Open Access Book available at DOAB: Europe – Space for Transcultural Existence? This topic doesn’t stray too far from what we’re doing at the Cluster. See more here.
Source: @DOABooks

OA Journal Article: Public library use of free e-resources, by Heather Hill. This article describes a multi-method research project examining the use of various freely available online collections and projects, such as Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Creative Commons-licensed ebooks, by public libraries. This research begins with the questions: what are libraries doing with freely available materials? Are there barriers to incorporating them into the collection? What role are librarians playing in expanding access and awareness of these resources? More here.
Source: @alpsp

Peer Access vs. Public Access: OA Pragmatics vs. Ideology. “The (shared) goal of open access advocates is presumably open access (OA), not abstractions. If papers are made OA, it means they are freely accessible to everyone online: both peers and public. If not, not. So the only problem is getting the papers to be made OA — and that means getting their authors (peers) to make them OA. If all or most peers made their papers OA of their own accord, that would be it: The OA era would be upon us. But most don’t make their papers OA — for a large variety of reasons, all of them groundless, but nevertheless sufficient to have held back OA for over 20 years now. The solution, fortunately, is known, and already being adopted, though not quickly or widely enough yet: OA has to be made mandatory. The peers have to be required by their funders and their institutions to provide OA.” More here.
Source: @brembs

YouTube Video: JISC – Deborah Shorley, Director of Library Services at Imperial College, on making open access policies effective. Watch here.
Source: @oatp

Article: Making the case for open access books, by Simon Chaplin of the Wellcome Trust. A policy requiring open access to academic books? Surely that’s asking for trouble? After all, it was only a few months ago that many humanities researchers were up in arms when Research Councils UK (RCUK) implemented its new policy on open access to journal articles. Although such measures are broadly accepted in the sciences, the RCUK policy was criticised by the Royal Historical Society, among others, for being a blunt instrument, insensitive to the differences that mark out historians from histologists. Given the anguish that RCUK’s policy caused, the announcement last week that the Wellcome Trust – a major funder of biomedical research – has now extended its open access policy to include books and book chapters might seem a little, well, insensitive. After all, the Trust’s long-standing policy on open access to journal articles was seen by many as having beaten the path for RCUK’s approach. So why books, and why now?” Read here.
Source: @openscience

Trend Report: Open Educational Resources 2013. The Trend Report: Open Educational Resources 2013 describes trends in open educational resources (OER) and open education in the Netherlands and elsewhere, from the perspective of Dutch higher education. It comprises fifteen articles by Dutch experts in the field of open and online education. It also includes 15 short  “Intermezzos” giving high-profile examples. The report is published by the Open Educational Resources Special Interest Group (SIG OER) supported by SURF. More here.
Source: @oatp

Facilitating access to free online resources: challenges and opportunities for the library community. A white paper from Taylor & Francis. The volume of freely available online resources continues to grow exponentially. Potentially, many of these resources could be of enormous value for teaching, learning and research purposes. However, finding, evaluating and facilitating access to this content brings with it many challenges, for both librarians and their user communities. Taylor &Francis have conducted a research programme to help explore the issues relating to free content discoverability from the perspective of librarians. We wanted to understand what role librarians see free content having within their institutions; its relative importance compared to paid-for resources; and the challenges associated with making better use of this material. This paper presents the results of this research programme. We hope that by exposing some of the challenges we can stimulate discussion on this important topic and help make it easier for institutions to enrich their paid-for collections with high-quality free content. Read here.
Source: @oatp

European Parliament adopts open data strategy. On Thursday, the European Parliament approved new rules, introduced by the European Commission, for re-using public sector information. These changes will require that administrative data is published according to open data principles. When implemented, all documents made accessible by public organisations will be re-usable for any purpose, unless they are protected by third party copyright. EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes, however, was unable to completely get her way when it came to providing most of the data for free. Instead, in most cases, agencies will be able to charge no more than the amount necessary to reproduce, provide, and disseminate the information. In some cases, purchasers will still have to pay other costs, including any interest that may apply. In any case, public sector bodies must be clear from the outset about potential fees and who has to pay them. More here.
Source: @oatp

Bournemouth University Research Blog: Open access publishing – common misunderstandings! “I did a bit of research and came across an excellent article by Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project.  In the article, Peter addresses the common misunderstandings and misconceptions about open access publishing, many of which we part of the concerns raised during the recent mock REF exercises.  I’ve selected the ones I most frequently hear and provided a summary below, and would urge you to read the article in full here – A Field Guide to Misunderstandings About Open Access. More here.
Source: @SPARC_EU

PLOS ONE – Measuring Article Impact. A common misconception of PLOS ONE is that just because we don’t consider perceived impact or novelty when deciding what to publish, doesn’t mean we don’t care about the impact of articles we publish. We of course understand that some papers are more impactful than others. That’s why we’re committed to developing new tools that realistically and unbiasedly evaluate how our papers shape their fields. The number of citations an article collects offers one perspective on how the work has influenced its field, and is one of the many diverse measures that PLOS Article-Level Metrics provide to help the community measure article impact (others include usage and social sharing). We recently plotted all citations to every PLOS ONE paper published in 2010. More here.
Source: @KeitaBando

Metrics 2.0: who will be the ‘Google of altmetrics’? At last week’s SSP conference in San Francisco, those of us interested in Altmetrics were rather excited to see representatives from each of the major products come together in a session entitled ‘Metrics 2.0: It’s about Time…..and People’.  More here.
Source: @KeitaBando

Previous Webinar: Traditional journal bibliometrics meets newcomer altmetrics. Although this event has passed, you can still view the webinar here.
Source: @KeitaBando

LSE Blogs: Developing indicators of the impact of scholarly communication is a massive technical challenge – but it’s also much simpler than that. Conversations on impact tend to revolve around technical issue of measurement and finding appropriate metrics. To widen the conversation J. Britt Holbrook presents a list of 56 indicators of impact developed by the Center for the Study of Interdisciplinarity to help simplify the question of impact. By moving beyond technical aspects there is a greater opportunity for academics to embrace and explore other facets of impact. Read here.
Source: @LSEImpactBlog

Article: Open access metadata: current practices and proposed solutions, by Chad Hutchens. Nearly every major publisher offers open access content of some sort, but open access metadata standards are non-existent amongst content providers. Users, librarians, content providers, and technology vendors who offer OpenURL resolvers and discovery services all stand to benefit from standardized ways to indicate what content is open access and what is not. Additionally, all stakeholders would benefit from a standardized method by which one can ascertain what form of open access any content may be; indeed, there are many definitions of open access. There is ample evidence that every publisher handles their content metadata differently and this creates inefficiencies in the scholarly information supply chain and leads to user confusion. Many initiatives are currently working on solutions to these problems including the NISO KBART workgroup, NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative, and NISO’s very recently created Open Access Initiative. There are also pre-existing concepts based on services, such as CrossRef’s CrossMark service and discovery systems that hold promise with respect to open access content and metadata. More here.
Source: @oatp

CC Launches Affiliate Project Grants. CC is excited to announce the launch of our Affiliate Project Grants. These project grants will be used to support and expand the work of CC’s Global community of volunteers. The goal of the grant program, which is enabled by sponsorship from Google, is to increase the capacity of CC Affiliates and community members working towards our mission, by providing support for local events and projects. Projects that might be covered by the grants include everything from OER workshops to film and music festivals to publications to research – anything, in fact, you can imagine that expands knowledge and adoption of open policies and practices around the world. Proposals submitted by CC affiliates and community members will be selected to receive up to $20,000 USD towards their project(s). We are hoping to distribute these globally, with at least one project in each of the major geographical regions, and to cover projects small (eg writing and printing factsheets) and large (eg running a region wide series of workshops). The application deadline is July 8. More here.
Source: @creativecommons