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Toward a more vetted, citable Wikipedia Jeffrey R. Young, A 'Frozen' Wikipedia Could be Better for College, Founder Says, Wired Campus, May 16, 2008. Excerpt:
Update. Also see Jan Velterop's comments. Google indexes 90% of recent engineering research John J. Meier and Thomas W. Conkling, Google Scholar’s Coverage of the Engineering Literature: An Empirical Study, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2008. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far.
Deposit rates by discipline and other IR questions Ronald C. Jantz and Myoung C. Wilson, Institutional Repositories: Faculty Deposits, Marketing, and the Reform of Scholarly Communication, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2008. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far.
Stevan Harnad, Berkeley's Bold Initiative, Open Access Archivangelism, May 16, 2008. Excerpt: "It's one thing to say you support open-access publishing. It's another to provide authors with a pot of money to actually pay for it. That's what's happening at the University of California Berkeley..." (SPARC [e]News May 2008) Comment. Of course OA journals do provide OA itself, and I applaud the Berkeley OA journal fund. But I also join Stevan in hoping that Berkeley will adopt a green OA mandate like Harvard and a growing number of other universities. Note that the whole U of California system, including Berkeley, has been considering an OA mandate since 2005. (For details, see the postscript to my March 2008 article on the Harvard mandate.) When the Harvard mandate was adopted in February 2008, Gary Lawrence, the UC director of systemwide library planning, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that "Harvard's success in creating an arrangement that faculty members agreed on provides us a lot of encouragement." Open data to reduce retractions, enhance reproducibility Cameron Neylon, Avoid the pain and embarassment - make all the raw data available, Science in the open, May 16, 2008. Excerpt:
A specialized search engine for PubChem David J. Wild and Junguk Hur, PubChemSR: A search and retrieval tool for PubChem, Chemistry Central Journal, May 15, 2008. Abstract:
Review of Gallacher on OA in law Elena Maria Coyle, Law Schools and the Open Access Movement: An Article Review of Aux Armes Citoyens, Stanford Law School Research Paper No. 22, May 2008. (Thanks to Legal Research Plus.) Excerpt:
PS: For background, see our November 2007 blog excerpt from Gallacher's Aux Armes, Citoyens.
In one week, six journals agreed to support the NIH policy In the week from May 7 to May 15, these journals joined the NIH list of journals "committed to make the final published version of every NIH-funded article publicly available in PubMed Central within 12 months of publication, without author involvement."
First unleash abundance, then deal with it Jan Velterop, Dealing with abundance – getting more out of the science literature than you thought possible, The Parachute, May 15, 2008. Excerpt:
Reasons to remove permission barriers Klaus Graf, Warum brauchen wir Open Access mit Bearbeitungsrecht und kommerzieller Nutzung? Archivalia, May 16, 2008. A detailed recap of the reasons to remove permission barriers in addition to price barriers (in German). Here's his summary in English (by email):
Comment. Klaus is right and I've often made my own similar lists. Here's one from my interview with Richard Poynder (October 2007, p. 37-39):
New OA journal of humanoid robotics The Journal of Humanoids is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of humanoid robotics published by I-Tech. The inaugural issue (March 2008) is now online. Funding the free exchange of digital works Mutualised schemes for the funding of and reward to creative activities, La Quadrature du Net, May 16, 2008. (Thanks to Manon Ress.) Excerpt:
Call for open courseware in UK universities
Leo Max Pollak, Open Source and the Benefits of Education, report, undated but apparently recent. Apparently a preprint of "Free Higher Education course materials for all" as published in the current issue of Public Policy Research. See the description by Anthea Lipsett, Teach online to compete, British universities told, The Guardian, May 13, 2008:
See also the author's blog on the subject.
Heather Morrison, The Open Access Reserves List, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, May 15, 2008.
Researchers who are faculty, too, are soon likely to see a clear benefit to them of open access: the ease of creating a list of reserve readings for students. UK repository deposits double in 18 months
Leslie Carr, Repository Deposits Double in the UK, RepositoryMan, May 15, 2008.
The graph shows how monthly UK institutional repository deposits have doubled in the last 18 months. Each repository was receiving an average of 40 deposits per month in October 2006 and is now receiving about 80 deposits per month in April 2008.
International Journal of Zoology is an (apparently) new OA, peer-reviewed journal by Hindawi. The journal will publish "original research articles as well as review articles in all areas of zoology". There are no page charges, color charges, or article processing charges. Print subscriptions are $195. Articles are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
Sudhir Krishnaswamy, et al., Legal and Policy Framework for Promoting Equitable Access to Documentary Heritage, report submitted to UNESCO, March 31, 2008; deposited May 15, 2008. Abstract:
The National Mission for Manuscripts of India, in association with UNESCO, completed a research study to assist in the development of legal and policy framework and protocols for promoting equitable access to documentary heritage, relevant to India and other South Asian countries. ... [T]he study seeks to accurately identify and critically examine the legal and policy framework for promoting equitable access to documentary heritage. The National Mission for Manuscripts is the most important institution in India dealing with bibliographic databases and the conservation and preservation of valuable manuscripts. The study covers the legal and policy framework which envelops the lifecycle of the Mission's work: access to manuscripts, their digitisation and creation of databases. By critically examining the legal rules in the practical context of the Mission�s work, the research team has put together the first review of an initiative aimed at the protection of Indian traditional knowledge. The study illustrates working patterns of the Mission within the legal and policy framework of the country. It is a helpful sourcebook for understanding South Asian legal and policy framework for accessing documentary heritage collections. While the study does not set out to be the final word on these policy initiatives, it definitely makes significant progress in the policy debate and legal literature in this field. The conclusions presented in the form of draft legal agreements and policy recommendations will, with no doubt, be valuable tools for South Asian countries that share similar legal and policy framework within the sub-region.
Carol Minton Morris, Strands of a Global Web of Knowledge Come Together at the Third International Open Repositories Conference 2008, D-Lib Magazine, May/June 2008. A report on Open Repositories 2008 (Southampton, April 1-4, 2008).
OA database to coordinate science projects for development Scientists Without Borders launched an OA database to "coordinate science-based activities that improve quality of life in the developing world." (Thanks to Matt Cockerill.) From the announcement:
Update. Also see the summary of the project by Evelyn Strauss, Executive Director of Scientists Without Borders. As part of its 10th anniversary celebration, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society has launched the Publius Project. The idea is foster a public dialogue on the evolving norms for governing the internet, just as Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, under the pseudonym Publius, fostered a public dialogue through the Federalist Papers (1787-1788) on the norms which ought to govern the newly independent United States. From the FAQ:
All the contributions to the Publius Project are OA, under CC-BY licenses, and all are attributed. The first 10 are now online and other contributions will be released in waves. (Disclosure: My own contribution, on the evolving norms for deciding who controls access to research, will be released in a subsequent wave.) More on university OA journal funds Berkeley steps forward with bold initiative to pay authors’ open-access charges, SPARC enews, May 2008. Excerpt:
OA strategies at the U of Pennsylvania Newsmaker Interview: Shawn Martin, Penn’s New Scholarly Communication Librarian, Library Journal Academic Newswire, May 15, 2008. Excerpt:
OA to textbooks from Open U. of Israel
Ehud Zion Waldoks, Open University to put full textbooks on-line, Jerusalem Post, May 14, 2008.
Comment. I can't find other coverage of this news, and I can't get the site to load, so I don't know whether the textbooks are libre (available under an open license) or merely gratis (free of charge). Update. Also see Ofri Ilani's story in Haaretz for May 27, 2008. Update. See also the announcement by the university, posted at OCW Blog. U of Oregon senate encourages use of an author addendum Yesterday the University of Oregon Faculty Senate adopted a resolution encouraging faculty to use an author addendum:
Thanks to JQ Johnson (Director of Scholarly Communications and Instructional Support for the University of Oregon Libraries) for the alert and for this summary of the task force report endorsed by the Senate:
OA to UK UFO files -- for a limited time
Laura Blue, Britain Releases its X-Files, Time, May 14, 2008. (Thanks to Susan Morris.)
... This week Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) begins releasing all its files about UFOs � in ministry parlance, "Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon" � on a government website, free for download. ...See also: France posted its UFO files last year.
MSF makes its research accessible to health workers in developing countries, press release, May 15, 2008.
Today, the international medical humanitarian organisation Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has launched a website which makes available, for free, published research based on its medical work. ...See also the comments by Public Library of Science and BioMed Central (whose Open Repository service, based on DSpace, runs the MSF site). Comments on WiChempedia and Chempedia
Peter Murray-Rust, Chemical compounds in Wikipedia, petermr�s blog, May 15, 2008.
... Recently two derivative works of [Wikipedia] compounds were announced: [WiChempedia and Building Chempedia]. This post is primarily to welcome these developments and add some general comments.
Our own work on collections of common compounds using RDF is progressing well though it has been technically harder than we thought mainly due to variability in data input. ... We shall, of course make our results freely and Openly available, modulo the difficult issues which have been raised about data sharing are re-use. OA journals in library science
Stephen Francoeur, Open access journals in Library Literature, Digital Reference, May 14, 2008. (Thanks to Robin Peek.)
I did a quick review of how many open access journals are covered in the Wilson database, Library Literature and Information Science Index (Library Lit). ... Here are the numbers:
Don Kazak, Stanford gets Stephen Jay Gould's books, Palo Alto Online News, May 14, 2008. (Thanks to LISNews.)
OA to landmark science articles
National Science Digital Library has launched a new OA project, Classic Articles in Context. The project provides OA to landmark papers in a particular field and adds supporting materials. See the description by Carol Minton Morris, Plug a Wiki into a Fedora Repository and Get . . . A Scholarly Publication, HatCheck Newsletter, May 14, 2008.
OA impact advantage even greater for developing countries Michael Norris, Charles Oppenheim, and Fytton Rowland, Open Access Citation Rates and Developing Countries, a forthcoming presentation at ElPub 2008 (Toronto, June 25-27, 2008). (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.) Excerpt:
David W. Lewis, Library budgets, open access, and the future of scholarly communication: Transformations in academic publishing, College and Research Libraries News, May 2008.
Report on study of data repositories
Liz Lyon, et al., Scaling Up: Towards a Federation of Crystallography Data Repositories, report funded by JISC Digital Repositories Programme, May 12, 2008. (Thanks to UKOLN.) From the executive summary:
The Scaling Up Report presents the results of a JISC-funded scoping study to assess the feasibility of a federated model for data repositories in the domain of crystallography. It builds on earlier work in the eBank UK Project and has been based on a mix of desk-based research, a consultation workshop and a series of interviews with stakeholders. OA to books from Venezuelan publisher
Laura Vidal, Venezuela: Publishing House Provides Works Online, Global Voices Online, May 13th, 2008. (Thanks to Jerzy Celichowski.)
First Australasian university signs the Cape Town Declaration
As announced on May 14, the forthcoming release of Open Journal Systems (2.2.1) is looking for pre-release testers.
Will my publisher allow self-archiving? BURP [Bradford University Repository Project], May 2008. Excerpt:
More on the ACS position on OA Bob Michaelson, The American Chemical Society and Open Access, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Winter 2008. Excerpt:
Sian Harris interviews Brian Crawford in the April/May issue of Research Information. Crawford is the President of Publications division of the American Chemical Society (ACS) and Chairman of the Executive Council of the Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). He was chair of the PSP/AAP Executive Council at the time it hired Dezenhall Resources and launched PRISM. Excerpt:
Comments. I'll limit myself to three comments here. But for more comments on his OA position, see my blog archive.
Update. Also see the comments on Plausible Accuracy.
JISC: Synthesizing what we know about repositories
Tom Franklin, Repositories and Preservation Programme Synthesis, JISC Information Environment Team blog, May 13, 2008.
New OA journal of ear-nose-throat medicine
The Medscape Journal of Medicine has launched an Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery section. From the inaugural editorial by David Goldenberg, posted April 29, 2008:
Overview of LOC digitization projects
Paula J. Hane, LC Works to Make Collections Accessible and Compelling, Information Today, May 12, 2008.
Indian J. of Ophthalmology provides OA to backfile
Back files of IJO from vol 1 available for free access, Medknow, May 2008.
Back files of last 55 years of Indian Journal of Ophthalmology are now available online (except for a couple of issues). The entire collection of over 3,500 articles is available for free access. IJO is PubMed and SCI indexed journal with a print circulation of over 10,000. ...
Gino D'Oca, Chempedia: "a free and continuously-updated" chemical compound encyclopaedia, Chemistry Central Blog, May 12, 2008.
More on Oregon's copyrighted laws
Nate Anderson, Fight shaping up over Oregon's state law copyright claims, Ars Technica, May 13, 2008.
Limiting PMC searches to OA articles PubMed Central allows users to filter or "limit" searches to OA articles. To find the option, click the Limits tab on the search page. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.) One aspect of this feature seems to be new (more below in the comment), but other aspects are not. Here's the part of the Help file on this filter:
Comments
Update. I just got some clarity from Ed Sequeira at the NLM. (Thanks, Ed.) Here's the gist:
Czech Academy signs the Berlin Declaration The Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge. (Thanks to Anja Lengenfelder.) Larousse offers free online access and some user freedom to contribute Emily Murphy, French publishing group sets up rival to Wikipedia, The Independent, May 14, 2008. Excerpt:
Comments
Ken Udas, Doing OER and OA: More Questions than Answers, Open Students, May 12, 2008.
Utah gets an open charter high school
David Wiley, The Open High School of Utah, iterating toward openness, May 12, 2008.
Comment. See my comments at gavinbaker.com: ... There are a few reasons this is particularly exciting. This school will have a strong concentrated interest in supporting OERs � you can expect the administration to be vocal advocates for favorable policies, funding, etc. The staff will develop deep experience with OERs, which can be shared with colleagues at traditional schools � and carried with them to future jobs. The school�s existence will establish a precedent, encouraging other educators to consider how to use OERs.Update. Wiley has posted the charter application documents. OA as balance to copyright control
Kenny Crews, Copyright in Bayreuth, �ollectanea, May 10, 2008.
See also our posts on the Section 108 Study Group Report and the orphan works legislation. Faculty views on the future of scholarly communication Diane Harley and four co-authors, Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An In-depth Study of Faculty Needs and Ways of Meeting Them, a "Draft Interim Report" from the University of California Berkeley's Center for Studies in Higher Education, Spring 2008.
Despite its mention in the abstract, there's little about OA in the body of the report:
PS: For background, also see the July 2006 report by most of the same authors, from the same Berkeley Center, Scholarly Communication: Academic Values and Sustainable Models. In my blog excerpts, I highlighted the findings which documented widespread faculty ignorance and misunderstanding of OA.
Donna Wentworth, How to free your facts, Science Commons blog, May 12th, 2008.
Roddy MacLeod, Wanted: Institutional repository RSS feeds, SPARC-OAForum mailing list, May 13, 2008.
... The Gold Dust project needs to know about IR RSS feeds.
Christian Zimmermann, A survey of RePEc services, The RePEc blog, May 11, 2008.
New ARL scholarly communication discussion guides
On May 12, the Association of Research Libraries updated its Brown-Bag Discussion Guide Series on Issues in Scholarly Communication. Two new guides were added: Author Rights II: Institutional Strategies for Enhancing Rights Management and New Model Publications.
Tempers flare on the AAP lawsuit against Google Craig Morgan Teicher, Panels Highlight the Copyright Divide, Publishers Weekly, May 12, 2008. Excerpt:
Comment. I'm with Sprigman. See for example, Does Google Library violate copyright? from October 2005. Communicating research results to research participants David I. Shalowitz and Franklin G. Miller, Communicating the Results of Clinical Research to Participants: Attitudes, Practices, and Future Directions, PLoS Medicine, May 13, 2008. Excerpt:
Comment. This leads to a simple and powerful argument for OA. Most research subjects are not faculty members with prepaid access to a large body of journal literature. The easiest and most direct way to give them access to the results is to make the results OA, either through an OA journal or an OA repository. Researchers could mail digital or print offprints to each participant, but that could easily cost more than OA, especially if the journal charges a fee for the reproduction and distribution of offprints. Helping faculty with OA in order to help them increase their impact Laura Bowering Mullen, Increasing Impact of Scholarly Journal Articles: Practical Strategies Librarians Can Share, Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship, Spring 2008.
From the body of the paper:
Comment. Some librarians use preservation as the hook to get faculty to deposit new articles in the institutional repository. It's an honest argument and I hope it works. But librarians should also use impact as a hook. (I know that many already do.) It's an honest argument as well and one supported by plentiful data. Publishing faculty need preservation and impact, but far more of them know they need impact than know they need preservation. In that sense the impact argument is closer to the surface of faculty interests. But because the two arguments are compatible, there's no need to choose. Have the impact argument ready when you need it --and put it on the library web site, as Mullen recommends. Guides for OA journal publishers The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened another list for community editing and enlargement: Remember that OAD is a wiki. You can help the cause by adding or revising entries to the OAD lists. Another OA mandate for a public funding agency in Ireland The Science Foundation Ireland has released a draft policy on The Open Access Repository of Published Research, undated but part of a call for comments apparently released today. From the draft policy:
From the call for comments:
Comment. This policy is virtually identical to the exemplary OA mandate adopted by the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology (IRCSET) earlier this month. The only significant differences are the provisions on books, data, and software added by SFI (##6-8 above). Kudos to all involved at SFI. As I did with the IRCSET policy,
Passions about the future of society publishing Jennifer Howard, Learned Societies' Gathering Delves Into Political and Publishing Challenges, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 2008. Excerpt:
Open education in medicine and healthcare R. Ellaway and R.D. Martin, What's mine is yours - open source as a new paradigm for sustainable healthcare education, Medical Teacher, March 2008. The March issue isn't online yet so I've linked to the abstract at PubMed:
Sharing subscription buffet revenue with OA content
Mark Surman, The world is flat (rate), commonspace, April 30, 2008.
See the response by Andrew Rens, Subscription based open content aggregation, ex Africa semper aliquid novi, May 12, 2008:
From the May 12 announcement by Ingegerd Rabow:
Supported by Nordbib, the old ScieCominfo has been revived to focus specifically on the Nordic and Baltic countries. ...Articles in the new issue:
New release of ETDs bibliography
Version 2 of Charles Bailey's Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography was released on May 12. From the announcement:
... This bibliography presents selected English-language articles, conference papers, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet ... New OA journal on medical case reports
Cases Journal is a peer-reviewed OA journal for medical case reports published by BioMed Central. The journal was announced on May 12. Article processing charges are �99 (�125, US$195) per accepted article, subject to discounts and waivers. Articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
Update. See also the comments at the BioMed Central Blog and by the journal's editor, Richard Smith, at OnMedica. Latest additions to DOAJ: 14 new entries
The following journals were added to the Directory of Open Access Journals since May 5, most recent first:
More controversy over OA for creative writing ETDs Andrea Foster, Readers Not Wanted: Student Writers Fight to Keep Their Work Off the Web, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 16, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
PS: For background, see our March 2008 post on the similar controversy at the University of Iowa.
Sean Kass, a third year Harvard law student, has released a 14 minute video, Open Access to Scholarly Publications. The video is a project in the course, The Web Difference, taught by John Palfrey and David Weinberger. The boundary between removing no permission barriers and removing some Stevan Harnad, Lower Bound Needed for Permission-Barrier-Free Open Access, Open Access Archivangelism, May 4, 2008.
Comments
OpenTuition is a new site offering free online study guides for accountancy. From the March 9 announcement:
The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened three more lists for community editing and enlargement: Remember that OAD is a wiki. You can help the cause by adding your own entries to these lists. How long to produce a journal issue with OJS?
Heather Morrison, Open Access Using OJS - how fast?, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, May 10, 2008.
How fast can a journal issue be published using Open Journal Systems (OJS)? Remembering the public domain for open data John Wilbanks, On the Erosion of the Public Domain, John Wilbanks' blog, May 10, 2008. Excerpt: PS: For a longer version of John's defense of the public domain for open data, as opposed to open licenses for open data, see the Science Commons Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data or my blog post on it from December 2007. |