News blog

RCUK changes open-access guidance yet again

The re-revised guidance still contains the government-endorsed “decision tree” articulating the Publishers’ Association’s understanding of the policy’s open access options. However, it adds that the choice of green or gold “remains at the discretion of the researchers and their research organisations”. The Publishers Association have previously insisted that the decision tree entails that the gold route must be chosen when funding is available.
Times Higher Education.

Open-access publishing is a flawed remedy

The UK coalition government, desperate to address sluggish growth, is promoting open access publishing, which aims to make peer-refereed journal articles available online at no cost to readers.

The idea is laudable and the principle is supported by academia. But as with all great ideas, the devil is in the detail.

Financial Times (Soap Box).

Open source publishing tool

Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required. More fundamentally, Scalar is a semantic web authoring tool that brings a considered balance between standardization and structural flexibility to all kinds of material. It includes a built-in reading interface as well as an API that enables Scalar content to be used to drive custom-designed applications. If you’re dealing with small to moderate amounts of structured content and need a lightweight platform that encourages improvisation with your data model, Scalar may be the right solution for you.

Fields medallists’ open-access track

Many researchers in those areas - such as former Royal Society president Lord Rees of Ludlow and Sir Timothy Gowers, the Fields medal-winning mathematician based at the University of Cambridge - already do most of their reading on arXiv. Yet even mathematicians and physicists still feel the need to publish their papers in standard journals, too. (…) But might it be possible at least to reduce the cost of journal publishing by taking it out of the hands of commercial publishers and using arXiv itself as the publishing platform? This is precisely what the Episciences Project aims to achieve by establishing a series of “epijournals” in maths.
Times Higher Education.

Editor-in-Chief at Nature talks about open science

This article refers to the  conference “Science as an Open Enterprise: Open Data for Open Science,” held at FAPESP’s headquarters in São Paulo. Philip Campbell, Editor-in-Chief of Nature magazine, chemist Martyn Poliakoff (Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society); and the FAPESP’s Scientific Director, Carlos Henrique de Brito Cruz talked.
Campbell went to explain, “The literature is published in many different scientific magazines, and if they are closed, it is impossible for any researcher to find them with ease. Since we need people from all disciplines and from several places working on climate change, it seems reasonable to make data open.”

What Open Access Needs Today Is Mandates, Not Money

No extra money is needed for Green OA self-archiving. It just requires a clear mandate (requirement) to self-archive, by depositing the author’s final, peer-reviewed draft in the author’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. The deposit should be made OA immediately (or after an embargo period whose allowable length should be as short as possible).

It’s time to align policy

says Alma Swan, director of Key Perspectives Ltd. and SPARC director for european advocacy in Nature’s article “How to hasten open access”.
So, harmonization is happening. But the development of seamless policies among funders needs to be the focus of advocacy. It will mean less author confusion and greater compliance. Authors will begin to understand the potential of truly open research and be inspired to devise further innovative practices. Then we can expect true disruption: a very different kind of scholarly communication, catalysed by good policy.

UK pirate party on open access

 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.

A guide to open educational resources

Releasing open educational resources is not simply about putting learning and teaching material online; it involves making the material available in a genuinely open way. Creative Commons or similar licenses are used so that the creator of the resources can retain copyright, while others can copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work. OER can be looked upon as a process as well as a set of products. This is because educators need to rethink the way in which they create, use and distribute learning and teaching materials.

Don’t Let the Dream of Open Access Journals Die

Open access is necessary for true science outreach that can really push society intellectually forward. It will be easier for everyone to access the primary literature, and it will be more difficult to talk of conspiracy theories when the data is for all to see and evaluate. Of course, there will be debates, but these will now revolve around the quality and interpretation of the evidence with more in-depth analyses.

The Atlantic.