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EFF calls for OA study at WIPO
The World Intellectual Property Organization's Committee on Development and Intellectual Property met in Geneva on July 7-11, 2008. Among the statements made was the following by the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
... WIPO could undertake a study of the impact of these new innovation methods to identify the impacts of standardized, low-transaction cost licensing and a survey of the various Open and Public Access policies being considered in the US, Europe, Australia, Brazil and Canada, to assist Member States to identify how the outputs of government funded research could be managed to best promote innovation in science and education. ...See also the statement by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and the coverage at IP Watch (1, 2, 3). Update. See also the blog notes from Knowledge Ecology International.
Yaşar Tonta, Open Access and Institutional Repositories: The Turkish Landscape, in Turkish Libraries in Transition: New Opportunities and Challenges, 2008; self-archived July 10, 2008. Abstract:
The development of the �Open Access� (OA) movement since early 1990s has been radically changing the scientific communication landscape. Within the last decade more universities and research institutions are recommending their scholars to make their works freely accessible through their web sites and/or institutional repositories (IRs). The research impact of OA articles as measured by the number of citations is much higher than that of printed ones. Several universities have developed policies to mandate OA and set up IRs to guarantee public access to the output of publicly funded research projects. Refereed journal articles, conference papers, theses and dissertations, and courseware (i.e., lecture notes, audio and video records of lectures) can be given as examples of such research output. This paper defines the concepts of OA and IR and briefly reviews the current situation of IRs in Europe. It then chronicles the development of IRs in Turkey. The paper concludes with some recommendations. Spanish overview of OA archives
Alejandra Marcela Nardi, La ciencia, un recurso p�blico, La Voz del Interior, July 8, 2008. (Thanks to Vilma Raquel Fontana.) English abstract:
This note explains the importance and scope that holds for developing countries the movement called "Open Archives Initiative." The author mentions a project currently in the Biblioteca Manuel Belgrano de la Facultad de Ciencias Econ�micas de la Universidad Nacional de C�rdoba (Argentina). A summary of this note was published in a newspaper widely recognized and trajectory of the city of C�rdoba (Argentina), La Voz del Interior. The purpose of this communication in the newspaper is that society knows the changes that are occurring in the system of scientific communication.
Signs of the Ingelfinger rule in education In a blog post yesterday, Gabi Reinmann laments that more and more journals in the field of education are following the Ingelfinger rule, that is, refusing to consider submissions which have been self-archived as preprints. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) Read it in German or Google's English. OA archiving at the U of Pittsburgh Kimberly Barlow, Open Access: Online archives, University Times (from the University of Pittsburgh), July 10, 2008. (Thanks to Colin Steele.) Excerpt:
Universities prefer combined OA repository and publications database Kate Price, Results of repository/research database poll, a message to the JISC-Repositories list, July 9, 2008. Excerpt:
Update. In blogging the same Kate Price message, Charles Bailey adds the following:
More on OA to promote conservation Veerle Van den Eynden, Michael P. Oatham, and Winston Johnson, How free access web-based electronic resources benefit biodiversity and conservation research � Trinidad and Tobago's endemic plants and their conservation status, Oryx, July 2008. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:
Thanks to Kevin Zelnio for the alert and for blogging this excerpt inaccessible to me:
Milestone for Scientific Commons Scientific Commons has passed the milestone of 20 million publications and 8 million authors. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.) Personal publication lists to motivate self-archiving Michael Smith has blogged a testimonial to SelectedWorks from Bepress. For me, his post is more evidence that the desire for personal publication lists (handsome, comprehensive, up to date) can motivate self-archiving. This incentive for populating repositories isn't limited to SelectedWorks, and was taken up by PublicationsList in April 2007 and by EM-Loader in June 2008. Update. Charles Bailey points out that RePEC offers a related tool for creating Customized Publication Compilations. These are not lists of one's own publications but lists of publications by selected authors or publications on a topic of interest. More on OA for science journalism Lisa Conti, Filtered Science, Stimulating Aliquot, July 10, 2008. Excerpt:
PS: See my past posts on how OA promotes science journalism, not just original research. Why public health requires open data Brandon Keim, Crowdsourcing the Flu Vaccine, Wired Science, July 10, 2008. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Excerpt:
From Salzberg's paper in Nature:
Nature's editorial in the same issue calls for redoubled efforts to prepare for an avian flu pandemic, but doesn't comment on Salzberg's call for open data. Related: See my past posts on OA to avian flu data. CC meeting and Science Commons Slides and videos of the presentations at the Creative Commons Technology Summit (Mountain View, June 18, 2008) are now online. The Panel on Science Commons is covered in the first YouTube video. (Thanks to Donna Wentworth.) Interview with Padmanabhan Balaram K. S. Jayaraman, Open archives � the alternative to open access, SciDev.net, July 9, 2008. Excerpt:
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More Nature coverage of OA in developing countries Massimo Sandal, Future of open access could be online and peer-reviewed, Nature, July 10, 2008. A letter to the editor. Excerpt:
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Update. Also see Barbara Kirsop's comment, concluding that the Nature headlines, not OA, do more harm than good. New OA journal on energy research and policy Energies is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of energy and "Related Scientific Research, Technology Development and Studies in Policy and Management", published by the Molecular Diversity Preservation International. The inaugural issue is now online. New OA press from Carnegie Mellon ETC-Press is a new OA press from a partnership of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Lulu.com. (Thanks to the Creative Commons blog.) From the site:
More details from the about page:
Hybrid OA journal boosts impact factor in 2007 The hybrid OA journal, Genome Research, boosted its impact factor significantly in 2007. From its July 7 press release:
PS: GR's policy is to make all its articles OA after a six month moving wall and to offer an immediate OA option for a $2,000 fee. More OA publishers spamming researchers Gunther Eysenbach has named Dove Medical Press and Libertas Academica (run by the same person, Tom Hill a.k.a. Tim Hill) as spammer of the month for spamming researchers to solicit articles. Update to Bioinformatics Links Directory M.D. Brazas and four co-authors, Keeping pace with the data: 2008 update on the Bioinformatics Links Directory, Nucleic Acids Research, July 1, 2008. Because the article isn't yet online at the journal site, I'm linking to the abstract at PubMed.
Update. The article is now online and OA at the journal site. (Thanks to Francis Ouellette.)
OA book publishing in Australia Colin Steele, We must e-publish or perish, The Australian, July 9, 2008. Excerpt:
New prices for Elsevier hybrid journals reflect rate of author uptake
Charles Bailey, Elsevier Says Its 2009 Journal Price Increases Average Six Percent or Less, DigitalKoans, July 8, 2008.
Gold OA publisher now green too Scientific Journals International has turned green. (Thanks to Richard Poynder.) From the SJI front page:
All SJI journals, current and forthcoming, are OA. NPG's conditions for IR deposits are met Stevan Harnad, Batch Deposits in Institutional Repositories (the SWORD protocol), Open Access Archivangelism, July 9, 2008. Excerpt:
Comment. Here's a little more of the context. The Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is willing to deposit peer-reviewed manuscripts from NPG journals in institutional repositories, at least for authors bound by institutional OA mandates. But it "will need institutional repositories to accept automated deposits by publishers on behalf of authors, preferably using a similar batch upload service to that offered by PubMed Central...." Now we know that EPrints and DSpace support batch uploads --and of course if they do, then the vast majority of IRs around the world do so as well. Good news. The ball is in NPG's court. Kristopher A. Nelson, The Impact of Government-Mandated Public Access to Biomedical Research: An Analysis of the New NIH Depository Requirements. A preprint, self-archived June 2008.
From the conclusion:
More on OA to legal scholarship Richard Danner, Applying the Access Principle in Law: The Responsibilities of the Legal Scholar, International Journal of Legal Information, Vol. 35, No. 355, Winter 2007. (Thanks to Joe Hodnicki.)
More on the Stanford OA mandate Kathleen Sullivan, Education faculty to make articles available to all, Stanford Report, July 9, 2008. Excerpt:
PS: For details on the Stanford policy, see my posts from June 26 and June 29.
Presentations from Italian OA conference
The presentations from Pubblicazioni scientifiche, diritti d�autore ed Open Access: Il punto di vista di ricercatori, editori e biblioteche (Trento, June 20, 2008) are now available online.
Comment. We previously blogged one of the presentations from this conference.
Francis Deblauwe, Ancient Righting: Archaeologists & Copyright, iCommons.org, July 7, 2008.
From 6-8 June, I was lucky enough to be able to attend a scholarly symposium at UCLA in sunny Southern California: the UCLA/Getty Storage Symposium. Preservation and Access to Archaeological Materials. I live blogged it on the IW&A Blog. ... [O]ne issue that reoccurred several times was how to deal with copyright inside a very specialised, niche academic discipline. When closed publishers support OA
Material Contributions To Open Access, Open Chemistry Web, July 7, 2008.
The Free Our Data blog describes a new service from the UK's Office of Public Sector Information to navigate issues in re-using government data:
Contrasting Open Source Software and Open Access, Plausible Accuracy, July 7, 2008.
In an article published July 8 in PLoS Biology, a group of researchers describe their efforts to establish an OA "gene wiki" to collect information on the relationship and function of human genes. See also the description from the PLoS press release:
.. There is a lot of potential information about any given gene�its name, sequence, position on a chromosome, the protein(s) it encodes, other gene(s) it interacts with, etc. and presenting this information is referred to as 'gene annotation.' As information may come from many different researchers working independently, it is important that resources exist to collect the information together. Existing annotation libraries include Gene Portals and Model Organism Databases�however, the information stored in these is considered to be definitive, which requires constant updates by specific experts and formal presentation of information. The work reported in this week's PLoS Biology is intended to allow a much more flexible, organic accumulation of science, with all readers also able to edit and add to the Gene Wiki pages. The presentations from ICSTI 2008, New Frontiers for Scientific and Technical Communication (Seoul, June 11-12, 2008), are now online. Stevan Harnad, Automatic search for OA versions of cited articles, Open Access Archivangelism, July 8, 2008. Excerpt:
Comment. Paracite is great and I'm glad Stevan had a chance to remind everyone that it exists. (It hasn't gotten much notice recently.) But I'd answer Matt's question differently. Matt is right that facing a pay-per-view screen means you didn't click on a link to an OA copy of an article, even if there is an OA edition of the same article elsewhere. And he's right it would be very useful to click on a citation in a reference list and go straight to an OA copy of the full-text. That's a reason to publish in OA journals. But it's also a reason to link to OA repository copies when they exist, even when we also link to TA copies in TA journals, and it's a reason to deposit all our paper in OA repositories. We could shift the question to the relative strategic priorities of gold and green OA, but we don't have to. Giving priority to gold OA is not a reason to change the definition of OA to exclude green OA, any more than giving priority to green OA is a reason to change the definition of OA to exclude gold OA. That was the original question. Let's pursue green and gold OA in parallel and hold to the definition of OA which embraces both. Isabella Meinecke, Eine Verbindung mit Zukunft: Bibliotheken, E-Journals und Open Access, a slide presentation at Deutscher Bibliothekartag (Mannheim, June 3-6, 2008). Videos of Trieste conference, now in progress The sponsors of the Workshop on Using Open Access Models for Science Dissemination (Trieste, July 7-16, 2008) are posting videos of the presentations as they occur. (Thanks to Leslie Chan.) Nature will deposit into disciplinary and institutional repositories Nature Publishing Group to archive on behalf of authors, a press release from the Nature Publishing Group, July 8, 2008. Excerpt:
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Update. Also see Stevan Harnad's comment: "...If Nature really wants to help OA, then dropping its access embargo would be a lot more helpful than saving authors from having to do a few keystrokes...." Update. EPrints and DSpace do support batch uploads, meeting the NPG conditions for IR deposits. Update. Also see Dorothea Salo's comment:
David Wiley has officially announced the launch of Open Education News, July 7, 2008. Excerpt: PS: This is a very welcome development. The Open Ed movement has needed this for a long time. I wish everyone at OEN the best, and I recommend that OAN readers with an interest in open education make it part of their daily routine.
The 2008 World eBook Fair began July 4, with the theme "Own Your Own Library". Participating organizations include Project Gutenberg, the World Public Library, and the Internet Archive. See also the news posting from Project Gutenberg.
Versioning, validating, and evaluating OA repository content
Francesca Valentini, Le pubblicazioni in Open Access: versioni, validazione e valutazione, presented at Pubblicazioni scientifiche, diritti d�autore ed Open Access: il punto di vista di ricercatori, editori e biblioteche (Trento, June 20, 2008). English abstract:
This presentation focuses on peer review and version identification of digital objects as a means for Open Access scientific outputs to finally enter the "exclusive world" of research evaluation and assessment, as well as for OA repositories to become part of research assessment workflows. Some versioning projects are presented, in the frame of Italian and British research assessment situations. The University of Crete has launched an institutional repository, E-Locus. (Thanks to Vangelis Banos.) SPARC Europe and DRIVER work for European IRs SPARC Europe and DRIVER sign Memorandum of Agreement, a press release from SPARC Europe, July 7, 2008. Excerpt:
Columbia U looking for an IR coordinator Columbia University is looking for a Digital Repository Coordinator. PS: If this is of interest, then you should follow the OA-related job postings on OAD. India's publicly-funded project to support OA repositories at Indian universities has now launched 10 pilot repositories:
The project is not new, but I notice that I've never blogged background information on it. It's funded by India's Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR) and carried out by the National Centre for Science Information (NCSI) at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). It includes the CASSIR cross-archiving search engine for Indian repositories, which launched in February 2007. I can't find a home page for the project, at least under what appears to be its official name, Development of OAI-Based Institutional Research Repository Services in India, but here's a description of it from the DSIR page on the Technology Information Facilitation Programme (last revised April 28, 2008):
Isabel Galina and Joaquin Gimenez, An Overview of the Development of Repositories and Open Access in Mexico. A paper presented at ElPub 2008 (Toronto, June 25-27, 2008). Excerpt:
More on the two-sidedness of OA Stevan Harnad, The #1 Myth About Open Access, Open Access Archivangelism, July 6, 2008. Excerpt: "Just what is open access?... In an open access journal, there's no charge for reading articles... Yes, that's pretty much all there is to the definition." Comment. Stevan is right to correct the impression that all OA is gold OA (through journals), and to remind everyone of green OA (through repositories). But "free online access" is itself only part of the story. Stevan links from that phrase to a more complete discussion. But because he doesn't elaborate in his post, I'll elaborate a little. The term "OA" is now used in at least two ways: (1) to remove price barriers alone ("free online access" or gratis OA) and (2) to remove both price and permission barriers (libre OA, which includes BBB OA). The gratis/libre distinction is not the same as the gold/green distinction. The former is about rights or freedoms, and the latter is about venues. Gold OA can be gratis or libre, and green OA can be gratis or libre. Just as we can't afford to forget green OA, we can't afford to forget libre OA. Three French journals convert to OA
Revues.org announced in its July 3 newsletter that it had launched 3 new OA journals: Balkanologie: Revue d��tudes pluridisciplinaires [Balkanology: Journal of multidisciplinary studies], Lapurdum: Revue d��tudes basques [Lapurdum: Journal of Basque studies], and the Revue historique des arm�es [Journal of military history]. (Thanks to Jean-Claude Gu�don.)
Balkanology and Lapurdum have been in print for over 10 years each; the Revue historique des arm�es has been in publication since 1945. In the same newsletter, Revues.org also announced that its parent organization, the Centre pour l��dition �lectronique ouverte [Center for Open Electronic Publishing], has become the first French organization to contribute financially to the Directory of Open Access Journals. Preview release of Digital Library of Mathematical Functions
The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a preview of its Digital Library of Mathematical Functions. The library is a rewrite of the Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables and will be OA. (Thanks to Free Government Info.)
Catharine van Ingen, Researchers Create a "Digital Watershed" of Data, Microsoft.com, undated. A profile of the California Water CyberInfrastructure project.
Urban Library Journal converts to OA
Stephen Francoeur reports that Urban Library Journal (formerly known as Urban Academic Librarian) will convert to OA. It is a refereed journal published by the Library Association of the City University of New York.
Christian Zimmermann, RePEc in June 2008, The RePEc blog, July 3, 2008.
Comment. If I'm reading this right, then the number of papers in RePEc has grown by 20% in under a year. Those are remarkable growth figures, if that's the case.
The International Journal of BioSciences and Technology is a new peer-reviewed OA journal sponsored by the VM University. The inaugural issue is now available. (Thanks to ICAAP.)
Three new items from Medknow:
Nobelist calls for openness in science
John Sulston, recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize for medicine, has launched a new research institute, the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester. Sulston is using the launch to highlight his views on openness in science and the need to reform innovation and intellectual property policy. (Thanks to Subbiah Arunachalam.)
See the op-ed co-authored by Sulston and Joseph Stiglitz in the July 5 edition of The Times: ... The question of �Who owns science?� is therefore a crucial one, the answer to which will have broad-reaching implications for scientific progress and for the way in which the benefits of science are distributed, fairly or otherwise. Two of the most pressing issues concern equity of access to scientific knowledge and the useful products that arise from that knowledge. ...See also coverage in The Times and the BBC. Update. See also coverage in IP Watch. Publisher policies on NIH-funded authors The Open Access Directory (OAD) is pleased to announce that its list of Publisher policies on NIH-funded authors is now open for community editing and enlargement. The list starts with 204 links to publisher policies and 26 annotations. We've very grateful to Arta Dobbs (University of Connecticut Health Center), Molly Keener (Wake Forest University Health Sciences), and P. Scott Lapinski (Harvard Medical School) for their hard work in developing this foundation on which the public can now build. OAD is a wiki and we encourage all users to help keep it comprehensive, accurate, and up to date. We especially encourage publishers with a policy on NIH-funded authors to make sure that their policy is included on the new list. Labels: Hot |