Following the success of 2012 and 2011 grant competitions, the EIFL-OA programme invites new proposals for organising national or institutional open access advocacy campaigns to reach out to research communities. We particularly wish to involve researchers and students, research administrators and policy makers, university presses and society publishers.
Preparations are underway for the much-anticipated launch of the Digital Public Library of America. The public unveiling is to occur on April 18th and 19th at the Boston Public Library. This ambitious project, envisioned by Harvard University Librarian, Robert C. Darton to be an important step towards “a modern Digital Library of Alexandria”.
This is the second in our Series of Interviews with PeerJ Editors, giving them a voice to express their thoughts about academic publishing, open access and PeerJ. This time around we spoke to Fabiana Kubke who is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Medical Sciences (Department of Anatomy with Radiology) and a member of the Centre for Brain Research at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
Open Education Week is taking place from 11-15 March 2013 online and in locally hosted events around the world. The purpose of Open Education Week is to raise awareness of the open education movement and opportunities it creates in teaching and learning worldwide. Participation in all events and use of all resources are free an open to everyone.
Anyone who has been tracking the rapid transition from the recommendations of the Finch Group to the emergence of RCUK’s policy must admit that the horse-trading around OA embargoes caused considerable confusion. The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee report into the policy published on 22 February 2013 produced this graphic to highlight how it should work.
A total of 252,418 articles were published with the CC-BY license during the period shown above.
Ask your university press todisavow the AAP stance on FASTR. Universities, as major recipients of federal funding for research, should be in support of a strong public access bill; their own publishing shops should not, by default, subscribe to the AAP’s position.Letter to use provided on website.
A project has been launched to see whether games can help increase people’s interest in environmental issues. “Play is, has and always will be part of human nature” (Ed Gillespie).BBC News.
Bryan Alexander, a senior fellow at the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, explores some potential explanations, including MOOCs’ relative novelty and their top-tier-university cachet. But the obvious answer is, as it nearly always is, money. For many institutions, MOOCs are viewed as a potential revenue stream, higher education’s business model of the future.The Chronicle.
The College of Wooster Library, Information Resources, and Technology Committee (LIRTC) that introduced the policy believes that the resolution supports the institutional mission. LIRTC’s informational page highlighted the benefits of the policy.
Longer embargo periods of up to 24 months for green open access will only apply when universities’ annual block grants for “gold” article fees have run out, Research Councils UK has confirmed.Times Higher Education.
David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, argues that scholars have an obligation to publish their research in journals that make free copies available online. The Tech Therapy team talks with him about how the debate over open access to research has heated up in recent months, and invites journal publishers to give their views on next month’s podcast.The Chronicle.
In other words, the selfish obstinacy of the copyright industries, in their refusal to consider any approach other than yet more licensing, is likely to cause serious economic losses to Europe, alongside the cultural ones. Once again, we have a clear demonstration of how copyright maximalists are happy to harm an entire continent rather than concede that their scarcity-based approach is outdated and needs to be re-thought in a world of digital abundance. That the copyright industries should cling to this retrogressive approach is no surprise - it’s what they’ve done at every turn for the last fifteen years or more. That the European Commission still hasn’t learned its lesson from the street demonstrations against ACTA last year, and tries to shore up decrepit intellectual monopolies to the disadvantage of the 500 million citizens of Europe it supposedly serves, is not just extraordinary, but truly shameful.Blog entry. Computerworld UK.
Emerging publisher Frontiers is joining Nature Publishing Group (NPG) in a strategic alliance to advance the global open science movement.Nature News.