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Dramatic Growth of Open Access

Dramatic Growth of Open Access

Graphics on the growth of open access repositories, based on OA data by The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE), operated by Bielefeld University Library.

The Directory of Open Access Journals is getting close to 8 thousand titles, and adding titles at a rate of over 3 per day. The Internet Archive provides access to 670,000 movies, 100,000 concerts, 1.3 million audio recordings, and 3.5 million texts.

Publisher Wiley Extends Open Access Option to Over 80% of Journals

Publisher Wiley Extends Open Access Option to Over 80% of Journals

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., announced today that its open access option for individual journal articles, OnlineOpen, will be available to authors in 81% of the journals it publishes. OnlineOpen gives authors the option to publish an open access paper in their journal of choice where it will benefit from maximum impact.

Press release by John Whiley & Sons.

Wellcome Trust will penalise scientists who don’t embrace open access

Wellcome Trust will penalise scientists who don't embrace open access

The U.K. Wellcome Trust enters a decisive strategy to promote and sustain their open access policies.

The Wellcome Trust plans to withhold a portion of grant money from scientists who do not make the results of their work freely available to the public, in a move that will embolden supporters of the growing open access movement in science. In addition, any research papers that are not freely available will not be counted as part of a scientist’s track record when Wellcome assesses any future applications for research funding.

The Guaridan.


Researchers of Tomorrow: Findings show that open access can be confusing to young researchers

Researchers of Tomorrow: Findings show that open access can be confusing to young researchers

U.K.: The JISC ( ‘Joint Information Systems Committee’) publishes the report Researchers of Tomorrow about the research behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students.

“Researchers of Tomorrow” is the UK’s largest study to date on the research behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students (born between 1982 and 1994). JISC and the British Library jointly commissioned the three year study in 2009, which involved 17,000 doctoral students from 70 universities at various stages in the project.

Representatives Urge White House to Support Public Access to Federally Funded Research

Representatives Urge White House to Support Public Access to Federally Funded Research

U.S. Congressman Mike Doyle (Democrat) writes an open letter to U.S. government urging the White House to support open access to federally funded research. He names successful strategies outside the U.S. and relates to the petition “Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research”.

While we believe a continued commitment to research and development is an important component of investment in U.S. economic competitiveness, the added value of making research publicly available is that it can exponentially increase collaboration and intelligent knowledge sourcing among researchers.  Public access policies can help to boost the value of academic works by exposing them to larger audiences and increasing the potential for citations.

Open Science & Research Funding: Write collaboratively in this blog.

Open Science & Research Funding: Write collaboratively in this blog.

The advent of Open Science paradigms leads to new interdependences between Research Funding and Open Science. On one hand Research Funders require projects to make more than just text publications available according to the Open Access principles, on the other hand it is to be discussed how Researching Funding itself could be more open (or reach the next level as Research Funding 2.0). This contribution focusses on the both aspects: How Research Funding is promoting Open Science and how an innovative and open Research Funding could look like.

Curation Project for Implementing an Open Science Platform

Curation Project for Implementing an Open Science Platform

New open science platform providing downloads of accompanying data and analysis/visualisation scripts of research material while reading a publication without having to ask the author.

Also, it should be possible to implement methods of data analysis and visualisation. An Open Science platform increases the transparency of research findings, facilitates reproduction of experiments and comprehension of the exact details of an experiment. It results in easier error correction and suggestion of more efficient ways of data analysis.