The Humanities and Social Sciences are a vital component of human culture and offer an essential insight into the world in which we live. The Digital Humanities reflect the transition of the Humanities to the digital age. However, they do not only bring with them new technical means, but also new forms of knowledge creation and dissemination within, across and outside academic disciplines.
We’re calling it the Open Access button. Every paywall met is an isolated incident; it’s time we capture those individual moments of injustice and frustration to turn them into positive change.Here is a new project that wants to track potential readers that were rejected access to research papers published behind paywalls.
Not surprisingly, as researchers adjusted their behaviour, so did publishers. The top journals did not increase space for the increased demand. Instead, they spawned ever more low-ranking offspring to reinforce the ratchet and keep the demand high.An Essay by Björn Brembs.
In the largest open-source video-data sharing project of its kind, behavioral researchers, digital library scientists, and computer scientists are undertaking the creation of Databrary, a web-based video-data library sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).The Databrary project includes not only a web-based repository for open sharing and preservation of video data and associated metadata, but also a free, open source video-coding software, that enables coding, exploring, and analyzing video data. The data management system supports data-sharing within labs, among collaborators, and in the Databrary repository. Read more here.
Springer’s new policy says that authors may make the post-refereed versions of their articles available immediately on their personal websites but must wait a year before making them available in repositories. This embargo is nothing new with respect to subject repositories — Springer’s previous policy required a year-long embargo for subject repositories. But it is new for institutional repositories — Springer used to allow articles to appear immediately there. This change to a year-long embargo for institutional repositories makes self-archiving harder and more confusing and thus less likely to be attempted. So that’s bad. And in addition to being a bad change, it’s arguably a nonsensical change.
Open access to validated molecular components is crucial to the field’s success, says Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University in California. Endy says that synthetic biologists are similar to software engineers, with the genetic code as their programming language. The software industry has favoured open-source approaches and copyright protections, because inventions often come faster than patents can be acquired. The same holds for synthetic biology (...).Nature.
In our view, all of these problems can be addressed by a more open approach to science. We see Open Science as making the scientific process and all of its outcomes openly accessible to the general public. Open Science would benefit science, because it would make results more reproducible, and quality control more transparent. Open Science would also benefit the society by including more people in the process and sparking open innovation.Read here
Near the corner of Tillary and Jay Streets in Brooklyn, Michael Heimbinder stood near a blue mailbox, head down, poking at his smartphone. A graph appeared: a single line plotting ambient carbon monoxide exposure in the neighborhood. Minutes later, he ran over to an idling Honda Pilot and held a small, black sensor to its tailpipe. On his phone, carbon monoxide levels, predictably, jumped off the chart. A woman opened the car door and said, “Can I help you out?”
The New York Times.
The British Academy today publishes a series of 8 newly commissioned articles reflecting on the challenges and opportunities for humanities and social sciences open access publishing practices.You can read them here.
Those publishers are not our partners, they’re our exploiters. We don’t need to negotiate with them; we don’t even need to fight them. We just need to walk away.
With the spread of Open Access in the scientific community, now universities, institutions and sometimes even governments introduce special policies to standardize the process of sharing and publishing research results in an open and free-of-charge way. Over the past few years, dozens of universities have introduced OA policies and have opened special funds for publishing in this model. Oregon State University did the same thing recently.As the first university in the Pacific Northwest and one of the first land grant universities in the USA, Oregon State University has adopted an open access policy requiring faculty members to make their scholarly articles available for free through a digital repository.
In recent years many government organizations have implemented Open Government Data (OGD) policies to make their data publicly available. This data usually covers a broad set of domains, from financial to ecological information. While these initiatives often report anecdotal success regarding improved efficiency and governmental savings, the potential applications of OGD remain a largely uncharted territory. In this paper, we claim that there is an important portion of the population who could benefit from the use of OGD, but who cannot do so because they cannot perform the essential operations needed to collect, process, merge, and make sense of the data. The reasons behind these problems are multiple, the most critical one being a fundamental lack of expertise and technical knowledge. We propose the use of visualizations as a way to alleviate this situation. Visualizations provide a simple mechanism to understand and communicate large amounts of data. We also show evidence that there is a need for exploratory mechanisms to navigate the data and metadata in these visualizations. Finally, we provide a discussion on a set of features that tools should have in order to facilitate the creation of visualizations by users. We briefly present the implementation of these features in a new tool prototype focused on simplifying the creation of visualization based on Open Data. Read more here
This paper examines the covergence of movements that make up "open science" and what they may mean for the information professional. The related movements include open access, open data, open research, and open platform. The author also contrasts open science with the more closed, or proprietary, science.Read more here
A team of researchers at the University of Oxford and University of Koblenz recently joined forces to organise an event on ‘Rigour and Openness in 21st Century Science‘ examining whether and how recent developments in open science can lead to increased reproducibility and rigour in scientific research. While the key themes of open access and data were addressed, other sessions touched on the question of how to ensure data collected and analysed by citizens is validated, the role of openness in innovation and pre-competitive commercial environments and new technical services that are being built to facilitate sharing, analysis and further application of research outputs.See more at: http://blog.okfn.org/2013/06/25/rigour-and-openness-in-21st-century-science/
From time to time, it's important to pause the bureaucratic debate about open access and recognise how stupid scientific publishing is.The Guardian.
The 2014 Global Land Project Open Science Meeting will synthesize and discuss the role of the land system as a platform for human-environment interactions, connecting local land use decisions to global impacts and responses.
The US Supreme Court ruling on gene patents is a welcome boost to efforts to increase the free exchange of scientific information, says Colin Macilwain.
"Alternative academic" Eric Kansa starting working on Open Context more than a decade ago to promote access to archaeological research data that rarely saw the light of day. Last week Kansa, a researcher with the University at California, Berkeley School of Information, was honored for his efforts to make more of that data public. The Alamedan caught up with Kansa just as he was getting on a plane to Italy for a dig.The Alamedan.
Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals (“journal rank”) that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On the other hand, much has been written about the negative effects of institutionalizing journal rank as an impact measure. So far, contributions to the debate concerning the limitations of journal rank as a scientific impact assessment tool have either lacked data, or relied on only a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the consequences of our current scholarly communication system with respect to various measures of scientific quality (such as utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert ratings or retractions). These data corroborate previous hypotheses: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current journal system.Read the full article by Björn Brembs, Katherine Button and Marcus Munafò online. It's hot off the press.
This paper discusses the conclusions and recommendations of two reports that were published recently in consequence of this data fraud. The reports are relevant for scientific integrity and trustworthy treatment of research data. Next, this paper reports on the outcomes of enquiries in data cultures in a number of scientific disciplines. The concluding section of this paper contains a number of examples that show that the approach towards data sharing is improving gradually. The data fraud case can be regarded as a wake-up call. (read here)
Open Access as a model for publishing research results in the form of a book or article by scholars is becoming more commonplace and more widely accepted by the scientific community. However, despite the many advantages, some scientists are still quite reluctant to publish in Open Access. What are the main reasons for this situation? (here)