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The future of OA in high-energy physics CERN's SCOAP3 project has posted a summary of Rolf-Dieter Heuer's talk, Innovation in Scholarly Communication: Vision and Projects from High Energy Physics, at the Academic Publishing in Europe 2008 conference (Berlin, January 21-23, 2008). Heuer is the Research director of DESY and Director-General Elect of CERN. Excerpt:
Harvesting and organizing OA blog discussions of peer-reviewed research After a few months of community comment and collaboration, ResearchBlogging officially launched on January 21, 2008. From the about page:
91% of 10,000 surveyed journals support self-archiving Of 10,000 journal policies recorded on SHERPA/Romeo, a full 91% now support preprint and/or postprint archiving. (Thanks to the EPrints Self-Archiving Policy Commitment page.) Notes from the workshop on Asia and the Commons Rebecca MacKinnon has blogged some notes on the International Workshop on Asia and Commons in the Information Age (Taipei, January 19-20, 2008). (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Excerpt:
Questions about institutional responsibilities for complying with the NIH policy T. Scott Plutchak, Questions for the ARL Public Access meeting, T. Scott, January 25, 2008.
Comment. Good questions. I'm only puzzled by the final paragraph. The NIH policy is a major advance for the OA movement and should result in free online access to 80,000 peer-reviewed articles per year, a bigger bump than we will ever get from any other single institutional policy. As I put it in this month's issue of SOAN:
Freeing up all the world's scientific (and scholarly) literature is still the goal. What comes next: more OA through journals and archives; more policies from funding agencies and universities to encourage or require OA archiving; and more education, assistance, and incentives for publishing scholars. Update. See Scott's response to my comments. Visualizing repository metadata Greenstone has released an OAI metadata analysis tool for "producing statistics and visualisations of repository metadata". (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) Effective use of an institutional repository Peter Cliff, Making effective use of your repository, a slide presentation at Queen's University Belfast, January 17, 2008. College credit for writing Citizendium articles Citizendium and several university partners have launched a project to give college credit for contributing to Citizendium articles. From the January 24 announcement:
Citizendium has reached the milestone of 5,000 articles. More on the need for open data in medical research Andrew Vickers, Cancer Data? Sorry, Can’t Have It, New York Times, January 22, 2008. (Thanks to LISNews.) Excerpt:
Update. For the record, Eli Lilly denies that it ever suppressed results of negative clinical trials. In the course of reporting this for Outsourcing-Pharma, Kirsty Barnes unearthed a few other nuggets:
Notes from the COMMUNIA workshop on the public domain Jonathan Gray has blogged some notes on the Communia workshop on Technology and the Public Domain (Torino, January 18, 2008).
Report on the first DRIVER summit Norbert Lossau, First DRIVER Summit demonstrates the advancement of the European repository network and lays out further actions, DRIVER, January 25, 2008. Excerpt:
New blog for students about OA Gavin Baker has launched Open Students, a new blog about OA for students. From his introductory post:
Comment. Welcome to Gavin and Open Students. When SPARC honored the student campaign for OA with its Innovator Award in December 2007, it named five students in particular as agents of change, and Gavin was one, "The Professional". I'll be a regular reader. Sign on to support OA textbooks George Porter, Preston McAfee signs Faculty Statement of Intent supporting Make Textbooks Affordable, Open Access Authoring @ Caltech, January 23, 2008. Excerpt:
Update. Also see the press release from StudentPIRGs on the sign-up initiative. Update. Also see Heather Morrison's comments on the initiative. Text of the OA mandate from the ISS Institute's compliance to open access principles, a press release from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (National Institute of Health, or ISS), January 17, 2008. (Thanks to Paola de Castro.) Excerpt:
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Update. I have just confirmed with ISS that, while it does have some external grantees, the current policy only applies to ISS staff researchers. More on the new NIH OA mandate Kimberly K. Barlow, NIH mandates open access to researchers' publications, University of Pittsburgh University Times, January 24, 2008. (Thanks to Heather Joseph.) Excerpt:
Dorothea Salo has sketched a painfully plausible, fictitious Dr. Troia to dramatize the problem of getting faculty to self-archive. Excerpt:
Comment. We've all met Dr. Troia. We all work with Dr. Troia. When you think about motivating real-life OA archiving, think about Dr. Troia. By all means know the evidence for benefits to authors and readers, but don't limit yourself to it. If you're a good teacher, you teach the students in the room, not the ideal student who doesn't really need you. If we're good OA advocates, we must address researchers where we find them. Update. Dorothea has created another character, Cassandra Athens, "webmaster for the Department of Basketology at Achaea University." Update. Next on stage is Menelaus Fox, a collection-development librarian at Achaea University. Update. Next up is Ulysses Acqua, the repository manager at Achaea University. Discovering and deterring duplicate publications A study in the January 24 issue of Nature turned up 200,000+ duplicate articles in journals indexed by Medline. Charles Bailey draws an OA connection:
Comment. Here's another OA connection. As the OA percentage of the literature continues to grow, journals wishing to avoid publishing a duplicate or plagiarized article will find it easier to discover potential problems in advance of publication. Likewise, journals that don't care, or with the opposite desire, will find it harder to publish duplicates undetected. OA advocates have long argued that OA will reduce duplication of effort, allowing researchers to focus on new questions. For example, see how this point has been made by Jean Collins, B. Gitanjali, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Edward Mills, Vinita Salvi, Sukhdev Singh, a pseudonymous blogger, the Applied Economics Research Bulletin, the European Commission, the Medical Research Council, and the Wellcome Trust. For the same reason, OA will reduce duplication of publication, at least for journals which make it a goal. This is a variation on the theme that OA deters plagiarism or, as Louis Brandeis put it, that sunlight is the best disinfectant. YouTube lectures from Indian Institutes of Technology The seven Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) have created a YouTube channel for video lectures. Currently the channel covers 13 courses, and will grow to cover 110 courses by March. The project is part of India's National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning. (Thanks to Subbiah Arunachalam.)
Tracking OA conversations about OA articles Jon Udell, Alf Eaton shows how to gather scientific reaction to open access scientific articles, Jon Udell, January 24, 2008. Excerpt:
Survey of Cuban health researchers on OA journals Nancy Sánchez Tarragó and Juan Carlos Fernández Molina, Open Access Journals: Knowledge and Attitudes among Cuban Health Researchers, MEDICC Review, 10, 1 (2007) pp. 18-21. Self-archived January 22, 2008.
OA tables of contents in linguistics Online Contents Linguistik is an OA database of journal tables of contents in general linguistics. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) From the site:
Neurocommons OA project one to watch in 2008 Greg Simon, the President of FasterCures, has put together a list of Ten to watch in 2008 --for accelerating medical research and translating research into cures. Excerpt:
Update. Also see the response from Science Commons, which launched the Neurocommons project:
Stevan Harnad, The OA Self-Archiving Sweepstakes: One More University and One More Funder Mandate, Open Access Archivangelism, January 24, 2008.
PS: The lead story in next week's issue of SOAN will be the OA mandates adopted or revealed in January 2008. Problems and Opportunities in Spanish Peter Suber, Problemas y oportunidades (tormentas de nieve y bellos atardeceres), SEBBM (the journal of the Sociedad Española de Bioquímica y Biología Molecular), December 2007. This is a Spanish translation of Problems and opportunities (blizzards and beauty), from SOAN for July 2, 2007. Forthcoming guide to best practices for OA journals An announcement from Co-Action Publishing:
OA database of misinformation about Iraq The Center for Public Integrity has created an OA database of 900+ false statements made by Bush administration officials to justify the invasion of Iraq. (Thanks to Reuters.) Compare and contrast, OA and OD Stevan Harnad, Open Access and Open Data, Open Access Archivangelism, January 23, 2008. Excerpt:
Comments. I agree with nearly all that Stevan says here, and will just make a couple of short points on where we may diverge.
Note to Davos: Remember openness The World Economic Forum 2008: The Coming of Age of Open and Collaborative Innovation? IQsensato, January 21, 2008. Excerpt:
Petition to free up access to the Cochrane Library Last month, the EU Alliance for the Dissemination of Evidence launched a petition to the European Commission, asking it to subsidize free online access for the Cochrane Library, at least within Europe. From the text:
Update. The petition essentially calls on the EU to pay Wiley to provide EU-wide access for research largely produced by public funding. Ben Toth has given me permission to post his reservations about the petition. Toth is the Director of Health Perspectives and former Director of the NHS National Knowledge Service.
An OA mandate for Italy's premier funder of medical research Yesterday, Italy's Istituto Superiore di Sanità (National Institute of Health, or ISS) adopted an OA mandate for ISS-funded research. (Thanks to Valentina Comba.) The policy is not yet online in Italian or English. It requires deposit of the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript in the ISS repository at the time of acceptance for publication in a journal. The full text will be available by intranet immediately (apparently for ISS personnel only) and by public internet after the publisher's embargo runs (apparently 24 months max). I hope to post a link to the actual policy shortly. Update. See my post on January 25, 2008, for the English-language text of the new policy. Supplementary Open Access, The RePEc blog, January 23, 2008. Excerpt:
Free online access to 12 years of The Atlantic The Atlantic has provided free online access to its backfile from 1995 to the present. The rest of its backfile (from 1857 onwards) is still behind a price barrier. (Thanks to Larry Cebula.) Update. I should have added that this applies to the current issue as well. Bilingual guide to Germany's new copyright law and its consequences for OA The Open Access Unit of the Max Planck Digital Library has released a detailed wiki-based guide to Germany's new copyright law and its consequences for OA. The guide is in German and English. (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access.) Update. Klaus Graf argues that the Max Planck guide is not helpful, ignores important debates, and repeats common misunderstandings. Profile of Germany's Informationsplattform Open Access Dagmar Giersberg, Open-acces.net informiert zentral über barrierefreie Publikationsformen, Goethe Institut, December 2007. Read it in German or Google's English. An OA mandate for Charles Sturt University Australia's Charles Sturt University has adopted an institutional OA mandate. (Thanks to ROARMAP.) From the policy:
Comment. "CRO" ("CSU Research Output") is the university's institutional repository. The policy was clearly adopted sometime last year, perhaps early last year, but I only just learned about it. The policy not only mandates deposit of peer-reviewed manuscripts, but makes compliance a condition for internal funding and promotions --a smart and natural incentive. Kudos to all involved.
More from Australia's science minister on OA for publicly-funded research Brendan O'Keefe and Bernard Lane, Scientists 'obliged' to share wisdom, The Australian Higher Education, January 23, 2008. (Thanks to Colin Steele.) Excerpt:
PS: Senator Kim Carr is also Australia's Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research. For background, see his public comments last week on the open dissemination of science. SPARC announces SPARKY winners SPARC has announced the winners of the first annual SPARKY awards. From today's press release:
PS: Congratulations to Yazdi, McCauley, Silver, Espinel, and Hadro. UC Berkeley has launched a pilot program to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals. The program is funded by the discretionary accounts of Thomas Leonard, University Librarian, and Beth Burnside, Vice Chancellor for Research. (Thanks to Chuck Eckman.) From the site:
Also see the program description, applicant instructions, FAQ, and yesterday's press release. Helmholtz Alliance terascale physics project joins SCOAP3 The Physics at the Terascale project of the Helmholtz Alliance has joined joined CERN's SCOAP3 project. Here's its announcement in full:
10 university collections on YouTube OpenCulture has posted links to 10 university collections on YouTube. More publisher objections to the NIH policy Rebecca Trager, NIH battles publishers over open access, Chemistry World, January 22, 2008. Excerpt:
Comment. The ACS is blowing smoke. The copyright objection is groundless and the peer review objection is groundless. So is the objection that the bill requires NIH to consult with publishers. The bill says nothing of the kind, and in any case, and the NIH has conducted extensive public consultations in which publishers participated fully. For details on the public consultations, see my account or Heather Joseph's. More on the Cape Town Declaration Scott Jaschik, International Call for Open Resources, Inside Higher Ed, January 22, 2008. Excerpt:
Also see the op-ed by Jimmy Wales and Rich Baraniuk in today's San Francisco Chronicle. Excerpt:
Official launch of the Cape Town Declaration If you recall, the Cape Town Open Education Declaration made a "soft launch" last November in order to gather signatures before its official launch this year. (My November blog post also includes a long excerpt from the declaration.) The declaration officially launched today. From the press release:
Comment. This is a superb document, and should unify and accelerate open education worldwide, roughly as the Budapest Open Access Initiative has done for OA. Please consider signing it, as an individual, on behalf of your institution, or both, and please spread the word. Blog comments v. MIT Press peer reviewers Jeffrey Young, Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2008 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
Update. Also see Ben Vershbow's post at if:book. Update (March 13, 2008). Also see Jeffrey Young's update on Wardrip-Fruin's experiment. Update (April 2, 2008). Also see Jeffrey Young's next update on the experiment. Discussion of OA at India's NIC Sukhdev Singh has written a report on a discussion of OA at a training program on Biomedical Information Retrieval hosted by India's National Informatics Centre (NIC) on January 15-17, 2008. Excerpt:
Richard Poynder interviews Peter Murray-Rust In the latest installment of his Open Access Interviews, Richard Poynder interviews Peter Murray-Rust, January 21, 2008. This is another superb, wide-ranging Poynder interview, covering the importance of separate treatment of open data (OD) and OA for texts, the benefits of OD for research, technical and legal barriers to text- and data-mining, publishers who claim copyright on data, licensing OD, the distinction between price barriers and permission barriers, the difficulty of determining publisher policies on OD and OA, the need for a central organization to pursue OD, and the deep connections between OD and open source software. From the introduction:
Video of SPARC panel on student views on OA Matt Agnello made a video of the SPARC forum, Working with the Facebook Generation: Engaging Student Views on Access to Scholarship at the ALA Midwinter Meeting (Philadelphia, January 11-16, 2008). Also see his collection of humorous quotes from the event. (Thanks to Gavin Baker.) Spanish funder launches an OA repository The largest public funder of research in Spain, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spanish National Research Council, or CSIC) launched an OA repository, Digital.CSIC, on January 18. (Thanks to Markus Trapp via Klaus Graf.) This suggests that CSIC has some kind of OA policy for CSIC-funded research. But I don't know what it is and my Spanish is too weak to let me explore the site for clues. If you know or discover the CSIC policy, please drop me a line or post an English summary to SOAF. In February 2006, CSIC signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge, and in June 2007 it converted 12 of its 32 journals to OA and announced plans to convert the rest. Update (1/21/08). Gavin Baker reports that the CSIC appears not to be operating under an OA mandate. (Thanks, Gavin.) Here's his English-language paraphrase of a section of the Digital.CSIC FAQ:
He also turned up this interesting provision from the Digital.CSIC copyright page:
Business leaders support OA for publicly-funded research, again Harnessing Openness to Transform American Health Care, a new report from the Digital Connections Council of the Committee for Economic Development, January 2008. (Thanks to Rick Johnson.) From the executive summary:
From the body of the report:
Comment. The CED is a non-profit organization of business leaders dedicated to public policy research. This is not the first time the CED has endorsed OA. Also see its April 2006 report, Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness, which recommended that the NIH strengthen and extend its OA policy. Update. Also see the short article in Wired Science for February 8, 2008. OA texts to train translation software JRC publishes texts to help development of computer-assisted translation systems, a press release from the EU's Joint Research Centre (JRC), January 21, 2008. Excerpt:
Comment. This is a great example of one of the most important but least discussed virtues of OA. OA not only removes access barriers for readers and increases impact for authors, but free online texts become free online data for sophisticated software that creates new forms of value for everyone. OA editions of IARC monographs The WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has started to offer free online full-text PDFs for its monographs. It now has free online editions of its three most recent monographs and will add others retroactively. (Thanks to medinfo.) New journal of biolinguistics with short embargo period Biolinguistics is a new peer-reviewed journal providing free online access to registered users three months after publication. Its inaugural issue is now online. Peter Brantley on the Google Library Project Andrea Foster interviews Peter Brantley in the Chronicle of Higher Education for January 25, 2008. Excerpt:
Obstacles to making an OP book OA Julian Dibbell has written a detailed account of the obstacles he faced in making an OA edition of his book, My Tiny Life, even after it went OP and the rights reverted to him. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Excerpt:
OA works by and about Martin Luther King Jr. Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the US. ResourceShelf has put together a good set of links to OA works by and about King.
More on the possibility of a funder OA mandate for books Stevan Harnad, What About Open Access to Books? Open Access Archivangelism, January 20, 2008. Excerpt:
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Notes from the Science Blogging conference The author of In between the lines has blogged some notes on the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference (Research Triangle Park, January 19, 2008). See the post on open science and the post on open science in developing nations. More on the barrier of copyright clearance John Mark Ockerbloom, Copyright and Provenance: Some Practical Problems, Bulletin of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Data Engineering, December 2007. Self-archived, January 3, 2008. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
From the body of the paper:
Video on the European Digital Library European Digital Library to contain all knowledge, a video news story from Futuris, January 19, 2008. The Futuris blurb:
Addressing the limitations on online data access Rick Luce, Learning from E-Databases in an E-Data World, Educause Review, February 2008. Excerpt:
John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0, Educause Review, February 2008. Excerpt:
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