Internationally, the World Intellectual Property Organisation was looking at a range of new copyright exceptions and limitations. Nationally, an increasing number of EU countries were recognising the need for reforms while testing new ideas in this field. But it was suggested that a common European solution was needed to avoid fragmentation and to seize benefits for a European Digital Single Market.University World News.
Episciences Project to launch series of community-run, open-access journals. Mathematicians plan to launch a series of free open-access journals that will host their peer-reviewed articles on the preprint server arXiv. The project was publicly revealed yesterday in a blog post by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medal winner and mathematician at the University of Cambridge, UK.Nature News.
Transparency is essential for trust and credibility in the research community, and true openness brings great opportunities for academia. The internet facilitates the free flow of information and knowledge, and permits new forms of communication both for researchers and for the general public. Already, today’s children can listen freely on the internet to university courses taught by world-leading scientists, and everybody has the best encyclopaedia ever written (Wikipedia) at their fingertips. These are real game changers. Opening up the research literature is the next logical step.Blogpost by David Shotton and Heinrich Hartmann.
BIBLIOBLOG DER HOCHSCHULE HANNOVER (in German).
Guest post by evolutionary ecologist Ted Hart in the Dynamic Ecology Blog.
As a scientist your job is to bring new knowledge into the world. Hiding it behind a journal’s paywall is unacceptableThe Guardian. Notes and Theories.
The world of ed-tech is ramping up another notch, and getting a lot more open in the process: educational publishing giant Elsevieris in advanced talks to buy Mendeley, a London/New York-based provider of a platform for academics to share research and collaborate with each other via a social network. TechCrunch understands from sources close to the companies that the deal is underway and should close this quarter, possibly by the end of February — all things being equal — and will be in the region of $100 million.techcrunch.
Here are some tips for those of you who want to start a ScienceOnline satellite, as well as how to participate in San Diego.
DISCOVER Magazine is partnering with Instructables and SciStarter, an online citizen science community, to solve real problems facing researchers. The Citizen Science Contest is your opportunity to help millions of regular people contribute to scientific discovery. Prizes include a Celestron telescope, DISCOVER subscriptions, and time-lapse cameras! But hurry, the deadline is January 21, 2013.
In our talk we tried to outline what’s wrong with the academic system of doing science and discuss various initiatives which try to improve the situation. We focused on how to make the publishing system more open and transparent (Open Science) and create completely new ways of collaborating and sharing scientific knowledge (so called “Science 2.0”).Michał Kotowski and Piotr Migdał.
After an introduction by Cameron Neylon (PLoS) and Martin Rasmussen (Copernicus Publications), participants will discuss several statements relating to open access of publications, in both small groups and in a plenary session. The aim of this KNAW open access dialog is to raise awareness of open access by discussing controversial statements. In this way, advantages and disadvantages of the various publication models as well as do’s and don’ts will be considered.Register here.
We need to prod scholars to be more receptive to scholarship that takes place outside of the traditional closed publishing system. One major rub with open systems of scholarly communication is that peer review essentially comes after the act of publication, which strikes many traditional academics as odd.Wired. Opinion.
Internet activist killed himself a month before going on trial for what family calls ‘an alleged crime that had no victims’.
The Guardian. See also Cory Doctorow’s post on BoingBoig.
Open access publishing has been proposed as one possible solution to the serials crisis | the rapidly growing subscription prices in scholarly journal publishing. However, open access publishing can present economic pitfalls as well, such as excessive publication charges. We discuss the decision that an author faces when choosing to submit to an open access journal. We develop an interactive tool to help authors compare among alternative open access venues and thereby get the most for their publication fees.
The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee will next week hold its first evidence session in a new short inquiry into the Government’s open access policy and its implementation by the Research Councils UK (RCUK) (the partnership of the UK’s seven research councils).
Idea #1: defend a real choice in terms of open data licences (“pro-choice” approach) Ideal #2: the General Interest Data, G.I.D. Idea #3: Contribution peering: I contribute/I receive Idea #4: Contributive pricing on use (GET>POST)
OKF Blog.
The Register & Read program was designed to make access to JSTOR’s treasure trove of journal articles at least a little more open. While access to JSTOR’s full content is reserved for those with ties to libraries that purchase subscriptions, the Register & Read program lets anyone, university-affiliated or not, read — but not download or copy — up to three articles every two weeks, for free.
The new data release policy is part of the deliverables detailed in the Digital Management Strategy, which the Office of Management and Budget released in May. It calls for a new policy for open data, content and web API standards within six months. The policy is now two months late.Federal News Radio.
What is really needed, though, is a thorough analysis of optimum embargo periods by discipline and/or a plan for monitoring the effectiveness of different embargo periods in different disciplines.Historians revolt against RCUK’s embargo periods and the CC-BY licences which would not fit to their way research is done, they say.
