue of the journal contains one paper that discusses internationally recognized approaches for the post-market risk assessment of food contaminants that are both genotoxic and carcinogenic, and a second paper that focuses on assessing the health risks associated with the consumption of Canadian grade A eggs internally contaminated with Salmonella Enteritidis...’" |
| US petition could tip the scales in favour of open access publishing Posted: 22 May 2012 01:38 PM PDT Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk, (22 May 2012) “The problem of access to research has been well covered in the Guardian - by analysis, by excoriation and by parable. The situation again, in short: governments and charities fund research; academics do the work, write and illustrate the papers, peer-review and edit each others' manuscripts; then they sign copyright over to profiteering corporations who put it behind paywalls and sell research back to the public who funded it and the researchers who created it. In doing so, these corporations make grotesque profits of 32%-42% of revenue - far more than, say, Apple's 24% or Penguin Books' 10%... The missing factor in this equation is the funders. Governments and charitable trusts that pay academics to carry out research naturally want the results to have the greatest possible effect. That means publishing those results openly, free for anyone to use. Suddenly it seems that funding bodies are waking up to the importance of this. In recent weeks, we've seen the Wellcome Trust promising to get tough on grant recipients who don't make their work available; the astonishing pro-open access speech by science minister David Willetts to the Publishers Association AGM; and the European Union's intention to use open access for the results of its €80 billion Horizon 2020 programme. Publishers' responses to all this have been tiresomely predictable. Commenting on the new draft open-access guidelines proposed by Research Councils UK, Graham Taylor of the Publishers Association said that publishers would not accept that authors could deposit their papers in open-access repositories six months after publication. This is pure bluster. It's none of publishers' business what conditions funders impose on authors. Publishers are only service providers, with no more right to dictate policy than suppliers of laboratory equipment. If funders choose to impose conditions, authors will have to abide by them. If that means depositing papers in open-access repositories, publishers who forbid that will simply be bypassed in favour of those that are not stuck in the 1990s. So mandates from funders are the way to break through on open access, and it's great to see the UK and European Union leading the way. The surprise at the moment is that the US government - having introduced the important and influential NIH public access policy in 2005 - seems to have fumbled the ball... Happily, an opportunity has arisen in the US to fix this. The White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy has taken a strong interest in open access, sponsoring two requests for public information in as many years. The issue also has the attention of President Obama's science adviser, who has met with both publishers and open access advocates. There is a feeling that the administration fully understands the value of open access, and that a strong demonstration of public concern could be all it takes now to goad it into action before the November election. To that end a Whitehouse.gov petition has been set up urging Obama to ‘act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research’. Such policies would bring the US in line with the UK and Europe... There is always a question of whether petitions really make a difference. But there are good reasons for optimism in this case. The White House has been looking at open access for some time and is known to be sympathetic. This is a chance to demonstrate public support for action, and the executive has the power to direct federal agencies to take that action. Also, there is already bipartisan legislation in both US houses to require public access to federally funded US research. Demonstrating public support will strengthen this legislation's chances. Change in politics comes when the opportunity for decision coincides with a clear statement of the community's view. You need both. So please sign the White House petition. You do not need to be a US citizen. Anyone aged 13 or older is eligible. Signing requires very minimal registration (email address and password), and clicking a link in a confirmation email. Do it now. You can make a difference.” |
| EOL Computable Data Challenge - Encyclopedia of Life Posted: 22 May 2012 01:37 PM PDT eol.org “Background ... EOL has spent four years aggregating text, multimedia, and hyperlinks from more than 200 content providers, representing thousands of individual contributors and a wide range of biological subjects. We have reorganized and delivered this information in a standardized format for multiple audiences, both via our user-friendly web interface and via an Application Programming Interface (API). Information is now available on nearly one million organisms ranging from sub-specific to higher taxa; most but not all information is in English and geographic scope is worldwide. The subjects and types and richness of information on each page vary; an index of richness is available for each page. All information is either in the public domain or licensed with Creative Commons licenses and therefore available for re-use and text-mining. Information is subject to curation and re-identification. However, the computability of this information has not been tested. How can EOL be used for scientific analyses? What transformations or additional computable data sources might be necessary? ... The Challenge ... We invite ideas for scientific research projects that use EOL, including the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), to answer questions in biology. The specific field of biological interest for the challenge is open; projects in ecology, evolution, behavior, conservation biology, developmental biology, or systematics may be most appropriate. Projects advancing informatics alone may be less competitive. EOL may be used as a source of biological information, to establish a sampling strategy, to assist the retrieval of computable data by mapping identifiers across sources (e.g. to accomplish name resolution), and/or in other innovative ways. Projects involving data or text or image mining of EOL or BHL content are encouraged. Current EOL data and API shall be used; suggestions for modification of content or the API could be a deliverable of the project. We encourage the use of data not yet in EOL for analyses. In all cases projects must honor terms of use and licensing as appropriate... Prize ... Total available prize funds are US$50,000. Multiple awards are possible, depending on submitted budgets. All prize funds must be spent before May 31, 2013... Submission Process ... Please describe your project idea in 3-6 pages with the following sections...” |
| Big Data Troves Stay Forbidden to Social Scientists - NYTimes.com Posted: 22 May 2012 01:36 PM PDT www.nytimes.com “When scientists publish their research, they also make the underlying data available so the results can be verified by other scientists. At least that is how the system is supposed to work. But lately social scientists have come up against an exception that is, true to its name, huge. It is ‘big data,’ the vast sets of information gathered by researchers at companies like Facebook, Google and Microsoft from patterns of cellphone calls, text messages and Internet clicks by millions of users around the world. Companies often refuse to make such information public, sometimes for competitive reasons and sometimes to protect customers’ privacy. But to many scientists, the practice is an invitation to bad science, secrecy and even potential fraud. The issue came to a boil last month at a scientific conference in Lyon, France, when three scientists from Google and the University of Cambridge declined to release data they had compiled for a paper on the popularity of YouTube videos in different countries. The chairman of the conference panel — Bernardo A. Huberman, a physicist who directs the social computing group at HP Labs here — responded angrily. In the future, he said, the conference should not accept papers from authors who did not make their data public. He was greeted by applause from the audience. In February, Dr. Huberman had published a letter in the journal Nature warning that privately held data was threatening the very basis of scientific research. ‘If another set of data does not validate results obtained with private data,’ he asked, ‘how do we know if it is because they are not universal or the authors made a mistake?’ ... The problem is not limited to the social sciences. A recent review found that 44 of 50 leading scientific journals instructed their authors on sharing data but that fewer than 30 percent of the papers they published fully adhered to the instructions. A 2008 review of sharing requirements for genetics data found that 40 of 70 journals surveyed had policies, and that 17 of those were ‘weak...’ The data-sharing policy of the journal Science says, ‘All data necessary to understand, assess and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science.’ But in the case of a 2010 article based on data from cellphone patterns, a legal agreement with the data provider prevented the researchers from even disclosing the country of origin... Similarly, an April 2011 article in the journal PLoS One stated that the research was ‘based on the records of 72.4 million calls and 17.1 million text messages accumulated over a one-month period,’ but did not identify the provider of the information. A founder of PLoS, Michael Eisen, a cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a a forceful advocate for ‘open science,’ sounded rueful about that paper in an e-mail message. ‘It’s antithetical to the basic norms of science to make claims that cannot be validated because the necessary data are proprietary,’ he wrote. The issue was foreshadowed in a 2009 essay in Science whose authors included Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a physicist at Northeastern University who was also an author of the controversial papers in Science and PLoS One. ‘Perhaps the thorniest challenges exist on the data side, with respect to access and privacy,’ they wrote. They warned that even anonymizing data sets could be imperfect, and they called for new models for collaboration between industry and academia to aid research and safeguard privacy. Last year the National Science Foundation said that researchers who receive its funds would be ‘expected’ to share data with other researchers. Many scientists agree that this is as it should be...” |
| Steelcase captures corporate heritage in DSpace | atmire Posted: 22 May 2012 01:35 PM PDT atmire.com “Steelcase Inc., a global leader in the office furniture industry, celebrated its centennial anniversary on March 16, 2012. The anniversary was the driving force for hiring Reagan Marketing + Design, LLC in 2009 to develop, implement and recommend best practices for a digital repository. Goals for the endeavor included the creation of a globally accessible system that would preserve and allow access to the corporation’s heritage materials, was quick-to-implement, user friendly, and provided secure access to many items housing intellectual property. After careful consideration, DSpace was chosen for the private Steelcase digital repository. In 2011 the anniversary team strategized various solutions for collecting stories from people around the world, DSpace again was determined to be the best fit for online story submissions. The story collection site is split from the private repository, making it feasible to create public collections without communicating that a much broader repository exists. A multi-lingual feature was added to the story instance, allowing submitters to share their story in up to seven languages... It is the goal of the archivist to add 1,500 items to the private ‘Heritage’ instance this year, and 500 each subsequent year... Working with an Open Source platform was not a conscious decision. The feature set of the software itself was evaluated as best of breed and fit with the requirements of the project... Access on mobile platforms was not considered in the decision to use DSpace. However, the team has been pleasantly surprised at how well the Mirage theme for the DSpace XML User Interface works on mobile phones and tablets... Both repositories are intended to help Steelcase employees strengthen their knowledge of the company’s heritage. By accessing records in the each repository, employees can learn from the past as well as carry forward the human insight business initiated by the company’s founders 100 years ago.” |
| Kick-starting the School of Data! Posted: 22 May 2012 01:35 PM PDT Open Knowledge Foundation Blog, (21 May 2012) “Earlier this year, we announced plans to launch the School of Data. Thanks to the generous support of Open Society Foundations and the Shuttleworth Foundation, we’re now ready to go! We’re holding a kick-off sprint next week, and we invite you to get involved... The School of Data is led by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) and Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). The School will provide online training for data ‘wrangling’ skills – the ability to find, retrieve, clean, manipulate, analyze, and represent different types of data. The School of Data is a collaborative and community-orientated project, and we welcome partners and participants... We are particularly excited to welcome the Tactical Technology Collective to our sprint next week, and look forward to benefiting from their wide-ranging experience (see e.g. their drawing by numbers project)... Next week, a small team of us will be gathering in Berlin for the School of Data kick-off sprint. This is a great opportunity to get to know one another, and to start building materials and resources for the School. During the sprint we will be holding a designated virtual session, and we warmly invite you to join us online! Details of the sprint are as follows: When: Thursday 24th May, 12pm-4pm UTC Where: Online, through our IRC channel (#schoolofdata on freenode) How: Sign-up on the etherpad and then just drop in! ... As well as the kick-off sprint, there are many ways to get involved with the School of Data. Right now, we are looking for volunteers to...” |
| FOSE: A framework for open science evaluation Posted: 22 May 2012 01:34 PM PDT ilogue.com “A hot topic among scientists lately is a discussion of shortcomings of the current system for evaluation of scientific work: journal-based peer-reviewing, and whether we should turn to alternatives or improve this system. These developments have been termed the academic spring. Many agree that more openness is the way to go. Niko Kriegeskorte and Diana Deca invited Alexander Walther and me to contribute to their special issue on post-publication evaluation in Frontiers. In our contribution we argue that the key to getting social-network-like reviewing going is interoperability, so that both new (e.g. thirdreviewer.com) and existing players (publishers) can compete fairly. We therefore propose a standard for the format of such evaluation content and a protocol for its exchange between these providers, together called FOSE (abstract). We welcome anyone interested to comment and/or join us. As a next step we plan to prepare a demo implementation of FOSE, at fose1.org.” |
| Posted: 22 May 2012 01:33 PM PDT access2research.org Use the link to access the full text of the petition, complete background information, and easy to follow directions for signing the petition. The “context” for the petition is described as follows: “After years of fighting in the US Government trenches for open access to scholarly research, and after winning the battle to implement a public access policy at NIH, it has become clear that being on the right side of the issue is necessary but not sufficient. We’ve had the meetings, done the hearings, replied to the requests for information. But we’re opposed in our work by a small set of publishers who profit enormously from the existing system. They can - and do - outspend those of us who have chosen to make a huge part of our daily work the expansion of access to knowledge. They can even get legislation introduced to prohibit public access policies and restrict scientific data sharing. This puts the idea of access at a disadvantage. We know there is a serious debate about the extension of public access to taxpayer funded research going on right now in the White House, but we also know that we need more than our current approaches to get that extension made into federal policy. The best approach that we have not yet tried is to make a broad public appeal for support, straight to the people. The Obama Administration has created a web platform to petition the White House directly called We The People. Any petition receiving more than 25,000 digital signatures is placed on the desk of the President’s Chief of Staff and must be integrated into policy and political discussions. But there’s a catch - a petition only has 30 days to gather the required number of signatures to qualify. We can get 25,000 signatures. And if we not only get 25,000, but an order of magnitude more, we can change the debate happening right now. On May 20, we published our petition and the 30 day cycle began. What we’re asking you to do is to sign the petition yourself, and then leverage your personal and professional networks to get the word out. You can do this in any way that makes you feel comfortable. A blog post, an email to constituencies, a tweet, a facebook share, you name it - something that tells thousands of people ‘I support this petition, I’m signing this petition, and I thought you should know about it too...’” |
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