Peter Murray-Rust, University of Cambridge, set online (blog post) a conversation with Springer Science+Business Media to discuss Springer’s position and explanation on SpringerImages.
See also the Springer Open statement concerning Murray-Rust’s blog entry here.
Article by Cameron Neylon.
A reasonable current lower bound for realisable added value by publication service providers is ~$1000 per paper. This is likely to drop as market pressures come to bear and existing archives and repositories seek to provide a wider range of low cost services.
Experts on Open Access are invited to reflect on e-journals. Discussion will be held in English.
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Dorotheenstraße 24, 10999 Berlin, Friday, June, 8th 2012, 2- 7 pm.
The “Wikipedia Academy 2012: Research and Free Knowledge” provides a platform for the research community and the Wikipedia community to connect, present, discuss and advance research on Wikipedia in particular and on free knowledge in general.
Dates: June 29 - July 1 2012, Berlin. Registration closes on June 15th 2012.
This article points out that the open access debate has to go further into opening up scientific software.
Computers need software, and some of that software will be specially written or adapted from existing code to meet the particular needs of the scientists’ work. This makes computer software a vital component of the scientific process. It also means that being able to check that code for errors is as important as being able to check the rest of the experiment’s methodology. And yet very rarely can other scientists do that, because the code employed is not made available.
The petition for open access has already reached its goal to collect 25.000 signatures by June 19th 2012.
A report for the Association of Learned, Professional and Society Publishers (ALPSP) and The Publishers Association claims that the impact on all publishers’ revenues would be considerable. The findings of the Publishing and the Ecology of European Research (PEER) project announced it had found no evidence that the self-archiving of academic papers threatened journal viability.
A list of websites on Open Science and Crowd Science including definition and principles, methods and introducing groups and individual initiatives (blogs) and projects.
The Open Knowledge Foundation set definition, principles and stragegies on text / content mining.
While Open Access (OA) is improving the ability for researchers to read papers (by removing access barriers), still only around 20% of scholarly papers are OA. The remainder are locked behind paywalls. As per the vast majority of subscription contracts, Subscribers may read paywalled papers, but they may not mine them.
A well researched article about the rise of the open access debate, including comments on iniciatives such as Open Knowledge Foundation or David Willetts.
A survey on how e-infrastructure in the UK might be built. Questionaire open until June 13th 2012.
Deadline: All entries must be postmarked on or before 1 August 2012.
Entries are now being accepted for the 2012 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards. The awards program was established in 1945 and recognizes outstanding reporting for a general audience in the sciences, mathematics and engineering. The contest is administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and endowed by the Kavli Foundation.
Article on the PEER project and Neelie Kroes’ speech, see post below, claiming that 100% gold and green open access can only be achieved if universities, authors and publishers collaborate closely.
Stephen Curry on the >Big Deal< article, posted below, in confrontation with other aspects and opinions concluding that:
These are uncertain times for publishers — and academics. Change is coming, and perhaps more than any of us is bargaining for.
This article tries to give solutions to the scientific journal subscription debate.
Researchers push for end to publishers’ default ban on computer scanning of tens of thousands of papers to find links between genes and diseases.
The Guadian.
Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, claims that open access is a must-have for Europe to remain competitive in not only knowledge-based means but also economical.
Neat collection of links on Open Science.
For all the German readers, a couple of days old, but still interesting thoughts on Germany in regards to the Elsevier boycott:
Deutsche Wirtschaftswissenschaftler sympathisieren zwar mit Elsevier-Boykott und Open Access, hängen aber am etablierten Reputations- und Rankingsystem
There are also some nice graphics to illustrate the issue.
Publishers fully support expanding access to publicly funded research but only as part of a model that is financially viable.
The Guardian.
The The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) has voted to adopt open access policy. All current and future scientific articles will be freely available to the public.
Visualization of the signature process concerning the US petition for open access.
Researchers of the Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec CANADA conclude that open access papers get twice as many citations as non-open access papers, and on top that open access raises quality.
We demonstrate that the greater citation impact of open access research is causal rather than an artifact of author bias (i.e., authors self-selectively making higher quality research open access) by showing that the citation increase is just as great when the open access is mandatory; the open access impact advantage is independent of other correlates of citation impact, and greater for higher quality research.
This video was produced by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition): http://www.arl.org/sparc