The initial focus of the Open Content Program is to make available all images of public domain artworks in the Getty’s collections. Today we’ve taken a first step toward this goal by making roughly 4,600 high-resolution images of the Museum’s collection free to use, modify, and publish for any purpose.
Even without concrete solutions, Frachioni remains enthusiastic about the possibilities of open science. “This is all completely unprecedented, and that isn’t going to give us any reassurance at the end of the day,” he said, “but I think that it’s our responsibility to enter into this knowing that and knowing that we should do it anyway.”Elizabeth Murray, National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Open might mean public domain, or liberal licensing, or just not withholding. Open needs to be reconciled with privacy (an under-acknowledged challenge). And it needs technical infrastructure, policy infrastructure, boundary organizations, and new norms to flourish.As a senior fellow at FasterCures, chief commons officer at Sage Bionetworks, data commons expert and advocate John Wilbanks aims to advance the conversation about the term "Open Science" and its different facets. (Read more...)
The Open Economics Working Group would like to introduce the Open Economics Principles, a Statement on Openness of Economic Data and Code. A year and a half ago the Open Economics project began with a mission of becoming central point of reference and support for those interested in open economic data. In the process of identifying examples and ongoing barriers for opening up data and code for the economics profession, we saw the need to present a statement on the guiding principles of transparency and accountability in economics that would enable replication and scholarly debate as well as access to knowledge as a public good.
The Academic Senate of the University of California passed an Open Access Policy on July 24, 2013, ensuring that future research articles authored by faculty at all 10 campuses of UC will be made available to the public at no charge. The policy covers more than 8,000 UC faculty and as many as 40,000 publications a year. By granting a license to the University of California prior to any contractual arrangement with publishers, faculty members can now make their research widely and publicly available, re-use it for various purposes, or modify it for future research publications. Faculty on three campuses (UCLA, UCI and UCSF) will begin depositing articles in eScholarship on November 1, 2013. Progress on deposit implementation will be reviewed during the following year. Deposit of articles by faculty on the remaining campuses is expected to begin on November 1, 2014.
Publishers may soon compete with libraries. The business case for enticing users away from library-managed portals is simple, compelling, and growing. As funding agencies and universities enact Open Access (OA) mandates and publishers transition their journals from the site-license model to the Gold OA model, libraries will cease to be the spigots through which money streams from universities to publishers. In the Gold-OA world, the publishers' core business is developing relationships with scholars, not librarians. For publishers, it makes perfect sense to cater to scholars both as authors and readers. (...) Publishers, indexing services, journal aggregators, startups, some nonprofit organizations, and library-system vendors all have expertise to produce compelling post-OA services. However, publishers only need to protect their Gold OA income, and any new revenue streams are just icing on the cake. All others need a reasonable expectation of new revenue to develop new services. This sets the stage for a significant consolidation of the scholarly-communication industry into the hands of publishers.SciTechSociety.
The dispute amongst scholars and policy makers about which road to take to Open Access (gold or green) revolves to a great extend around the problem (or danger) of double dipping. It is widely acknowledged that publishers ought not to be allowed to charge twice for scientific publications, that is scholars and their public funders on the one hand and publicly funded libraries and readers on the other hand. On first glance this claim seems to be quite obvious as well as its solution appears to be trivial: when published open access a text has to be put online free of charge. Yet, that’s only part of the story.
The open access movement is forcing publishers to take down paywalls, making publicly funded research available to the public for free. But beyond that a more important development is pacing in the wings – that of open data.
Now that I can automatically import my publications from my ORCID profile and display them in this blog, I also want to visualize them.
Spreading and sharing valuable scientific knowledge generated as a result of years of experiments and research to the humanity at large is something that is laudable and appreciable (read more...)OMICS Publishing Group publishes more than 300 online journals on Medical, Clinical Life & environmental sciences, Engineering, Pharma and Management.
Most of the discussions of open access licenses haven't considered the exploitation of these licenses by for-profit publishers, probably because this niche opened only very recently, once open-access papers became widely available.
1. The embargo distinction between STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and AHSS (Arts, Humanities and Social Science) is arbitrary and unjustifiable: if there must be embargoes, let them be 6 months for all; 2. Set learned societies free! They can choose not to be open access if it would drain too much from their coffers. Their prestige (and the prestige of publishing with them even if that means not being returnable to research assessment exercises) should sustain them;Read the whole blog post on The Disorder of Things.
This course is a collaborative learning environment meant to introduce the idea of Open Science to young scientists, academics, and makers of all kinds. Open Science is a tricky thing to define, but we've designed this course to share what we know about it; working as a community to make this open resource better. Think of it as a layer on top of the way science is commonly done now. Just better.The course at PSPU starts August, 6th 2013. Sign up until August, 4th 2013.
Alice Meadows, head of society relations at John Wiley, talks with podcast host Stewart Wills about the challenges and opportunities for scholarly and professional societies in finding new value-adds in a competitive, Internet-driven environment — and how many of the “new” sources of relevance are rooted in things that have made societies central to their members’ professional lives for many years.Scholarly Kitchen. Podcast.
Open research can lead to new drugs tackling diseases that afflict the world's poor. But first, more scientists need to buy into contributing to something bigger than their careers
The Guardian.
Students vote to make their scholarly articles available for free to educators, policy makers and the general public. In a move to expand public access to academic research on education issues, doctoral students at the Stanford Graduate School of Education have voted in favor of an open access policy to make their scholarly articles available for free to scholars, educators, policymakers and the public worldwide.
Open science is not a new goal; scientific progress has always predicated on the free and open exchange of ideas. Read more....
The School of Open is offering its second round of facilitated courses! Starting today, you can sign up for 7 courses during a two week period; sign-up closes 4 August (Sunday) and courses start on or after 5 August (Monday). All courses are free to take and open to reuse under the CC BY-SA license.There is a cource called "Open Science: An Introduction" that might be interesting to some of you.
The UK funding councils have narrowed the scope of their proposed open access mandate for the post-2014 research excellence framework.TimesHigherEducation.