Open Access News

... I’ve mentioned Open Access a few times in this blog in the past, for example in this post about the Open Studens initiative, also here and here in blog roundups, in this post about the Depot, in a post entitled Open Access - some pointers, and in a follow-up post on Open Access - more updates. So, it’s nice to welcome today as Open Access Day. ...

... I've decided to direct some attention to the issue of open access in nursing. ...

... Nursing research is also useless when not accessible, but timliness and particularity are less important [for biomedical research]. So, the researcher-to-researcher sharing that can come from open access and confer advantages in biomedicine is less relevant to nursing. Instead, open access relates to nursing mostly vis-a-vis three other avenues: (1) integrated self-care, (2) information access in the clinical milieu, and (3) education. ...

... [F]or the most part, nursing needs to be lead and is most comfortable when it has a institution impetous for change. The current model for this observation is Keeping Patients Safe. Rather than a grass-roots effort at improving conditions in individual hospitals, this is a top-down program from the Institute of Medicine (IOM).

So, what about open access? Open access publishing is currently flying under the radar in nursing. ...

The time is right for nursing leaders to make a push to create a culture of open access for nursing as well. ...

Today I attended an OA Day event in the [Queensland University of Technology] Library ...

First, we watched the “Voices of Open Access” video ... and the QUT Library Secretariat “Shout Out” for OA video.

We then had some presentations and discussions, moderated by Elizabeth Stark.

Peter Jerram, CEO of PLoS, gave a short introduction. ...

Dr Phil Bourne, Editor in Chief of PLoS Computational Biology, who was presenting from University of California San Diego, gave the keynote presentation. ...

As part of our Open Access Day celebration at Duke, we held a keynote and panel event on Tuesday, Oct. 14th featuring Duke faculty and a student talking about why open access is important to them and important to Duke.  About 50 staff and faculty members attended, and following is a brief summary of the very exciting talks we heard.

Prof. James Boyle of the Duke Law School and the board of Creative Commons began the afternoon with an entertaining and inspiring talk on why Open Access matters. ...

Boyle offered a vision for open access based on three stages. At “Open Access 1.0,” scientific research and information will be exposed to many more human eyeballs. At the stage of Open Access 2.0, computers will have access to a depth of scientific information that will permit text mining for new and serendipitous discovery. Finally, with Open Access 3.0 computers and humans will work together to create a map of knowledge within in a given field and amongst fields where relationships were previously not discoverable.

Law School Assistant Dean for Library Services Melanie Dunshee followed Boyle with some interesting information about Duke Law’s ten-year-old experiment with open access to legal scholarship. ...

Next up was Dr. Ricardo Pietrobon from the Medical School, where he chairs the group that is doing “Research on Research.”  His presentation really built on Boyle’s call by suggesting that we need to move beyond text mining and data mining (once we get there) to consider what he called “scientific archeology.”  Only at that point, when open access encourages not just access but replicability, accountability and transparency, will the promise of the Internet for scientific learning be fulfilled.

The climax of the afternoon, and what made the need for open access very real to our audience, was the remarks by Josh Sommer, a Duke student who was diagnosed with a rare form of brain tumor during his freshman year. ... Josh has co-founded the Chordoma Foundation and has himself become actively involved in research to understand and treat this disease.  His story of how the privileged access he has as a Duke student has helped significantly in his research is only part of the story.  He also tells of previously unknown connections between other forms of cancer research and the effort to treat chordoma that have been discovered using open access medical literature.  Finally, Josh talked about his young friend Justin who died from chordoma earlier this year; a young man who did not have the advantages that have given Josh the ability to fight his grim prognosis (see the link above for more on Justin’s short life).  As Josh puts it, there is no reason that the knowledge that could have saved Justin’s life is walled off behind access barriers. ...

On October 14, I attended the Open Access Day Web cast at Binghamton University Libraries. While we had a decent showing of librarians, I was disappointed by the lack of faculty and students. ...

The presentation started with videos of interviews of researchers, librarians, graduate students, and other interested parties talking about why Open Access is important and how Open Access impacts their ability to locate and access information that they need. ...

I found the Web cast worthwhile. If you missed it, the Web cast will be available online for people who missed [it] to view at their leisure. ...

When asked what students can do to promote open access, Sir Richard Roberts, a joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1993 for discovering split genes and RNA splicing said (paraphrasing) “One of your principle jobs while in college is to rebel. If you are going to have new ideas they are not going to come from the establishment”. Of course to be a rebel with a cause, you need to do something besides just rebel. ...