We’re calling it the Open Access button. Every paywall met is an isolated incident; it’s time we capture those individual moments of injustice and frustration to turn them into positive change.Here is a new project that wants to track potential readers that were rejected access to research papers published behind paywalls.
Not surprisingly, as researchers adjusted their behaviour, so did publishers. The top journals did not increase space for the increased demand. Instead, they spawned ever more low-ranking offspring to reinforce the ratchet and keep the demand high.An Essay by Björn Brembs.
In the largest open-source video-data sharing project of its kind, behavioral researchers, digital library scientists, and computer scientists are undertaking the creation of Databrary, a web-based video-data library sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).The Databrary project includes not only a web-based repository for open sharing and preservation of video data and associated metadata, but also a free, open source video-coding software, that enables coding, exploring, and analyzing video data. The data management system supports data-sharing within labs, among collaborators, and in the Databrary repository. Read more here.
Springer’s new policy says that authors may make the post-refereed versions of their articles available immediately on their personal websites but must wait a year before making them available in repositories. This embargo is nothing new with respect to subject repositories — Springer’s previous policy required a year-long embargo for subject repositories. But it is new for institutional repositories — Springer used to allow articles to appear immediately there. This change to a year-long embargo for institutional repositories makes self-archiving harder and more confusing and thus less likely to be attempted. So that’s bad. And in addition to being a bad change, it’s arguably a nonsensical change.
Open access to validated molecular components is crucial to the field’s success, says Drew Endy, a synthetic biologist at Stanford University in California. Endy says that synthetic biologists are similar to software engineers, with the genetic code as their programming language. The software industry has favoured open-source approaches and copyright protections, because inventions often come faster than patents can be acquired. The same holds for synthetic biology (...).Nature.
Near the corner of Tillary and Jay Streets in Brooklyn, Michael Heimbinder stood near a blue mailbox, head down, poking at his smartphone. A graph appeared: a single line plotting ambient carbon monoxide exposure in the neighborhood. Minutes later, he ran over to an idling Honda Pilot and held a small, black sensor to its tailpipe. On his phone, carbon monoxide levels, predictably, jumped off the chart. A woman opened the car door and said, “Can I help you out?”
The New York Times.
The British Academy today publishes a series of 8 newly commissioned articles reflecting on the challenges and opportunities for humanities and social sciences open access publishing practices.You can read them here.
Those publishers are not our partners, they’re our exploiters. We don’t need to negotiate with them; we don’t even need to fight them. We just need to walk away.
With the spread of Open Access in the scientific community, now universities, institutions and sometimes even governments introduce special policies to standardize the process of sharing and publishing research results in an open and free-of-charge way. Over the past few years, dozens of universities have introduced OA policies and have opened special funds for publishing in this model. Oregon State University did the same thing recently.As the first university in the Pacific Northwest and one of the first land grant universities in the USA, Oregon State University has adopted an open access policy requiring faculty members to make their scholarly articles available for free through a digital repository.
From time to time, it's important to pause the bureaucratic debate about open access and recognise how stupid scientific publishing is.The Guardian.
The 2014 Global Land Project Open Science Meeting will synthesize and discuss the role of the land system as a platform for human-environment interactions, connecting local land use decisions to global impacts and responses.
The US Supreme Court ruling on gene patents is a welcome boost to efforts to increase the free exchange of scientific information, says Colin Macilwain.
"Alternative academic" Eric Kansa starting working on Open Context more than a decade ago to promote access to archaeological research data that rarely saw the light of day. Last week Kansa, a researcher with the University at California, Berkeley School of Information, was honored for his efforts to make more of that data public. The Alamedan caught up with Kansa just as he was getting on a plane to Italy for a dig.The Alamedan.
Most researchers acknowledge an intrinsic hierarchy in the scholarly journals (“journal rank”) that they submit their work to, and adjust not only their submission but also their reading strategies accordingly. On the other hand, much has been written about the negative effects of institutionalizing journal rank as an impact measure. So far, contributions to the debate concerning the limitations of journal rank as a scientific impact assessment tool have either lacked data, or relied on only a few studies. In this review, we present the most recent and pertinent data on the consequences of our current scholarly communication system with respect to various measures of scientific quality (such as utility/citations, methodological soundness, expert ratings or retractions). These data corroborate previous hypotheses: using journal rank as an assessment tool is bad scientific practice. Moreover, the data lead us to argue that any journal rank (not only the currently-favored Impact Factor) would have this negative impact. Therefore, we suggest that abandoning journals altogether, in favor of a library-based scholarly communication system, will ultimately be necessary. This new system will use modern information technology to vastly improve the filter, sort and discovery functions of the current journal system.Read the full article by Björn Brembs, Katherine Button and Marcus Munafò online. It's hot off the press.
As a consequence and to respond to the scientists’ needs, some journals also involves themselves by providing new peer review models.
Open access is a utopian pipe dream, says Richard Hoyle.TimesHigherEducation.
The PMC (PubMed Central) Open Access Subset is a relatively small part of the total collection of articles in PMC. Articles in the PMC Open Access Subset are still protected by copyright, but are made available under a Creative Commons or similar license that generally allows more liberal redistribution and reuse than a traditional copyrighted work. Please refer to the license statement in each article for specific terms of use. The license terms are not identical for all articles in this subset
In the way that smart phones have permeated our culture, citizen science seems equally ubiquitous, appearing at science conferences, museums, conservation organizations, government agencies, journal articles, web sites and yes, in blogs. Citizen science covers a diverse collection of activities in which groups undertake investigations alongside or under the supervision of scientists.PLOS
“Scientists created the web — but the open web still hasn’t transformed scientific practice to the same extent we’ve seen in other areas like media, education and business,” Mozilla’s Mark Surman argues.Techcrunch.
Science ministers from the G8 group of the world’s richest countries have jointly endorsed the need to increase access to publicly-funded research.