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Chemistry Central gives referees a discount on publication fees Gino D'Oca, 20% discount on article processing charge for peer reviewers, Chemistry Central blog, October 1o, 2007.
More on the Open Archaeology Prize The Alexandria Archive Institute has announced the first annual ASOR Open Archaeology Prize. From the announcement:
The Open Archaeology Prize competition is sponsored by the Alexandria Archive Institute, promoting the development and use of open educational resources in archaeology and related disciplines. The Open Archaeology Prize aims to enhance community recognition of open scholarly communication. The competition is supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the David Brown Book Company. Comments
Will Griffiths has launched Open Chemistry Web, a blog from ChemSpider. From the October 11 inaugural post:
More on opening access to public sector info in the UK Nick Holmes, Free access is not open access, Binary Law, October 11, 2007.
OA articles should allow harvesting and repurposing Peter Murray-Rust, Outrage: Repurposing Open Access material is allowed without explicit permission, A Scientist and the Web, October 13, 2007. Excerpt:
Harnessing the crowd to make OA texts from public-domain print sources Tim Armstrong, Crowdsourcing and Open Access, Info/Law, October 12, 2007. Excerpt:
Retaining rights and increasing research impact Ellen Duranceau, Retaining Copyrights to Increase Research Impact: Online Tutorial Now Available, MIT Libraries News, October 12, 2007. Excerpt:
Presentations from the Ottawa OA workshop Two of the four presentations from Open Access: the New World of Research Communication (Ottawa, October 12, 2007) are now online:
Update. Slides of all four presentations, a webcast and a podcast are now online. Adam Bernstein, Digital Historian Roy A. Rosenzweig, Washington Post, October 13, 2007. (Thanks to John Willinsky.) Excerpt:
Comment. Roy Rosenzweig was the leading US advocate for OA in the field of history, and one of the leading advocates anywhere for OA in the humanities. His most important article on OA was Should Historical Scholarship Be Free? (Perspectives, April 2005). In a blog post from April 15, 2005, I said, "I wish every discipline had a high-profile essay of this cogency to kick the ball forward." Here are some excerpts from that article:
He and co-author Daniel Cohen wrote an OA guidebook for historians, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web, and his Center for History and New Media at George Mason put theory into practice by developing Zotero, the Firefox-based tool for gathering and organizing online scholarship. He wrote what is still one of the best scholarly assessments of Wikipedia: Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, The Journal of American History, June 2006. Commenting on MIT's Open Courseware project, he once said, "We should be in the business of having people steal our stuff, because we're trying to foster innovation, exchange, communication, and dialogue." He will be missed. Update. The History News Network is collecting tributes to Roy.
New OA journal on ethics and global politics Ethics & Global Politics is a new peer reviewed OA journal published by Co-Action Publishing and the Department of Political Science at Stockholm University. The first issue will be published in 2008, but a call for papers is already online. From the press release:
Introducing the Open Research Society Jakoblog has blogged some notes on the Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (Achileion, October 11-12, 2007). Excerpt:
Gore and IPCC could boost OA to research on climate change Al Gore and the UN Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel peace prize today. More coverage. Comments. What's the OA connection?
Update. Adam Hodgkin makes a similar argument at ExactEditions: "Given the environmental message of the author it is strange that Gore has not insisted that his publishers promote with open access versions of his book. The book is so beautifully produced that more copies would surely be sold." Recapping the method and benefits of self-archiving Nishith K Singh, The self-archiving principle: a momentous trek, Postgraduate Medical Journal, 2007. (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.) Excerpt:
Retroactive OA for key articles on superconductivity Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer Theory of Superconductivity Papers Now Open Access, Issues in Scholarly Communication, October 11, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. Kudos to the APS. I proposed a similar strategy a couple of years ago ("When a scientist wins the Nobel Prize, clearly the journals that published his or her work would benefit science as well as their own standing if they provided open access [retroactively] to the breakthrough articles"). I don't flatter myself that APS got the idea from me, but I'm always glad to see steps to provide OA to past research articles, starting with the most important. Update. Also see the APS announcement. Update. The American Institute of Physics has taken a similar step, and provided OA copies to 10 articles by this year's physics laureates. (Thanks to George Porter.) Update. By contrast, Wiley boasts that the Nobel laureates in chemistry, physics, medicine, and economics have published in Wiley journals, but doesn't make any of their articles OA.
Public comments on OA policy in Europe The European Commission has released the preliminary results (September 2007) of the public comments on its green paper, The European Research Area: New Perspectives (April 2007). The public comment period closed on August 31. (Thanks to the INIST Libre Accès blog.) Excerpt:
Comment. There's nothing new in these comments, pro or con. When the green paper appeared in April 2007, the European Commission had already received extensive comments on OA from all stakeholders in the build-up to the EC-hosted Brussels conference of February 2007. For example, on the pro-OA side, it received strong recommendations from an EC-sponsored study in 2006, a December 2006 statement from the Scientific Council of the European Research Council (ERC), a January 2007 report from the European Research Advisory Board (EURAB), and a petition signed at the time by more than 20,000 European researchers and research institution (and signed today by more than 26,000). The EC's own Research Directorate-General --which also released the green paper-- supported OA in its February 2007 Communication (p. 7): "Initiatives leading to wider access to and dissemination of scientific information are necessary, especially with regard to journal articles and research data produced on the basis of public funding." The EC heard the anti-OA arguments in the Brussels Declaration from the STM, the ALPSP, and a host of signatory publishers (February 2007). The mere fact that the green paper had to ask, in April 2007, for further comments on OA policy is a sign of delay and indecision. And even if it was a good faith effort to beat the bushes for comments it hadn't heard before, it doesn't appear to have worked. It's time for the EC to adopt the recommendations from the study it sponsored in 2006, firm up its commitment to its own policy guidelines in the communication of February 2007, and give effect to the policy arguments of the overwhelming majority of the respondents to the green paper. There are enough studies and surveys. It's time to act. Alma Swan's OA Calendar now in print Alma Swan is now selling a print edition of her Open Access Calendar. The OA edition is still available, of course. What makes a good research librarian? Rose at Rose's Library has made a list of the skills and competencies possessed by a good research librarian. Excerpt:
Comment. I like this. Next up: what makes a good researcher, provost, editor, publisher, funding manager, society officer, legislator, voter...? T. Scott Plutchak anticipates his debate with Rick Anderson at the upcoming Charleston Conference (Charleston, November 7-10, 2007) on the consequences of OA for libraries. Excerpt:
Wiley deflects questions about PRISM Mark Chillingworth, Wiley boss side steps PRISM questions, Information World Review blog, October 10, 2007. Excerpt:
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Jan Hagerlid, Scholarly Open Access Journals and Libraries, in M. Rundkvist (ed.), Scholarly journals between the past and the future, Stockholm: Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien, Konferenser 65, 2007. The article is in English and OA.
PS: The book in which this article appears collects the presentations from an April 2006 conference and came out in April 2007.
New OA journal of conference presentations The Video Journal of Conference Presentations is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of, well, conference presentations. A submission consists of a text file with author information and an abstract; a PowerPoint file; and an MP3 audio file. From the site:
Washington U revises its author addendum Washington University has revised its author addendum. From the announcement on the WU scholarly communications blog:
More on the UKPMC Publishers Panel statement of principle Stevan Harnad, On Paid Gold OA, Central Repositories, and "Re-Use" Rights, Open Access Archivangelism, October 9, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. I can't agree. While the statement focuses on details of gold OA, it says nothing to encourage gold OA in preference to green OA, and when implemented it will do nothing to slow down green OA. General arguments to prefer green OA are not germane here. Nor does the agreement state the obvious. It describes what re-use rights publishers should provide when funders pay for gold OA. That's new, beneficial, and important. From my blog comment on Monday: "When a funder pays a publisher to make an article OA, the publisher should remove permission barriers as well as price barriers. But too often publishers have only removed price barriers. This agreement to remove a key set of permission barriers is an important step forward that will help users get their work done (both human and machine users), help funders get full value for their investment, and help all players live up to the full BBB definition of OA." More on executive bonuses at the ACS This memo from "ACS Insider" has been sent directly to many librarians and university administrators, and to at least one public listserv, NASW-Freelance from the National Association of Science Writers. I received a copy from one of the recipients. I don't know anything about the pseudonymous author.
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South Africa moving toward open data Eve Gray, A policy workshop on access to data, Gray Area, October 9, 2007. Excerpt:
Also see Eve's post to Opening Scholarship on the same meeting, DST Workshop On National Access To Research Data – The South African Perspective, October 9, 2007 More on German publishers on OA Charlotte Hubbard, Observations from the "Open Access Policies of German Publishers" conference, BioMed Central blog, October 9, 2007. Excerpt:
Matt Bodie's Advice for Erwin Chemerinsky: An Open-Access Approach to Legal Education, TaxProf Blog, October 8, 2007. TaxProf Blog has been asking law professors, "What is the single best idea for reforming legal education you would offer to Erwin Chemerinsky as he builds the law school at UC-Irvine?" Here's the suggestion of Matthew Bodie of Saint Louis University School of Law:
Tony Hey on e-Science and Scholarly Communication Rice University now offers audio (MS, Real, MP3) and video of Tony Hey's public lecture on September 19, 2007, e-Science and Scholarly Communications.
Elsevier provides free online access to two medical magazines Elsevier launches DoctorPortal, the independent online voice of UK doctors, a press release from Elsevier, October 4, 2007. Excerpt:
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TA publishers thinking about how to build on OA repositories Stephane Goldstein has blogged some notes on the ALPSP conference, Repositories - for better or worse? (London, October 5, 2007). Excerpt:
Comment. One of the brightest futures for all stakeholders is for TA publishers to see OA as a business opportunity, not a business killer, or to reconfigure their operations to make it a business opportunity. This is the path of adaptation, not resistance. In this future, publishers accept and even encourage OA to peer-reviewed articles, and make their money by selling enhanced editions of the basic OA texts and selling tools and services to build, and build on, that OA foundation. There have been earlier signs of movement in this direction, from priced access to priced services for adding value to OA literature, but Goldstein's notes suggest that this meeting was one of the strongest to date. 2007 Annual Review of Anthropology The 2007 Annual Reveiw of Anthropology is OA. (Thanks to Anthropology.net.) Mark Chillingworth, Scientists, publishers and authors rage against PRISM, Information World Review, October 8, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. Chillingworth is right that publishers are part of the protest against PRISM, but he doesn't list those involved. Here's my list from last week:
Funders and publishers agree to remove key permission barriers for fee-based OA articles Statement of principle from the UKPMC Publishers Panel in relation to re-use of documents for which an open access fee has been paid, a joint statement from the UKPMC Publishers Panel (membership described in the statement itself), October 8, 2007. Here it is in its entirety:
Also see today's press release from the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers. Excerpt:
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Update. Also see the press release from STM.
Scirus has added 26 institutional repositories from 10 countries to its search index. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Stevan Harnad on publisher dilemmas Stevan Harnad, Gold Conversion: A Prisoners' Dilemma? Open Access Archivangelism, October 7, 2007.
PS: Though not evident from this summary, Stevan's full post includes a critique of Mark Rowse's idea for flipping a journal to open access that I summarized, elaborated, and recommended in the October issue of SOAN. New EU project on the public domain Communia is the new "European Thematic Network on the Public Domain in the Digital Age" from the EU's eContentPlus program. From the site:
The project was funded with one million Euros. It was launched on September 1, 2007, and will end on August 31, 2010. Update. Also see the Creative Commons blog post on Communia's kick-off meeting (Turin, September 28, 2007). Review of UK science policy, minus OA Lord David Sainsbury, The Race to the Top: A Review of Government’s Science and Innovation Policies, HM Treasury, October 2007. Also see the Treasury's press release on the report. Comments
New OA repository for anthropology Alex Golub, Please submit to Mana’o, Savage Minds, October 5, 2007. Excerpt:
More on OA for cultural heritage in Germany Ingo Bading, Museums- und Archivbestände öffentlich machen, Studium Generale, October 7, 2007. Read the German original or Google's English. Organizing institutional support for an IR Fereshteh Afshari and Richard Jones, Developing an integrated institutional repository at Imperial College London, Program: electronic library and information systems, 41, 4 (2007) pp. 338-352. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:
Update. Here are two more articles from the same issue:
Update. There is now an OA edition of the Afshari-Jones paper. Using TRIPS to pry open access to journal articles Gavin Yamey, Using trade law to break publishing monopolies, PLoS blog, October 5, 2007. Excerpt:
New OA journal of business research Germany's Verband der Hochschullehrer für Betriebswirtschaft (German Academic Association for Business Research) has chosen OA for its new official journal, Business Research. The journal has issued a call for papers for the inaugural issue, which is scheduled to appear in March 2008. Librarians optimistic about OA The LITA Blog has some notes on a discussion moderated by Gregg Silvis on libraries in 2023, apparently at the LITA Forum 2007 (Denver, October 4-7, 2007). Excerpt:
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