Open Access NewsNews from the open access movement Jump to navigation |
|||||||||||||||
The Cryosphere is a new peer-reviewed, OA journal from the European Geosciences Union. From the site:
PS: This two-stage form of review, with the first closed and the second open, and the first prospective and the second retroactive, was pioneered by Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics and made more popular by PLoS ONE. I believe The Cryosphere is the first journal in this family to go beyond OA for the second-stage discussion and treat it as a separate ISSN-registered journal. AnthroSource journal prices more than double after move to Wiley-Blackwell John Hawks, AAA journals ratchet up 108 percent for 2008, john hawks weblog, November 7, 2007. Excerpt:
Comments
More on JAM about the NIH policy Jan Velterop, JAM tomorrow, The Parachute, November 9, 2007. Excerpt:
Comments
Profile of the open education movement A Q&A with Catherine Casserly, Program Officer, Open Educational Resources, Hewlett Foundation Newsletter, November 2007. (Thanks to the Creative Commons blog.) Excerpt:
SWORD 1.0 to facilitate repository deposits SWORD 1.0 has been released (thanks to Richard Jones and Charles Bailey). SWORD stands for Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit. From the original project plan:
For background, see my post on SWORD's launch in April 2007. Plan for a Swedish National Data Service Improved access to research results in Sweden, Co-Action Publishing, November 7, 2007. Excerpt:
Andrea Foster, Faculty Members Prefer Digitized Texts, Wired Campus, November 8, 2007. Excerpt:
Comments
SCOAP3 makes a home on the web CERN has created a home page for the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3). It includes this succinct statement of the consortium's plan:
The page links to background information and documents on the project, and will soon include an FAQ. It also includes this piece of news, which I haven't yet blogged:
California's plan to mandate OA for greenhouse gas data California wants to mandate reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and then provide OA to the data. From the November 6 press release:
Update. Glyn Moody summarizes succinctly: Using a commons to protect a commons. New OA journal on critical statistics DataCrítica: International Journal of Critical Statistics is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from the Centro de Publicaciones Academicas (CEPA) at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez. (Thanks to Antrópico.) The inaugural issue is now online. OA improves metrics, and metrics improve research assessment Stevan Harnad, UUK report looks at the use of bibliometrics, Open Access Archivangelism, November 8, 2007. Excerpt:
Update. Also see Stevan's follow-up, November 9, 2007. Stevan Harnad, OA: Not OK, But Not DOA Either, Open Access Archivangelism, November 7, 2007. Excerpt:
Educating faculty about scholarly communication and OA Kathleen A. Newman, Deborah D. Blecic, and Kimberly L. Armstrong, Scholarly Communication Education Initiatives: SPEC Kit 299, Association of Research Libraries, August 2007.
PS: Don't confuse this with the ARL SPEC Kit 300, directly on OA, which I blogged just last week. Kit 299 is about attempts to educate faculty about scholarly communication developments, and includes some useful data and anecdotes on attempts to educate faculty about OA. J of the California Dental Association converts to OA The Journal of the California Dental Association has converted to OA, starting with the October 2007 issue. The journal will also offer OA to past issues back to 1998. (Thanks to Graham Steel.) An official announcement should be coming soon --and I'd expect that the page of subscription prices would be coming down at about the same time.
On November 1, Rick Weiss wrote in the Washington Post:
This is not true. As I wrote in my blog comment: "The policy would require deposit in an OA repository (PubMed Central), not submission to OA journals. It's about green OA, not gold OA." Then on November 5, an unsigned editorial in The Journal Times of Racine, Wisconsin, repeated the Post error:
Now today, Nature News repeats the error:
And Slashdot picks up the error from Nature News:
I don't blame Slashdot for picking up language from Nature, but I did expect Nature to base its language on the bill itself. Here's the NIH provision in its entirety from the LHHS appropriations bill just approved by both houses of Congress (see the House bill or the Senate bill):
NB: It's all about deposit in PMC. There isn't a word about where authors should or should not submit their work. There isn't a word about journal access policies. Although this outbreak is new, the Post-Times-Nature-Slashdot error is old. In January 2006 it was already old:
Ray English and I have sent a letter to the Post to correct the error. But we can't keep up with this rapidly spreading virus. If you see a newspaper, journal, blogger, or listserv contributor repeat the Journal-Archive Mixup, please send a correction. Update. Stevan Harnad seconds the motion. Update. Andrea Gawrylewski has picked up this story for The Scientist, Media bungles open access details, November 13, 2007. (Thanks, Andrea.) Update. The letter to the editor that Ray English and I wrote to the Washington Post is now online, November 13, 2007 (p. A18). Tracking copies, dunnning copiers Richard Pérez-Peña, Publishers See A Way To Track Their Content Across The Net, New York Times, November 5, 2007.
Comments
Kim Tucker, Say "Libre" for Knowledge and Learning Resources, apparently a preprint, last revised September 15, 2007. (Thanks to Ray Corrigan.)
Should we look for alternatives to copyright? The Center for Economic and Policy Research has released a podcast of a panel discussion, Copyrights -- Do They Have a Future in the Internet Age? (Thanks to Free Government Information.) From the description:
Student stakes and student action in the open access movement Gavin Baker, Student activism: How students use the scholarly communication system, College & Research Libraries News, November 10, 2007. Excerpt:
Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society has released a 54 minute podcast of Christine Harold's talk yesterday on copyright and open content. From the description:
Don't let a shiny interface make open data less useful Rufus Pollock, Give Us the Data Raw, and Give it to Us Now, Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, November 7, 2007. Excerpt:
Linking to open ebooks v. controlling the user experience Peter Brantley, Books Working with the Web, O'Reilly Radar, November 5, 2007. Excerpt:
Harvesting New Zealand's OA repositories The New Zealand government and National Library of New Zealand have launched the Kiwi Research Information Service (KRIS). From the site:
Thanks to the NZVCC Electronic News Bulletin, November 6, 2007, which provides a few extra details:
More on CC licenses, derivative works, and moral rights Thinh Nguyen, CC, Open Access, and moral rights, Science Commons blog, November 7, 2007. Excerpt:
Managing copyrights for open education John Casey, Jackie Proven, and David Dripps, Managing IPR in Digital Learning Materials: A Development Pack for Institutional Repositories, Trust in Digital Repositories, undated but apparently recent. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) A major paper plus 2 discussions, 20 readings, 6 tools, a bibliography, and many links to related sites, all on managing copyrights for e-learning contents on deposit in OA repositories. Excerpt:
OA interviews with molecular biologists and neuroscientists Molecular Interventions is not an OA journal, but it has been publishing a series of OA interviews with leading scientists in the field. There's no easy way to find them all, but MindHacks has put together links to eight of them. JWYG has blogged some notes on the OpenLearn 2007 conference at the UK's Open University (Milton Keynes, October 30-31, 2007). Three OA publishers talk about sustainability SPARC and ACRL have released podcast and text interviews with three OA publishers --from PLoS, BMC, and Hindawi-- talking about business-level details of their operations, and a comparison of their businesses by Alma Swan. From yesterday's announcement:
Heather Morrison, Unlock the PDFs, for the print disabled (and open access, too), a posting to SOAF and other lists, November 6, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. Exactly. If publishers insist on using PDFs at all, then at least they should unlock them. To facilitate re-use even further, they should offer HTML or XML editions alongside the PDFs. Change of plan: two different airlines screwed up yesterday and I couldn't get to the University of Texas at Arlington in time for my talk, scheduled for today. Fortunately, they screwed up so badly that I didn't have to leave Bangor, my home airport, although I did have to spend half the day there waiting to see whether delayed flights would take off in time to make any feasible distant connection to Texas. Hence, I'm home again, and can start to catch up today rather than tomorrow. My UTA hosts have been incredibly understanding and flexible. I thank them again for that.
(Flight delayed, blogging from Bangor airport....) Richard Gallagher, OA, OK? The Scientist, November 2007. An editorial. Excerpt:
Comments
In just a minute I'll be on the road for two days with few opportunities for blogging or email. Except for stolen moments here and there, I'll start to catch up on Thursday. OA for the inner nautilus or OA for everyone? Joseph J. Esposito, Open Access 2.0: The nautilus: where - and how - OA will actually work, The Scientist, November 2007.
Comment. Even though my excerpt is long, the article is a lot longer and I've had to omit many of its major points. Read the whole thing. But because the article is long and I have a lot to say about it --and because I'm just stepping out the door to catch a plane-- I can only make a series of quick comments. Apologies for their brevity. I like the basic metaphor of the nautilus and the spiral of proximity to an author and the author's research topic. But Esposito underestimates the benefits of OA to readers far from the center of the nautilus, especially interdisciplinary researchers who never would have known about the author or the author's topic without easy access (access for readers as well as search engines). Likewise he underestimates the limitations on access even at affluent institutions or, conversely, overestimates how well conventional subscription journals have served the generality of researchers. He underestimates the number of OA advocates and OA critics who acknowledge the prospect of long-term OA/TA coexistence, and tries to position himself as one of the first to see this prospect. He seems unaware that some OA journal publishers are already making a profit, some charging publication fees and some not. I share his view that OncologySTAT is a promising development that might trigger a promising trend (even if not fully OA), although there are good reasons not to be nearly as sanguine about hybrid OA journals as he is. He assumes that scarcity of attention means that OA doesn't really improve dissemination, which doesn't follow. He's right that scarcity of attention is a serious problem and one not directly helped by improved access, but he seems to assume that the best way to cope with information overload is to filter by ability to pay rather than (say) to filter by relevance on a more accessible and comprehensive corpus of literature. He assumes that OA either bypasses peer review or bypasses relevance filters; but both assumptions are false. He overstates the role of publisher marketing in giving researchers the terms and concepts on which they run searches. He assumes that OA will undermine the role of publisher brands in helping authors identify literature worth reading. He assumes that it's a "paradox" that OA helps authors and not just readers, when helping authors was part of the purpose all along. I actually like his own model of an OA platform or repository, enhanced with alert services and user comments, but he underestimates the extent to which these needs are and can be filled by free and open-source software costing much less than he estimates. (Yes, I acknowledge that FOSS has costs.) And apart from cost, his fee-based OA platform is only attractive as another option alongside other vehicles for delivering OA, such as peer-reviewed OA journals and no-fee repositories, both of which have undergone steady evolution and refinement since their first, pre-internet appearance more than two decades ago. Update. Also see the comments by Tom Wilson. Update (6/15/08). Esposito has published an expanded version of this article in the Spring 2008 JEP. Opting out from OA mandates and displays of download data Stevan Harnad, Should Institutional Repositories Allow Opt-Out From (1) Mandates? (2) Metrics? Open Access Archivangelism, November 6, 2007. Excerpt:
Defending the Google Library project Paul Courant, On being in bed with Google, Au Courant, November 4, 2007. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) Courant is the Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, which was an early partner in the Google Library project. Excerpt:
Update. Also see the response by Siva Vaidhyanathan. The comments to Siva's post include a reply from Paul Courant and another reply from Siva.
Editorial in support of an OA mandate at the NIH Open knowledge, open future, The Journal Times (from Racine, Wisconsin), November 5, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. I'm glad to see another editorial in support of an OA mandate at the NIH. Unfortunately, this one repeats the error made by the Washington Post on Thursday. Correction: The NIH policy would require deposit in an OA repository (PubMed Central), not submission to OA journals. It's about green OA, not gold OA. Third annual SPARC Europe Award for Scholarly Communications SPARC Europe is calling for nominations for the third annual Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications. From today's announcement:
Tim O'Reilly, "Free is more complicated than you think", O'Reilly Radar, November 2, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. All the examples in O'Reilly's post are free editions of works that also have priced editions. Free may be complicated, but no one should be surprised that dual editions are complicated. Carl Malamud and Public.Resource.org have struck again. (Thanks to Boing Boing and Free Government Information.) From Public.Resource's agreement with the US National Technical Information Service (NTIS):
Comments
Does OA help or hurt scientific illustrators? Tim Fedak, Open Access and Medical Art, Medical Illustrations, November 2, 2007. Excerpt:
Islands of free in oceans of price Shirl Kennedy, Resources of the Week: Free Stuff From Pricey Database Vendors, ResourceShelf, November 5, 2007. Excerpt:
More on Elsevier's social networking tools Paula Hane, Elsevier Creates Social Spaces for Researchers, Information Today NewsLink, November 4, 2007. Excerpt:
PS: For some background, see my posts from June 2007 on the Scirus Topic Pages (one, two). The move toward open innovation is beginning to transform entire industries, The Economist, October 11, 2007. (Thanks to Thiru Balasubramaniam.) This article focuses on patents rather than copyrights, and manufacturers rather than publishers. But how far do its insights transfer to copyrights and publishers? Excerpt:
What do we need to know about scholarly communication? Establishing a Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication: A Call for Community Engagement, Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL), November 5, 2007. John Ober and Joyce Ogburn are co-chairs of the ACRL Scholarly Communications Committee, which prepared this white paper. Excerpt:
The discussion of open access takes place mostly under rubric #4. For example:
There's also some discussion under rubric #8:
Update. Also see the short article on this in Library Journal Academic Newswire, November 6, 2007.
Winners announced in essay contest on equitable access The Lancet and the Global Forum for Health Research have announced the winners of the 2007 essay contest on Equitable access: research challenges for health in developing countries. From Friday's press release:
Thirty-two of the submissions, including the five winning essays, are now online --all OA. The paper most focused on OA is Anoop Dhamangaonkar, "Health research in developing countries: challenges and possible solutions for its improvement" (pp. 50-53). More on OA to student research Macalester College opened its institutional repository to student honor projects in September 2005. Lisa Moldan and Zac Farber bring us up to date in an article in the Macalester student paper for November 2, 2007. Excerpt:
One medical library's efforts to support OA Molly C. Barnett and Molly W. Keener, Expanding medical library support in response to the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy, Journal of the Medical Library Association, October 2007. This article was submitted to JMLA in April 2007, well before the recent House and Senate votes to mandate OA at the NIH. Excerpt:
Why Eric von Hippel chose OA for two of his books In an 8:33 minute podcast, MIT's Eric von Hippel talks about Openness, Innovation, and Scholarly Publishing. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) From the description:
PS: For background, see my earlier blog posts on von Hippel. OA and derivative works, continued Last Thursday I wrote some blog comments on OA and derivative works which elicited disagreement from several friends and allies: Klaus Graf (disagreeing with my position), Peter Murray-Rust (agreeing with my support for CC-BY licenses but disagreeing with my position on derivative works), and Matt Cockerill (disagreeing with my position on derivative works --by email, not online). Much of the trouble, perhaps all of it, was my own fault. I should have said more to make my position clear, and here I take the chance to do so. We may still disagree when all is clarified, but I suspect that we will disagree less. I'll frame my response as a dialog with Matt Cockerill, who has allowed me to quote from his email:
Update. See Klaus Graf's response. Worldwide Lexicon combines open-source software and crowdsourcing methods to translate online documents. It's not new, but I haven't seen it discussed in scholarly communication circles and blog it here to start that discussion. Here's a description from WWL founder Brian McConnell:
Streamlining repository deposits Dorothea Salo, Less cognitive load, faster deposit, Caveat Lector, November 2, 2007. Excerpt:
Update. See Dorothea's follow-up from November 5, summarizing ideas sent by her readers and lamenting the lack of an effective repository manager community to swap ideas and best practices. More on business models supporting open content Collaborators please for ‘Open-IP’ business models research, Open Business, November 1, 2007. Excerpt:
More on the value of removing permission barriers Heather Morrison, The Usefulness of Open Access, or Yet Another Positive OA Cycle, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, November 3, 2007. Excerpt:
More on the British Library / Microsoft book-scanning project Jim Ashling, Progress Report: The British Library and Microsoft Digitization Partnership, Information Today, November 4, 2007. Excerpt:
|