Open Access NewsNews from the open access movement Jump to navigation |
|||||||||||||||
Canada establishes working group on research data management
Research Data Strategy Working Group Established, press release, August 12, 2008.
Christian Zimmermann, NEP alerts now available through RSS, The RePEc blog, August 13, 2008.
NEP (New Economics Papers) is an email service that alerts subscribers to new online working papers in their area of interest. About 80 fields are currently available, and the roughly weekly emails are sent free of charge. While the RePEc team thought email dissemination was sufficient, there also appears to be demand for RSS feeds as for this and other blogs. This is now available, and the RSS feeds can be subscribed to by clicking on the relevant field report on the NEP home page. ... Author rights and the NIH policy
On August 15, the Association of Research Libraries released "PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights: Agreements between 12 Publishers and the Authors Subject to the NIH Public Access Policy", analyzing policies adopted by several policies to facilitate author compliance with the NIH policy. From the press release:
[ARL] has released �PubMed Central Deposit and Author Rights: Agreements between 12 Publishers and the Authors Subject to the NIH Public Access Policy,� by Ben Grillot, ... legal intern for ARL.Update. See also Kevin Smith's comments: Two quick points struck me as I read Grillot�s article beyond those conclusions that he reaches. First, I think many authors would be very surprised at just how limited their rights to make their own work available to others are when they sign publication agreements. ... The very limited set of open access rights retained by authors under these standard publication agreements argues forcefully for the approach taken recent by the Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty to grant Harvard a license for use in an institutional repository prior to any transfer of copyright to a publisher. The second thing that caught my attention is the brief notation, in a footnote to table 2, that Oxford University Press charges authors more for participation in their �author pays� open access program if the author is affiliated with an institution that does not subscribe to Oxford�s journals. Authors� rights are thus directly and explicitly tied to institution�s expenditure of monies with that publisher. ... I suggest that institutions emulate it. Whenever we negotiate a new contract for a journal database, whether a new acquisition or a renewal, we should insist that the rights that authors at our institutions who publish with that publisher retain are spelled out. For some of us it has seemed inopportune to tie the rights of individual scholarly authors to our enterprise-wide subscriptions, but it is starting to seem more and more logical. ... Update (10/9/08). STM, ALPSP, and the AAP/PSP released an open letter to the ARL in order to "express concern regarding [the] accuracy" of the paper. OAI-ORE and SWORD support in OJS
From the Public Knowledge Project blog on August 12, 2008:
New OA journal of systematic zoology
ZooKeys is a new peer-reviewed OA journal on systematic zoology published by Pensoft Publishers. Page charges are �12 per page, subject to discounts and waivers. Authors retain copyright to their work and articles are released under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The inaugural issue is now available, including an editorial which discusses OA.
GPO seeks to digitize 2.2 million documents
The U.S. Government Printing Office has issued an RFP for Mass Digitization. Proposals are due September 19, 2008. (Thanks to Free Government Information.)
[GPO] plans to digitize the entire collection of legacy materials that have been disseminated through the Federal Depository Library Program. The estimated size of the collection is approximately 2.2 million documents, which amounts to about 90 million pages. GPO has a requirement to digitize publications that are within scope of GPO's dissemination programs that only exist in tangible format. ... In exchange, the private or public sector participant will be able to maintain a collection of files produced in the process for inclusion in their collections ...See also our past posts on OA at the GPO.
Science-related social networking sites and data portability
Euan Adie, Data portability for scientific web apps, Nascent, August 11, 2008.
Update to Repository 66 service
Stuart Lewis, Repository mashup map software update, Stuart Lewis� Blog, August 12, 2008. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)
I'll be on the road August 16-23 with few opportunities for blogging or email. But Gavin will be on the job, and I'll start to catch up as soon as I return. Chris Patil, Opening science: How unconferences changed my life, Ouroboros, August 14, 2008. Excerpt:
Rima Kupryte recognized for her work on info sharing and OA Rima Kupryte, Director of Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL) was awarded the 2008 IFLA Medal for her work on global information sharing, including OA. From yesterday's announcement:
Comment. Rima is one of the original 16 signers of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and under her leadership eIFL has become a major force in promoting OA in transition and developing countries. See for example OAN's 73 past posts on eIFL's OA projects. Congratulations, Rima, on this richly deserved honor.
A conversation about OA in anthropology Christopher Kelty and six co-authors, Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies, Cultural Anthropology, August 13, 2008.
OncologyWatch has put together a list of 19 OA journals of oncology. Google Scholar results starting to appear in vanilla Google Stuart Lewis, Google bring Scholar richness into normal search results, Stuart Lewis' Blog, August 13, 2008. Excerpt:
T&F will deposit in PMC, reaffirms embargo on self-archiving An announcement from Taylor & Francis, August 13, 2008:
Mike Dunford, For-Profit Scientific Publishers and the Culture of Entitlement, The Questionable Authority, August 13, 2008. Excerpt:
Bringing information sharing to the classroom New web tools help educators use Sparky video awards in fall courses, an announcement from SPARC, August 11, 2008. Excerpt:
NSF Task Force calls for OA to NSF-funded research, data, and OERs Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge, August 11, 2008. A Report of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Task Force on Cyberlearning. The report is dated June 24, 2008, but wasn't released until August 11, 2008. (Thanks to Clifford Lynch.) The report focuses on access to technology and teaching materials, but has something to say about OA to research literature and data:
Comment. Kudos to Christine Borgman, who chaired the task force. The NSF Task Force on Cyberinfrastructure (as opposed to this one, on Cyberlearning) also supports OA, at least to data. Kevin Smith, Updates on NIH Public Access, Scholarly Communications at Duke, August 12, 2008. Commenting on a series of developments with the NIH policy (all of which were covered here at OAN). Excerpt:
Student participation in the OA movement Gavin Baker, The Right to Research: student involvement in open access to scholarly communication, a 53 minute podcast of a talk at the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science. OA collections of Ukrainian literature Liladhar Pendse has gathered links to seven Open Access Ukrainian Digital Collections.
Andy Guess, Open Textbook Meets Community Colleges, Inside Higher Ed, August 12, 2008.
Update. See also this story from �We�re hoping that this is the first of many,� said Joel Thierstein, executive director of Connexions ... New OA journal on environment and society Surveys and Perspectives Integrating Environment and Society is a new peer-reviewed, no-fee OA journal, sponsored by the Institut Veolia Environnement and published by Copernicus. The inaugural issue came out in February 2008. (Thanks to John Reidelbach.) "A National Research Park system for ideas" John Wilbanks, Meme testing, John Wilbanks' blog, August 11, 2008. Excerpt:
OA pharma journals cited more than non-OA pharma journals Kevin A. Clauson and three co-authors, Open-access publishing for pharmacy-focused journals, American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy, August 15, 2008. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far:
The same issue has an editorial by C. Richard Talley, Open-access publishing: why not? It's accessible only to subscribers, at least so far. Update (8/13/08). I've now seen the full-text of Talley's editorial. He acknowledges that OA to pharma journals "might indirectly improve public health", but tries to explain why AJHP is not OA. He starts with a potshot at the article by Clauson et al., which he just agreed to publish, by asserting flatly that "Davis et al. found that open-access publishing does not increase article citations." He doesn't attempt to reconcile the Clauson and Davis studies, and doesn't mention that the Davis study found no short-term citation increase while dozens of previous studies have found long-term citation increases. He seems to believe that all OA journals charge publication fees (unaware that most OA journals charge no fees), and claims that AJHP would have to charge a publication fee of $7,000 to cover its expenses. He says that free online abstracts and interlibrary loan will meet much of the demand. In the meantime, he will consider delayed OA. "The projected effect of this on membership recruitment and retention, as well as other economic concerns, will influence this decision." Journals, magazines, and newspapers that publish articles about OA The Open Access Directory (OAD) just opened a list of Periodicals that frequently publish articles about open access. As the editors point out in the scope note, the list "should be useful for readers looking for work on OA, and even more for authors looking for places to submit their work or media releases on OA." OAD is a wiki and appreciates your help in keeping its lists comprehensive, accurate, and up to date.
Survey of Asian commons initiatives
Frederick Noronha, Copyleft ... but without violating anyone's rights, TestMatch, August 11, 2008.
... [Subbiah Arunachalam] outlines the strengths [of OA], for journals: Many leading journals published in India are already open access. ... Another society launches an OA journal The Journal of African Real Estate Research is a new peer-reviewed journal from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (UK) and the African Real Estate Society (South Africa). The inaugural issue (January 2008) is now online. (Thanks to John Reidelbach.) EC funds more digitization for OA, calls on member states to do the same Opening soon: a digital library for Europe, a press release from the European Commission, August 11, 2008. Excerpt:
Update (8/13/08). Thanks to Fleur for pointing out the accompanying Progress Report and Staff Working Paper. From her post:
Profile of the IR at the Spanish National Research Council Agnes Ponsati and Pablo de Castro, Repository increases visibility, Research Information, August/September 2008. Excerpt:
PS: For background, see our post on the CISC repository and policy to fill it. Dale Peters, Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research (DRIVER), a slide presentation at the JISC/CNI meeting on Transforming the User Experience (Belfast, July 10-11, 2008). The other presentations from the meeting are now online as well. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)
University OA policies in the public interest John Willinsky and Deborah Stipek, Open access responds to public's hunger for knowledge, Mercury News, August 10, 2008. Willinsky and Stipek are both professors of education at Stanford University. Excerpt:
QUT creates experimental OA journal fund Queensland University of Technology has created an experimental $10,000 fund to pay the publication fees at PLoS journals during 2008. Comment. I applaud this step. When other universities launch funds to pay publication fees at fee-based OA journals, I applaud them too, but I wonder why they haven't already taken steps to provide green OA for their entire output of peer-reviewed research articles. Fortunately, that question is unnecessary here. QUT has had a green OA mandate in place since January 1, 2004. It was the first university anywhere to adopt one, and now it's the first university to launch an OA journal fund to supplement an existing green OA mandate. Labels: Hot U. Washington developing social site for researchers
Research1 is being developed by staff of the University of Washington as a service of the Research Channel. The site will be a social platform for researchers, including sharing documents and integrated Creative Commons licensing. See the July 24 story in University Week. (Thanks to Wired Campus.)
Blog notes on LIBER conference
John MacColl, LIBER, Equality, Fraternization, hangingtogether.org, August 8, 2008. Blog notes on the LIBER (Ligue des Biblioth�ques Europ�ennes de Recherche / Association of European Research Libraries) conference (Istanbul, July 1-5, 2008).
MyDriver goes live!, DRIVER, August 8, 2008.
Researchers and Repository managers are invited to register with the MyDriver service to access a range of features. This service allows users to filter their searches of repository content and subscribe to communities and collections. In the near future, registered repository managers will be granted additional rights to run the DRIVER Validator on their published data and follow their repository conformance to the DRIVER guidelines. Further details of MyDriver are available here.See also our past post on MyDriver. |