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SPARC Japan will extend SPARC's effectiveness Bette Brunelle, Launch of SPARC Japan Adds Worldwide Momentum to SPARC Agenda, Outsell Now, January 19, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt:
OA to Spanish neurological journals Javier Gonz�lez de Dios, �ngel P�rez Sempere, and Rafael Aleixandre Benavent, Las publicaciones biom�dicas en Espa�a a debate (II): las �revoluciones� pendientes y su aplicaci�n a las revistas neurol�gicas, Revista de Neurolog�a, January 16, 2007 (accessible only subscribers, at least so far). There's an English-language abstract in PubMed:
Chinese book publisher joins Google project to increase sales Jessie Ho, Google teams up with publisher of Chinese books, Asia Media, January 19, 2007. Excerpt:
Getting the best deal on a mass digitization contract Richard K. Johnson, In Google�s Broad Wake: Taking Responsibility for Shaping the Global Digital Library, forthcoming in the ARL Bimonthly Report No. 250 (February 2007). Excerpt:
PS: The most important parts of this article are impossible to excerpt: Johnson has brought in applicable principles from nine organizations that might guide the parties in drafting mass digitization contracts. He's also offered his own extensive checklist for institutions that might enter into such an contract. Citizendium unforks experimentally Larry Sanger, The Citizendium unforks, Citizendium blog, January 18, 2007. Excerpt:
A survey of AAAS members on copyright and research The presentations from the symposium, Effects of Intellectual Property Protections on Scientific Research: Results of a Survey of U.S. AAAS Members (Washington, D.C., January 16, 2007), are now online. Excerpts from the summary document:
Peter Kaufman, Statistics to contemplate, from Google, PMT Forum, January 19, 2006.
Comments.
U of Texas joins the Google Library project The University of Texas at Austin has joined the Google Library project. From Google's announcement yesterday:
Also see the UT announcement. Fedora 2.2 is now available for downloading. The January issue of Portal is now online. Here are the OA-related articles.
Thanks to William Walsh both for the alert and for blogging excerpts. Notes from Google's conference on book publishing Caroline McCarthy has published some notes at C|Net on Thursday's Google-sponsored conference, Unbound: Advancing Book Publishing in a Digital World (New York, January 18, 2007):
Confused Slashdot thread on OA There's a new Slashdot thread on the European petition for OA to publicly-funded research. Unfortunately, it got off to a bad start by confusing open access and the public domain: "How do scientists feel about it? Does public funding really turn their results into public property?"
SPARC at Ten: A Decade Later, Organization Still Aims to Be Part of The Solution, Library Journal Academic Newswire, January 18, 2007. Excerpt:
Case study in OA publishing: Medical Education Online David J. Solomon, Medical Education Online: a case study of an open access journal in health professional education, Information Research, January 2007. Number two in a series on Case studies on open access publishing. Abstract:
Writing competition on access to knowledge The Yale Law School Information Society Project and the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy are hosting a writing competition on access to knowledge in conjunction with the Second Conference on Access to Knowledge (New Haven, April 27-29, 2007). Excerpt:
The Wiley-Blackwell deal will reduce access to research information Five European library organizations have sent an open letter (January 10, 2007) to the European Commission's Directorate General for Competition, opposing the Wiley plan to buy Blackwell. Excerpt:
The letter is signed by the directors of Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL), European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA), Ligue des Biblioth�ques Europ�ennes de Recherche (LIBER), the Society of College, National & University Libraries (SCONUL), and SPARC Europe. PS: Compare this with the open letter from the Information Access Alliance to the US Justice Department opposing the same deal for the same reasons (November 26, 2006). Digitized public-domain docs from US history behind access barriers Dan Cohen, The Flawed Agreement between the National Archives and Footnote, Inc., Dan Cohen's blog, January 19, 2007. Excerpt:
Comment. Thanks to Klaus Graf for pointing out Dan Cohen's post and for collecting some other comments on the NARA-Footnote deal. The new Democratic Congress should look into this problem. It shouldn't try to undo the Footnote deal, which is better than nothing for readers who can't get to Washington. But it should try to swing a better deal, perhaps even funding the digitization and OA directly. EPrints 3.0, Release Candidate 2 EPrints has issued Version 3.0, Release Candidate 2. More details at EPrints Insiders:
Improving the CIHR draft OA mandate Stevan Harnad, CIHR's proposal to mandate self-archiving, University Affairs, January 2007. A letter to the editor. Excerpt:
One model for OA to public info in the UK Michael Cross, Statistics are free - now let's work on the rest of the data, The Guardian, January 18, 2007. Excerpt:
More on OA podcast lectures and courseware Jon Gordon has conducted a podcast interview with Dan Colman, director of Stanford University's continuing studies program, on the rise of free online audio and video podcast courseware. The OA impact advantage seems to be the same for green and gold OA Stevan Harnad, Citation Advantage For OA Self-Archiving Is Independent of Journal Impact Factor, Article Age, and Number of Co-Authors, Open Access Archivangelism, January 17, 2007.
Update (1/22/07). This post has now been expanded into a technical report for the U of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, self-archived January 22, 2007. The future of large open databases The Database Revolution, Nature, January 18, 2007 (accessible only to subscribers). An editorial. Excerpt:
Comment. It's striking how similar this question is to the choice between central and distributed eprint repositories. One difference is that the interoperability of data repositories will be much more difficult to ensure than the interoperability of text repositories. Progress toward OA in legal scholarship Lawrence Solum, Download It While Its Hot: Open Access and Legal Scholarship, Lewis & Clark Law Review, Vol. 10 (2006) pp. 841ff. Self-archived January 16, 2007.
Time for researchers to step forward Stevan Harnad, Researchers of the World: Unite to Support European Commission Open Access Policy, Open Access Archivangelism, January 17, 2007. I described the OA petition in my own post yesterday but omitted this key argument for researchers to sign:
The Digital Library Federation (DLF), with help from the National Science Digital Library, maintains an OAI Best Practices wiki. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) From the wiki front page:
Review of the Neil Jacobs anthology Michael Guti�rrez has written a review of Neil Jacobs (ed.), Open Access: Key strategic, technical and economic aspects, Chandos Publishing, 2006. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) Excerpt:
Disclosure: I wrote the chapter on Open Access in the United States. In Canada, legal deposit sans DRM, OA preferred Michael Geist, One Down, 29 to Go, Michael Geist's blog, January 16, 2007. Excerpt:
One more bit from Geist's longer version in the Ottawa Citizen:
New issue of Learned Publishing The January 2007 issue of Learned Publishing is now online. Here are the OA-related articles. Only abstracts are free online, at least so far.
Several others might be relevant as well, but I can't tell because their abstracts are missing or too short. Check out the table of contents. The December 2006 issue of Focus on UKOLN is now online. This issue has several short pieces on institutional repositories and one each on the DRIVER project, eScience, eBank, and open licenses. Editorial from a new OA journal Danny N. Dhanasekaran, An open access journal of molecular signaling: a critical need at a critical time, Journal of Molecular Signaling, November 2006. JMS is an OA journal from BioMed Central and recently published its second issue (December 2006). This is the editorial from the inaugural issue. Excerpt:
Disciplinary "craft practices" as obstacles to re-usable OA data Samuelle Carlson and Ben Anderson, What Are Data? The Many Kinds of Data and Their Implications for Data Re-Use, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12, 2 (2007) article 15. Abstract: One key feature of e-science is to encourage archiving and release of data so that they are available in digitally-processable forms for re-use almost from the point of collection. This assumes particular processes of translation by which data can be made visible in transportable and intelligible forms. It also requires mechanisms by which data quality and provenance can be trusted once "disconnected" from their producers. By analyzing the "life stages" of data in four academic projects, we show that these requirements create difficulties for disciplines where tacit knowledge and craft-like methods are deeply embedded in researchers, as well as for disciplines producing non-digital heterogeneous data or data derived from people rather than from material phenomena. While craft practices and tacit knowledges are a feature of most scientific endeavors, some disciplines currently appear more inclined to attempt to formalize or at least record these knowledges. We discuss the implications this has for the e-science objective of widespread data re-use. New OA database of European research policies The European Commission has launched ERAWATCH, an OA database of research policies throughout Europe. From the January 12 press release:
Comment. From the description, you'd think that OA policies would fall within its scope. But so far, it doesn't contain any of the European OA policies I've blogged and analyzed over the past few years. More on the OA impact advantage Philip M. Davis, Citation advantage of Open Access articles likely explained by quality differential and media effects, PLoS Biology, a letter to the editor, January 16, 2007. Here's the abstract from Davis' self-archived edition of the letter: In a study of articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Gunther Eysenbach discovered a significant citation advantage for those articles made freely-available upon publication (Eysenbach 2006). While the author attempted to control for confounding factors that may have explained the citation differential, the study was unable to control for characteristics of the article that may have led some authors to pay the additional page charges ($1,000) for immediate OA status. OA articles published in PNAS were more than twice as likely to be featured on the front cover of the journal (3.3% vs. 1.4%), nearly twice as likely to be picked up by the media (15% vs. 8%) and when cited reached, on average, nearly twice as many news outlets as subscription-based articles (4.2 vs. 2.6). The citation advantage of Open Access articles in PNAS may likely be explained by a quality differential and the amplification of media effects. The International Journal of Design is a new peer-reviewed, OA journal. It posted a call for papers in September 2006 and is now assembling its inaugural issue. Law schools should launch or use IRs Carol Parker, University Institutional Repositories: Are You Underutilizing A Valuable Resource? Law Librarian Blog, January 17, 2007. Excerpt:
Spanish guide to OA and rights management Ignasi Labastida Juan and C�sar Iglesias Rebollo, Gu�a Sobre Gesti�n de Derechos de Autor y Acceso Abierto en Bibliotecas, Servicios de Documentaci�n y Archivos, Sociedad Espa�ola de Informacion y Documentacion Cient�fica (SEDIC). Undated but the authors signed the preface December 15, 2006, and the SEDIC blog announced its publication yesterday. Petition for OA to publicly-funded research in Europe A group of European institutions is petitioning the European Commission to mandate OA for EU-funded research. Specifically, the petition calls on the Commission to adopt the recommendations of the report on scientific publishing it requested in 2005 and published in 2006. (See my article on the report from May 2006.) From the petition:
The petition is sponsored by JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee, UK), SURF (Netherlands), SPARC Europe, DFG (Deutsches Forschungsgemeinschaft, Germany), and DEFF (Danmarks Elektroniske Fag- og Forskningsbibliotek, Denmark). Comment. The 2006 report not only made excellent recommendations for OA, but made the prospect of an EU-wide OA mandate suddenly realistic. This petition can make a real difference and it's critical that we get as many signatures as possible from researchers and research institutions, worldwide but especially from Europe. Please sign and spread the word. Update. Also see JISC's press release on the petition.
Three more German institutions sign the Berlin Declaration
Three of Germany's national research institutions have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge:
Overview of the Zwolle principles Kenneth D. Crews and Gerard van Westrienen, Copyright, Publishing, and Scholarship, The "Zwolle Group" Initiative for the Advancement of Higher Education, D-Lib Magazine, January / February 2007. Excerpt:
I'm on the road with intermittent opportunities to blog. I'll start catching up on recent news tomorrow or the next day. Bibliography of OA in biomedicine Elena Giglia, Open Access e ricerca in area biomedica : un'introduzione, Universit� degli studi di Torino, Servizio Informazioni Biomediche, 2007. Self-archived, January 15, 2007. In Italian but with this English-language abstract:
More on the OA mandate proposal from EURAB Stevan Harnad, EURAB's Proposed OA Mandate: Strongest of the 20 Adopted and 5 Proposed So Far, Open Access Archivangelism, January 15, 2007. Excerpt:
Mandating OA department by department Arthur Sale, The Patchwork Mandate, D-Lib Magazine, January/February 2007.
PS: This is the published version of paper I blogged as a preprint on November 11, 2006. See my earlier post for a supportive comment.
Tim Brody's doctoral dissertation on the OA impact advantage Timothy David Brody, Evaluating Research Impact through Open Access to Scholarly Communication, a doctoral thesis at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science, May 2006. Self-archived January 14, 2007.
PS: Tim Brody is one of the first, one of the most prolific, and one of the most knowledgeable people to study the ways in which OA amplifies citation impact. I've cited his work on my blog and newsletter 47 times already. Congratulations, Dr. Tim, on this milestone in a career that has already had a large public impact. Profile of CARL's support for OA Heather Morrison, Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL): Canadian Leader in Open Access, Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, January 13, 2007. Excerpt:
Advice for OA database maintainers The January 2007 issue of Nucleic Acids Research is devoted to databases, mostly OA databases. (Thanks to bbgm.) From Alex Batemen's editorial introduction to the issue:
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