Open Access NewsNews from the open access movement Jump to navigation |
|||||||||||||||
Calling US libraries interested in SCOAP3 ICOLC (the International Consortium of Library Consortia) is looking for US academic libraries and library consortia interested in joining CERN's SCOAP3 project. From yesterday's announcement:
Update on WIPO Development Agenda
William New, Proponents: Slow Better Than Poor For WIPO Development Agenda, Intellectual Property Watch, March 21, 2008.
See also this February 2008 South Centre policy brief, Implementing the WIPO Development Agenda: Next Steps Forward. For background on the Development Agenda and its relationship with access to knowledge, see our post on the meeting earlier this month, or all previous OAN posts on the topic. On openness and networks in higher ed
David Wiley, Openness, Networks, and the Disaggregation of Higher Education, iterating toward openness, March 20, 2008.
DSpace version 1.5, Release Candidate 1, is now available for downloading. Update. The final release of version 1.5 is now available. See the March 25 announcement for a list of its new features. More on the Afghanistan Digital Library Yan Han and Atifa Rawan, Afghanistan Digital Library Initiative: Revitalizing an Integrated Library System, Information Technology and Libraries, 26, 4 (2007) pp. 44-46. Self-archived March 21, 2008.
From the body of the paper:
PS: For background, see my January 2008 post on the ADL and my other past posts on OA in Afghanistan.
OAI-PMH implementation in Java
OAI4J is a free and open source client library for OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE. The project is written in Java and was developed by the National Library of Sweden. The project was registered on Sourceforge on March 12; the latest release, 0.6 Beta 1, was March 18.
It can be used to harvest metadata from OAI-PMH compliant repositories. It can also be used to create new OAI-ORE Resource Maps from scratch, to parse existing ones and to serialize them to xml. Review of journal policies for sharing research data
Heather Piwowar, A review of journal policies for sharing research data, Research Remix, March 20, 2008. An open draft of a paper to be presented at ELPUB (Toronto, June 25-27, 2008). Abstract:
Health and Human Rights converting to OA
Health and Human Rights is converting to OA. From the undated announcement:
More publisher comments on the NIH policy Andrea Gawrylewski, Publishers ask NIH to delay open access, The Scientist, March 21, 2008. Excerpt:
Comments
Update (3/25/08). Also see the article in Library Journal Academic Newswire. Economic benefits of OA for public sector info Michael Cross, In sight of victory, The Guardian, March 20, 2008. Excerpt:
French OA policies and French publishing in the social sciences and humanities TGE Adonis is launching a study to evaluate French publishing in the social sciences and humanities. (Thanks to the INIST Libre Accès blog.) The goal is to identify indicators to measure the impact of OA policies, especially for publicly-funded research. Read yesterday's announcement in French or in Google's English. FWF OA policy in English translation If you recall, Austria's Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (Fund to Promote Scientific Research, or FWF) strengthened its OA policy earlier this month. FWF has now released the policy in English. Excerpt:
Chance to affect Canadian science policy The Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology has announced hearings Canadian on science and technology policy. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.) The committee will take oral testimony from key stakeholder groups and accept written testimony from anyone else. Written briefs should be sent to INDU@parl.gc.ca by April 18, 2008. According to Michael Geist:
OA policy at Otago Polytechnic New Zealand's Otago Polytechnic has a progressive IP policy with implications for OA. (Thanks to Sarah Stewart.) With a couple of exceptions, it authorizes "free and open access" under a CC-BY license to all the intellectual property the institution "owns or co-owns". Two more excerpts:
Catherine Saez, Panel Sees Tension Between IP And Human Rights, Intellectual Property Watch, March 20, 2008.
Intellectual property rights are affecting human rights in several areas such as public health, access to knowledge and agriculture, and human rights advocates have a decisive role to play to reverse the trend, according to members of a recent panel discussion on the negative impacts of intellectual property systems. Panel on L&E's to international copyright
Kaitlin Mara, Panellists Outline Strategies On Exceptions And Limitations To Copyright, Intellectual Property Watch, March 20, 2008.
An event at the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) last week brought some key actors in copyright and related rights to discuss the value of limitations and exceptions and to present a recently released study describing an international instrument on limitations and exceptions. ...See my earlier post about the discussion of limitations and exceptions at the WIPO Copyright Committee session. Photo essay on OCA digitization
Dave Bullock, The Internet Archive Keeps Book-Scanning Free, Wired, March 19, 2008. A photo essay on the digitization process of the Open Content Alliance. According to the article, the process is largely manual, but results in 1,000 titles a day.
More on the World Digital Library
Mohamed Elshinnawi, US Library of Congress Puts Knowledge on the Web, Voice of America, March 17, 2008. On the LoC's digital collections and participation in the World Digital Library.
See also past OAN posts on the World Digital Library. Blog notes on Million Books Workshop
Gabriel Bodard blogged notes on the Million Books Workshop (London, March 14, 2008): What would you do with a million books? (round table) and Services and Infrastructure for a Million Books (round table).
Purdue endorses CIC author addendum The Purdue University Senate endorsed the CIC author addendum. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) From Tuesday's announcement:
Comment. The Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) is a consortium of 12 research universities: University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a consortium, CIC has organized provost support for FRPAA (July 2006), joined the Google Library project (June 2007), and written an author addendum (May 2007). While more than half the CIC institutions now endorse the addendum, none requires its use, not even with an opt-out e.g. as Harvard now does. Presentations from Syrian OA workshop now online
Presentations from the SYReLIB Institutional Repository Workshop in Syria (Aleppo, December 4-5, 2007) are now online.
Quoting in full this announcement from Electronic Information for Libraries, dated March 19:
eIFL-OA Program seeks to enhance access to, and greater use of research findings, increase the efficiency of research and developments, accelerate use and innovation, stimulate economy. To achieve this, we apply the developing practices of Open Access as defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative.The countries in which eIFL operates are: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Cameroon, China, Croatia, Egypt, Estonia, Georgia, Ghana, Jordan, Kenya, Kosova, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Latvia, Lesotho, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Mali, Moldova, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nepal, Nigeria, Palestine, Poland, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, Sudan, Swaziland, Syria, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Zambia, Zimbabwe. New OA journal on drinking water science
Drinking Water Engineering and Science is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by Copernicus for the Delft University of Technology. The journal has an open peer review process, where accepted manuscripts are posted to Drinking Water Engineering and Science Discussions for referee and reader comments prior to revision and publication in Drinking Water Engineering and Science. The inaugural issue is in production, but several papers are available in open discussion. Papers are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
See also this article on the journal from First Science News, dated March 19. (Thanks to Sigma Xi's Year of Water.) April issue of Learned Publishing
The April issue of Learned Publishing is now available. At least the following articles appear to be related to OA, none of which are OA (at least so far).
Paris discussion of OA publishing The INIST Libre Accès blog has posted some notes on the round-table discussion of OA publishing at Le Salon du Livre (Paris, March 14-19, 2008). Read the notes in the original French or Google's English. Also listen to the French podcast of the discussion. EC funds another study on impact of OA archiving on journal subscriptions Cliff Morgan, The Latest OA Landscape, Wiley-Blackwell Journal News, March 2008. (Thanks to Robin Peek.) A short summary of recent developments, including the NIH mandate, the ERC mandate, the Harvard mandate, the Berkeley OA journal fund, and the EU Council Conclusions. Here's the only part that may be new to OAN readers:
Comments
Heather Morrison, Open Access: Roles for the Aggregators, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, March 15, 2008.
There are important roles for vendors of aggregated databases, such as EBSCO and ProQuest, in transitioning to open access, and in a fully open access environment.Comment. I have also been informed that Serials Solutions' Access and Management Service includes the DOAJ as an offered database, at no additional charge to the licensee. But journals aren't the only content that can be aggregated in such databases: there's no reason open repositories couldn't be included as well, thus providing users access to that content through a library's OPAC.
Ross Scaife died of cancer at his home on March 15; he was 47. Scaife was founding editor of the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities and a professor of classics at the University of Kentucky.
SCOAP3 meeting podcasts and video now online
Video and podcasts from the SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) US focal meeting (Berkeley, February 29) are now available online.
Public Domain Dedication and Licence v. 1.0
Version 1.0 of the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication & Licence was released on March 15. See the announcement and changelog.
See also background on the license and the Open Data Commons project. Noel M. O'Boyle, Chris Morley, and Geoffrey R. Hutchison, Pybel: a Python wrapper for the OpenBabel cheminformatics toolkit, Chemistry Central Journal, March 9, 2008. Abstract:
PS: Also see OBRuby, the Ruby interface to Open Babel. Johns Hopkins University has expressed interest in joining CERN's SCOAP3 project. From the SCOAP3 announcement:
Publisher deposits and the NIH policy Stevan Harnad, Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse, Open Access Archivangelism, March 18, 2008. Excerpt:
Comment. It's one thing to argue that the NIH policy should mandate deposit in the author's institutional repository (when they have one). But as long as the NIH is mandating deposit in PMC, and as long as a journal meets the NIH's criteria for depositing articles on behalf of authors, then I don't see any reason why authors shouldn't take advantage of the option. I did object to journal deposit under the older, voluntary policy, because it gave publishers the decision on the length of the embargo. Under the new policy, however, the length of the embargo is already set by the time the author signs the copyright transfer agreement. Hence, journal deposit cannot change the terms of the deal. Or if there's some subtle way in which it can, then I'll join Stevan's call on authors to make the deposits themselves. I already agree with him that, if the policy were to mandate deposit in the author's IR, then author deposits would make much more sense than journal deposits. Update (3/20/08). Stevan just updated his post to make clear that he was talking about publishers who want to charge fees for depositing papers in PMC. My response above was limited to publishers who do not charge fees, and I share Stevan's objections to those who would charge fees. For example, see my April 2007 article, Paying for green open access. Update (3/22/08). Also see Stevan's three follow-up posts: Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse: II, Publisher Proxy Deposit Is A Potential Trojan Horse: III, and One Small Step for NIH, One Giant Leap for Mankind. The last is a response to my blog comments above.
Danish Nabi, 3-day workshop for M. Lib students begins at KU, GreaterKashmir.com, March 17, 2008.
A three-day workshop on 'Open Access Repositories and Greenstone Software' was inaugurated in the Library Science department of Kashmir University Monday. The inaugural function was presided over by the vice-chancellor KU, Prof Riyaz Punjabi. Prof Shabahat Hussain, a guest from Aligarh Muslim University who specially visited the valley to attend the seminar was chief guest on the occasion. ... He advised the management of the department to look for possibilities to help affiliated colleges of the University to benefit from the new concept. The VC showed an urge for the formation of a committee, which would carry forward this work. ... In his address Prof Shabahat said that repositories were being established world over as free access to knowledge. "Open access repositories are being developed in the world and it is high time that the concept be seriously taken up," he said. ... What's limiting OA in the humanities?
Sigi J�ttkandt, Open access for critical and cultural theory: Open Humanities Press, Open Students, March 17, 2008. J�ttkandt is a co-founder of the Open Humanities Press.
OA, science journalism, and media embargoes
Rebecca Walton, If It Ain't Broke, Don't Break It, PLoS blog, March 18, 2008. Discussing the topic of media embargoes, where a news item is released to the press but with the request that the story not be publicly reported before a certain time:
Comments on NIH policy now online The U.S. National Institutes of Health is holding a public meeting on the implementation of its recently-adopted OA mandate, on March 20 at the NIH offices outside Washington, D.C. The agency had solicited online comments in advance of the meeting for those unable to attend; that comment period closed yesterday. The comments received are now available online. Update. The Professional/Scholarly Publishing (PSP) Division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) has released a March 17 letter to NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, elaborating its objections to the NIH policy, and a March 20 call for more publisher consultation on the policy. Update. The NIH has released a 2 hour, 41 minute video of the meeting, and three slide presentations:
ACRL, ARL, and SPARC today released a short video "to help librarians effectively engage disciplinary faculty and researchers on the topic of author rights".
On March 15, Carl Malamud of public.resource.org announced the release of a new batch of U.S. federal case law to be made OA by the project. (Thanks to Boing Boing.) Per the post at Boing Boing, the release contains
... a metric boatload of early federal case law (1880-1923), known as the First Series of the Federal Reporter. The Second and Third series were released earlier this year, as well as the "Federal Cases" which are the precursor the Federal Reporter. We're about 89% of the way towards a complete release of the Courts of Appeals archive.The new material is here; all the available material from the case law project is here. Sunshine Week campaigns for OA to U.S. PSI
Today marks the beginning of Sunshine Week, the annual campaign by journalists and open government groups to raise awareness of open government and freedom of information. News media across the U.S. will run stories and editorials (like this and this), and advocates and public officials will issue statements and proclamations (like this and this). The laws inspired by these campaigns have been fundamental in opening access to public sector information of research value. The spirit of those laws have also been applied to the rhetoric of OA to academic publications and data, especially those resulting from publicly-funded research.
Comment. Happy Sunshine Week. Peter Murray-Rust on Leo Waaijers
Peter Murray-Rust, Leo Waaijers: DARE to Inspire, A Scientist and the Web, March 14, 2008. An homage to the OA trailblazer.
CFP on repositories and research management
On March 14, JISC announced a call for tenders
... to undertake a project to identify successful models for embedding repositories in research management systems and processes within higher education institutions. DRIVER solicits wiki contributions
DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) is soliciting contributions to its wiki. From the announcement dated March 2008, "if you would like to contribute please email info@driver-support.eu for the password."
|