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Video on Google Scholar and OA
Google Scholar and Open Access to Scholarly Literature is a video of a one-hour presentation by Donna Gunter, apparently recorded at the University of North Carolina - Charlotte on November 30, 2007 and posted to blip.tv on August 8, 2008.
A bigger, better digital library for Sudan - SOA 2.0, Rift Valley Institute, undated but apparently recent. (Thanks to Afrora.com.)
An expanded version of the Sudan Open Archive is now available online. The new version, SOA 2.0, features an improved user interface and open access to over a thousand books and documents. SOA 2.0 also incorporates an internet guide with regularly updated links to several hundred Sudan-related websites. The Archive is a searchable, full-text database that covers all aspects of Sudan, making a wide range of material available in digital form for the first time. SOA 2.0 includes dictionaries, historical material on human rights and environmental issues and an extensive collection of recent reports on local peace meetings. There are also key documents concerning the current political process in Sudan. Among the books and reports in the Archive are "The Dhein Massacre" by Ushari Mahmud and Suliman Baldo, the Report of the Abyei Boundaries Commission, dictionaries of Sudanese and Juba Arabic and F.W.Andrews' three-volume "The Flowering Plants of Sudan".See also our past posts on the archive. Linda O�Brien, Mark Brodsky, and Margaret L. Ruwoldt, Melbourne�s scholarly information future: a ten-year strategy, University of Melbourne, July 2008. (Thanks to Colin Steele.) Excerpt:
For much of the thinking behind the new 10-year strategy, also see a second report from the same authors, Information Futures Commission: final report of the Steering Committee, University of Melbourne, July 2008.
Francis Deblauwe, OA Academia in Repose, iCommons.org, August 7, 2008. Compares arXiv, arXiv Math, CERN Document Server, CDL eScholarship Repository, Connexions, Directory of Open Access Journals, Dspace@Cambridge, and the Trance Project.
I looked for the number of full-text OA documents and the like available in the repositories, and the date for the numbers in question. ... The repositories' slope, a measure of how fast they have grown on average over their lifespan, is plotted against the start dates ...Update. See also the comments by Stevan Harnad: Summary: Re: Deblauwe, F. (2008) OA Academia in Repose: Seven Academic Open-Access Repositories Compared: A useful way to benchmark OA progress would be to focus on OA's target content -- peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journal articles -- and to indicate, year by year, the proportion of the total annual output of the content-providers, rather than just absolute annual deposit totals. The OA content-providers are universities and research institutions. The denominator for all measures should be the number of articles the institution publishes in a given year, and the numerator should be the number of articles published in that year (full-texts) that are deposited in that institution's Institutional Repository (IR). (If an institution does not know its own annual published articles output -- as is likely, since such record-keeping is one of the many functions that the OA IRs are meant to perform -- an estimate can be derived from the Institute of Scientific Information's (ISI's) annual data for that institution.) New edition of university Web rankings
A new edition of Ranking Web of World Universities has been released, which reflects (according to the researchers) universities' relative commitments to OA.
See also previous posts on the Webometrics rankings. Overview of CC from Digital Curation Centre
The JISC-funded Digital Curation Centre released on August 6 an overview of Creative Commons Licensing as part of its Legal Watch Papers series. Papers in the series are OA from the DCC site. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)
See also the paper on Sharing Medical Data � the Legal Considerations, released April 25.
OA series on commodities and empires
The Commodities of Empire Project, from the Open University's Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies and London Metropolitan University's Caribbean Studies Centre, provides OA to its working papers series. The papers in the series are from 2007 and 2008. Thanks to Rachel Laudan.)
Cochin University of Science and Technology launches an IR India's Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) has launched an institutional repository. For details, see today's article in The Hindu:
Will the OECD open data guidelines also support commercial research? Klaus Hoeyer, Mette N. Svendsen, and Lene Koch, OECD guidelines on open access: commercialization in disguise? Trends in Biotechnology, August 5, 2008. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:
PS: For background, see the OECD Declaration on Access to Research Data From Public Funding from January 2004, and its Principles And Guidelines For Access To Research Data From Public Funding from April 2007. Alex Holtzman is the new president of the American Association of University Presses (AAUP), the successor to Sanford Thatcher. From today's announcement from the AAUP:
Comment: I don't know of any university presses which experimented with "abandoning all restrictions on intellectual property" and I don't know of any OA advocates who recommended it (for books or journals as opposed to data). More support for OA in the humanities SCI 6 Focuses on Models for Humanities Research Centers, CLIR Issues, July/August 2008. Excerpt:
Profile of Oxford's Open Access Repository System Mike Cave, Sean Loughna, and John Pilbeam, Open Access Repository System for Forced Migration Online, ALISS Quarterly, undated but apparently August 2008. Excerpt:
PS: For background, see our previous posts on OARS and FMO. Most publishers demand the maximum embargo under NIH policy From the August 7 issue of Library Journal Academic Newswire:
Comment. This should surprise no one. It happened under the older, voluntary policy (one, two) and it's happening again under the new, mandatory policy. Remember that the NIH is an outlier: it's the only OA-mandating funder of medical research in the world which permits a 12 month embargo. Every other OA-mandating funder of medical research caps the embargo at six months: the Arthritis Research Campaign (UK), British Heart Foundation, Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, European Research Council, Cancer Research UK, Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Executive Health Department, Department of Health (UK), Fund to Promote Scientific Research (Austria), Genome Canada, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Joint Information Systems Committee (UK), and the Wellcome Trust (UK). This matters because delaying public access to publicly-funded research is a compromise with the public interest, and delays are more harmful in medicine than in any other field. Now that the OA mandate is law, researchers and their institutions are learning how to comply with it, and TA publishers are accommodating it, it's time to talk about stepping down the maximum permissible embargo from 12 months to nine and then six.
Interview with Flat World Knowledge
Dian Schaffhauser, Textbook Publishing in a Flat World, Campus Technology, August 6, 2008. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) An interview with Eric Frank, co-founder of OA textbook publisher Flat World Knowledge.
See also our past posts on FWK. OA cell signaling journal adds society sponsorship
Cell Communication & Signaling, an OA journal published by BioMed Central, has been adopted as the official journal of the Signal Transduction Society, according to a blog post August 6 by BMC.
See the journal's editorial on the move:
The Signal Transduction Society (STS) is delighted to join BioMed Central with an open access journal. Over the last years, our society members have increasingly appreciated that access to scientific information generated by publicly funded academic research must not be restricted by commercial interests. With overwhelming support of the society members, the presidial council and advisory board of the STS are therefore now taking action and moving from an access-restricted print journal to online open access publishing.Update. This post was corrected, per Matthew Cockerill, to clarify that the journal was previously OA and published by BMC; the news here is the society's adoption. Springer journal participates in PMC From George Porter on SOAF this morning:
How many published papers could have been self-archived? Sigbj�rn Hernes has calculated that at least 47% of the research articles published in Norwegian journals in 2005-2006 could have been (and could still be) deposited in OA repositories. The percentage might be much higher: for 27% of the articles, Hernes couldn't ascertain the publisher's self-archiving policy. Hernes' paper is in Norwegian. Unfortunately it's a PDF and I can't link to a machine translation. My summary is based on Google's English translation of the front page of the OpenAccess.no wiki. I don't know whether Hernes calculated how many of the papers which could have been deposited were actually deposited. Perhaps a reader of Norwegian could drop me a line, or post a note to SOAF, with some of the other important details. Update (8/8/08). Charles Bailey has painstakingly harvested the text from the PDF, run it through Google Translate, and sent me the result. (Thanks, Charles.) Hernes identified 19,070 articles published in Norwegian journals in 2005-2006. While 9,110 or 47% were published in green journals which permitted postprint archiving, only between 143 and 408 have been self-archived to date (between 0.016% and 0.45% of those eligible). Update (9/17/08). Here are some corrections and updates to my original account of this study. I'm very grateful to Jan Erik Frantsv�g for his help.
Summary of some recent university OA mandates Eve Gray has summarized some the major recent university policies to mandate OA for their research output. The details won't be new to readers of OAN. But if your institution isn't already considering an OA mandate, then consider sharing Eve's summary with selected colleagues. It could be a very useful eye-opener. Some of the OA initiatives from CERN and high-energy physics Robert Aymar, Scholarly communication in High-Energy Physics: past, present and future innovations, apparently a preprint, July 2008. Aymar is the Director-General CERN. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)
From the conclusion:
The Vietnamese Rice Knowledge Bank is a new OA resource by the Vietnamese Ministry of Rural Development and Agriculture. From the August 6 description in Nhan Dan:
... The website offers information and knowledge concerning rice in Vietnam, which are provided by the International Rice Research Institute. It also updates Vietnamese scientists' research results. More on author attitudes on OA
Florian Mann, et al., Open Access Publishing in Science: Why It Is Highly Appreciated But Rarely Used, Communications of the ACM, forthcoming. (Thanks to Glen Newton.) More information on the research is available from the study's Web site. Excerpt:
... We surveyed 481 researchers from three heterogeneous research disciplines of whom more than 85% liked the idea of Open Access publishing. This result is underscored by the widespread international support for Open Access Initiatives ... Distributed chemistry from PubChem data
M. Karthikeyan, et al., Distributed Chemical Computing Using ChemStar: An Open Source Java Remote Method Invocation Architecture Applied to Large Scale Molecular Data from PubChem, Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling, April 11, 2008. See also the abstract in PubMed. (Thanks to Glen Newton.) Abstract:
We present the application of a Java remote method invocation (RMI) based open source architecture to distributed chemical computing. This architecture was previously employed for distributed data harvesting of chemical information from the Internet via the Google application programming interface (API; ChemXtreme). Due to its open source character and its flexibility, the underlying server/client framework can be quickly adopted to virtually every computational task that can be parallelized. Here, we present the server/client communication framework as well as an application to distributed computing of chemical properties on a large scale (currently the size of PubChem; about 18 million compounds), using both the Marvin toolkit as well as the open source JOELib package. As an application, for this set of compounds, the agreement of log P and TPSA between the packages was compared. Outliers were found to be mostly non-druglike compounds and differences could usually be explained by differences in the underlying algorithms. ChemStar is the first open source distributed chemical computing environment built on Java RMI, which is also easily adaptable to user demands due to its �plug-in architecture�. The complete source codes as well as calculated properties along with links to PubChem resources are available on the Internet via a graphical user interface ... ANU Data Management Manual: Managing Digital Research Data at the Australian National University, Version 1.0, July 22, 2008. Excerpt:
Comment. Very well-done. The only weak spot is that the authors don't seem aware that Science Commons now recommends the public domain, rather than open licenses, for data. See for example its Protocol for Implementing Open Access Data from December 2007. Bishops block OA to English translations of public-domain Latin texts The International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) is angering Catholics with its copyright policy on translations of public-domain Latin texts. ICEL is an initiative of the Catholic Bishop's Conferences. (Thanks to Gino D'Oca.) Jeffrey Tucker explains:
Update (8/25/08). ICEL has proposed free online access for sheet music, although with some provisos that may delay the access for several years or require stripping the texts from the music. (Thanks to Gino D'Oca.) Big science creates natural pressures for open data Richard Poynder, In search of the Big Bang, Computer Weekly, August 6, 2008. Excerpt:
OA to digitized special collections Merrilee Proffitt and Jennifer Schaffner, The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship: Reflections on a Symposium about Digitization and the Humanities, OCLC, July 2008. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)Excerpt:
Lack of OA endangers public health Pesticide Problems Go Unnoticed by EPA, a press release from OMB Watch, August 5, 2008. Excerpt:
Comments
The US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has launched the Health Care Innovations Exchange. (Thanks to Ted Eytan.) From the about page:
From the page on submissions, Share Your Innovations:
From the page of criteria, How Innovations Are Selected:
Labels: Hot What makes a successful repository? Dorothea Salo, Repository tidbits, Caveat Lector, August 5, 2008. Excerpt:
More on increased visibility and increased citation counts J. P. Dietrich, Disentangling Visibility and Self-Promotion Bias in the arXiv:astro-ph Positional Citation Effect, a preprint self-archived on June 25, 2008. (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.)
PS: Also see my 2005 article, Visibility beyond open access. Update. Also see Stevan Harnad's comment:
List of Australian university repositories
Neil Godfrey has blogged a list with links of Australian universities' OA repositories. (Thanks to pintiniblog.)
I have compiled the following from a combination of the ROAR list, the ARROW list and web searches against a list of Australian universities. It is more up to date than the current ROAR list, but I have also restricted my list to university research and publications repositories. ... Profile of the Personal Genome Project
Thomas Goetz, How the Personal Genome Project Could Unlock the Mysteries of Life, Wired, July 26, 2008.
... To [George] Church, [founder of the Personal Genome Project,] ... all of this [progress in genetics] is unfolding according to the same laws of exponential progress that have propelled digital technologies, from computer memory to the Internet itself ...
Stuart Shieber on OA at Harvard Interview with Stuart Shieber, Harvard University Library Notes, July 2008. Shieber is the Welch Professor of Computer Science at Harvard, co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, Director of Harvard's Office of Scholarly Communication, and the architect of the OA mandate at the Harvard Faculty of Art and Sciences. Excerpt:
SciELO's OA experience in Latin America could benefit South Africa Eve Gray, ASSAF scholarly publishing team visits SciELO in Brazil, Gray Area, August 5, 2008. Excerpt:
Case study of an OA portal for medical research Elke Roesner, Open Access Portale und ihre Etablierung am Markt : die Entwicklung eines Gesch�ftsmodells f�r �German Medical Science�, Berliner Handreichungen zur Bibliotheks- und Informationswissenschaft, Vol. 230, 2008. (Thanks to medinfo.) Because the file is a PDF, I can't link to a machine translation. Knowledge repositories for geology
K. P. Jaikiran, Knowledge management in geological sciences, Current Science, July 25, 2008. (Thanks to MyNews.in.)
... Scientists and academicians are basically knowledge-workers whose work involves application of multidimensional knowledge in their respective fields. Tremendous scope exists for the creation of knowledge repositories and networks in the scientific world for overall improvement in the quality of work. ...
Christian Zimmermann, RePEc in July 2008, The RePEc blog, August 3, 2008.
Oxford Journals to manage NIH deposit
Daniel Griffin, Oxford Journals to place NIH funded articles into PubMed Central, Information World Review, August 4, 2008.
Biomedical articles that have been published in Oxford Journals and funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) will now be deposited into PubMedCentral (PMC).Update. See also the press release from Oxford Journals. Update (PS). Also Tracey Caldwell's article on the same subject in the same journal (September 4, 2008). Among other things, Tracey compares and contrasts the Oxford policy with the Nature policy. Oxford will always deposit the published edition, while Nature will only deposit the final version of the author's peer-reviewed manuscript. But Nature will (eventually) deposit into institutional repositories as well as central repositories like PMC, while Oxford has no plans to deposit in institutional repositories. OA as a condition of Type 1 civilization Michael Shermer, Toward a Type 1 civilization, Los Angeles Times, July 22, 2008. Excerpt:
Improvements at Bioinformation Matt Hodgkinson reports that Bioinformation, a self-described OA journal, formerly charged a publication fee while claiming not to, and formerly blocked all copying while claiming to block only copying for commercial use. However, the editor quickly fixed these problems when Matt pointed them out. PS: Thanks to Matt for taking the time to write to the editor, and thanks to Prof. Kangueane for attending to the problems so promptly. Article sharing + social networking = Labmeeting Labmeeting is a new online service combining article sharing and social networking. The about page is less informative than Erick Schonfeld's description on TechCrunch (July 30, 2008). From Schonfeld:
From the page of terms:
More on the Evans study and OA Stevan Harnad, Are Online and Free Online Access Broadening or Narrowing Research? Open Access Archivangelism, August 4, 2008. Evans, James A. (2008) Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship Science 321(5887): 395-399 DOI:10.1126/science.1150473Excerpt: "[Based on] a database of 34 million articles, their citations (1945 to 2005), and online availability (1998 to 2005),... as more journal issues came online, the articles [cited] tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles... [B]rowsing of print archives may have [led] scientists and scholars to [use more] past and present scholarship. Searching online... may accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas built upon." ...
PS: Also see my comments on the Evans article.
More blog notes on the Edinburgh Repository Fringe
Stuart Macdonald has posted more blog notes on the Edinburgh Repository Fringe (Edinburgh, July 31-August 1, 2008):
See also our earlier post on the conference.
New OA journal on tobacco-related diseases
Tobacco Induced Diseases is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from BioMed Central and the International Society for the Prevention of Tobacco Induced Diseases. See the July 31 announcement. The article-processing charge is �850 (�1080, US$1690), subject to discounts and waivers. Authors retain copyright to their work, and articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
Update. To clarify, the journal was launched in 2002. What's new is that it moved to BMC. See also the blog post from BMC. Copyright law now protects failed business models more than innovation William Patry, whom I quoted here just last week on copyright and the NIH policy, is laying down his influential copyright blog. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Patry is the Senior Copyright Counsel at Google and former copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. From his final post:
Comment. It's sad that we're losing this sane, sage voice on copyright law, and alarming that a copyright centrist would be so deeply depressed by the current state of the law and its continuing trajectory. If you haven't paid much attention to the severe tilt of copyright law away from its traditional balance of interests toward maximalism, this should be a wake-up call. Report on the April OA workshop in Nigeria Ezra Shiloba Gbaje, Advocating for Open Access Model in Disseminating Scholarly Information in Nigeria, Nigerian Library Association, undated. The version to which I've linked is an image scan of a print original. I don't have time to rekey excerpts and appreciate this summary from eIFL.net:
Rising OA Quotient for biomedical literature Matthew Cockerill, How open access is your research area? (revisited), BioMed Central Blog, August 2, 2008. Excerpt:
Portal of OA-related projects at the U of Michigan Open.Michigan is a new portal of OA-related projects at the University of Michigan. Also see its blog and wiki. From the about page:
Comment. This is a great idea. It reminds insiders and outsiders alike of the school's many commitments to openness, reminds us of the relatedness of related projects (in open research, open software, open education, and open standards), and reminds us that universities are in the knowledge discovery and sharing business, not the knowledge lock-down and commodification business. |