The route to open-access publishing endorsed by the British government puts unacceptable strains on research budgets at a time of funding shortages, says a parliamentary report released today. The report also argues for more transparency and competition in the costs of publishing research.
Nature News.
MOOCs and MOOTs are different things, and we should be working a lot more on the latter than the former. A MOOT is a Massive Open Online Text, a flexible on-line teaching tool that combines searchable, comment-on-able text, multimedia, tools for peer-to-peer collaboration and feedback, and who knows what other goodies we haven't thought of yet.
Kenly Hiller worked along the shore at the Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Falmouth. Hiller is trying to raise $6,000 so she can design and study barriers that block nitrogen runoff from polluting coastal waters.
The Boston Globe.
The following post is by Graham Steel. It is an adaptation of a five minute lightning talk given at Glasgow’s 1st Open Knowledge Foundation meet-up.
Was sind Open Educational Resources? Und andere häufig gestellte Fragen zu OER. Bonn: Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission, 2013. 32 Seiten. ISBN 978-3-940785-50-3
Numerous research institutions and universities worldwide offer special funds for publishing in OA, and governments and international organizations follow the suit, by introducing mandatory policies for publishing in this model. To cut a long story short: money has finally appeared in the system. The funds are scarce but they are there. It is worth to look for funds. Just where to find them?
Do you belong to professional societies? What journals are central to your work? Do you attend conferences? What is your view of open access? If you could fix one thing about scholarly communications, what would it be?
The scholarly kitchen.
Springer (commendably) publishes most of its APC-paid Open Access under CC-BY licences and allows free re-use for any purpose. However some “Open Access” (e.g. Drugs in R&D) is licensed under CC-BY-NC (non-commercial). This excludes, for example, re-use as teaching materials. Anyone wishing to re-use material in lectures will have to pay Springer, even though the author probably wanted it to be freely used. Here is the evidence; I strongly urge Springer to drop all NC licences, as otherwise it harms academics and many other sectors.
petermr's blog.
Below is the text from a short talk given by James Baker, Digital Curator at the British Library about helping librarians and curators at the British Library acclimatise to the idea that the Library is becoming a place full of data as much as it is a place full of physical stuff, and that there is a growing community of users who see it that way. It is, in short, about helping those who are not digital scholars engage with digital scholarship.
Frontiers in Energy Research will provide an open-science and interactive web platform for the research community to publish high-quality and rigorously peer-reviewed articles. Frontiers' real-time and interactive peer review enables fast, transparent and constructive review of a range of article types.
Recently, I was asked some questions about Goals for #SciFund participants that I hadn’t investigated since round 1. Namely, what’s do people usually ask for? Which of course led me in a few directions.
SciFund Challenge.
Even the most optimistic advocates of open access to academic publications must admit that we are years — and perhaps decades — away from full conversion to such a system. It is easy to call for open access, but more difficult to make it happen. More science funders must put their money where their mouths are, and back their positive words with action. It will not be cheap, but the longer we wait, the more expensive it will be.
Nature News.
The marriage should provide a boost to OpenBEL, which is already used by many in industry and academia to enable better collaboration on big data projects, such as drug development. The hope is that the nonprofit can do for OpenBEL what it is doing for Linux, which has become lingua franca among collaborative software developers and hackers alike.
Looking back on 2009, there was one particular note that seemed to sound repeatedly, resonating through the professional discourse at conferences and in posts throughout the blogosphere: the likelihood of disruptive change afoot in the scientific publishing industry.
The scholarly kitchen.
Techdirt has been reporting for some time on the growing number of moves towards making academic work freely available to the public -- for example this recent major boost from the University of California. But what about the bigger picture?
Paywalls may not be the only barrier we need to overcome if the public is to benefit from academic research, says Ellen Collins
The Guardian.
A: The present business models of subscription based publishing forces librarians to spend most of their budget or all of their budget on package deals with the major publishers. Just to illustrate the situation: For some libraries, in particular smaller libraries which cannot afford all the journals they need, publishers offer to take their whole budget to get access to the complete list of that publisher. As a result, no money is left to buy the publications of other publishing houses, or other content resources. However, those libraries accept that situation as the lesser evil.
Brazil, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the US have the highest rates of open access publishing. In Europe, 20 out of 27 countries, including the UK, are likely to have tipped towards a majority of papers published in 2008-2011 being made available for free.
“Data is the new currency for research,” said Alan Blatecky, the director of advanced cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation. “The question is how do you address the cost issues, because there is no new money.”
New York Times.