Open Access NewsNews from the open access movement Jump to navigation |
|||||||||||||
Berkeley library reaffirms its BMC membership
In light of the news from Yale, the University of California Berkeley Library has made a point of reaffirming its institutional membership in BioMed Central.
Science journalists can link to full-text OA articles Matthew Cockerill, Press coverage of research, embargoes and open access, BMC blog, August 10, 2007.
IR for Indonesia's U of Muhammadiyah Surakarta Indonesia's University of Muhammadiyah Surakarta has launched an institutional repository. (Thanks to Indonesian Open Access Initiative.) David Wiley drafts a new open content license David Wiley, Open Education License Draft, Iterating Toward Openness, August 8, 2007. Excerpt:
The draft license itself occurs at the end of the post. For more on Wiley’s argument that proper licensing is a better solution for open content than the public domain, see his next post (August 9).
Another editorial calls for an OA mandate at the NIH Public deserves access to NIH research work, Honolulu Advertiser, August 10, 2007. An editorial. Here it is in its entirety:
Heise Online has launched a three-part series on Freie Inhalte im Web. Part 1, on music, movies, and books, has been online since August 8. Part 2, on research and education, was supposed to appear today but I haven't seen it yet. And Part 3, on crafts and knitting, will appear on August 13.
Update. Part 2 did appear on August 10: Susanne Schmidt, Friede, Freude und freie Eierkuchen-Rezepte. Read the original German or Google's English. This is an unusually thorough overview covering dozens of OA projects and organizations. Another declaration of independence Another Journal Board Resigns, Not Even Wrong, August 6, 2007. (Thanks to Alexandre Borovik.) Excerpt:
Comments.
Model self-archiving policy for universities Stevan Harnad, Model University Self-Archiving Policy, Open Access Archivangelism, August 7, 2007.
Swiss National Science Foundation adopts an OA mandate Yesterday the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) announced an OA mandate to take effect on September 1, Open Access: Der SNF erl�sst Weisung f�r die Umsetzung. Read the announcement in German or in Google's English. (Thanks to Susanne G�ttker.) The policy requires OA archiving for the results of SNF-funded research. Grantees may deposit their work in institutional or disciplinary repositories, and must apparently respect any embargo imposed by their publisher. The SNF does not have its own repository and does not apparently plan to launch one. The SNF encourages without requiring publication in an OA journal, and at least sometimes will pay the publication fees at fee-based OA journals. Comments.
Update (8/11/07). Klaus Graf sends this addition and clarification: "In a nut-shell: Established embargos have to be respected. If no such embargo exists SNF will accept TA-only if the author has tried to get OA rights." (Thanks, Klaus.) Andrea Gawrylewski, Yale dumps BioMed Central, The Scientist, August 9, 2007. Excerpt:
German funders take different roads on OA Martin Ragg asked Germany's Bundesministerium f�r Bildung und Forschung (Federal Ministry of Education and Research or BMBF) for its position on OA. The answer is that BMBF neither requires nor encourages OA. But the final reports for BMBF-funded research are available to the public, in hardcopy. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) Read the German original or Google's English. By contrast, Germany's primary research funder, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or DFG, has mandated OA since January 2006. HTML for OA journals and repositories Peter Sefton, Why not HTML for online journals? People need the right tools, PT's Outing, August 8, 2007. Excerpt:
Comments.
Update. Peter Sefton writes: "If anyone out there is hearing about ICE for the first time, via Dorothea [Salo] or Peter Suber or Peter Murray-Rust we'd be happy to help you try it out for your research and/or scholarship. Drop me a line." David C. Prosser, Public Policy and the Politics of Open Access, 2007. Apparently a preprint. Self-archived August 8, 2007.
From the body of the paper:
Free culture party coming to a city near you Heather Ford, 50 Parties Club, Hblog, August 8, 2007. Excerpt:
OA for 400+ historically significant medical films JISC and the Wellcome Trust are providing OA to 400+ films important in the history of medicine. From today's announcement:
Open education for healthcare in developing countries The People's Open Access Education Initiative is a new open education project focusing on medical education in developing countries. From the home page:
From the about page:
Grid computing for data crunching and sharing in the humanities Tobias Blanke, Beyond books: grid technologies for arts and humanities research, International Science Grid This Week, August 8, 2007. A look at the grid computing projects of the UK’s Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre. Excerpt:
Interview with Open Library's Aaron Swartz Scott McLemee, Open Library, Inside Higher Ed, August 8, 2007. Excerpt:
Two announcements from DRIVER:
Cornell joins the Google Library project Cornell University Library becomes newest partner in Google Book Search Library Project, a press release from Cornell, August 7, 2007. Excerpt:
Google's OA mandate for research on Google data Google is sharing data with researchers under an interesting proviso: the results of their research on the data must be OA. From Dorothea Salo on SOAF:
Comment. Dorothea is right: this is novel and Google’s mandate is like a funder mandate except that Google is providing data rather than money. Kudos to Google, both for sharing its data with researchers and for requiring that researchers share the results of their research in turn. Historians contributing to Wikipedia Ralph Luker, Historians and Wikipedia, Cliopatria, August 2, 2007. (Thanks to Karen Winkler.) Excerpt:
Comment. I applaud this. I stand by the recommendation I made in a SOAN article from July 2005:
Access to research and access to medicines Gavin Yamey, Access to university research and innovations, PLoS Blog, August 6, 2007. (Thanks to Gavin Baker.) Excerpt:
Update. See the good comments of Steven Salzberg. Graham Pryor, Attitudes and Aspirations in a Diverse World: The Project StORe Perspective on Scientific Repositories, International Journal of Digital Curation, 2, 1 (2007). (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)
From Medline abstracts to OA full-text Yasunori Yamamoto and Toshihisa Takagi, OReFiL: an online resource finder for life sciences, BMC Bioinformatics, August 6, 2007. Abstract:
Why do online-only OA journals use PDF? Andy Powell, Open, online journals != PDF ? eFoundations, August 6, 2007. Speaking of the International Journal of Digital Curation (IJDC):
If you recall, Yale dropped its BMC membership on Friday. Today BMC Publisher Matthew Cockerill posted a response on the BMC blog. Excerpt:
Update. See Bill Hooker's comments, including this math: A quick fiddle with biology + medicine data from the Journal Cost-Effectiveness database gives an average price per article of around $12 for toll-access journals, but that's (one subscription)/(total no. articles). The question is, how many subscriptions do they sell -- that is, what is their income/article? We know what BMC makes per article: about $1600 on average. If an average toll-access journal sells just 135 subscriptions per year, they're bringing in more per article than BMC. Frank Schulenburg, Im Gespr�ch: Klaus Graf �ber Wikisource, Archivalia und den anhaltenden Kampf um gemeinfreies Kulturgut, G�ttingischen unparthenischen Correspondenten, August 7, 2007. An interview with Klaus Graf, one of Germany's leading OA advocates, on the campaign for OA to cultural heritage. One lesson: The challenge for libraries, archives, and museums is to raise funds for OA, not to develop DRM for cultural heritage projects. Read the interview in the original German or in Google's English. Publishing linked data on the web Chris Bizer, Richard Cyganiak, and Tom Heath, How to Publish Linked Data on the Web. Apparently a preprint; undated but apparently July 27, 2007.
Thomas E. Vanhecke and three co-authors, PubMed vs. HighWire Press: A head-to-head comparison of two medical literature search engines, Computers in Biology and Medicine, September 2007. Not even an abstract is free online. Update. A couple of colleagues have sent me the paper. Here's the abstract: PubMed and HighWire Press are both useful medical literature search engines available for free to anyone on the internet. We measured retrieval accuracy, number of results generated, retrieval speed, features and search tools on HighWire Press and PubMed using the quick search features of each. We found that using HighWire Press resulted in a higher likelihood of retrieving the desired article and higher number of search results than the same search on PubMed. PubMed was faster than HighWire Press in delivering search results regardless of search settings. There are considerable differences in search features between these two search engines. Jon Udell on access to public data Hugh McGuire, Interview: Jon Udell, DataLibre.ca, August 5, 2007. Excerpt:
Ask the Senate to support an OA mandate at the NIH NIH public access moves forward in House; full Senate to consider, ACRL Legislative Update, August 1, 2007. Excerpt:
Comments.
Helping librarians help faculty make their work OA ARL, ACRL, SPARC Provide Free Access to Archive of Author Rights Webcast, a press release from ARL, August 4, 2007. Excerpt:
Gary Anthes, Meet the nerd who's already shaping the future, IT Business, August 6, 2007. An interview with MIT Computer Scientist Hal Abelson --one of the co-founders of Creative Commons, one of the co-creators of MIT's Open Courseware project, and a critic of “fossilized and myopic” computer science departments everywhere. Reading the fine print of a publisher's self-archiving policy Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Publisher Author Agreements, DigitalKoans, August 5, 2007. Excerpt:
Libraries and the book-scanning projects The Library as Search Engine, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 5, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
|