Thursday 19 January 2012

Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items)

Connotea: Bookmarks matching tag oa.new (50 items)


SOPA and the AAP: Dumb and Dumber? Publishers seek to crush open access in US Congress

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 07:33 AM PST

 
SOPA and the AAP: Dumb and Dumber? Publishers seek to crush open access in US Congress
UK Council of Research Repositories, (09 Jan 2012)
"Hopefully you all had a chance to read the AAP's Christmas present "Publishers Applaud Research Works Act, Bipartisan Legislation To End Government Mandates on Private-Sector Scholarly Publishing"; and personally I'm thankful I avoid reading it to the new year, lest I have choked on my turkey with bitter disgust....Every one of you needs to make sure that you bring this potential bill and the moves by publishers to tighten their stranglehold on the intellectual publication market to the attention of the movers and shakers in your own organisation....Frankly it's time we stopped letting the publishers have their own ways in this arena! ..."

New bill would put taxpayer-funded science behind pay walls | Seattle/LocalHealthGuide

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 07:28 AM PST

 
New bill would put taxpayer-funded science behind pay walls | Seattle/LocalHealthGuide
mylocalhealthguide.com
"Right now, if you want to read the published results of the biomedical research that your own tax dollars paid for, all you have to do is visit the digital archive of the National Institutes of Health. There you’ll find thousands of articles on the latest discoveries in medicine and disease, all free of charge. A new bill in Congress wants to make you pay for that, thank you very much....This isn’t the first effort by publishers to push Congress to roll back the NIH’s public access policy, which was enacted in 2008 and applauded by doctors, patients, librarians, teachers and students...."

Holy Cow, Peer Review

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 07:12 AM PST

 
Holy Cow, Peer Review
The Parachute, (11 Jan 2012)
"Looking at it as dispassionately as possible, one could conclude that peer review is the only remaining significant raison d’être of formal scientific publishing in journals. Imagine that scientists, collectively, decided that sharing results were of paramount importance (a truism), but peer-review isn't considered important any longer. If you imagine that, then the whole publishing edifice would suddenly look very different. More like ArXiv (where, by the way, I found this interesting article). A recent report estimates that the “total revenues for the scientific, technical and medical publishing market are estimated to rise by 15.8% over the next three years – from $26bn in 2011 to just over $30bn in 2014.” If we assume an annual output of 1 million articles, this revenue – which, for practical purposes, equals the cost to science of access to research publications – equates to a cost of $3000 per article, and even if the output is 1.5 million articles, it’s still $2000 per article. So the real question is: is peer review worth that much? ...[G]iven its costs, can we really not deal with a lack of this quality assurance in the light of the benefits of universal and inexpensive Open Access that ArXiv-oid platforms could bring? Are we not dealing with it right now? We all know that almost all articles eventually meet their accepting journal editor, and it’s difficult to imagine that every article we find with a literature web search is of sufficient ‘quality’ (whatever that means anyway) for our purposes. And yes, we will encounter ‘rubbish’ articles. Don’t we now, with nigh universal peer review? But we deal with outliers in data all the time, and it is my conviction that we can deal with outliers in the literature just as well...."

Synthetic biology and the rise of the 'spider-goats'

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 07:10 AM PST

 
Synthetic biology and the rise of the 'spider-goats'
m.guardian.co.uk
"As with any great revolutions, there are those who stand to make a killing after the doors are kicked open. At the other end of the scale from the open-source, open-access utopia of BioBricks, synthetic biology commercial enterprises are emerging. The tech may be new, but the fields are not. With synthetic biology only a few years old, the most intense areas of commercialised synthetic biology are in fuel and drug production...."

WA Legislature considering K-12 OER Bill

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 07:03 AM PST

 
WA Legislature considering K-12 OER Bill
Cable Green
Open Educational Resources, (17 Jan 2012)
"The Washington State Legislature is considering an OER bill. Video of today's testimony...."

Copyright for Librarians (CFL) reaches millions more | EIFL

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 07:02 AM PST

 
Copyright for Librarians (CFL) reaches millions more | EIFL
www.eifl.net
"Copyright law directly affects library services providing access to learning resources, scientific and research information. Librarians and their professional organisations play key roles in shaping national and international copyright policy and in protecting and promoting access to knowledge. “Copyright for Librarians” is an online open curriculum on copyright law developed by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, in conjunction with EIFL. It aims to inform librarians about copyright law in general, and in particular those aspects of copyright law that most affect libraries, especially those in developing and transition countries. Nine modules, at five different levels, can be used as the basis for a self-taught course, as traditional classroom learning or as distance-learning...."

Campus OA Policies: Interviews from the Berlin 9 Conference

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 06:56 AM PST

Five New Paradigms for Science and Academia and an Introduction to DataOne on Vimeo

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 06:53 AM PST

SWORD: Facilitating Deposit Scenarios

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 06:49 AM PST

 
SWORD: Facilitating Deposit Scenarios
Stuart Lewis, Pablo de Castro, and Richard Jones
D-Lib Magazine 18 (1/2), (Feb 2012)
Abstract: The SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol was designed to facilitate the interoperable deposit of resources into systems such as repositories. The use of an interoperable standard eases the burden of developing clients to deposit such resources. This paper examines nine different deposit use cases, and provides case studies and examples of each use case to demonstrate the wide range of repository deposit scenarios. The use cases range from the deposit of scholarly communication outputs from a publisher to a repository and the automatic deposit of data from laboratory equipment, to inter-repository transfer and collaborative authoring workflows.

ARROW: Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works Towards Europeana

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 06:47 AM PST

 
ARROW: Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works Towards Europeana
Cinzia Caroli et al.
D-Lib Magazine 18 (1/2), (Feb 2012)
Abstract: The European Union promotes programs of "mass digitization" in order to make the cultural and scientific resources in Europe accessible to all, and to preserve them for future generations. The Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works Towards Europeana (ARROW) project began in September 2008 with the aim of facilitating the management of rights in digitization projects. Partial funding was provided by the European Commission under the programme "ICT Policy Support". The outcome of the project was an automated system for distributed management of rights information that meets the needs of digital libraries and is easily adaptable to other contexts of use. With the approval of the "ARROW Plus" project in April 2011, the system will be further improved, extending the number of covered countries, and integrating rights information about images contained in books.

The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles - a Framework for Article Evaluation

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 06:45 AM PST

 
The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles - a Framework for Article Evaluation
David Shotton
D-Lib Magazine 18 (1/2), (Feb 2012)
Abstract: I propose five factors — peer review, open access, enriched content, available datasets and machine-readable metadata — as the Five Stars of Online Journal Articles, a constellation of five independent criteria within a multi-dimensional publishing universe against which online journal articles can be evaluated, to see how well they match up with current visions for enhanced research communications. Achievement along each of these publishing axes can vary, analogous to the different stars within the constellation shining with varying luminosities. I suggest a five-point scale for each, by which a journal article can be evaluated, and provide diagrammatic representations for such evaluations. While the criteria adopted for these scales are somewhat arbitrary, and while the rating of a particular article on each axis may involve elements of subjective judgment, these Five Stars of Online Journal Articles provide a conceptual framework by which to judge the degree to which any article achieves or falls short of the ideal, which should be useful to authors, editors and publishers. I exemplify such evaluations using my own recent publications of relevance to semantic publishing.

OPEN ACCESS: IMPACT FOR RESEARCHERS, UNIVERSITIES AND SOCIETY

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 06:43 AM PST

 
OPEN ACCESS: IMPACT FOR RESEARCHERS, UNIVERSITIES AND SOCIETY
www.rluk.ac.uk
"Open Access brings benefits for a variety of constituencies. Researchers gain from the increased usage and impact of their work. Their institutions benefit from the aggregated usage and impact of their researchers and the increased presence that Open Access brings. Society benefits from better technology transfer, better di!usion of know-how and a better-informed populace. Open Access helps research to be carried out more e"ciently by reducing duplication and blind alley research, by enabling researchers to find what they need more quickly and without cost and by helping researchers develop and di!use the use of open standards. It makes possible better peer review and other methods of upholding academic rigour because researchers can easily see and judge the work of their peers and can access data for re-analysis and independent confirmation of findings. It also encourages collaborative endeavours by making research visible to new communities, including the general population...."

Supreme Court Upholds Law That Pulled Foreign Works Back Under Copyright - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 06:37 AM PST

 
Supreme Court Upholds Law That Pulled Foreign Works Back Under Copyright - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education
chronicle.com
"A professor lost his long legal fight to keep thousands of foreign musical scores, books, and other copyrighted works in the public domain when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him on Wednesday in a case that will affect scholars and artists around the country. The scholar is Lawrence Golan, a music professor and conductor at the University of Denver. He argued that the U.S. Congress did not have the legal authority to remove works from the public domain. It did so in 1994, when the Congress changed U.S. copyright law to conform with an international copyright agreement. The new law reapplied copyright to millions of works that had long been free for anyone to use without permission. The Supreme Court heard the case, Golan v. Holder, No. 10-545, last October, and in a 6-to-2 ruling on Wednesday, the justices upheld the changes in U.S. copyright law. "Neither the Copyright and Patent Clause nor the First Amendment, we hold, makes the public domain, in any and all cases, a territory that works may never exit," declared the majority opinion, which was written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg...."

Farewell, obscure objects of desire

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 05:51 AM PST

 
Farewell, obscure objects of desire
www.timeshighereducation.co.uk
"Open-access publishing models will end once and for all the outdated and expensive production of little-read monographs that "exist for the purposes of existing". The prediction was made in a debate titled Open Access: The New Future of Academic Publishing? at the British Academy, where William St Clair, senior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, said that the print-only monograph was now little more than "a union card to apply for jobs in academia - if there are any". Mr St Clair, who is also co-founder and chairman of Open Book Publishers, said the typical university press monograph "is printed in an edition of 500 copies, much the same number as in the 18th century. They are priced at about £60 to £100. "Of these, about 300 are sold to rich universities in the US, where they may attract a handful of readers each. On any reasonable estimate of the cost of producing this knowledge [which may have required five years' research], every act of reading must cost - what can we say? - £20,000." Yet Mr St Clair suggested that open-access publishing had eliminated this absurdity...."
Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.books oa.new on Thu Jan 19 2012 at 13:51 UTC | info | related

Who Owns Government-Funded Research Papers? - Miller-McCune

Posted: 19 Jan 2012 04:47 AM PST

 
Who Owns Government-Funded Research Papers? - Miller-McCune
www.miller-mccune.com
"The Research Works Act would prevent publicly funded research from automatically being available to the public for free. Private publishers back the bill, while open-access partisans are appalled....Some publishers never stopped fighting the [NIH] policy — a 2009 precursor to the Research Works Act never made it out of committee — and it has awkwardly divided the membership of the Association of American Publishers....[A]cademic research is not all that unique from the open-access movement in general. The same principle underlies why the White House should publish visitor records, or why cities should release traffic data, or why weather satellite information should go online. Not only does this information belong to the public; it becomes more valuable when the public has access to it, and, oftentimes, the public can actually add value to it...."

AAAS News Release - "AAAS Does Not Endorse the Research Works Act"

Posted: 18 Jan 2012 05:32 PM PST

 
AAAS News Release - "AAAS Does Not Endorse the Research Works Act"
www.aaas.org
"The nonprofit American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, today reaffirmed its support for the current public access policy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). Contrary to recent news reports, AAAS does not endorse the Research Works Act....“We believe the current NIH public access policy provides an important mechanism for ensuring that the public has access to biomedical research findings,” said AAAS Chief Executive Officer Alan I. Leshner, executive publisher of Science. “At the same time, the NIH policy provides appropriate support for the intellectual property rights of publishers who have invested much in science communication.” ..."

Nature Publishing Group and Digital Science joint statement on Research Works Act

Posted: 18 Jan 2012 10:48 AM PST

 
Nature Publishing Group and Digital Science joint statement on Research Works Act
www.nature.com
"Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and Digital Science note the concern amongst the scientific and library communities about the Research Works Act (H.R. 3699), currently under consideration by the U.S. federal government, and wish to clarify our position. NPG and Digital Science do not support the Research Works Act....Dr Annette Thomas (then Managing Director of NPG) was on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) working group that introduced the NIH Public Access Policy, and NPG has actively supported self-archiving since 2005....NPG's January 2011 position statement on open access remains representative of our views. NPG's business development efforts are very much focused on open access as one of a range of sustainable publishing models...."

Cracks Form in Anti-Open Access Push

Posted: 18 Jan 2012 08:27 AM PST

 
Cracks Form in Anti-Open Access Push
The Scientist, (18 Jan 2012)
"Academic publishers are publically disagreeing with their commercial counterparts over their association’s support of a bill being considered in the US Congress that would limit open access to research findings funded with tax payer dollars. It was not so surprising when last week the Association of American Publishers (AAP) came out in favor of the Research Works Act, which would roll back the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy mandating that all published research funded by the federal science agency be submitted to the publically accessible digital archive PubMed Central. But since announcing its stance, the trade group, which includes in its ranks scientific journal publishers Elsevier, Sage, and other corporate members, has been seeing its non-profit members—university presses and the like—voice their disagreement. The MIT Press was the first to contravene the association’s position on the legislation...."

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