Tag Archives: Open Access

Seven Propositions on Open Access

1. The embargo distinction between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and AHSS (Arts, Humanities and Social Science) is arbitrary and unjustifiable: if there must be embargoes, let them be 6 months for all; 2. Set learned societies free! They can choose not to be open access if it would drain too much from their coffers. Their prestige (and the prestige of publishing with them even if that means not being returnable to research assessment exercises) should sustain them;
Read the whole blog post on The Disorder of Things.

MOOC on open science, free and open to all!

This course is a collaborative learning environment meant to introduce the idea of Open Science to young scientists, academics, and makers of all kinds.  Open Science is a tricky thing to define, but we've designed this course to share what we know about it; working as a community to make this open resource better.  Think of it as a layer on top of the way science is commonly done now.  Just better.
The course at PSPU starts August, 6th 2013. Sign up until August, 4th 2013.

Stanford: Gradual School of Education (ESE) students adopt open access policy for scholarship

Students vote to make their scholarly articles available for free to educators, policy makers and the general public. In a move to expand public access to academic research on education issues, doctoral students at the Stanford Graduate School of Education have voted in favor of an open access policy to make their scholarly articles available for free to scholars, educators, policymakers and the public worldwide.

Peter Suber on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

Peter Suber in an interview with Richard Poynder on open access and it's future challenges. Peter Suber is the Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, a Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Senior Researcher at Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Research Professor of Philosophy atEarlham College, and a non-practicing lawyer. His most recent book is Open Access(MIT Press 2012). For more information, see his home page.

Danny Kingsley on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done?

This is the seventh Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA). On this occasion the questions are answered by Danny Kingsley, Executive Officer of the Australian Open Access Support Group (AOASG), an organisation founded at the end of last year by six Australian universities in order to provide “a concerted and coordinated Australian voice in support of open access.”
Blog by Richard Poynder.

TYT Science on Open Access and Open Data

An overview of two big "open science" changes presented by Mike Galsworthy from TYT Science.
Open Access is the drive to make sure all the academic literature is freely available to everyone. Open Data is the drive to get scientists to publish their actual raw data so that integrity of science can be assured and the data can be re-used by others. Together these movements are ushering in something of a scientific revolution - but how will this all be done in practice? Mike takes us through what is happening right now. To see his recent article on Open Data, please click here.

Evaluating the Open Access software toolchain

This is an article on how to build open access publishing websites, what needs to be done it says is the formation of an Open Access Toolset Alliance:
If we want tools that can plug in to any architecture, then we need to start working out where we have tied things too closely to our platforms, come up with standard interface formats and begin abstracting the functionality.
 

Open Access Button

We’re calling it the Open Access button. Every paywall met is an isolated incident; it’s time we capture those individual moments of injustice and frustration to turn them into positive change.
Here is a new project that wants to track potential readers that were rejected access to research papers published behind paywalls.

Springer Also Losing Some OA Sparkle

Springer’s new policy says that authors may make the post-refereed versions of their articles available immediately on their personal websites but must wait a year before making them available in repositories. This embargo is nothing new with respect to subject repositories — Springer’s previous policy required a year-long embargo for subject repositories. But it is new for institutional repositories — Springer used to allow articles to appear immediately there. This change to a year-long embargo for institutional repositories makes self-archiving harder and more confusing and thus less likely to be attempted. So that’s bad. And in addition to being a bad change, it’s arguably a nonsensical change.

New Open Access policy at Oregon State University

With the spread of Open Access in the scientific community, now universities, institutions and sometimes even governments introduce special policies to standardize the process of sharing and publishing research results in an open and free-of-charge way. Over the past few years, dozens of universities have introduced OA policies and have opened special funds for publishing in this model. Oregon State University did the same thing recently.  
As the first university in the Pacific Northwest and one of the first land grant universities in the USA, Oregon State University has adopted an open access policy requiring faculty members to make their scholarly articles available for free through a digital repository.