Tag Archives: Open Access

Neo4j: A way to create an online database using social network systems

To build a network of species, the Open Tree of Life team has adopted Neo4j, an open-source database that stores information structured in graphs rather than in tables. It is developed by Neo Technology, which has offices in the Silicon Valley, England, Germany, and Sweden.
Neo4j website, download free tool for online property graph database.

Publishers Flip Out, Call Bill To Provide Open Access To Federally Funded Works A ‚Boondoggle‘

Last week, a new version of Doyle’s bill was introduced and it’s been improved. First off, it’s got some nice bipartisan backing in both parts of Congress. On the Senate side, it was co-sponsored by Senators Cornyn and Wyden, while on the House side we’ve got Doyle along with Reps. Yoder and Lofgren. Also, it reduces the time to open publishing from one year down to six months (like a NY bill that came out last year). It doesn’t spread the policy to all federal agencies, but the vast majority of federally funded resarch would qualify (all agencies that spend over $100 million on research are covered).
TechDirt.

Not FASTR Enough

While the publishing industry continues to explore numerous avenues for providing full Open Access to the stewarded versions-of-record of the scientific literature, SPARC once again offers up the hope that the US Congress will save us from the evil paywalls.  Is  this really the best they can do?
T. Scott Blog

FASTR – Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act

This bill will give the American people greater access to the important scientific research results they’ve paid for,” Congressman Doyle said today.”Supporting greater collaboration among researchers in the sciences will accelerate scientific innovation and discovery, while giving the public a greater return on their scientific investment.
See also this article on FASTR by Robin Lloyd, responsible for editing and assigning stories and managing the twitter feeds for Scientificamerican.com or this article by John Morgan, deputy news editor of TimesHigherEducation.co.uk Peter Suber, director of the Harvard Open Access Project, collects major information material on FASTR here. Berkman Center provides further detailed information here.

Fools‘ gold?

Open-access publishing, once a niche preoccupation, is now a hot-button issue. But concern is growing that unintended consequences of new publication mandates will cost individual scholars and the UK sector dear. Paul Jump reports
Times Higher Education.

Open Data without Open Access?

Velichka Dimitrova, Project Coordinator of Open Economics at the Open Knowledge Foundation, sums up the open access workshops at Minho University, Portugal:
While open access policies and structures might be getting more popular in some countries or science fields, there is still limited understanding of how to make data from research available on a wider scale. It is however clear that the experiences of the open access movement are key lessons for our understanding of how to make research data openly available.

Academic Publishing Survey of funders supports the benign Open Access outcome priced into shares

Public sector funders finance ~80% of world’s academic research.
  • Proprietary survey of research funders reinforces our view of an earningsneutral transition to Open Access.
  • However, the OA discount in share prices has largely corrected; we lower our ratings for the first time in 3 years.
  • Downgrade Reed Elsevier Plc to N from OW (TP 720p) and Informa to UW from N (TP 440p); maintain OW on Reed Elsevier NV (TP EUR13.30).
HSBC Global Research.

Set the Default to „Open“: Reproducible Science in the Computer Age

While different types and degrees of reproducible research were discussed, many argued that the community needs to move to “open research,” which means research where widely used software tools are routinely used to (a) fully ‘audit’ the computationally procedure, (b) replicate and independently reproduce the results of the research, and (c) extend the results or apply the method to new problems.