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OA infrastructure on European wish list
Daniel Clery, Panel Draws Up Shopping List, Science Magazine, October 20, 2006 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
PS: For more background, see my blog post from October 19. Hemai Parthasarathy at the Berkman Center David Weinberger has blogged some notes on Hemai Parthasarathy's appearance at Harvard's Berkman Center yesterday. Excerpt:
A new project to share archaeological excavation data
Eric Kansa, Archaeological Data Management and Sharing: Nabonidus.org, Digging Digitally, October 20, 2006. Excerpt:
Report on the eIFL meeting in Jordan
eIFL has written a report on its 2006 General Assembly in Amman, Jordan (September 10-12, 2006). Excerpt:
OA and kindred openness movements in higher ed David Wiley, Open Source, Openness, and Higher Education, Innovate, October/November 2006. Excerpt: With the growth of open source software and other related trends, a culture of openness is advancing from the edges of society to the core of academic culture. In this article I provide an overview of how the expansion of open source software in culture at large has affected the world of education, describe how the greater use of open source software in education has unfolded hand-in-hand with the development of open course content and open access research, and argue that this more comprehensive shift towards "openness" in academic practice is not only a positive trend, but a necessary one in order to ensure transparency, collaboration, and continued innovation in the academy.... Open tool for open educational content
Toru Iiyoshi, Cheryl Richardson, and Owen McGrath, Harnessing Open Technologies to Promote Open Educational Knowledge Sharing, Innovate, October/November 2006. Excerpt:
PS: KEEP includes integration with DSpace repositories.
From Elsevier to BioMed Central
Christopher Leonard, former Publishing Editor for theoretical computer science journals at Elsevier, has moved to BioMed Central. (Thanks to Computational Complexity.) He describes the transition on his blog for October 10:
PS: While he was at Elsevier, Leonard played a role in the experiment to offer one year of free online access to Information and Computation. Update. Also see the BMC press release (October 24) announcing Leonard's new role and Bryan Vickery's new position at Chemistry Central. Marketwatch reports that U.S. District Judge John Sprizzo has consolidated two of the lawsuits against Google for its opt-out Library Program. (Thanks to Barry Schwartz.) The merged suits are those from the Authors Guild and five book publishers led by McGraw-Hill. At the same time, Sprizzo said he wouldn't be able to decide the case until February or May 2008, leaving the parties plenty of time to settle. The University of Zurich, one of the handful of universities with an OA mandate for faculty research, now has a web page on OA in German and English. (Thanks to medinfo.) On it we learn that the university's IR, ZORA (Zurich Open Repository and Archive), officially launched on October 13, 2006. From the new page:
Blogging the Open Scholarship conference Here are some bloggers taking notes on the presentations at Open Scholarship: New Challenges for Open Access Repositories (Glasgow, October 18-20, 2006).
Murray-Rust on open scholarship
Peter Murray-Rust has blogged a preview of his talk at Open Scholarship: New Challenges for Open Access Repositories (Glasgow, October 18-20, 2006). Excerpt:
Improving discoverability, if not access
Jeffrey Pomerantz, Google Scholar and 100% Availability of Information, Information Technology and Libraries, 25, 1 (2006) pp. 52-56.
From the body of the paper:
Another OA mandate from the UK
The UK's Particle Physics & Astronomy Research Council (PPARC) has decided to mandate OA to PPARC-funded research. Excerpt from its new policy (October 19):
PPARC supports the sentiments in the RCUK position statement on research outputs and, following discussions with the other Research Councils, has decided that for grants arising from proposals submitted after 1 December 2006, it will be a requirement of the grant that the full text of any articles resulting from the grant that are published in journals or conference proceedings, whether during or after the period of the grant, must be deposited, at the earliest opportunity, in an appropriate e-print repository, wherever such a repository is available, subject to compliance with publishers' copyright and licensing policies. Wherever possible, the article deposited should be the published version. Comment. This is an important development. PPARC is the fifth of the eight Research Councils UK to adopt an OA mandate. Here's the current tally: five have mandates (BBSRC, ESRC, MRC, NERC, and PPARC), one has opted for mere encouragement (CCLRC), and two are still deliberating (AHRC and EPSRC). Polimetrica has published an OA book on OA: Giandomenico Sica (ed.), Open Access, Open Problems, Milan, 2006. The entire book is free online (103 pp. PDF). Here's the table of contents:
PS: I thank Polimetrica for its willingness to publish on the subject of OA and for its willingness to make the entire book OA. Polimetrica makes all its books OA, either immediately upon publication or after a certain number of copies have been sold. For details see the page on its editorial policy. New model site license permits OA archiving The new Model NESLi2 Licence for Journals, updated October 2006, contains a very welcome provision on self-archiving. (Thanks to Tom George.)
The model license isn't yet in force, but JISC will use it as the basis for negotiating with journal publishers for future site licenses at UK institutions.
Giant publisher merger in the offing The two powerful holding companies Cinven and Candover, which already own Springer, may buy Informa and create a Springer-Informa merger. For details, see the news coverage. For background, see Mark McCabe, The Impact of Publisher Mergers on Journal Prices.
T. Scott Plutchak has blogged an untitled post on the Society for Neuroscience annual conference, (R)evolution in Scientific Publishing: How Will it Affect You? (Atlanta, October 16, 2006). Excerpt:
Libre information short of OA?
The LIBRErian Manifesto, Librerian, October 18, 2006. The first post to a new blog. Excerpt:
PS: The authors give proper attention to open source software and open standards, but seem to be unaware of open access literature. Review of OA index of library research
P�ter Jacs� reviews EBSCO's Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA) in his Digital Reference Shelf for October 2006. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Excerpt:
Stuart Church has put together a list of OA journals related to usability (or the user experience, UX), all from the DOAJ.
More on the Australian economic impact study
Eve Gray, The economic impact of access to research - the Australians count the cost and benefits, Gray Area, October 18, 2006. Excerpt:
OA to British law, forthcoming Heather Brook, At last, the price is right for access to our laws, The Guardian, October 19, 2006. Excerpt:
PS: For background, see my blog postings from August 2006 and June 2004.
John Hunter has put together a list of 17 OA journals in engineering. I haven't checked to see whether they're all alread listed in the DOAJ.
MRC moves the page on its OA policy
The UK Medical Research Council has moved the page on its OA policy.
PS: What was wrong with the older, shorter URL? Could it at least trigger a redirect so that users interested enough to have bookmarked the old page could find the new one? EU support for OA in the humanities
The EU has identified 35 research infrastructures for focused support. From today's announcement:
One of the 35 projects is OA. From the companion memo describing the 35:
Israel Scholar Works, an OA repository for Israeli and Jewish scholars worldwide, officially launched on October 14. From the announcement:
Access experiments at the LMS journals Starting in January 2007, Oxford University Press (OUP) will publish three of the four journals of the London Mathematical Society (LMS). The journals will not be OA, but they will have two unusual access policies. First, subscribers will have online access to the full runs back to 1865 at no extra charge. Second, each new issue will offer free online access to everyone for the first six months after publication and then move behind the subscription wall. The three journals are the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, the Journal of the London Mathematical Society, and the Bulletin of the London Mathematical Society. The journals are currently published by Cambridge University Press, where they have experimentally tried access policies similar to the ones coming at OUP. During 2005, the Proceedings and the Bulletin offered free online access to the most recent two issues before moving them behind the subscription wall. The same experiment is now in progress for the Journal during 2006. LMS's fourth journal, LMS Journal of Computation and Mathematics, will remain at Cambridge, where it is OA. Or as the Cambridge site puts it, "access is free until further notice". Citizendium launches this week
The Citizendium project has issued its first press release, Co-Founder to Launch Edited Version of Wikipedia, October 17, 2006. Excerpt:
Indian network will promote info sharing
Shabana Hussain, 'Knowledge Network' to connect academia, Mumbai Business Standard, October 18, 2006. Excerpt:
Comment. This project will not by itself enlarge the body of OA literature, but it will overcome some access barriers that reside in India's information infrastructure. Meantime, the NKC is considering proposals that address OA more directly. Timo Hannay on harnessing the web for science
David Weinberger has blogged some notes on Timo Hannay's talk at Harvard's Berkman Center yesterday. Excerpt:
Update. Timo's slides and a video of his presentation are now online. Microsoft jacks up book-scanning program
Michelle Pauli, Deal takes Microsoft further into Google territory, The Guardian, October 17, 2006. Excerpt:
Comment. The Google and Microsoft projects (along with all the other book-digitizing projects) could be seen as complementary rather than competitive. For us, the more the merrier. But insofar as they are competitive, we also win. Imagine very wealthy companies racing to make more literature more usefully available to more people. The least complementary aspect of the proliferating projects is the lack of coordination to reduce redundant book-scans. But for now, even redundant scans work in our favor, limiting corporate lock-in and creating competition to make the overlapping editions more and more accessible. Remember that Google didn't originally allow downloading or printing even for its public-domain books, but pressure from users and rivals led it to lift these restrictions in August. Update. Also see the Kirtas press release and the Cornell press release. Providing OA to library literature
Dorothea Salo, Open access to the library literature, Caveat Lector, October 17, 2006. Excerpt:
Gutting EPA libraries and access to research
Budget cuts are forcing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to cancel journal subscriptions. From the October 9 press release of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility:
Comment. Just what we need in the face of global warming: an under-informed agency leading the search for solutions in the nation most responsible for causing the problem. I wonder what percentage of the research to which the EPA no longer has access was funded by the EPA. The agency provides OA abstracts to the research it funds, but doesn't yet require or even encourage OA to the full-texts. Under FRPAA, however, the EPA would have to require OA to EPA-funded research.
10th anniversary edition of Bailey bibliography
Charles W. Bailey Jr. has released an update to his his monumental Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. The new edition is not only version 64, but the 10th Anniversary edition. It cites and organizes over 2,780 print and online articles, books, and other sources on scholarly electronic publishing. Thanks and congratulations, Charles, on this remarkable 10-year run.
Australia debates the economic impact of moving to OA
Bernard Lane, Benefits of Free Access, The Australian, October 18, 2006. Excerpt:
Even a modest move towards making research results freely available could deliver $628million a year in economic and social benefits to the nation. The claim is made by the first study to weigh the cost and benefit of a shift away from the system of scholarly communication based on expensive journals that are restricted to subscribers. Comments. I'm delighted to see the Houghton-Steele-Sheehan study get attention in the mainstream press. Taxpayers need to realize how much the return on their investment in research could be amplified by a transition to OA and how how much they are paying for every delay in that transition. Here are a few responses to the critics.
Tracey Caldwell, Europe starts to build an Open Access information network, Information World Review, October 17, 2006. Excerpt:
Podcast on open libraries and OA
Library Journal has posted a free podcast, Open Libraries Episode 1, in which Karen Coombs, Melissa Rethlefsen, and Dorothea Salo talk about different aspects of open libraries. The hour-long podcast, moderated by Jay Datema, covers 27 mini-conversations, three of which are explicitly about OA and several others are about institutional repositories. The web page includes a timeline to help you find the segments of interest.
The OA discussion at the Society for Neuroscience
Jake Young has blogged extensive notes on the OA discussion at the Society for Neuroscience annual conference, (R)evolution in Scientific Publishing: How Will it Affect You? (Atlanta, October 16, 2006). For a summary of Young's summary, see Dave Munger's blog notes. Excerpt from Munger's briefer version:
Another journal converts to OA The Journal of Chiropractic Education has converted from TA to OA. JCE is the official journal of the Association of Chiropractic Colleges. (Thanks to Annietv600.) PS: I can't tell whether the new incarnation of JCE will charge author-side fees; the web site doesn't yet say. OA to Spanish medical journals M.F. Abad Garc�a, A. Gonz�lez Teruel, and C. Mart�nez Catal�n, [Open Access and Spanish Medical Journals], Medicina Cl�nica, September 30, 2006. The article is in Spanish and so far I only have this PubMed entry without an abstract. Calling for an OA alternative to Library Journal
Getting Serious About an OA Journal for Librarians, The History Librarian, October 16, 2006. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) Excerpt:
The case for valuing access more than usage
Jan Velterop, The use of usage, The Parachute, October 16, 2006. Excerpt:
Stevan Harnad, Premature Rejection Slip, Open Access Archivangelism, October 17, 2006. Excerpt:
Comment. I read Richard's article differently. As I read it, Richard never said that readers should have to do peer review on their own and neither did the open-review advocates whom he discussed without endorsing. Nor did he find that OA intrinsically favored any particular model of peer review, as opposed to affording certain opportunities that some journals will seize and others will not. Notes toward the Bangalore Commitment to OA
Stevan Harnad, The Bangalore Commitment: �Self-Archive Unto Others as You Would Have Others Self-Archive Unto You�, Open Access Archivangelism, October 16, 2006. Excerpt:
Summary: There is no need for developing countries to wait for the developed countries to mandate Open Access (OA) self-archiving: They have more to gain because currently both their access and their impact is disproportionately low, relative to their actual and potential research productivity and influence. Lately there have been many abstract avowals of support for the Principle of OA, but what the world needs now is concrete commitments to its Practice. Under the guidance of India�s tireless OA advocate, Subbiah Arunachalam, there will be a two day workshop on research publication and OA at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on November 2-3, at which the three most research-active developing countries � India, China and Brazil � will frame the �Bangalore Commitment�: a commitment to mandate OA self-archiving in their own respective countries and thereby set an example for emulation by the rest of the world. Alexei Koudinov and Svetlana Nekrasov, Developing Universal Open Access to Neuroscience Literature, a presentation at the Neuroscience 2006 conference (Atlanta, October 14-18, 2006). Also see Alexei's blog notes on the presentation. New contributors to the Open Content Alliance
The Boston Library Consortium, Indiana University, University of Alberta, University of Georgia, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have joined the Open Content Alliance.
New "for authors" service at DOAJ The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is offering a new service. (I forwarded the announcement to SOAF on Saturday but forgot to blog the news.) The new "for authors" service lets authors look up journals by keywords and find both full OA journals and hybrid OA journals. Even better, users can filter the results and choose to look only at the no-fee journals or the fee-based journals. Comment. This is a very useful new service. Authors looking for journals that will offer OA to their articles will want to scan both the full and hybrid OA journals. It appears that only full OA journals, and no hybrids, appear in the main directory of OA journals. I only tested it on a handful of hybrids, but the pattern seems to hold. If true, this was the right decision. Readers looking for OA literature will be more interested in full OA journals than hybrids; and if they want to look at the hybrids, they can use the new "for authors" service. I just hope the DOAJ will stop calling the fee-based journals "author pays" journals. Given the frequent availability of fee waivers and sponsors to pay on behalf of authors, the term "author pays" is false and misleading. Beyond citation counts to reading measurements
Donald W. King, Carol Tenopir, and Michael Clarke, Measuring Total Reading of Journal Articles, D-Lib Magazine, October 2006. Excerpt:
From the body of the paper:
Making IRs indispensable to campus users
Tyler O. Walters, Strategies and Frameworks for Institutional Repositories and the New Support Infrastructure for Scholarly Communications, D-Lib Magazine, October 2006. Excerpt:
Harvesting metadata records containing "asset actions"
Robert Chavez and six co-authors, DLF-Aquifer Asset Actions Experiment: Demonstrating Value of Actionable URLs, D-Lib Magazine, October 2006.
Abstract: Metadata records harvested using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) are often characterized by scarce, inconsistent and ambiguous resource URLs. There is a growing recognition among OAI service providers that this can create access problems and can limit range of services offered. This article reports on an experiment carried out by the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Aquifer Technology/Architecture Working Group to demonstrate the utility of harvestable metadata records that include multiple typed actionable URLs ("asset actions"). The experiment dealt specifically with digital image resources. By having for all images a consistent set of well-labeled URLs (e.g., pointing to thumbnails, in-context presentations of images on data provider's Website, or medium and high resolution views), the service provider was able to insure consistent results across repositories of content from multiple institutions. With predictable retrieval, advanced features such as thumbnail result displays, image annotation and manipulation, and advanced book bag functions are possible. It was even possible to overlay for use with this widely dispersed content a locally developed digital object collector tool from the University of Virginia. Results illustrate the potential of asset actions and support the need for further work at the community level to define and model actionable URLs for different classes of resources, and to develop agreements on how to label and convey these URLs in concert with descriptive metadata. Deepening repository interoperability
Herbert Van de Sompel and five co-authors, An Interoperable Fabric for Scholarly Value Chains, D-Lib Magazine, October 2006.
From the body of the paper:
PS: For more background, see the ORE announcement from last Friday. A nuanced look at OA and peer review
Richard Poynder, Open Access: death knell for peer review? Open and Shut, October 15, 2006. Another superbly detailed study by Richard. This excerpt only scratches the surface:
Creative Commons has launched its second annual fund-raising campaign. From the CC blog:
PS: Please support this good cause if you can. Martin Richardson on Oxford's OA experiments
KnowledgeSpeak has interviewed Martin Richardson, Managing Director of Oxford Journals. Excerpt:
Comment. To be precise, the low uptake Oxford has experienced in some fields is for fee-based OA, not for OA itself.
The Australian government has proposed some copyright reforms that will benefit research and education, for example, by permitting circumvention and widening the fair-dealing exception for universities and libraries. The content industry interest-group, Copyright Agency Limited, is fighting back. (Thanks to CAUL.)
Position statement on open chemistry
Chemists Without Borders has adopted an Open Chemistry Position Statement, October 12, 2006. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.) Excerpt:
Stevan Harnad, The Special Case of Astronomy, Open Access Archivangelism, October 14, 2006. Excerpt:
Summary: Astronomy is unusual among research fields in that all research-active astronomers already have full online access to all relevant journal articles via institutional subscriptions (because astronomy has only a small closed circle of core journals). Many astronomy articles are also self-archived as preprints prior to peer review and publication, but usage all shifts to the published version as soon as it is available. Self-archiving, even where it is at or near 100%, has no effect at all on subscriptions or cancellations. The Open Access (OA) citation advantage hence reduces to merely an "Early Access Advantage" in astronomy, because all postprints are accessible to everyone. There is also the much-reported positive correlation between the citation counts of articles and the proportion of them that were self-archived. This is no doubt partly a self-selection effect or "Quality Bias" -- with the better articles more likely to be self-archived. But this is unlikely to be all or most of the source of the OA advantage even in astronomy -- let alone in most other fields, where the postprints are not all accessible to all active researchers. The most important component of the OA advantage in general is that OA removes the access and usage barriers that prevent the better work from having its full potential impact (Quality Advantage). In astronomy, where those access barriers hardly exist, there is still a measurable OA advantage, but mostly just because of Early Advantage (and self-selection). With all postprints accessible, Competitive Advantage is restricted to the prepublication phase; Usage Advantage (downloads) can be estimated: downloads are doubled by universal online accessibility. And the Quality Advantage no doubt persists (though it is difficult to estimate independently). What's holding back the OA policy at the SSHRC?
Stevan Harnad, Canada's SSHRC Just Keeps Spinning Its Wheels, Open Access Archivangelism, October 14, 2006. Excerpt:
Five out of the eight UK Research Councils (BBSRC, CCLRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC) nevertheless seem to have managed to go from principle to action... "Does SSHRC have a policy? No. There is more to this than just mandating OA."Four out of the eight UK Research Councils (BBSRC, EPSRC, MRC, NERC) nevertheless seem to have managed to mandate it, and Canada's CIHR seems to have managed to propose to mandate it... "Figure out how to support OA journals. Conducting experiments to figure out best approach."Why is SSHRC fussing about supporting OA journals instead of mandating the self-archiving of SSHRC research output? Is SSHRC a research funder or a journal funder? The OA mandate pertains to the former, not the latter: to maximizing the access and impact of SSHRC research output, not to the budgeting of SSHRC's journal subsidies. Journals SSHRC may happen to be subsidising have nothing to do with the mandate in question.... Nonsense. If publishing the research in a peer-reviewed journal can be a grant fulfillment condition, so can self-archiving the article.... |