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The students in Basic Biotechnology at Michigan State University publish their papers in an OA course journal. In fact, Open Journal Systems is used for the entire course site, including syllabus, links to readings, etc. The course received a university award for its use of OJS. (Thanks to the Public Knowledge Project.) See also our past posts on OA class journals at San Jose State University and the University of British Columbia. A reader's perspective on improving OJS
Gavin Baker, How to improve OJS: a reader’s perspective, A Journal of Insignificant Inquiry, December 31, 2008.
OA metadata repository of Swedish academic publications
SwePub is a forthcoming OA harvester of "metadata for all Swedish scientific publications from the publication databases of all Higher Education institutions". One of the strategic aims is to "increase the share of Swedish scientific publications that is Open Access". (Thanks to Fabrizio Tinti.)
Investigating the usage of open archives
Fernanda Peset, et al., Indicadores de rendimiento para acciones de acceso abierto, presented at La proyección de los repositorios institucionales (December 10-12, 2008, Madrid); self-archived January 9, 2009. English abstract, lightly edited:
Study of the situation of the providers of information in order to evaluate the performance of the investments effected in initiatives [using] OAI-PMH. [S]tatistical information is presented on distribution of contents and the situation and growth of the projects from 2006, year in which we begin to compile the information, and compare[d] with reports of other places.
Tom Steinberg, Top 5 Internet Priorities for the Next Government (any next Government), mySociety blog, January 7, 2009. (Thanks to the Sunlight Foundation.)
More OA audio books from Open Culture
Open Culture added to its collection of free audio books on January 9.
Rick Kulkarni, Open-Access Medical Knowledge: Where Are We Currently and Where Should We Be Going?, Medscape Journal of Medicine, January 9, 2009. A video editorial. (Free registration required.)
... Most publishers of medical journals have stuck to a 400-year-old model of fee-based publication. Such fees are downright prohibitive to much of the world. Why is this tolerated by medicine and the general public? ... Dissertation on the OA impact advantage wins Emerald prize Doctoral thesis highly commended, News from DIS (the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University), January 9, 2009. (Thanks to Stevan Harnad.) Excerpt:
PS: Congratulations, Michael! Also see the published article based on the dissertation: Michael Norris, Charles Oppenheim, and Fytton Rowland, The citation advantage of open-access articles, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, July 9, 2008. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, neither the article nor the dissertation is yet OA. Update (1/13/09). Two articles based on this dissertation have now been self-archived:
Update (1/15/09). The dissertation itself has now been self-archived as well. STM briefing on university OA mandates STM has written a members-only briefing document on university OA mandates. Unless you're a member, it's all secret except for this blurb:
Fernanda Peset and Antonia Ferrer-Sapena, E-LIS : Central repository on Library and Information Science, presented at Online Information 2008 (London, December 2-4, 2008); self-archived January 8, 2008. Abstract:
E-LIS is an international open archive for the Library and Information Science fields, established in 2003. With over 8,600 documents as of November is an international open archive for the Library and Information Science fields, established in 2003. With over 8,600 documents as of November 2008, E-LIS is the world’s largest archive for LIS. Over half the documents in E-LIS are peer-reviewed. With support for 22 languages and a volunteer editorial team from over 40 countries, E-LIS is an outstanding example of global cooperation, which is reflected in one of the strengths of LIS. Over half the documents in E-LIS are peer-reviewed. With support for 22 languages and a volunteer editorial team from over 40 countries, E-LIS is an outstanding example of global cooperation, which is reflected in one of the strengths of E-LIS, the diversity of its content. OA and self-archiving in Quebec
Kumiko Vézina, Libre Accès à la recherche scientifique (Open Access) et dépôts institutionnels : contexte et enjeux, presentation to the Association pour l'avancement des sciences et des techniques de la documentation, section santé, September 19, 2008; self-archived January 8, 2009. English abstract:
This presentation defines Open Access and gives an overview of the academic (teaching faculty) perspective on open access publishing and self-archiving and what it all means in the real-world university (library) environment. Some strategies are mentioned that could help the self-archiving movement.The presentation includes data from a survey of professors in life sciences at 6 Quebec universities:
Book on scientific publishing in French
Joachim Schöpfel, ed., La publication scientifique: analyses et perspectives, published by Hermès, November 2008. (Thanks to Odile Contat.) Only a book description and table of contents is OA, at least so far. See especially these chapters:
Rick Johnson, Free (or Fee) to All?, Library Journal, December 23, 2008.
See also Johnson's longer piece on better models for digitization. More on J. Biomed. Sci.'s conversion to OA
Michael M. C. Lai, Journal of Biomedical Science, marking a new epoch: moving to open access in 2009, Journal of Biomedical Science, January 8, 2009. An editorial. See also the post on the BioMed Central blog.
See also our previous post on the Journal of Biomedical Science. Vittorio Klostermann, Die große Allianz gegen das Buch, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 8, 2009 (accessible only to subscribers). Klostermann, who founded the German publishing house, Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, objects to the new Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen (Alliance of German Science Organizations) and its plans for OA in Germany. His objections assume that the Allianz wants to abolish copyright, that a green OA mandate would undermine publisher revenues, that it would undermine author revenues (apparently thinking of books, not journal articles), and that it would undermine quality. Thanks to Klaus Graf for the alert and for his comments, which you can read in German or Google's English. PS: Also see our past posts on the Allianz and its commitment to OA. As far as I can tell, the Allianz still doesn't have a web site. The January issue of Physics World contains two letters to the editor under the title, Debating open access and arXiv. Neither letter is OA, at least so far, and PW doesn't even link to them from the TOC. But thanks to John Glen for blogging citations and summaries (1, 2):
Case study of journal economics
Heather Morrison, Molecular Biology of the Cell, or, Why Open Access by Article Processing Fee Sometimes Just Makes Sense, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, January 7, 2009.
Nature launches OA educational site
Nature Publishing Group, Nature Education launches free education website fit for Generation Y, press release, January 7, 2008.
Presentations, etc. from open science workshop
Materials from the Open Science workshop at the 2009 Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (Big Island of Hawai’i, January 5, 2009) are now available:
New OA journal of philosophy and economics
The Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics is a new OA journal published by graduate students at the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics of Erasmus University Rotterdam. The inaugural issue was released in autumn 2008. (Thanks to History of Economics Playground.)
Project Gutenberg year in review
Mike Cook, The 2008 Project Gutenberg Year In Review, Project Gutenberg News, January 7, 2009. Contents:
Brian Fitzgerald and Anthony Austin, eds., Legal Strategies for Streamlining Collaboration in an e-Research World, report, December 2008; self-archived January 7, 2008. At least two chapters are related to OA:
Chance reading of a TA warning against TA Andrew Maynard, Scientific knowledge, and the “pay to play” culture, 2020 Science, January 7, 2009. Excerpt:
A partnership of open standards and open source for geospatial research OGC and OSGeo Sign Memorandum of Understanding, a press release from the Open Geospatial Consortium and the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, January 7, 2009. Excerpt:
Boost for an open chemical identifier Rebecca Trager, Web chemistry progresses InChI by InChI, Chemistry World, January 6, 2009. Excerpt:
PS: See our past posts (1, 2) on the use of proprietary CAS Registry numbers for OA chemical research. DFG funding repository projects The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has launched a funding program on OA repositories and is now soliciting applications. The program description is a PDF, so I can't link to a machine translation. But you can read the summary from Informationsplattform Open Access in German or Google's English. Climate change makes the case for OA William Calvin, Climate Will Change Everything, Edge, January 7, 2009. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Excerpt:
Comment. We can wait until climate change forces us to change the way we do science, and then make more work OA and remove obstacles to new research. Or we can decide that we've already waited long enough and expand the scope of OA, now, with all deliberate speed, in order to save the chance that the impact of new research will be large enough, soon enough. I made an argument to this effect in my open letter to Obama and McCain last November:
UNC researchers talk about their libraries K.T.L. Vaughan, Bradley Hemminger, and Meredith Pulley, Scientists Comment on Their Libraries: Successes, Shortcomings, and Dreams for the Future, apparently a preprint. Self-archived January 7, 2009.
From the body of the paper:
Alienation of the author from his work
Björn Brembs, Closed access is when you can't read your own article, bjoern.brembs.blog, January 7, 2009. (Thanks to Dorothea Salo.)
... First, we get invited to submit articles to the Journal of Neurogenetics for a special issue for the retirement of my thesis advisor Martin Heisenberg. Then so many people want to write in his honor, that it totally blows their budget so they ask for a US$60 page charge. And when the articles finally appear, I don't even get access to my own article! Can someone help me out here? ... New portal of OA journals from Chile
eQuipu is a portal of OA journals from Chile published with Open Journal Systems, launched last year. All of the 13 current journals were previously OA, but it looks like they're moving to OJS as their publishing platform. See also the project's blog. (Thanks to Public Knowledge Project.)
More on OA to facilitate reproducible research Victoria Stodden, The Legal Framework for Reproducible Scientific Research: Licensing and Copyright, Computing in Science & Engineering, January 2009. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) The journal version of this article is not OA, but I'll soon be able post a link to an OA postprint.
PS: If you can't tell from the abstract, Stodden's standard for reproducible research depends on OA. Update (1/9/08). An OA edition of an earlier version of the article is now online. Digital libraries and bibliographic tools
Duncan Hull, et al., Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web, PLoS Computational Biology, October 31, 2008. Abstract:
Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described as “thought in cold storage,” and unfortunately many digital libraries can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of digital libraries for the computational biologist, including PubMed, IEEE Xplore, the ACM digital library, ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Citeseer, arXiv, DBLP, and Google Scholar. We illustrate the current process of using these libraries with a typical workflow, and highlight problems with managing data and metadata using URIs. We then examine a range of new applications such as Zotero, Mendeley, Mekentosj Papers, MyNCBI, CiteULike, Connotea, and HubMed that exploit the Web to make these digital libraries more personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places. We conclude with how these applications may begin to help achieve a digital defrost, and discuss some of the issues that will help or hinder this in terms of making libraries on the Web warmer places in the future, becoming resources that are considerably more useful to both humans and machines. This afternoon Open Access News passed the milestone of 16,000 posts. Thanks for reading what we're writing. Publishing lobby appeals to Obama transition team to stop NIH policy Allan Adler for the Association of American Publishers and Martin Frank for the DC Principles Coalition have released their December 22 letter to the Obama transition team, asking it to oppose the NIH policy and support the Conyers bill. Excerpt:
The letter is also signed by 36 publishers and accompanied by a petition from 400 scientists. Excerpt from the petition:
Comments
New issue of DSpace newsletter
A new issue of NewSpace, the DSpace newsletter, is available. Contents:
DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons have been working closely together over the last month to kick off plans to develop DuraSpace. DuraSpace is a potential service that would provide trusted and reliable asset management in the cloud. The organizations received a joint planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to explore the concept over the next six months. Both teams have been meeting jointly with service providers, members of our community, and other interested parties that are managing cultural heritage material to analyze the need, business model, technical feasability and use cases. There will be a joint web cast on DuraSpace in the early part of next year. For more information on ongoing efforts and projects please visit the collaboration's wiki. Presentations from American Astronomical Society meeting
Abstracts from the American Astronomical Society meeting (Long Beach, Calif., January 4-8, 2009) are online from the Astronomy Abstract Service. At least two mention open data:
Rank of authors in OA journals
Elaine A. Nowick, Academic Rank of Authors Publishing in Open Access Journals, Agricultural Information Worldwide 1(2), 2008. Not even an abstract is OA, but Gerard McKiernan has posted one:
When deciding where to publish their research results, faculty take into consideration factors such as the prestige and readership of journals. The weight a journal article will carry is particularly a concern for pre-tenured faculty members. Previous research has indicated that some faculty members may have some concerns about publishing in Open Access journals because of a perceived lack of rigor and reputation of Open Access titles. In this study, the academic rank of authors publishing in Open Access and commercial scholarly journals was compared. Most authors in both Open Access and for-fee journals were full professors. There was no indication that pre-tenured faculty avoided Open Access titles. In fact, there was a slight but significant trend for pre-tenured faculty to publish in Open Access journals.
Repositories Support Project, RSP and the JISC Repository Projects Call, Repositories Support Project, January 7, 2009.
New OA journal of game studies
The International Journal of Role-Playing is a new peer-reviewed OA journal. The inaugural issue was released on December 30. (Thanks to Frans Mäyrä.)
Heather Joseph defends the NIH policy against the Conyers bill, continued Heather Joseph, the Executive Director or SPARC, has released her December 1 letter to Howard Berman, answering five of his follow-up questions and supplementing her testimony at the September 2008 hearing on OA, the NIH policy, and the Conyers bill ("Fair Copyright in Research Works Act"). Berman is the last chairman of the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property, which held the hearing. John Conyers, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has since abolished the subcommittee. Comment. At the time of the hearing, Berman was said to have some doubts about the bill, which would overturn the NIH policy and forbid other federal agencies from adopting similar policies. While his subcommittee is now gone, shifting power to Conyers, the bill's sponsor, Berman remains an influential member of the Judiciary Committee. It's a good sign that he asked for these five follow-up questions and a good sign that he now has these five strong answers. Update. Berman also had follow-up questions for Martin Frank, one of the publisher representatives who opposes the NIH policy and supports the Conyers bill. Frank has also released his December 1 answers to Berman. Last October, Frank submitted another written supplement to his oral testimony, and I commented on it at the time. Labels: Hot Unlocking the precursors to knowledge John Wilbanks, Beliefs, Knowledge, Articles, Databases, Common Knowledge, January 5, 2009. Excerpt:
Bush FDA reduces access to drug trial information Jonathan Kimmelman, Charles Weijer, and Eric M. Meslin, Helsinki discords: FDA, ethics, and international drug trials, The Lancet, January 3, 2009. Accessible to subscribers only. John Daly has blogged a summary, bringing out the OA connection:
Dorothea Salo wrote on Monday:
Paul Ginsparg replied by email (posted with permission):
Update. Here's a follow-up from arXiv's Simeon Warner (posted with permission):
Update (1/8/09). Also see Dorothea's response. Labels: Hot Compliance audit for the Wellcome Trust's OA mandate The Wellcome Trust is taking steps to increase the compliance rate with its OA mandate. From the January issue of its Grantholders Newsletter:
Labels: Hot
Presentations from Australian PKP workshop The presentations from Open Access Publishing: A two-day Public Knowledge Project Workshop (Sydney, December 4-5, 2008) are now online. (Thanks to PKP.) See also our past post on the workshop. New OA journal of education in French
Travail et formation en éducation is a new OA journal published by the Unité Mixte de Recherche - Apprentissage, Didactique, Evaluation, Formation. See the journal's about page or the January 5 announcement.
2 new CKAN packages of library data
The Open Knowledge Foundation has added two library-related datasets to its Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network; see yesterday's announcement. The packages:
New version of Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography
Charles Bailey has released Version 74 of his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. See this blog post for information on what's been updated.
Cell transplantation journal converts to OA
Cell Transplantation - The Regenerative Medicine Journal converted to OA, according to an announcement today by the journal's editors. (Neither the journal's site at the publisher nor at IngentaConnect reflects the fact yet.) From the announcement:
Top 10 academic library stories of 2008 Andrew Albanese, Top Ten Academic Library Stories of 2008, Library Journal Academic Newswire, January 6, 2009. Seven of the 10 have an OA connection have been covered here in OAN, some briefly, some extensively.
More on peer review at PLoS ONE In my SOAN article last week, Open access in 2008, I mischaracterized the nature of peer review at PLoS ONE. I'm happy to post this correction from the managing editor, Peter Binfield. I'll also run it as an erratum in the next issue of SOAN.
The Frontiers Research Foundation has launched an "open access research publishing community" called Friends of Frontiers. From today's announcement:
From the FoF site:
Also see the FoF page on Current Problems in Research Publishing:
Comment. In the fall of 2007, the Frontiers Research Foundation launched an OA journal, Frontiers in Neuroscience. At the time it was definitely OA and today it's less clear. All the articles I tested in the current issue are gratis OA. But the journal charges subscriptions, which cost €149 for individuals and €199 for institutions. If the full text is OA and the subscriptions are only for a print edition, then the subscription page doesn't say so. For more background on the journal and its OA policy at the time of launch, see my blog post from October 2007. Can IRs duplicate the functionality of arXiv? Stevan Harnad, A Physicist's Challenge to Duplicate Arxiv's Functionality Over Distributed Institutional Repositories, Open Access Archivangelism, January 5, 2009.
PS: Also see Dorothea Salo's comments on one of Stevan's earlier posts on SWORD.
Peter Sefton, Potential projects: #2 Integrating ICE with the Open Journal Systems, ptsefton, January 6, 2009. Excerpt:
PS: Also see our past posts on ICE.
NSF advisory committee recommends OA At its December 16-17 meeting, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Advisory Committee on Cyberinfrastructure (ACCI) adopted this statement, drafted in its previous meeting:
(Thanks to Tony Hey.) Comment. The NSF should be the next agency after the NIH to adopt an OA mandate. This important recommendation carries special weight because it comes from the ACCI. Kudos to all the ACCI members. Also see our past posts on the NSF's cyberinfrastructure policy deliberations. Labels: Hot In-Tech, the Austrian OA publisher, has launched two new peer-reviewed OA journals:
In both cases, the inaugural issues are still forthcoming. In-Tech first announced the journals about two months ago, when it launched its new web site intechweg.org. (Thanks to Aleksandar Lazinica.) Obama's Solicitor General nominee and OA U.S. President-elect Barack Obama today named Elena Kagan as his nominee for Solicitor General. See the announcement. Kagan currently serves as dean of Harvard Law School. She presided over the adoption of the school's OA mandate last year, the first such policy for a law school. See e.g. her positive comments on the policy here. Kagan also presided over the successful efforts to lure Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig back to Harvard. See e.g. her warm comments on Lessig and CC from this December 2008 event. Comment. The Solicitor General represents the federal government in the Supreme Court, files amicus briefs in cases at the appellate level, and decides whether to appeal cases found adversely to the government. Having a friend of OA as Solicitor General is a welcome development, especially if publishers follow through on their threat to file suit against the NIH policy or a future public access policy. See also our past posts on Obama's nominees for Secretary of Energy, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration administrator, and President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology co-chairs.
Doctor Spurt, Proposal: The Journal of Null Results, Effortless Incitement, January 5, 2009.
Comment. For examples, see the OA Journal of Negative Results in BioMedicine, Journal of Negative Results (ecology and evolutionary biology), and Journal of Interesting Negative Results in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.
International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists, How accessible is your agricultural information?, AgInfo News from IAALD, January 2, 2009.
The UK Data Archive released a suite of Web pages on data sharing and management on December 23, 2008. (Thanks to DataShare Blog.) From the announcement:
Forthcoming OA journal of insect science
The International Journal of Insect Science is a forthcoming peer-reviewed OA journal published by Libertas Academica. See the January 5, 2009 announcement. Article processing charges are $1395, subject to discount or waiver.
Francis Collins rumored to be Obama's pick for NIH Director The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Francis S. Collins May Be in Line to Head the NIH. Excerpt:
Comment. This would be a superb appointment. Collins has the respect of researchers in the field and he's a strong supporter of OA. He's the person most responsible for OA to the results of the human genome project, as well as a defender of PubChem against the ACS. As he told the Baltimore Sun (April 7, 2005) when Celera made its own genome data OA:
See our past posts on Collins' OA-related work. OA on Obama's Open for Questions Open for Questions is a feature of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's transition Web site. Open for Questions is a Digg-style, user-submitted press conference, where users submit questions and vote them up or down, and the most popular questions in each round are answered by the transition team. The current round was opened December 29. A question about OA is presently ranked in the top 40 Science & Technology questions:
Comment. The confusion of OA journals and archives in the question is regrettable. However, interested citizens can still create an account and vote up the question. It's a bit late in this round, but it seems that questions carried over from the previous round; if it's not answered this time, the votes may count for the next round. There's no deep link to the question, but you can find it in the Science & Technology category or by searching for "open access". See also our past posts on Obama CTO, a similar site. Another legal impediment to book scanning Peter Hirtle, When is a published work not a publication? Library Law Blog, January 4, 2009. Excerpt:
eMJA, the online edition of the TA Medical Journal of Australia, is retreating from OA. From the announcement:
From Martin B. Van Der Weyden's editorial in the January 2009 issue:
Thanks to David More for the alert and this comment:
PS: SHERPA has no info on whether MJA or eMJA has a green policy on OA archiving. The MJA instructions for authors page suggests not: "All authors are asked to transfer copyright to AMPCo before publication. Accepted manuscripts may not be published elsewhere, in whole or in part, without written permission from the Australasian Medical Publishing Company (AMPCo) Ltd." The Journal of Science Communication has adopted the CC-NC-ND license, starting with the December 2008 issue. Previously, the journal was OA but didn't use an open license. (Thanks to Alessandro Delfanti.) More on harvesting between central and institutional repositories Stevan Harnad, Comparing Physicists' Central and Institutional Self-archiving Practices at Southampton, Open Access Archivangelism, January 5, 2009.
Update (1/6/08). Also see Dorothea Salo's comments:
Catherine Saez, Project Underway To Convert High Energy Physics Literature To Open Access, Intellectual Property Watch, January 5, 2009. Excerpt:
Update (1/7/09). Also see Stefan Krempl's overview of SCOAP3 in the January 6 Heise Online, in German or Google's English. Update on publishers who allow OA archiving of published versions SHERPA has made two changes to its list of publishers "allow[ing] authors to deposit the publisher version or PDF of their article in an Institutional Repository, without fee or an embargo."
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