The Evolution of Scientific Dissemination: PeerJ Rises
In case you didn’t know, academic publishing is undergoing a major upheaval. Again.SciAm Blogs.
Tag Archives: Open Access
Advocacy: How to hasten open access
Three advocates for a universally free scholarly literature give their prescriptions for the movement’s next push, from findability to translations.Nature.
Three statements about academic publishing
(Netzpolitik - in German).Open access science news is mostly good, with a bit of ugly
Open access is expanding and just may solve some of the peer review’s problems.
From Open Access to Open data, initiatives in agriculture
Johannes Keizer, working for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, presents his initiatives at the INRA workshop on openScience, in Paris, April 2013The University of Luxembourg announces its Open Access deposit mandate
Open Access at the University of Luxembourg!Today, the University of Luxembourg has joined the growing number of Universities and funding institutions around the world in launching a mandate for deposit in their new Open Access digital repository, ORBi.
Open Access—Are the Barriers to Change Receding?
Bo-Christer Björk, Professor of Information Systems Science at the Swedish school of Economics and Business Administration in Helsinki, Finland, has published “Open Access—Are the Barriers to Change Receding?” in Publications. Download is open access.Open access aids science research
Says - Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner on politico.comOpen access to this research has been debated for several years. Advocates have argued that the ability to freely access government-funded information is not only fair but also enables innovation otherwise stymied by pay walls and restrictive websites. Scientific advances are collaborative. Innovation sparks further innovation as researchers exchange ideas.
UK: House Of Commons BUSINESS, INNOVATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE meets today
Today (see scedule here), the Business , Innovation and Skills Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the administration, expenditure and policy of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and its associated public bodies, including Ofcom and the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).Elsevier’s slice of Big Data pie
This machine driven data cleansing and enhancement relies on platform to platform interoperability. With the acquisition of PURE and Mendeley and the close integration of Scopus into ORCID, Elsevier have developed a locked-in platform specific workflow with real commercial potential. Open in terms of access and re-use. Open on Elsevier’s terms.
Open Access, the Impact Agenda and resistance to the neoliberal paradigm
OA is no more prone to the aspects of neoliberal practice outlined above than traditional scholarly publishing. Some arguments are surfacing that, in OA, we hand over our work for others to then privatise. (…) OA could actually undermine neoliberal competitive practices of the privatisation of knowledge. Why else would publishers be getting so hot under the collar? Finally, could OA exist outside these aspects of neoliberal doctrine? Well, of course, we are dependent on technology, produced under the system of late-capitalism, for our non-rivalrous commodity exchange. In some senses, then: no. However, the same can be said for industrial printing under conventional scholarly publishing.A critical view on open access research within the neoliberal publishing industries. See also the discussion.
Dangers lurk in move to open-access publishing
Dame Janet Finch, advised less by academics than by organisations with interests in academic publishing, recommends open access – but open access to what? Perhaps only to the publications from which these organisations benefit most. Access to research findings unapproved by these organisations is likely to become more difficult.Financial Times.
This video is of the “Copyright, Licensing, Open Access” session from the 18-19 March 2013 “MOOCs and Libraries: Massive Opportunity or Overwhelming Challenge?” event hosted by OCLC Research and the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. As courses are being offered online to a diverse and geographically distributed audience, what are the challenges for licensing and clearing copyright for materials used in courses? Are there opportunities for advancing the conversation on open access with faculty? Featuring Brandon Butler, Director of Public Policy Initiatives, Association of Research Libraries; Kevin Smith, Scholarly Communications Officer, Duke University; Kenny Crews, Director, Copyright Advisory Office, Columbia University; and Kyle K. Courtney, Manager of Faculty Research and Scholarship, Harvard Law School. See the MOOCs and Libraries event page athttp://www.oclc.org/research/events/2… for a complete overview of this event.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Conference on open access and its use in libraries
See this workshop OA workflow to Extract, Transform, Map, and Publish dynamic metadata at Elag 2013.This year’s tag line will be ‘Inside Out Library’: while ELAG (European Library Automation Group) 2013 will still be focused on specific, library related IT issues, we want to expand the aim and target audience by addressing innovative topics such as Open Access. ELAG 2013 will also host two pre-conferences: THATCamp, which focuses on researchers in the digital humanities, and an joint OpenAIRE/LIBER workshop ‘Dealing with data’ . ELAG 2013 is hosted by Ghent University Library and the Ghent University Faculty Library Arts & Philosophy, and will take place from May 28th until May 31st 2013.Pre-conferences on May 28th is free. Registration is open.
Door-to-door subscription scams: the dark side of The New York Times
A response by Michael Eisen, open access activist, on an article published in The New York Times (see older post here).
See also this blog post on the debate.
Germany: Ministry of Justice declares secondary utilisation rights to authors of scientific publications.
This means that all publicly-funded research and science is open access - at least 12 month after publishing.
See also this blog post on Technische Informationsbibliothek Hannover Blog.
Both in German.
Impact Factors — the revised RCUK open access guidelines
Stephen Curry on the revised RCUK open access guidelines.We cannot afford to keep research results locked away in ivory towers
Opening up British research may seem obvious, writes science minister David Willetts. But it is not just inertia that blocks this.The Guardian. Blog on Political Science.
RCUK changes open-access guidance yet again
The re-revised guidance still contains the government-endorsed “decision tree” articulating the Publishers’ Association’s understanding of the policy’s open access options. However, it adds that the choice of green or gold “remains at the discretion of the researchers and their research organisations”. The Publishers Association have previously insisted that the decision tree entails that the gold route must be chosen when funding is available.Times Higher Education.
Will open access to research achieve transparency? Your responses, please
Following David Willetts’ statement about increasing access to published academic research, let us know if you think it will achieve greater transparency.The Guardian. Blog on Political Science.
Open-access publishing is a flawed remedy
Financial Times (Soap Box).The UK coalition government, desperate to address sluggish growth, is promoting open access publishing, which aims to make peer-refereed journal articles available online at no cost to readers.
The idea is laudable and the principle is supported by academia. But as with all great ideas, the devil is in the detail.
Breaking Down the Academic Paywalls, in Africa Too
Across Africa, academics and researchers face financial barriers that keep them from accessing the same knowledge their peers elsewhere in the world can afford.
Fields medallists’ open-access track
Many researchers in those areas - such as former Royal Society president Lord Rees of Ludlow and Sir Timothy Gowers, the Fields medal-winning mathematician based at the University of Cambridge - already do most of their reading on arXiv. Yet even mathematicians and physicists still feel the need to publish their papers in standard journals, too. (…) But might it be possible at least to reduce the cost of journal publishing by taking it out of the hands of commercial publishers and using arXiv itself as the publishing platform? This is precisely what the Episciences Project aims to achieve by establishing a series of “epijournals” in maths.
Times Higher Education.