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Fair use has prevailed in James Joyce scholarship. From the Stanford Law School press release:
Another new, free journal quality measurement The Center for Journal Ranking was launched in January 2007. From the site:
From Nicole Martin's article in the April 2007 issue of EContent:
NIH Director believes an OA mandate is now necessary Elias Zerhouni, Director of the NIH, told the Senate last week that the NIH public access policy should be strengthened from a request to a requirement. He was testifying before the committee responsible for funding the agency. Quoting the Alliance for Taxpayer Access:
Comment. This is big. Nearly a year ago, in April 2006, Dr. Zerhouni told the same committee that "it seems the voluntary policy is just not enough". Now his position is considerably stronger. As I transcribe the video, he said: "We need to make [public access] a condition of federal fund granting....A mandatory policy seems to be the one that will be necessary for us to achieve our goals." Remember that in July 2004, Congress asked for a mandate and the NIH chose to adopt a request instead. Also remember that the policy is merely an in-house agency rule that the NIH can adopt or modify without a Congressional directive. Dr. Zerhouni: Now that you have decided that a mandate is necessary, I hope you will exercise your authority as Director to adopt it. The decision will bring large and lasting benefits to researchers in medicine and related fields, medical patients, practicing physicians, taxpayers, and the agency itself. Stevan Harnad, Clarifying the Logic of Open Choice: I (of 2), Open Access Archivangelism, March 24, 2007. Excerpt:
Alex Koohang and Keith Harman, The Academic Open Access E-Journal: Platform and Portal, Informing Science Journal, 9 (2006). (Thanks to Abdullah.)
From the body of the paper:
The French government is providing OA to its UFO investigations. Apparently it's the first government to do so. From yesterday's AP story:
Update (8/27/07). Exopolitics Toronto is urging the Canadian government to follow suit. Elsevier and the arms business Until now, I haven't blogged any of the controversy surrounding Reed Elsevier's involvement in the worldwide arms trade. Because it has no OA connection, I've regarded it as off-topic for this blog. But now the editors of The Lancet (an Elsevier journal) have created an OA connection. In the March 24 issue, The Lancet published seven letters to the editor, all condemning Elsevier for its arms business. (Thanks to idiolect.) In their reply, the Lancet editors make this argument:
Comment. I strongly support the editors' position and applaud their courage in criticizing the parent company. They are on solid ground when they argue that "the arms trade [is] incompatible with the professional values of a health-science publisher �promoting health and wellbeing, reducing death and disability, respecting human rights, and showing concern for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in society." But when they add the OA connection, I must say that their argument becomes uncharacteristically vague. Does it mean that Elsevier's arms business would be fine if the company hadn't already created so many enemies by lobbying against national OA policies? Or that lobbying against OA would be fine if the company weren't adding new enemies by selling arms? Either way, it leaves the unfortunate suggestion that the company has enough moral or political capital to do either one but not both.
How do digital-age scientists find and retrieve info? The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is undertaking a Survey of Information Habits and Preferences of Millennial Scientists. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
NIST is collecting public comments on the project until May 21, 2007. Profile of John Willinsky and the Public Knowledge Project Bruce Byfield, Open access and open source intersect in Public Knowledge Project, IT Manager's Journal, March 23, 2007. Excerpt:
Walt Crawford on recent rhetoric for and against OA The April issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online. This issue features a long article on Open Access and Rhetorical Excess. He focuses primarily on Eric Dezenhall's suggestion to the AAP that "public access equals government censorship", Richard Smith's analogy between conventional publishing and slavery, and the public response to them both. But in the process he also discusses the Brussels Declaration, the latest objections to FRPAA from the DC Principles coalition, and the AAUP statement on OA. Most of the statements back and forth were blogged here, but Walt's essay is a good way to see the highlights drawn together in one place. Zeno Tajoli, A World-Wide repository: the technical challenge of E-LIS, a presentation at Open Repositories 2007 (San Antonio, January 23-26, 2007). Abstract: E-LIS is the largest world-wide [OA] disciplinary repository for Library and Information Science. It stores and delivers metadata and digital papers in different Unicode scripts (Latin, Chinese, Greek and others). Contributions come from more than 80 countries in all continents. At present it contains around 4,500 full-text documents. The presentation describes the technical improvements implemented in order to manage linguistic differences in uploading, searching and disseminating contents, and to help the editors share their review tasks according to their country. We conclude with an analysis of the beta version of EPrints 3 against some problems that are still open. Tighter restrictions on CRS reports I've often written about the valuable, publicly-funded, non-classified but non-OA reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). Now the Federation of American Scientists' Secrecy News reports that CRS has imposed even tighter access restrictions on the reports. Excerpt:
Eigenfactor is a free tool from Carl Bergstrom and Ted Bergstrom for "evaluating the influence of scholarly periodicals and for mapping the structure of academic research." It aims to surpass the Impact Factor in accuracy and to remain free of charge for the scholarly community. The last time I blogged it (January 2007), only a preview version was online that indexed only 1,800 journals, all in the social sciences. Now --though it is still in beta-- it indexes all the 7,000+ journals listed in Thompson's Journal Citation Reports (JCR), including those in the natural sciences. It also indexes 110,000+ reference sources not listed in JCR, including reference books, newspapers, trade magazines, and software packages. Check it out. Nature on OA data for published articles
Attila Csord�s, Nature Publishing Editor on the idea of a public scientific multimedia site, PIMM, March 22, 2007. Csord�s conducted an email interview with Maxine Clarke on Nature's data sharing policy. Clarke is the Publishing Executive Editor at Nature. Excerpt (quoting Clarke):
Update. PZ Myers at Pharyngula builds on this post, and Attila's previous post, and thinks about places to deposit OA supplemental info. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) He mentions Google Base as one possibility and his readers mention others in their comments --eventually getting around to OA, OAI-compliant repositories. Video of the Free Our Data meeting A webcast of the Free Our Data meeting (Manchester, March 15, 2007) is now online.
Agency-level OA data policies coming to the US federal government Declan Butler, Agencies join forces to share data, Nature, March 22, 2007. Excerpt:
Comments.
Another way to remove access barriers Andrew Mytelka, Dutch Scientist to Receive $200,000 Prize From Southern Cal, Chronicle of Higher Education news blog, March 22, 2007. Excerpt:
PS: Unlike Lettinga, scholars who provide OA to their peer-reviewed journal articles give up no actual or potential revenue. The reason, of course, is that scholarly journals don't buy articles from authors and don't pay royalties. Lettinga is heroic, but we should all be glad that OA doesn't require heroism. Compare and contrast, Wikipedia and Citizendium Larry Sanger, We aren't Wikipedia, Citizendium blog, March 21, 2007. Sanger --the co-founder of Wikipedia and founder of Citizendium-- lists 10 ways in which the two OA encyclopedias are similar and 11 ways in which they differ. Beyond OA for reading to OA for processing Tim O'Reilly, How Google Books is Changing Academic History, O'Reilly Radar, March 22, 2007. Excerpt:
A year of the Free Our Data campaign Charles Arthur and Michael Cross, A few victories, but the battle goes on, The Guardian, March 22, 2007. Excerpt:
U of Hull investigates user needs for its IR Richard Green and Chris Awre, The RepoMMan User Needs Analysis, March 2007. I'd post an excerpt, but the authors have blocked cut and paste copying from the PDF. (Why?) From the press release (thanks to Charles Bailey):
Richard Baer, Flickr as source of OA material, OA Librarian, March 21, 2007. Excerpt:
PS: For an earlier example, see the 1997 Army manual on conduct in battle posted to Flickr by Daniel Cornwall (blogged here July 28, 2006). More on peer-reviewed OA videos Attila Csord�s, Let�s make �supplementary� peer-review scientific videos free and youtubish! PIMM, March 21, 2007. Excerpt:
PS: For background, see my blog post and comment (November 2006) on the Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE). Profile of Anita Coleman and dLIST Global Thinker, Library Journal, March 15, 2007. Excerpt:
PS: This is much-deserved recognition. I can add that Anita has agreed to let authors of articles about OA self-archive them in dLIST, regardless of their institutional or disciplinary affiliation.
OpenDOAR has opened up its API for experiments, mash-ups, and creative new services. (Thanks to Peter Millington.) From the site:
SHERPA may introduce some small changes between now and the official launch (e.g. adding copyright and licensing statements to the XML output) but doesn't expect any large changes. One example from SHERPA itself is this XML list of all the repositories listed in OpenDOAR. Another example is this XML list of data about Caltech's Earthquake Engineering Research Laboratory repository. The most exciting example to date is the mash-up of OpenDOAR and Google Maps from Repository66. Should OA repositories protect authors' moral rights? Kasia Kurek, Peter A.Th.M. Geurts, and Hans E. Roosendaal, The split between availability and selection Business models for scientific information, and the scientific process? Information Services and Use, 26, 4 (2006).
PS: OA is a kind of access, not a kind of business model. There are many business models compatible with OA. I believe the authors could say all they wanted to say about OA if they considered it an access model rather than a business model. Minutes of EC expert group discussing OA Summary Minutes of the 2nd meeting of the High Level Expert Group on Digital Libraries 17 October 2006, European Commission. While the meeting took place in October 2006, the summary minutes were only released on March 19, 2007. I'm quoting the entirety of Section 3, Digital Libraries of Scientific and Scholarly Information � State of the discussion in the Scientific Information subgroup (pp. 5-6):
Comments.
Presentations from the EC's February meeting on OA The presentations from the EC-hosted meeting, Scientific Publishing in the European Research Area - Access, Dissemination, and Preservation in the Digital Age (Brussels, February 15-16, 2007), are now online. (Thanks to Alma Swan.) Mary Wong, Copyright and Access to Knowledge, a public talk at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, March 20, 2007. It's now available in a 63-minute podcast. From the Berkman Center blurb:
More on OA from the AGRIS Network Imma Subirats, Irene Onyancha, Gauri Salokhe, and Johannes Keizer, Towards an architecture for open archive networks in Agricultural Sciences and Technology. No date or citation, but announced yesterday on the Agriscontent blog. Apparently a preprint. All the authors work for the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Organizing downloaded articles Jonathan Gitlin, Minireview: Papers for OS X, Ars Technica, March 18, 2007. (Thanks to Richard Akerman.) Excerpt:
Comment. Of course full OA solves the problem even better --you only have to run searches or, having run them, organize bookmarks or links rather than articles. But for offline use of OA articles, and emailed copies of non-OA articles, apps like this one will be very useful. So far, however, it's limited to Mac users and papers listed in PubMed. Open courseware for corporate training courses Novell has launched Novell Open Courseware, apparently the first open courseware from a for-profit company for its corporate training courses. (Thanks to David Wiley.) Eve Gray, The State of the Nation 3: Journal publishing in South Africa - the green or gold route in the country of gold? Gray Area, March 19, 2007.
PS: This is Part 3 of Eve's analysis of the state of research dissemination in South Africa. Also see Parts 1 and 2. Accessing journal content through a virtual network drive Leigh Dodds, Academic Journals as a Virtual File System, All my eye, March 20, 2007. Excerpt:
Publisher keeps DRM, loses MIT MIT Faculty and Libraries Refuse DRM; SAE Digital Library Canceled, MIT Libraries News, March 16, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. A required plug-in and no free circulation of metadata? It looks like SAE is more interested in keeping its papers secret than in disseminating them. That is its prerogative, of course, and now its circle of readers has narrowed even further. MIT made the right decision, and so would any other libraries that followed suit. Authors who want their work to be read, applied, built upon, and cited should think hard before publishing in SAE journals. Update. There's now a Slashdot thread on MIT's decision. Update. Here's a good comment by John Blossom at Shore Communications: This does not bode well for scholarly publishers who may be planning to use DRM controls as a way of managing electronic access. As generally implemented DRM controls make it difficult, if not impossible, to use premium content for collaboration, a key factor for research and engineering....Instead [of] insisting on reinforcing a print model that is increasingly incompatible with the productivity requirements of scientific and academic audiences scholarly publishers need to focus on how best to facilitate knowledge transfer. DRM does nothing to help facilitate knowledge transfer whatsoever. Hopefully the SAE and other societies and associations can work with their memberships to come up with more productive models for licensing content.
OLCOS report on OA courseware and research The EU-funded OLCOS (Open eLearning Content Observatory Services) has released a major report, Open Educational Practices and Resources: OLCOS Roadmap 2012, January 2007. (Thanks to Ignasi Labastida i Juan.) From the splash page:
In the full report, see esp. Chapter 5.3 ("Open Access and open content repositories" pp. 72-86) and Chapter 6.2 (the roadmap brief on the same topic, pp. 112-113), which both cover OA to research as well as OA to courseware. From the full report:
OLCOS welcomes feedback on the report. Thomson buys publicly-funded OA database Thomson Scientific has bought Unleashed Informatics. The purchase includes BIND (Biomolecular Interaction Network Database), a formerly OA database. (Thanks to John Wilbanks.) From today's press release:
Comment. BIND was originally developed by Blueprint, a non-profit organization funded by IBM and a handful of Canadian medical institutes, including the U of Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital. Significant funding came from Canadian taxpayers, for example CDN $29 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and perhaps more from Genome Canada. Bind was OA. In December 2005, Blueprint sold BIND to Unleashed Informatics, which maintained an OA edition and introduced a priced edition. Now Thomson has bought Unleashed Informatics. Thomson promises to "continue to make complimentary versions of BOND and BIND available to Unleashed Open Access registrants" but doesn't say whether it will accept new registrants. Three more CERN experiments endorse gold OA Two more CERN experiments have endorsed the Statement on Open Access Publishing first promulgated by CERN's ATLAS experiment on February 23, 2007. The statement itself is short:
Here are the two new experiments to endorse it:
A third experiment has agreed to endorse gold OA in some form but is still working out the exact language:
(Thanks to Jens Vigen at CERN.) Comment. Recall that CERN's CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) experiment endorsed the ATLAS OA statement earlier this month. Hence, that makes four CERN experiments endorsing the ATLAS statement and five endorsing some form of gold OA. Note, as I pointed out when the ATLAS board first issued its statement:
11 articles on OA in the Open Source Jahrbuch 2007 The Open Source Jahrbuch 2007 is now online. The full-text is available for downloading. See the full table of contents (158 articles), the 15 articles in English, or the 11 articles on open access. Nature Biotech recommends OA data Democratizing proteomics data, Nature Biotechnology, March 2007. An editorial. (Thanks to Francis Ouellette.) Excerpt:
Comment. This is a good policy. I'd only note that the same arguments for OA to datasets apply just as strongly to peer-reviewed articles interpreting or analyzing datasets. OA to articles would "enhance the utility, reproducibility and dissemination of the research published in [a journal's] pages...." OA research letters from Hindawi Hindawi Publishing has launched a "Research Letters" series of OA journals. From its announcement:
PS: A dozen new OA journals in one announcement. This is a sign of momentum.
Summary version of November 2006 report on self-archiving and journal cancellations The Publishing Research Consortium has released a condensed version of its November 2006 study, Self-Archiving and Journal Subscriptions: Co-existence or Competition? From today's announcement:
Comment. Here's what I said about the full-length study last November:
For a large number of comments on the study's methodological flaws, with replies by the authors (Chris Beckett and Simon Inger), see Steve Hitchcock's compendium from December 2006. Second thoughts on the Google Library project On March 4, Peter Brantley wrote a blog post arguing that the University of California made a mistake to join the Google Library project. On March 9, he wrote a second post to clarify the first. (Thanks to ACRLblog.) Brantley is the director of strategic technology for academic information systems in the UC's Office of the President. From the March 4 post:
From the March 9 post:
Lobbying help from R&D industries Stevan Harnad, Forging An OA Alliance With R&D Industries and Mobilizing University Mandates, Open Access Archivangelism, March 18, 2007. Excerpt:
Bypassing censorship filters to do research Sam Kean, Computer scientists use social networking to help foreign scholars bypass their governments' Web filters, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 23, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
The presentations from Open Knowledge 1.0 (London, March 17, 2007) are now online. Update. Glyn Moody has blogged some notes on the presentations. Update. Also see blog notes by Chris Corbin and Jessica Clark. Putting OA repositories on the map Tim Brody has done a mash-up of ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories) and Google Earth. The result lets you see the worldwide distribution, and precise locations, of OA repositories. For details, see his blog post. Update. Repository66.org has a similar mash-up based on OpenDOAR rather than ROAR. The two projects are connected and roughly simultaneous; for details, see this and this.
EU Grand Prize for book-scanning machine The ScanRobot from Treventus Mechatronics won one of the EU's three Grand Prizes for Information and Communication Technology for 2007. The ScanRobot is a book-scanning machine that will digitize an average book in six minutes. Student resolution for FRPAA coming to Emory U Students at Emory University are submitting a resolution in support of FRPAA to the Student Government Association for approval. The language is based on the resolution approved by the University of Florida Student Senate in June 2006. Update. Also see Stevan Harnad's comment urging students to lobby (as well) for OA mandates at their own institutions. IRs should host full texts, not just abstracts and links Jennifer De Beer, what an IR shouldn't be..., jenniferdebeer, March 18, 2007. Excerpt:
Gavin Yamey, Opening Up to Open Access: What Can Other Disciplines Learn from the Sciences? A public talk at Harvard University, March 14, 2007. A 77 minute podcast is now available for downloading. Also check out the separate Q&A session. Yamey is a physician, Senior Editor of PLoS Medicine, and Consulting Editor of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. Creative Commons is launching a new division called CC Learn (no web site yet), devoted to Open Educational Resources. It's now looking for an Executive Director. For anyone working in open education, this would be a great job. Spread the word. |