Tag Archives: Open Access

50 Shades of Grey in Scientific Publication: How Digital Publishing Is Harming Science

50 Shades of Grey in Scientific Publication: How Digital Publishing Is Harming Science

Dr. Douglas Fields draws out the dark sides of the shift currently happening in the publishing industry. 

Newsweek is dead. But we have Twitter. Harper-Collins just closed its last warehouse of books in the United States. Cambridge University Press, the oldest publisher of scholarly books and journals in the world, printing continuously since 1584, ceased printing operations this year and will outsource printing to another company. The Press survived tumultuous changes since the Middle Ages — the coming and going of plagues, the rise and fall of empires, wars and famine — but it could not sustain itself in the new environment of digital publication and self-publication that the electronic medium feeds.

Dr. Douglas Fields. Huff Post. Science. The Blog. 

See also the comments by Björn Brembs, declaring that Fields is wrong on open access.

Please have a look at this post by Jalees Rehman, cell biologist and as a physician at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), too.

Clay Shirky talks about open access

Clay Shirky, writer, consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, on open access practices and the academic mission:

The real tension around open access journals is that institutions occasionally get to this moment—the moment I think our community is in—where you’re given a choice between conserving your mission and conserving your practices. Institutions tend to want to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. And so we have a world where trying to keep the current structure of journals intact has become obviously a goal of, say, Reed Elsevier, but also it’s just the easy slot to fall into for tenure committees, if you know how to rank them. At the same time, we have open access journals, which are plainly more in line with our academic self-conception, mission, and goals. Not just for the generic spreading of information, but for the internal professional needs for wide self-criticism and conversation.

So the first thing I think you have to say about open access journals is: We have to support them. Interestingly, as the number of submissions to a journal goes up the quality of the submissions they can choose also goes up. … The other thing we can do, as some institutions have already done, is to announce that our institutional preference is for our mission and not our current practices, and that we expect faculty to expose their work widely for feedback and for conversation. That de facto means preferring the open access journals. Not as a way of intervening in the fight with Reed Elsevier, or what have you, but simply as a way of living up to our own stated goals. 

Clay Shirky (Q&A).

Watch the video of the talk: “IT as a Core Academic Competence” @ EDUCAUSE 2012 Conference in Denver, Colorado.


Should the internet get controlled by telecommunication firms?

Should the internet get controlled by telecommunication firms?

U.S. telecommunication giant Verizon tries to challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) Open Internet Rules by having a constitutional claims for the right to edit the internet pending at the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. 

If Verizon’s current assertions were allowed to prevail, the consequences for American society and our economy would be very grave. Every aspect of business and social conduct increasingly depends on access to information and collaboration on the Internet. 

Sharing Discoveries More Efficient, More Honorable Than Patenting Them

Sharing Discoveries More Efficient, More Honorable Than Patenting Them

More efficient. More honorable. It’s a small example of the potential destruction for both prongs of the pro-patent argument. If it makes science more efficient to not patent, there goes promoting the progress. If it’s more honorable, there goes the moral argument. And, unlike some pharma companies, I’m not even going to make patents the key point here: Jay Bradner’s focus is on helping people.

Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project

Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project

The Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project asks for public comment on the draft  data release policy concerning Medtronic Clinical Trial Data.

Feedback will be accepted through 11:59 pm ET Saturday, December 15, 2012. All comments will be taken into consideration but incorporated at the discretion of the YODA team. Neither submitted comments nor response by the YODA Project to submitted comments will be publicly posted at the conclusion of the comment period.

See also draft.

Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 1: what actually is Open Access?

Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 1: what actually is Open Access?

Mike Taylor, Computer programmer with Index Data and palaeontologist with the University of Bristol, gives a definition on Open Access and notes that 

the biggest issues that derails constructive discussion of the move to OA is that the term is used in different ways by different groups.

See also part 2: Open Access definitions and clarifications, part 2: Gold and Green.

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Need for access to academic knowledge is an open and shut case

Need for access to academic knowledge is an open and shut case

ACCESS barriers to published research “result in critical, relevant knowledge and research outputs in Africa being published in overseas journals — journals that are not affordable to African academic libraries”, Science and Technology Minister Derek Hanekom said at the Berlin 10 Open Access Conference last week.

BusinessDayLive.

A Scienceographic Comparison of Physics Papers from the arXiv and viXra Archives

A Scienceographic Comparison of Physics Papers from the arXiv and viXra Archives

by David Kelk, David Devine. Abstract:

arXiv is an e-print repository of papers in physics, computer science, and biology, amongst others. viXra is a newer repository of e-prints on similar topics. Scienceography is the study of the writing of science. In this work we perform a scienceographic comparison of a selection of papers from the physics section of each archive. We provide the first study of the viXra archive and describe key differences on how science is written by these communities.

Open access at the University of Southampton – pushing the boundaries and the art of the impossible

Open access at the University of Southampton - pushing the boundaries and the art of the impossible

For ten years, the University of Southampton has been at the forefront of open access development. Researchers, academics, service providers and senior management have worked together in partnership to develop a successful open access strategy.

JISC.

Open Access – Repository Interoperability

Open Access - Repository Interoperability

Since repository interoperability is paramount in order to achieve the goals of Open Access, it is a focal point for the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). This project is one of several tactics designed to promote the repository community’s understanding of the interoperability landscape, share current best practices, and provide knowledge and information necessary to chart and implement institutional strategies for interoperability that profit from the services made available through interoperability initiatives. This report is designed to be the first stage of a multi-phase process aiming to establish the COAR Roadmap for Interoperability. 

What happens when you blog and tweet about an open access paper?

What happens when you blog and tweet about an open access paper?

“There have been almost 3 times that number of downloads from our institutional repository…I think its fair to say: It’s a really good thing to make your work open access. More people will read it than if it is behind a paywall. Even if it is the most downloaded paper from a journal in your field, open access makes it even more accessed” says Melissa Terras, Co-Director of University College London (UCL) Centre for Digital Humanities.

Open Access — What Do Authors Really Want?

Open Access — What Do Authors Really Want?

Alice Meadows, Director, Society Relations at John Wiley and Sons, suggests to support golden access as publishing method but votes if this would succeed for more funding especially for young researchers.

Funding seems to be a key issue, with only 18% of authors receiving full funding for article publication.  Additionally, young researchers are nearly twice as likely not to have funding as their older colleagues; somewhat counter-intuitively, however, they don’t see this as any more of a barrier to publishing OA.  Presumably OA will rapidly move up the ranks as a factor in where researchers choose to publish as funder mandates start to kick in – the introduction of the RCUK mandate on April 1, 2013, and corresponding increase in APC funding for articles arising from UK funded research, should be a good indicator.