Public butterfly count aims to check countryside healthThe charity Butterfly Conservation is calling on the public to help survey the state of Britain's countryside by counting our most colourful insects.
See also: Sir David Attenborough urges public to count butterflies
BBC News.
Adequate funding has been allotted for universities to meet the cost of open access, the government has maintained.Times Higher Education.
Open access to publicly-funded research journal articles has been growing steadily across the world over the past ten years, and the value of unrestricted use and re-use of research results to current and future researchers is widely acknowledged.
A report released recently has highlighted how out of step the UK has become with the rest of the world on open access policies. The UK has sought to be a leader in making publicly-funded research openly available but has taken a very different approach to Australia and even the European Commission. The problem is, scientific publishing is a global business, so the consequences of the UK’s decisions are felt far beyond its borders.
hugely complex and often contradictory landscape that the House of Lords Science & Technology Committee and the BIS Committee have had to struggle to get to grips with.
Opening up British research may seem obvious, writes science minister David Willetts. But it is not just inertia that blocks this.The Guardian. Blog on Political Science.
And it’s hard to imagine a position more consistent with OA than that of the Pirate Party, with its focus on “the sharing of knowledge, ideas and culture” (as stated in the manifesto) and its commitment to the provision of infrastructure for this. Academic OA and the Pirate Party are a match made in heaven; it’s an arena in which much has already been achieved, but in which a truly optimal system is yet to emerge.
This analysis of options was undertaken initially with BIS to inform the Government response to the recommendations of the Finch Group.
It is not the job of government to concern itself with challenges faced by the publishing community at the expense of other stakeholders. This assertion does not arise from hostility to publishers, but from a simple recognition of who the government serves.
Early career researchers and other “poor” academics may be disadvantaged under the gold model of open access, evidence submitted to the Lords Science and Technology Committee has suggested.
They bodies blamed lack of consultation on the policy and said the “author processing charge” institutions will now pay to publish their academics’ work increased financial burden on British universities. The letter also argued that the policy had been formed in response to the science, technology and engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, and more consultation and “far fuller scrutiny” was needed by the government for the social sciences, arts and humanities (HSS) sector.
Proposals by David Willetts are condemned by coalition of academic groups for giving universities a ‘stranglehold’ over publications: The Council for the Defence of British Universities, whose members include Sir David Attenborough, has warned of dire “unintended consequences” for creativity and freedom in British academia.The Guardian.
JISC Collections, in partnership with OAPEN Foundation, is holding a two-day international conference intended for all stakeholders in scholarly communications including European research funders, senior institutional managers, publishers, learned societies, librarians and researchers. The conference aims to raise awareness of open access, to increase understanding of key challenges and to identify where international common policies and frameworks could support the adoption of open access monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences (HSS).
The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee will next week hold its first evidence session in a new short inquiry into the Government’s open access policy and its implementation by the Research Councils UK (RCUK) (the partnership of the UK’s seven research councils).
An invitation to an open panel discussion organised by the National Union of Journalists and hosted by The Wellcome Trust.The event will take place on Wednesday 6 February at 7pm in London.The venue is The Wellcome Trust, 215 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE
Someone once said to me that the best way to get researchers to be serious about the issue of modernising scholarly communications was to let the scholarly monograph business go to the wall as an object lesson to everyone else. After the last couple of weeks I’m beginning to think the same might be said of the UK Humanities and Social Sciences literature. I get that people are worried, even scared. I can also see some are stirring up mud behind the scenes to get academics and editors angry. But the problem is that people are focussing on the wrong problems and missing the significant opportunities to rejuvenate H&SS in the UK.
The online home of Cameron Neylon.
Paul Jump on the Research Council’s open access strategies:
Research Councils UK has insisted it will not punish universities that publish a lower proportion of gold open access papers than it envisaged in its allocation of block grants for article fees – provided the block grants are not misused.
See also the discussion on Implementing Finch.
The Open Data Institute, London, UK, opens this week. Today is ‘open house’ from 4pm - 6pm. To visit: Email required.
Address: 65 Clifton St, Shoreditch, London Borough of Hackney, EC2A, UK.
The organisation has some pretty weighty founders, father of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Professor Nigel Shadbolt, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, created it to be independent, non-profit and non-partisan. So far the ODI has nailed down £10 million ($16m+ USD) over five years from the UK government via the Technology Strategy Board, which invests in tech research and development, and a further $750,000 from Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm. The organisation is also working toward long-term sustainability through match funding and direct revenue.
Ralph Schroeder, is currently working on shared virtual environments and on the social implications of e-science at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, on digital transformations of research. (In German).
See also the videos here. (In English).
The Royal Statistical Society, London, discusses the adaptability of the Finch Report. November 29th & November 30th 2012.
A two-day Conference organised by the Academy of Social Sciences and kindly sponsored by the THE, Routledge, Wiley Blackwell and SAGE to look at the implementation of the recommendations of the Finch Review for Open Access publishing in the UK.
See also the discussion by the British Academy for the humanties and social sciences “Understanding the implication of open access publication in humanities and social sciences disciplines”.
Some concerning thoughts on the open access publishing method GOLDEN ACCESS by John Charmley, director of employability and professor of History at the University of East Anglia, UK:
By April 2013 all UK academic journals have been told they must sign up to the Gold Standard of Open Access – that is they will have to make their content freely available on-line; so the next time David Willetts writes a book, he can access the articles for free. The problem is there is no such thing as ‘free’. Academic journals have content-management systems and other costs which need paying for. Finch knows that and is suggesting that academics should pay up front for these services when submitting their articles. Here’s the first difficulty. Quite apart from the contested question of ‘how much?’ there are five related ones. How are Universities going to cover this cost? What about those not in tenured University posts? What about those outside the UK? What about the problem of “vanity publishing”– the fact that paying to publish an article undermines the entire notion that publication is a filter for quality? And most important: why does the Finch report recommend that universities continue to pay taxpayers’ money to for-profit academic publishers, at the expense of already-strapped university budgets?