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Misleading questionnaire on scholarly publishing The American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) has released a Scholarly Publishing Questionnaire. It includes several questions about OA. (Thanks to Robin Peek.) One question asks whether you believe that OA journals are "radical". Another asks whether OA entails that "archiving will suffer". Another asks whether you'd like to "personally deal with any permission requests" and "deal personally with any legal disputes when copyright is infringed", leaving the impression that OA would impose these burdens. Of course, OA makes permission requests unnecessary and permits rather than restricts most acts that normally count as copyright infringement, such as copying and redistribution. Granted, these are questions, not assertions. But they're loaded questions with misleading assumptions. There's one more reason to distrust the results: The questionnaire doesn't ask for an email address or assign a validation code. There's apparently nothing to stop anyone from filling it out more than once. Peter Murray-Rust, Open Data In Science, a preprint forthcoming from Serials Review. Self-archived January 5, 2008.
Also see Peter's blog post about this article. 155 years of cell science now OA The Journal of Cell Science has provided free online access to its entire 155 year backfile. (Thanks to Black Knight via McBlawg.) JCS is published by the Company of Biologists. STM response to the OA mandate at NIH STM comments on U. S. National Institutes of Health Unfunded Mandate, a press release from the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), January 4, 2008. Here it is in its entirety:
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Journals should make it easier to learn their access policies Peter Murray-Rust, Why getting information from publishers is soul-destroying, A Scientist and the Web, January 5, 2008. Peter starts from Bill Hooker's post on the AAP/PSP (blogged here just below), and then expands upon a more general problem:
Comment. Hear, hear. Three years ago I wrote an article entitled, Journals: please post your access policies. Here's a snippet:
Does the AAP/PSP criticism of the NIH policy reflect its members? Bill Hooker, Does the AAP/PSP really represent its members? Open Reading Frame, January 4, 2008. Excerpt:
Bill adds this clarification in a subsequent post:
Comment. Bill asks a good question and makes a good start toward an answer. To summarize his data: Counting AAP/PSP members as publishers, about half already have policies in place compatible with the coming NIH mandate. Counting AAP/PSP members according to the journals they publish, the vast majority (roughly 72%) already have such policies in place. When the AAP/PSP Executive Council launched PRISM in August 2007, it tried to give the impression that the new organization was a coalition and represented the AAP/PSP membership. But PRISM never publicly identified any members of the coalition, and nine major publishers soon disavowed or distanced themselves from it. Two members of the AAP/PSP Executive Council even resigned in protest: James Jordan, director of Columbia University Press, and Ellen Faran, director of the MIT Press. Has AAP/PSP ever consulted its members about its position on the NIH policy? Are AAP/PSP members willing to see their dues spent on a lawsuit to delay it? Update (1/5/08). Bill Hooker is drafting a letter to the green publishers who belong to the AAP/PSP, asking whether the association's position on the NIH policy reflects their views and whether it consulted them before making its position public. Let him know if you are willing to sign his letter (by email or by commenting on his blog). I am. Making 2008 the year of open data 2008 — year of open data, Open Data Commons, January 3, 2008. Excerpt:
Florida museum to make marine taxonomy data OA Florida Museum receives $186,000 for DNA bar-coding project, a press release from the University of Florida, January 4, 2008. (Thanks to Gavin Baker.) Excerpt:
US National Academy of Sciences defends evolution in OA book I no longer blog individual OA books, since there are now so many. But I'll make an exception for this exceptionally important one: Science, Evolution, and Creationism, by a special committee of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, National Academies Press, January 3, 2008. From the blurb:
One important way in which this book is not exceptional is that the full text is free online. All monographs from the National Academies Press are published in dual OA/non-OA editions, and have been since March 1994. Update. Also see the National Academies' press release, January 3, 2008. It names the 16 members of the authoring committee and makes this statement:
Isaac C-H Fung, Open access for the non-English-speaking world: overcoming the language barrier, Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, January 4, 2008.
AAP/PSP response to the OA mandate at NIH Publishers Say Enactment of NIH Mandate on Journal Articles Undermines Intellectual Property Rights Essential to Science Publishing, a press release from the Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers (AAP/PSP), January 3, 2008. I'm happy to quote the press release at length so that I can respond to it at length:
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Update. See Andrea Gawrylewski's article in The Scientist (free registration required). Excerpt:
Update. Also see the STM response to the NIH mandate, and my comments on it. More on the OA mandate at the NIH Stevan Harnad, Optimize the NIH Mandate Now: Deposit Institutionally, Harvest Centrally, Open Access Archivangelism, January 2, 2008. Excerpt:
Comment. Just two quick notes on the history:
"OA must remain a priority for the library community...." ACRL Research Committee, Environmental Scan 2007, Association of College and Research Libraries, January 2008. Excerpt:
30,000 books on a keychain, 7.5 million books on your desk Michael S. Hart, The Top Inventions of 2008, Global Politician, January 3, 2008. Hart is the founder of Project Gutenberg. Excerpt:
Australian cultural heritage and web 2.0 Michael Middleton and Julie M. Lee, Cultural Institutions and Web 2.0, in Proceedings Fourth Seminar on Research Applications in Information and Library Studies (RAILS 4), RMIT University, Melbourne, November 2007.
From the body of the report:
OA clinical drug trial database for the UK UK Commission Calls for Open-Access Clinical Trial Database, The Food & Drug Letter, January 4, 2008. Only the first sentence is free for non-subscribers:
Getting specific about the OA mandate at the NIH In my newsletter article yesterday on the OA mandate at the NIH, I pointed out six policy details on which Congress was silent and on which the NIH will be free to follow its discretion. In a blog post in response, Gavin Baker takes up all six and offers predictions on what NIH will do and suggestions on what it ought to do. E-Conservation Online has posted a questionnaire on open access. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) From the preface:
Revistes catalanes amb Accés Obert (RACO) is a collection of OA Catalan journals. (Thanks to Jan Szczepanski.) Here's the English-language description from Intute:
More on SCImago Journal Rank v. Impact Factors Declan Butler, Free journal-ranking tool enters citation market, Nature News, January 2, 2008. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) Excerpt:
An OA repository to save Afghani literature An announcement from the DSpace Federation:
From the ADL about page:
The ADL is a project of the NYU Libraries, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Reed Foundation, and the W.L.S. Spencer Foundation. Comment. This is another good example of how digitization enhances rather than jeopardizes preservation. Kudos to NYU and its partners. New German copyright law is confusing scholars Authors Object Under Copyright Act, German American Law Journal, January 1, 2008. Excerpt:
PS: For readers of German, the best source of information and pro-OA advice is Klaus Graf's Archivalia. RePEc in December 2007, and what we have done over Year 2007, The RePEc blog, January 2, 2008. (Thanks to Gavin Baker.) Excerpt:
Update (1/8/08). 75% of the top 1,000 economists are registered with RePEc. Beth Ashmore and Jill E. Grogg, The Race to the Shelf Continues: The Open Content Alliance and Amazon.com, Searcher, January 2, 2008. Excerpt:
New OA journal on language contact The Journal of Language Contact is a new peer-reviewed journal on the "evolution of languages, contact and discourse" published by the Dynamique du langage et contact des langues at the Institut Universitaire de France. The inaugural issue is now online. (Thanks to Adrianne's favories.) I just mailed the January issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. This issue takes a close look at the long-sought Congressional victory mandating OA at the NIH. It also contains my annual look back at OA developments from the previous year. The round-up section briefly notes 85 OA developments from December.
Glyn Moody, Word of the Year: Open, Linux Journal, January 1, 2008. Excerpt:
How to celebrate public domain day John Mark Ockerbloom, Public Domain Day gifts, Everybody's Libraries, January 1, 2008. Excerpt:
PS: Kudos to John for his info, his gift, and his example. I didn't start making web pages until about 1995, but I'll start to look for ways to follow his example on or before Public Domain Day 2010. OA Japanese literature in western languages Klaus Graf is collecting links to Japanese digitization projects making their works OA in western languages. The January 2008 issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online. This issue contains a lengthy retrospective on the Open Content Alliance and Google Book Search, in which Walt reviews major comments on the two projects over the past 25 months (disclosure: including some of my comments). ARL task force endorses open access and open data ARL Joint Task Force on Library Support for E-Science, Agenda for Developing E-Science in Research Libraries, Association of Research Libraries, November 2007. (Thanks to Clifford Lynch.) Excerpt:
See especially Appendix B: Model Principles for Research Library Roles in E-Science (pp. 21-22, drafted by Chuck Humphrey, "with edits from task force members"):
Update. See Dorothea Salo's comments on the report's position on institutional repositories. The Top 80 Charities for Open Source and Open Access Advocates, Virtual Hosting, December 31, 2007. (Thanks to Amy Quinn.) PS: I'd add at least these these two, the two most active non-profits working for OA to publicly-funded research in the US: From Alex Halavais at Thaumaturgical compendium:
From Cameron Neylon at Science in the open:
OA advocate honored "for services to geography" Robert Barr has been made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth "for services to geography". Barr is a professor of geography at Manchester University, managing director of Manchester Geomatics, and advocate for OA to public geodata in the UK. (Thanks to Free Our Data.) Presentations on OA from UUK meeting Stevan Harnad, Universities UK: Open Access Mandates, Metrics and Management -- PPTs now online, Open Access Archivangelism, January 1, 2008. Universities UK Research Information and Management Workshop [December 5, 2007]
End-of-year update on growth of OA Heather Morrison, Dramatic Growth of Open Access: Dec. 31, 2007 update, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, December 21, 2007. Excerpt:
New free journal from Springer Neuroethics is a new peer-reviewed journal from Springer. Instead of using Springer's Open Choice hybrid model, it will offer free online access to all its articles, at least for 2008 and 2009. (Thanks to Adam Kolber.) The page on instructions for authors says nothing about publication fees. It does, however, require authors to transfer copyright to Springer, which it justifies by saying, "This will ensure the widest possible dissemination of information under copyright laws." For the moment I'm less interested in the incorrectness of this statement than in the fact that Springer's hybrid journals use an equivalent of the CC-BY license. It looks like Springer is experimenting with a new access model: free online access for all articles in a journal (hence, not hybrid); no publication fees; but no reuse rights beyond fair use. The copyright transfer agreement permits self-archiving of the published version of the text but not the published PDF. Also see my post last week on Springer's new Evolution: Education and Outreach, with a similar access policy but a few confusing wrinkles of its own.
David Gallagher, On eBay, Some Profit by Selling What’s Free, New York Times, December 28, 2007. Excerpt:
Also see the reader comments at the end of the story, especially this one from Rick Prelinger, founder of the Prelinger Archives:
GovernmentDocs is an OA database of documents released under the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). (Thanks to Free Government Information.) From the site:
For more detail, see the November press release. Comment. GovernmentDocs is well-implemented. I expected to see scanned images of the original docs, but I didn't expect to see my search terms highlighted in the images or to see a first-draft OCR of the scan on the same page. What I like best, though, is the very idea: sharing these docs with everyone, multiplying the benefits that flow from the trouble of requesting them in the first place. Update. Also see GovernmentAttic, another OA collection of FOIA documents. (Thanks to Michael Ravnitzky.) OA portal of public records databases PublicRecordsWire is an "an open system for cataloging, sharing and discovering new public records databases." Users can search, tag, and rate the databases, browse by tags, category, and popularity, and add new databases. (Thanks to Abbie Mulvihill.) |