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.
A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that can amplify both movement and color, the baby’s face blinks crimson with each tiny heartbeat.The New York Times.
The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation to the leading professional association of scientists who study insects. But they found out the hard way that they were wrong.
The New York Times.
See also here (Nature).
Across Africa, academics and researchers face financial barriers that keep them from accessing the same knowledge their peers elsewhere in the world can afford.
Scalar is a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Scalar enables users to assemble media from multiple sources and juxtapose them with their own writing in a variety of ways, with minimal technical expertise required. More fundamentally, Scalar is a semantic web authoring tool that brings a considered balance between standardization and structural flexibility to all kinds of material. It includes a built-in reading interface as well as an API that enables Scalar content to be used to drive custom-designed applications. If you’re dealing with small to moderate amounts of structured content and need a lightweight platform that encourages improvisation with your data model, Scalar may be the right solution for you.
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.
Campbell went to explain, “The literature is published in many different scientific magazines, and if they are closed, it is impossible for any researcher to find them with ease. Since we need people from all disciplines and from several places working on climate change, it seems reasonable to make data open.”
No extra money is needed for Green OA self-archiving. It just requires a clear mandate (requirement) to self-archive, by depositing the author’s final, peer-reviewed draft in the author’s institutional repository immediately upon acceptance for publication. The deposit should be made OA immediately (or after an embargo period whose allowable length should be as short as possible).
Tied into the varying costs of journals is the number of articles that they reject. PLoS ONE (which charges authors $1,350) publishes 70% of submitted articles, whereas Physical Review Letters (a hybrid journal that has an optional open-access charge of $2,700) publishes fewer than 35%;Nature published just 8% in 2011.Nature.
So, harmonization is happening. But the development of seamless policies among funders needs to be the focus of advocacy. It will mean less author confusion and greater compliance. Authors will begin to understand the potential of truly open research and be inspired to devise further innovative practices. Then we can expect true disruption: a very different kind of scholarly communication, catalysed by good policy.
And it’s hard to imagine a position more consistent with OA than that of the Pirate Party, with its focus on “the sharing of knowledge, ideas and culture” (as stated in the manifesto) and its commitment to the provision of infrastructure for this. Academic OA and the Pirate Party are a match made in heaven; it’s an arena in which much has already been achieved, but in which a truly optimal system is yet to emerge.
Releasing open educational resources is not simply about putting learning and teaching material online; it involves making the material available in a genuinely open way. Creative Commons or similar licenses are used so that the creator of the resources can retain copyright, while others can copy, distribute, and make some uses of their work. OER can be looked upon as a process as well as a set of products. This is because educators need to rethink the way in which they create, use and distribute learning and teaching materials.
“Objections to the Creative Commons attribution licence are straw men raised by parties who want open access to be closed as possible, warns John Wilbanks.”
The licensing terms set by the publisher, Taylor & Francis Group, were scaring away potential authors, the editor who resigned, Damon Jaggars, associate university librarian for collections and services at Columbia University, told The Chronicle. The publisher did not respond to a request for comment.The Chronicle.
A vice-chancellor has argued that “crass implementation” of “the wonderful principle of open access” has led to universities “subsidising publishers’ businesses and not getting value for money from journals”.
Open Science. Moderne Kommunikationsmittel eröffnen neue Wege des Publizierens und Kooperierens. Verändert sich dadurch Wissenschaft? Wie sehen diese Wandlungsprozesse aus und was daran ist wirklich neu?In German.
Although the open access movement has been going strong for 10 years and has had good take-up in certain scientific disciplines, such as physics, the humanities currently lack the infrastructure and funding mechanisms needed to support the transition period triggered byRCUK’s (Research Councils UK) mandate.The Guardian Higher Education Network.
Science is built upon data collection, analysis, critique and reuse, yet the ordinary science-doing as imposed by research institutions requires secrecy, thus working against the maximisation of knowledge dissemination. Before one screams about paranoia, think of paywalls locking studies from access, publication of datasets as PDFs or even images.