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Ashley Wiehle, SIUC library to cancel some serials, The Southern, May 12, 2007. Excerpt:
Alma Swan has launched a blog, OptimalScholarship, which is bound to cover OA issues frequently and well. Alma is one of the principals of Key Perspectives and one of the most prolific and data-oriented researchers into the state of OA and author attitudes toward it. I've often cited her work in this blog. From her inaugural post:
PS: Welcome to the blogosphere, Alma! The University of Bremen's Science Plan 2010 (February 23, 2007, p. 35) endorses the goal of providing open access and creating the infrastructure needed for it. Thanks to Eric Steinhauer. Read his blog post in German or in Google's English.
The copyright problem in the German Parliament Yesterday, Germany's Urheberrecht f�r Bildung und Wissenschaft (Coalition for Action for Copyright for Education and Research) issued a press release explaining to the German Parliament why OA doesn't conflict with copyright. Read it in German or Google's English. However its action was unavailing. Today the upper house of Parliament seemed to accept the publishing lobby's argument that the evolving OA policy from the EU would violate copyright. For details, see Stefan Krempl's story in Heise Online (in German or Google's English). My German and Google's English are not good enough for me to grasp the details of the publisher objections or the Parliamentary action. If bilingual readers could help with summaries or insights on our forum (SOAF), I'd be very grateful. Update. Donat Agosti has generously posted an English translation of four key paragraphs from Krempl's article. Update. Also see Chris Armbruster's comments and clarifications on SOAF. Update. Also see Bundesrat: Open-access-Modell soll wissenschaftliche Ver�ffentlichungen nur erg�nzen, Institut f�r Urheber- und Medienrecht, May 11, 2007, and Google's English. Presentations from RIN conference The presentations from the conference, Why needs libraries anyway? (London, April 30, 2007), are now online. (Thanks to Colin Steele.) This is the conference where last month's report, Researchers' use of academic libraries and their services (commissioned by RIN and CURL, undertaken by Key Perspectives) was originally presented. Among other things, the report documents the extent of faculty ignorance of OA. Quentin D. Wheeler and Frank T. Krell, Codes must be updated so that names are known to all, Nature, May 10, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers). A letter to the editor. Thanks to Donat Agosti for the alert and, since I don't have access, for this summary:
Agosti continues, as a comment:
Two more German institutions sign the Berlin Declaration A German learned society and a German research institute have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge:
PS: VAAM's journal, BIOSpektrum, is published by Elsevier. I assume that it's green and not gold, like other Elsevier journals. Does VAAM's recent decision to sign the Berlin Declaration mean that it may strengthen BIOSpektrum's green policy, for example, to allow OA archiving in PubMed Central without anyone having to pay Elsevier a fee? Pakistan plans OA portal for all its journals Pakistani Journals to be available for worldwide electronic access through Online Portal, Associated Press of Pakistan, May 11, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. This is a big step. So far I don't know more, such as how these journals have been supported in the past, how they'll be supported after the transition, and whether Pakistan also plans to adopt an OA mandate for publicly-funded research --which might be published in a non-Pakistani journal. The slides from the WWW2007 session, Building a Semantic Web in Which Our Data Can Participate (Banff, May 10, 2007), are now online. (Thanks to Wendy Seltzer.) Update. Also see Peter Murray-Rust's blog notes on his own presentation. Discussion group for Antipodean repository managers Alison Hunter has created a new Google Group, Institutional Repository Community - ANZ, for repository managers especially from Australia and New Zealand. From the site:
One early mailing added that "although non-Antipodean members will not be solicited, they won't be excluded either." PS: By my count, this is the third site/group/list where repository managers can swap tips and talk shop. The first two are IR-Managers, launched by Dorothea Salo, and UKCoRR (UK Council of Research Repositories), launched by SHERPA, both in March 2007.
Automated abstracts to compete with Wikipedia Sage eReference is worried about competition from Wikipedia. In response, it's asking Google to produce 100-word abstracts for the SeR articles. For details, see Mark Chillingworth's story in the May 8 Information World Review. Comment. I assume that Google will use text-summarizing software to produce the abstracts. If so, the important news here is that Google is starting to apply these tools to scholarly content --a welcome development, especially if competitors drive up the quality for users. But I don't get it: how will this help SeR compete with Wikipedia? The abstracts won't improve the quality of SeR's articles or make their existing quality more evident. Moreover, SeR is is not OA. People who turn to Wikipedia don't always want to edit but they do always want OA. OA repository for Nordic arts and humanities The Copenhagen University Library has announced An e-print archive for Nordic arts and humanities. Excerpt:
PS: Apparently the archive itself isn't yet online, but I'll blog the URL as soon as it's made available. Damien O�Brien and Anne Fitzgerald, Copyright Guide for Research Students: What you need to know about copyright before depositing your electronic thesis in an online repository, Open Access to Knowledge (OAK) Law Project, May 2007. From the OAK law front page:
The first half is a general primer on copyright unrelated to theses, repositories, or OA, and a useful section at the end introduces students to CC licenses. BioOne offers free online access to society members BioOne has launched the Free BioOne Society Member Access program. From yesterday's announcement:
Report on Open Repositories 2007 Julie Allinson and three co-authors, What Is an Open Repository? Ariadne, April 2007. A report on Open Repositories 2007 (San Antonio, January 23-26, 2007). Excerpt:
Australia's evolving vision for OA repositories Andrew Treloar and David Groenewegen, ARROW, DART and ARCHER: A Quiver Full of Research Repository and Related Projects, Ariadne, April 2007. Excerpt:
More on Germany's Informationsplattform Open Access Germans advocate Open Access online, Information World Review, May 10, 2007.
Wisconsin also adopts CIC author addendum On May 7, the University of Wisconsin at Madison adopted the Author Addendum drafted by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC). (Thanks to Dorothea Salo.) This is becoming a trend among CIC member institutions. On May 3 the author addendum was adopted by the University of Minnesota and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Excerpt from the resolution adopted by the UWM Faculty Senate:
PS: Kudos to all involved at Wisconsin, especially to the Library Committee which prepared the resolution and submitted it to the Faculty Senate. Update. Also see the UWM press release. Publisher view of how to balance rights The ALPSP, AAP/PSP, and STM have issued a joint white paper, Author and Publisher Rights For Academic Use: An Appropriate Balance, May 2007. From the announcement:
From the full text:
Comments.
A definition of OA for the German Parliament Today the scientific services (Wissenschaftliche Dienste) of the German Parliament (Deutscher Bundestag) published a two-page document by Daniel L�bbert defining and explaining OA, Open Access: Freier Zugang zu wissenschaftlicher Information. PS: Recall that the Bundestag is now debating the evolving OA policy for Europe. The L�bbert definition is based on the Berlin Declaration but I can't tell whether it subtly spins the concept to help or hurt the case for OA. Because the document is a PDF, I can't link to a machine translation. Profile of Matt Cockerill and BioMed Central Jane Dudman, In the eye of the Open Access storm, IT Week, May 8, 2007. Excerpt:
A group of research institutions and two foundations have launched the Encyclopedia of Life, an OA, multimedia compendium of biodiversity on planet Earth. From yesterday's press release:
Also see the news coverage. Update. Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson conceived this project. See a 20-minute video in which he describes its central place in the fight to preserve our planet's biodiversity.
An OA repository on governance Melissa Fraser, IGLOO Library, Special Info & Musings for Ottawa IM Professionals, May 7, 2007. Fraser is the Content Services Specialist at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Waterloo. Excerpt:
More on the OA Journal of Medical Case Reports David Bradley, Open access medical records, ScienceBase, May 8, 2007. Excerpt:
How to convince researchers and management The eIFL.net Newsletter for May/June 2007 has some notes on the Sensitization Workshop for Institutional Repositories and Open Access for Scholarly Communication (Maseru, Lesotho, April 24-26, 2007). Excerpt:
Mark Chillingworth, Business is booming for humanities, IT Week, May 8, 2007. Excerpt:
Comments.
The US National Endowment for the Humanities adopted a policy to favor applications that promise OA for their results. The long-awaited report from the American Council of Learned Societies not only recommended OA for the humanities, but recommended OA mandates by funders and supportive actions by universities. The EU funded the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH). The OA Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy took large strides toward building its endowment. MediaCommons began to self-assemble as a cooperative OA book press for the humanities. The Karman Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Bern committed itself to OA for all its future projects. The Task Force on Electronic Publication for the American Philological Association and Archaeological Institute of America recommended that American classicists self-archive and may later recommend that American classics journals convert to OA. Eight classicists issued an open letter to colleagues calling for more OA in the field. Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council reaffirmed its support for OA, though it still stops short of a mandate. JISC and two of the UK Research Councils --the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)-- are extending the UK's e-Science program to the arts and humanities. The AHRC is covered by the general RCUK commitment to OA but is still deciding on the exact form of its own policy. The British Academy wrote a report showing how UK copyright law hindered scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. The Modern Language Association recommended tenure reforms to encourage digital publication and departmental rewards for it. And there was wider recognition, approaching a consensus, that the journal pricing crisis in the sciences is a major cause of the monograph crisis in the humanities --and that OA will help both. Increasing the visibility of the OCA's OA books Rick Prelinger, Access to our digitized books, Prelinger Library blog, May 5, 2007. Excerpt:
New LIS portal and repository for SE Europe Kosson is a new LIS portal for Romania and southeast Europe. It includes an OA repository for self-archiving by community members. (I can't tell who counts as a community member.) Also see Kosson's English-language brochure. No-fee OA journals for the developing world Pertti Saariluoma, Open Access Publishing As A Bridge Across The Digital Divide, Human Technology, May 2007. (Thanks to Kimmo Kuusela.) Excerpt:
Gathering and disseminating clinical drug trial data The World Health Organization (WHO) has launched the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) and an associated Search Portal. The idea is to gather together the world's clinical trials, published and unpublished, and provide OA to their results. When launched, the ICTRP contained 50,000 trials from the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) From the ICTRP front page:
From the page on results reporting:
Chembiogrid maintains an annotated list of Chemistry Databases on the Web. It appears that all or most of them are OA. (Thanks to Jean-Claude Gu�don.)
German copyright objections to OA for the EU Stefan Krempl, Skepsis im Bundesrat gegen�ber Open-Access-Publikationen, Heise Online, May 7, 2007. The upper house of Germany's Parliament has copyright problems with the EU's OA recommendations. Read the original German or Google's English. PS: It looks like German publishers are raising the familiar objection that an OA mandate for publicly-funded research will undercut publisher revenues. But my German and Google's English are not strong enough for me to know for sure. I'd be grateful if bilingual readers could shed light on problem in our forum. Amplifying a whole university's research impact Karen Herland, Increasing the impact of the academy, Concordia Journal, May 3, 2007. Excerpt:
OA and out-of-the-way universities Open access can neutralize some of disadvantages of smaller universities and let their other advantages come to the fore. Thanks to Donat Agosti for pointing out the example of wildlife biology at the University of Montana:
Daniel Sigulem, Paulo L. Salom�o, and Maykon Andersom Pires de Novais have collected more than 680 free medical books in English, Spanish, and Portuguese on their site at the Medical School of the Federal University of S�o Paolo. (Thanks to Jean-Claude Gu�don.)
Jingfeng Xia and Marija Dalbello, Self-Archiving as an Emergent Scholarly Practice: An Assessment of Self-Archiving in Institutional Repositories, apparently a preprint. Self-archived May 5, 2007.
PS: Although self-archived in dLIST, only the abstract is free online, at least so far. |