Open Access NewsNews from the open access movement Jump to navigation |
|||||||||||||||
Open Access Day room on FriendFeed
Graham Steel has started an room on FriendFeed for Open Access Day. See also Steel's blog post about it.
Breifing paper on IR steering groups
Repository Steering Groups, briefing paper by the Repository Support Project, dated July 2008 but apparently released October 3, 2008. Overview:
A well-chosen, well-informed and committed Steering Group can make an important contribution to the sustained success of a repository. This Briefing Paper highlights some of the issues for consideration when planning the role, remit and composition of a repository Steering Group.
Christian Zimmermann, RePEc in September 2008, The RePEc blog, October 3, 2008.
The September issue of eLearning Papers is devoted to Open Educational Resources.
Sparky Awards link up with Campus MovieFest; judges panel to include new media luminaries, press release, October 2, 2008.
See also our past posts on the Sparky Awards. Article on Wilbanks talk at Brisbane conference
Anna Salleh, 'Old-boys club' holding back innovation, ABC, October 3, 2008.
See also our past posts on the conference. See also this report on the talk from ANI. LIBER Quarterly converts to OA
Inge Angevaare, European Research Library Quarterly available in open access, diglib list, October 2, 2008.
As the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER) is a staunch supporter of open access publishing (see, e.g., the niitiatives within the Access Division), the LIBER Executive Board has decided that LIBER Quarterly should become an entirely open access publication, freely available online to the worldwide research library community, with paid printing-on-demand services to be offered upon completion of each volume (expected in January 2009 for the 2008 volume). ... Ginsparg's guide to the pre-history of OA Paul Ginsparg, The global-village pioneers, PhysicsWorld, October 1, 2008. A very enjoyable reminiscence over an important career, including the launch of arXiv. Excerpt:
arXiv has passed the milestone of 500,000 deposits. From today's announcement:
Which is the better hook, access or preservation? One of the bloggers for the JISC Information Environment Team blog has posted some notes on the Fifth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects. Excerpt:
Comment. I like the way this flips the conventional wisdom at many institutional repositories: "Don't mention open access (people don't know what it is or they will make up things to worry about); get faculty to deposit their manuscripts by talking about PRESERVATION." Now who's right? How conservative is the NIH policy? The American Physiological Society has released a September 18 supplement to Martin Frank's written and oral testimony at the September 11 hearing on the Conyers bill. Excerpt:
Comments
Looking for better ways to digitize public-domain works Richard K. Johnson, Free Our Libraries! Why We Need A New Approach to Putting Library Collections Online, Boston Library Consortium, September 25, 2008. Excerpt:
Update. For more on the event where Johnson delivered this paper, see the report we posted yesterday. Harvesting the DOAJ for customized reading lists According to Eric Lease Morgan, Notre Dame is using OAI harvesting through MyLibrary to create Reading Lists from the DOAJ. He says the method can add "specific subjects or specific journals" to a user's reading list. See our past posts on MyLibrary. Wanted: Tagline for OA publisher An unnamed publisher of OA books and journals is looking for a tagline. Any thoughts? Alma Swan, Doing things with data, OptimalScholarship, October 2, 2008. Excerpt:
Warsaw School of Economics becomes first Polish member of Nereus The Warsaw School of Economics joined Nereus, the mostly-OA repository of economic research harvesting from the IRs of major European research universities. The Warsaw School is the first Polish member of Nereus. For background, see our past posts on Nereus. Report on OA to agricultural research Hubert Schlieber, Der freie (kostenlose) Zugang zu Publikationen aus Wissenschaft und Bildung im Internet �ber Open Access (OA) : Schwerpunkt Landwirtschaft, Bundesanstalt f�r Agrarwirtschaft, August 2008. A review of many OA resources, with comments on their coverage of agricultural research.
Jane Park, International OER Community Update, Creative Commons blog, October 1, 2008. Discusses the UNESCO OER Community and the Open Educational Resources issue of eLearning Papers.
Report from digital library summit
Speakers at Universal Access Digital Library Summit Call for Action to Protect the Public Domain, press release, September 30, 2008. (Thanks to The Charleston Adviser.)
Blog notes on open textbook virtual meeting
Jonathan Gray, After the open textbook virtual meeting, Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, October 2, 2008. Blog notes on Open textbook virtual meeting (online, September 29, 2008).
... A transcript of the meeting is up on the wiki page. There is also a brief writeup on Wikibooks News. ... Wellcome renews Imperial College London's OA grant
Katie Stone, Wellcome Trust Open Access grant renewed, Physics and Maths info @ Imperial College London Library, October 2, 2008.
Wellcome have provided the College with a third open access grant to pay for the open access publication fees of its researchers. Wellcome will be contacting researchers in the next few weeks to remind them about open access. ... More on Bloomsbury's OA monograph imprint
Jennifer Howard, 2 New Digital Models Promise Academic Publishing for Profit, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 2, 2008.
See also our past posts on Bloomsbury Academic. NIH responses to public comments on its OA policy The NIH has released its Analysis of Comments and Implementation of the NIH Public Access Policy, 2008. The document doesn't include a month and date, but it was apparently released in the last day or two. Excerpt:
The body of the report summarizes the individual comments, including objections to the policy (without attribution), along with the NIH's responses. For example:
PS: For background, see our blog post on the NIH's March 2008 meeting and call for comments, our post on the subsequent RFI, a 2 hour 40 minute video of the March meeting, the full-text comments received by the NIH (with attribution), and various slide presentations from the NIH on the comments, including a preliminary version of the new document. Update. The document is still undated, but the NIH had added a date to the link on the comments page, September 30, 2008. Labels: Hot New OA journal of ovarian research
The Journal of Ovarian Research is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by BioMed Central. See the October 1 announcement. The article-processing charge is �850 (�1070, $1565), subject to discounts and waivers. Authors retain copyright to their work, and articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The inaugural editorial is now available.
I just mailed the October issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. This issue takes a close look at the bill to overturn the NIH public access policy, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act (H.R. 6845), and the publishing lobby's arguments in support of it. The round-up section briefly notes 149 OA developments from September. Labels: Hot
Klaus Graf reports that Germany's new cabinet-level regulation to implement the EU's INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe) does not provide OA. Read his post in German or Google's English. Klaus adds by email that most geodata will be gratis, but only for sampling, to let users decide whether to pay for it. Weather data will not even be gratis for sampling. Apparently no data will be libre OA, and will not even allow printing.
Cameron Neylon, A personal view of Open Science - Part I, Science in the open, September 30, 2008.
Openness is arguably the great strength of the scientific method. At its core is the principle that claims and the data that support them are placed before the community for examination and critique. Through open examination and critical analysis models can be refined, improved, or rejected. ... It is an open approach that drives science towards an understanding which, while never perfect, nevertheless enables the development of sophisticated technologies with practical applications.Update. See also part 2 of the essay. Update. See also part 3 of the essay. ... There are both benefits and risks associated with open practice in research. Often the discussion with researchers is focussed on the disadvantages and risks. In an inherently conservative pursuit it is perfectly valid to ask whether changes of the type and magnitude offer any benefits given the potential risks they pose. These are not concerns that should be dismissed or ridiculed, but ones that should be taken seriously, and considered. Radical change never comes without casualties, and while some concerns may be misplaced, or overblown, there are many that have real potential consequences. In a competitive field people will necessarily make diverse decisions on the best way forward for them. What is important is providing as good information to them as is possible to help them balance the risks and benefits of any approach they choose to take.Update. See also part 4 of the essay. ... There are two broad approaches to standards that are currently being discussed. The first of these is aimed at mainstream acceptance and uptake and can be described as �The fully supported paper�. This is a concept that is simple on the surface but very complex to implement in practice. In essence it is the idea that the claims made in a peer reviewed paper in the conventional literature should be fully supported by a publically accessible record of all the background data, methodology, and data analysis procedures that contribute to those claims. ... More blog notes on Southampton open science workshop
Cameron Neylon, The Southampton Open Science Workshop - a brief report, Science in the open, October 1, 2008. Blog notes on the Southampton Open science workshop (Southampton, August 31-September 1, 2008).
... Overall there was much enthusiasm for things Open and a sense that many elements of the puzzle are falling into place. What is missing is effective coordinated action, communication across the whole community of interested and sympathetic scientsts, and critically the high profile success stories that will start to shift opinion. These ought to, in my opinion, be the targets for the next 6-12 months.See also our previous post on the workshop. How librarians can support the future of research Carol Goble, The Future of Research, a slide presentation at the British Library Board Awayday, September 23, 2008. Goble discusses open science, open data, and open access, among other topics. (Thanks to Richard Akerman.) Erika D. Smith, IUPUI leads way in library digital repositories, Indianapolis Star, September 29, 2008. Excerpt:
OA medical research for lay researchers
John Schwartz, Logging On for a Second (or Third) Opinion, The New York Times, September 29, 2008.
... At least three-quarters of all Internet users look for health information online, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project; of those with a high-speed connection, 1 in 9 do health research on a typical day. And 75 percent of online patients with a chronic problem told the researchers that �their last health search affected a decision about how to treat an illness or condition,� according to a Pew Report released last month, �The Engaged E-Patient Population.� ... The anonymous blogger at World of Warcraft has blogged some notes on the OA session --Freies Wissen vs. Digital Divide-- of Momentum 08: Gerechtigkeit (Hallstatt , September 25-28, 2008). Read the post in German or Google's English. Heather Morrison, Dramatic Growth of Open Access September 30, 2008, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, September 30, 2008. Excerpt:
The NIH policy and an early precursor Jonathan Miller, �Publishers did not take the bait�: A Forgotten Precursor to the NIH Public Access Policy, a preprint forthcoming in the Spring 2009 issue of College & Research Libraries.
The National Cancer Institute of Canada (NCIC) has adopted an OA mandate. (Thanks to Jim Till.) Excerpt:
Also see the NCIC's Open Access FAQs. Excerpt:
Comments
Labels: Hot Impact of the NIH policy abroad
Open Access Strikes Turbulence in US with Possible Australian Repercussions, The Funneled Web, September 19, 2008. Discusses the recent government report recommending OA in Australia and the implications of the NIH public access policy (its transition from voluntary to mandatory and the pushback by some publishers). (Thanks to Colin Steele.)
Analysis of citations from OA papers
Kayvan Kousha, Characteristics of Open Access Web Citation Network: A Multidisciplinary Study, presented at COLLNET 2008 (Berlin, July 28-August 1, 2008). Abstract:
More knowledge about Open Access (OA) scholarly publishing on the web would be helpful for citation data mining and the development of Web-based citation indexes. In the current study, five characteristics of 545 OA citing sources targeting OA research articles in four science and four social science disciplines were manually identified, including file format, hyperlinking, Internet domain, language, and publication year. About 60% of the OA citing sources targeting research papers were in PDF format, 30% were from academic domains ending in edu and ac and 70% of the citations were not hyperlinked. Moreover, 16% of the OA citing sources targeting studied papers in the eight selected disciplines were in non-English languages. Additional analyses revealed significant disciplinary differences across science and the social sciences. Overall, the OA Web citation network was dominated by PDF format files and non-hyperlinked citations. This knowledge of some characteristics shaping the OA citation network gives a better understanding about their potential uses. Another profile of Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.Org
Noam Cohen, Who Owns the Law? Arguments May Ensue, The New York Times, September 28, 2008.
... As of Labor Day, he had put, he estimates, more than 50 percent of the nation�s 11 public safety codes online, including rules for fire prevention. �We have material from all 50 states, but we don�t have all 11 codes for all 50 states,� he said.Comment. At this rate, I'm not sure how Malamud has any time to do the work of PRO in between all the interviews. Keep it up! See also our many past posts about Malamud and PRO. Update. See also this profile from Network World. New OA journal of thyroid research
Thyroid Research is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by the Polish Society of Thyroidology and BioMed Central. See the September 30 announcement. The article-processing charge is �850 (�1070, $1565), subject to discounts and waivers. Authors retain copyright to their work and articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The inaugural editorial is now available.
OA, epidemiology, and language barriers
The September issue of Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, a theme issue on "Beyond English: Accessing the global epidemiological literature", is now online. At least two articles discuss OA:
Nicholas Joint, Current research information systems, open access repositories and libraries: ANTAEUS, Library Review 57(8), 2008. Abstract:
Purpose � The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of larger developments in the international research information environment, and to outline their impact on the open access movement within libraries. New OA journal of computer science
Algorithms is a new peer-reviewed OA journal of computer science published by Molecular Diversity Preservation International. The inaugural issue is now available. Article processing charges are 800 Swiss francs. Authors retain copyright and articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution license.
Iranian participation in E-LIS
AmirReza Asnafi, et al., A survey on amount of scientific publications of Iranian scientists and their collaboration in E-Print database, presented at COLLNET 2008 (Berlin, July 28-August 1, 2008). Abstract:
Information like blood flows in the vessel of society, so its production is a major indicator for development in countries. It can be utilized in various fields and domains. In current era, scientific and research indicators determine status and rank of countries around the world. Countries that increase their researches and scientific productions will have high scientific rank. This will lead to growth and development in each country. E-LIS� is an open access database of published and in-press technical and scientific documents in Library and Information Science field that authors can submit their articles to this database voluntary. Current research will study the amount of scientific publications of Iranian scientists and their collaboration in E-LIS (Electronic library and Information Science) database in comparison with other Asian countries and will determine rank of Iran in scientific collaboration among these countries in this database. Also, current research will study web transaction logs of produced papers by Iranian scientists that is presented in this database, in order to determine Amount of usability of these papers by various users. Also this research will study significant relationship among Iranian scientists' collaboration in scientific publications and amount of downloads of their articles by users.
The Directory of Open Access Journals has posted an appeal for supporters to join its membership program, launched last year. From the announcement:
Since the launch in 2003 DOAJ has steadily gained importance as the only comprehensive quality controlled resource for open access journals. We are now asking you to help us maintain this service by becoming a member. Membership fees for 2008 (for new members) paid after October 1st will also cover membership for 2009! ... New OA journal of Asian family medicine
Asia Pacific Family Medicine is a new OA peer-reviewed journal published by the Asia Pacific Region of Wonca and BioMed Central. See the September 29 announcement. The article-processing charge is �800 (�1010, US$1470), subject to waivers and discounts. Authors retain copyright to their article, and articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
DRIVER and eIFL to collaborate
DRIVER and eIFL.net signed Memorandum of Understanding, press release, September 29, 2008.
DRIVER and eIFL.net � Electronic Information for Libraries � have identified demand for cooperation in order to progress and enhance the provision, visibility and application of European research outputs through digital repositories. ... Law professors defend NIH policy against copyright objections Forty-six law professors and specialists in copyright law wrote to the House Judiciary Committee on September 8 to show that the publishing lobby's objections to the NIH policy misrepresent US copyright law. The Committee had the letter in hand when it convened the September 11 hearing on the Conyers bill. The letter is now online. Excerpt:
The folks at DRIVER updated the project home page to reflect the new goals of DRIVER II. Excerpt:
From the new page on OA (last link above):
Another call for OA to Australian research Colin Steele, Open Access to Australia's research, Canberra Times, September 29, 2008. Excerpt:
I spent some time this morning adding new events to the OAD list of Conferences and workshops related to OA. Two quick thoughts:
Systematically gathering and disseminating repository usage data Christine Merk and Nils K. Windisch, Usage Statistics Review: Final report, JISC, September 24, 2008. (Thanks to the JISC Information Environment Team.) Excerpt:
OA is desirable apart from the savings, but there are savings too Timothy Burke, Planning for Contraction, Inside Higher Ed, September 29, 2008. Excerpt:
Sometime on Friday Open Access News passed the milestone of 15,000 posts. Gavin and I thank you all for reading, subscribing, forwarding, suggesting, and linking. More blog notes on Brisbane conference
Kylie Pappalardo has posted a series of notes on Open Access and Research Conference 2008 (Brisbane, September 24-25, 2008):
See also our past posts on the conference.
Presentation on OA and Web 2.0
Danica Radovanovic, Open access, electronic resources and digital literacy in the networked Web 2.0 world, presentation at the International Scientific Conference: Electronic library 2.0, (Belgrade, September 25-27, 2008).
Matthias Spielkamp has blogged some notes (in German) on the panel, Kunst und ihre technische Reproduktion, at the Kreative Arbeit und Urheberrecht conference (Dortmund, September 26-28, 2008). The last section of his notes is devoted to the problem of OA for images. Read his post in German or Google's English. Stand up for an OA mandate at your university John Willinsky, How To Institute an Open Access Policy? Stand Up, Slaw.ca, September 28, 2008. Excerpt:
PS: For background, also see our past blog posts on the Stanford OA mandate, and the recent post about it by Bret Waters, a member of the Advisory Council for the Stanford School of Education. Consumer access to clinical drug trial data Shari Roan, Did the study work? Consumers can find out, Los Angeles Times, September 26, 2008. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Excerpt:
Comments
Update (9/29/08). Also see this September 26 announcement from the NLM, which describes an expansion of ClinicalTrials.gov but doesn't mention ClinicalTrials.com. The expansion will provide OA to results, or trial data themselves, not just to information about the trials. |