News blog

The Empire Strikes Back

Publishers may soon compete with libraries. The business case for enticing users away from library-managed portals is simple, compelling, and growing. As funding agencies and universities enact Open Access (OA) mandates and publishers transition their journals from the site-license model to the Gold OA model, libraries will cease to be the spigots through which money streams from universities to publishers. In the Gold-OA world, the publishers' core business is developing relationships with scholars, not librarians. For publishers, it makes perfect sense to cater to scholars both as authors and readers. (...) Publishers, indexing services, journal aggregators, startups, some nonprofit organizations, and library-system vendors all have expertise to produce compelling post-OA services. However, publishers only need to protect their Gold OA income, and any new revenue streams are just icing on the cake. All others need a reasonable expectation of new revenue to develop new services. This sets the stage for a significant consolidation of the scholarly-communication industry into the hands of publishers.
SciTechSociety.

Open Access (Books) vs. Double Dipping: An Ongoing Struggle

The Hybrid Publishing Lab at Leuphana University, Lüneburg, Germany gives a recap on the difficulties to find alternatives in scientific publishing and it's policies.
The dispute amongst scholars and policy makers about which road to take to Open Access (gold or green) revolves to a great extend around the problem (or danger) of double dipping. It is widely acknowledged that publishers ought not to be allowed to charge twice for scientific publications, that is scholars and their public funders on the one hand and publicly funded libraries and readers on the other hand. On first glance this claim seems to be quite obvious as well as its solution appears to be trivial: when published open access a text has to be put online free of charge. Yet, that’s only part of the story.

More Than 100 International Associations Sign Agreement with OMICS Publishing Group to Make Healthcare Information Open Access

Spreading and sharing valuable scientific knowledge generated as a result of years of experiments and research to the humanity at large is something that is laudable and appreciable (read more...)
OMICS Publishing Group publishes more than 300 online journals on Medical, Clinical Life & environmental sciences, Engineering, Pharma and Management.

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.

Scholarly Societies and the Search for Relevance

 Alice Meadows, head of society relations at John Wiley, talks with podcast host Stewart Wills about the challenges and opportunities for scholarly and professional societies in finding new value-adds in a competitive, Internet-driven environment — and how many of the “new” sources of relevance are rooted in things that have made societies central to their members’ professional lives for many years.
Scholarly Kitchen. Podcast.

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.

Improving Science through Data Management and Sharing

Here is a paper by Kathryn A. Kane on Data Management and Sharing from the URJHS—Undergraduate Research Journal for the Human Sciences that is.
Scientific discovery and innovation move society into the future, and it is the responsibility of researchers to use their work to advance that purpose. By effectively managing and sharing their data with the public, researchers can facilitate collaboration with their peers, thus conserving time and resources.

School of Open, Round 2: Courses open for sign-up

The School of Open is offering its second round of facilitated courses! Starting today, you can sign up for 7 courses during a two week period; sign-up closes 4 August (Sunday) and courses start on or after 5 August (Monday). All courses are free to take and open to reuse under the CC BY-SA license.
There is a cource called "Open Science: An Introduction" that might be interesting to some of you.

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.

Improving Science Through Data Management

An interesting undergraduate research project on the importance of data management and sharing by Kathryn A. Kane.
This is just one small example of how valuable data can be lost to both current and future researchers when there is no data management plan in place. Scientific discovery and innovation move society into the future, and it is the responsibility of researchers to use their work to advance that purpose. By effectively managing and sharing their data with the public, researchers can facilitate collaboration with their peers, thus conserving time and resources. This also leads to increased transparency and improved scientific reputations. There are some challenges facing this proposal, but with a concerted effort data management and sharing can become an integral part of the scientific culture.

Hiding your research behind a paywall is immoral

A vivid piece from the guardian on open access and why a researcher should make sure that people can get to his or her results.
No, no, no. Dammit, we're scientists. Our job is to make knowledge. If we make it, then brick it up behind a wall, we're wasting our time and our funders' money – which ultimately means we're squandering the world's wealth.

Book review on »Biohackers«

Biohackers. The Politics of Open Science is a book published by Pluto Press and written by Alessandro Delfanti a scholar who studies the relationships between science and society. He tells us not only that the hacker culture has many things in common with the world of science, but also, in a more fascinating way, that the current transformations of life sciences are and will be even more characterized by a mash-up or remix (by adopting the author’s own words) between the traditional scientific culture, the hacker ethics and the open access culture.