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LATimes editorial for OA mandate at NIH Accessing NIH research, Los Angeles Times, July 28, 2007. An editorial. Here it is in full:
I'm still on the road and far from caught up. I'll have more to blog at my next break. From my current location I can download email but I can’t upload any. Unfortunately some approved messages for SOAF will be delayed a while longer. Vexen Crabtree assesses Which Countries Set the Best Examples according to 17 criteria like human development, global peace index, life expectancy, gender equality, and economic freedom. Criterion #10 is Open Access to Research. Comment. Kudos for putting OA on the shortlist of criteria. I only wish that the data on how countries rank on providing OA had been open and current. Vexen’s OA rankings are from a May 2005 article in The Guardian and do not take into account the rapid, recent spread of OA repositories at universities and OA policies at public funding agencies. Vexen gives no link for the May 2005 article and neither Google nor the Wayback Machine can find a copy online. Vexen’s web page is dated “2005 +” but quotes some 2007 sources. BTW, Vexen’s top 10 countries on providing OA are (from the top down): Sweden, Netherlands, UK, Canada, Australia, Finland/Denmark (tie), Portugal/Belgium (tie), Germany, USA, and Hungary. UUK backs JISC on OA repositories JISC has announced a podcast report on the Universities UK support for JISC’s work on OA repositories:
University publishing in the age of the internet Ithaka has released a new report by Laura Brown, Rebecca Griffiths, and Matthew Rascoff, University Publishing in a Digital Age, July 23, 2007. From the splash page:
From the body of the report:
Also see the bulleted list at pp. 36-37 on the "often complementary strengths and weaknesses" of libraries and university presses "that could be harnessed to deliver a compelling new publishing enterprise." Comments.
SPARC announced the SPARC Discovery Award for information sharing (the “Sparky”) last month, and has now followed up (July 25) with this year’s theme and judges:
OA publishers discuss the challenges of sustainability The presentations and audio from the SPARC panel, Course check: A conversation with three open access publishers about the challenges of sustainability (Washington, D.C., June 23, 2007, within the larger ALA annual conference) are now online. All four presentations are relevant:
Presentations on publishing and the library of the future
The presentations from the ALPSP meeting, Publishing the Library of the Future (London, July 11, 2007), are now online. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)
S�ren Bertil Fabricius Dorch, To students: Publish your essays and become world famous! Copenhagen University Library (undated but recent). Excerpt:
I'll be on the road for three days with few opportunities for blogging or email. I'll start to catch up on Sunday or Monday.
HHMI responds to criticism of its Elsevier deal Tom Cech and four co-authors, A Reply from HHMI, Journal of Cell Biology, July 24, 2007. A letter to the editor. This is a response to the editorial by Mike Rossner and Ira Mellman in the June 11, 2007, issue of JCB, How the rich get richer. From the HHMI letter:
From the response by Mike Rossner (Executive Director, The Rockefeller University Press) and Ira Mellman (Editor in Chief, Journal of Cell Biology):
Comment. Rossner and Mellman are right. In my evaluation of the HHMI-Elsevier deal in the April issue of SOAN, I responded to some of the HHMI points that Rossner and Mellman did not address:
Interview with Chemistry Central's Bryan Vickery David Bradley has interviewed Bryan Vickery for Reactive Reports, July-August 2007.
OA medical journal moves to BMC Asia Pacific Family Medicine moves to BioMed Central's Open Access Platform, a press release from Asia Pacific Family Medicine, July 25, 2007. Excerpt:
Update. A second journal made the same move today: The Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition (from the International Society of Sports Nutrition) has also joined BMC. See the BMC press release. Paul Horwitz, 'Evaluate Me!': Conflicted Thoughts on Gatekeeping in Legal Scholarship's New Age, Notre Dame Legal Studies Paper No. 07-34, Connecticut Law Review, Vol. 39, 2007. (Thanks to Michel-Adrien Sheppard.)
Peter Morgan, Alive and kicking: a progress report on Open Access, institutional repositories, and health information, He@lth Information on the Internet, August 2007. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:
Dorothea Salo, Mandate Me! Caveat Lector, July 24, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. I do believe this is one factor in the complex explanation of why researchers spontaneously self-archive at low rates (about 15%) but declare, at high rates (81%), that they would willingly comply with an institutional or funder mandate. I like the fuel efficiency analogy, and once made a similar argument (SOAN for January 2002) using similar examples:
More on Pat Schroeder's comments on the NIH policy William Walsh, Schroeder follows Dezenhall's script, Issues in Scholarly Communication, July 24, 2007. Excerpt:
In his Digital Reference Shelf for June 2007, P�ter Jacs� reviews dLIST. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Excerpt:
PS: dLIST is one of two OA repositories (the other is E-LIS, which Jacso reviewed in May 2007) that have agreed to host scholarly papers on open access regardless of the author�s institutional or disciplinary home. More on the student movement for access to medicines Sandeep P. Kishore and Prabhjot S. Dhadialla, Student-Led Campaign to Help Tackle Neglected Tropical Diseases, PLoS Medicine, July 24, 2007. (Thanks to Gavin Baker.) Excerpt:
PS: For more background, see my 11/18/06 post on the Philadelphia Consensus Statement.
India launches OA registry for clinical drug trials India launches Clinical Trials Registry, Times of India, July 20, 2007. Excerpt:
Augmenting interoperability for repositories Simeon Warner and five co-authors, Pathways: augmenting interoperability across scholarly repositories, International Journal on Digital Libraries, May 15, 2007. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:
PS: Also see an OA paper of the same title (“Augmenting Interoperability Across Scholarly Repositories”) by two of the co-authors of the current paper (Jeroen Bekaert and Herbert Van de Sompel), blogged here August 5, 2006. German perspective on the momentum for OA at the NIH
Peter M�hlbauer, Erfolg f�r Open Access in den USA, Telepolis, July 24, 2007. German press coverage of the House bill to establish an OA mandate at the NIH, with some comparisons to the state of OA in Germany. Read the German original or Google’s English.
BMC open to open notebook science Heather Piwowar, Conversation with BMC on Open Notebook Science, Research Remix, July 24, 2007. Excerpt:
More on the Nat'l Library of Australia as an OA publisher Bobby Graham, Open Access to Open Publish, National Library of Australia, June 27, 2007. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
Scott Jaschik, Momentum for Open Access, Inside Higher Ed, July 24, 2007. Excerpt:
Comments.
Australia's e-Research Strategy Mike Sargent, An Australian e-Research Strategy and Implementation Framework, the Australian Department of Education, Science and Training and the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, April 2006. Excerpt:
More on CC licenses for Australian govt info Anne Fitzgerald, Prof. Brian Fitzgerald, and Jessica Coates, Serving the Public: CC and Australian Governments, iCommons.org, July 23, 2007. Excerpt:
V�tor Faustino, Flu data goes public, Innovations Report, July 23, 2007. Excerpt:
More on publisher resistance to OA at the NIH Andrew Albanese, Congress Backs NIH Access Policy, But Publishers Resist, Library Journal, July 23, 2007.
Comment. To be more precise, a lawsuit would delay implementation even if copyright law would not. And delay would be the sole purpose of a lawsuit. There’s no doubt that an OA mandate at the NIH could be implemented “in a matter consistent with copyright law”. There are many ways to do it. For example, the NIH could use the fact that the OA editions will not be the published editions on which authors transfer copyright but merely the final versions of the authors’ peer-reviewed manuscripts. Or the NIH could use the the existing government-purpose license to distribute the results of publicly-funded research. Or the NIH could make the OA condition an explicit term of the funding contract and require grantees to make any subsequent copyright transfer agreements subject to the terms of the prior funding contract. Publishers who try to boost voluntary compliance with the current policy, as a tactic to head off a mandate, are effectively conceding that compliance need not cause copyright problems. Emerging consensus for OA in Australia Arthur Sale has posted some notes on the recent meeting of Australia’s National Scholarly Communication Forum, Improving Access to Australian Publicly Funded Research (Canberra, Australia, July 16, 2007). Excerpt:
Update. The presentations from the meeting are now online. (Thanks to Colin Steele.) Measuring the OA Quotient of a research topic Matt Cockerill, How open is your research area? BMC blog, July 22, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. For topics covered by PubMed, the OAQ is a great idea. I’ve been hoping for such a measurement for all topics since 2002, but it’s impractical (so far) for fields where there is no PubMed or equivalent. By all means, however, let’s start with PubMed and measure what is measurable P.A. Kostagiolas, and Chr. Banou, Managing Expectations for Open Access in Greece : Perceptions from the Publishers and Academic Libraries, in Leslie Chan and Bob Martens (eds.), Proceedings ELPUB2007: The Eleventh International Conference on Electronic Publishing - Openness in Digital Publishing: Awareness, Discovery and Access, pp. 229-238, Vienna, 2007. Self-archived July 23, 2007.
eCancerScience is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the European Institute of Oncology in Milan. It has issued a call for papers and plans its official launch for September 23. From the site:
The journal pricing crisis in Germany
Hilde Braun, K�ndigungswelle im Zeitschriftenregal, a Deutschlandfunk radio broadcast from July 20 on the journal pricing crisis in Germany, library cancellations, and OA. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) Replay the broadcast, read the transcript in German, or read the transcript in Google’s English.
More on the coming OA mandate at the NIH Brandon Keim, One Small Vote for House, One Giant Leap for Open Science, Wired News, July 20, 2007.
OA publishing at Goettingen University Press The university press at Georg August Universit�t G�ttingen makes most of its publications OA. I can’t tell whether this policy is new, but it’s new to me. (Thanks to Jim West.) From the English-language version of the press’ home page:
Which publishers allow harvesting of public-domain data? Peter Murray-Rust, Request to Elsevier for robotic extraction of data from their journals, A Scientist and the Web, July 22, 2007. Excerpt:
Elizabeth Church, Turning the ivory tower into an open book, Globe and Mail, July 21, 2007. Only a three-sentence blurb is free online, at least so far. Thanks to Richard Akerman for the alert and this longer excerpt:
Update. Also see the comments of Jim Till. New OA journal of shoulder surgery
The International Journal of Shoulder Surgery is a new peer-reviewed OA journal. Its second issue (April-June) is now online.
Measuring and publicizing OA visibility
Stevan Harnad, Making Visibility Visible: OA Metrics of Productivity and Prestige, Open Access Archivangelism, July 21, 2007.
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