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New OA journals of pharmacy science
Vikas Anand Saharan points out several new OA journals of pharmacy science:
New OA journal of Flaubert criticism
Flaubert. Revue critique et génétique is a new OA journal published in French by the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes on the Revues.org platform. See the January 30 announcement.
Flat World Knowledge starts public beta
David Wiley, Flat World Knowledge Public Beta!, Iterating Toward Openness, January 29, 2009.
Stephane Couture, Pour l’accès libre à la connaissance scientifique, Alternatives, January 29, 2009. Read it in the original French or Google's English.
The end of an early OA medical journal Ivan Oransky, RIP: The Medscape Journal of Medicine, an open access pioneer, stops publishing new papers, Scientific American, January 31, 2009. Excerpt:
PS: See our past posts on MJM and George Lundberg. German regional law recognizes role of OA in a university's mission The new Brandenburg Higher Education Act, adopted last month, refers to the fostering of OA as a forward-looking part of a university's mission. Read it in German or Google's English. (Thanks to Eric Steinhauer via Klaus Graf.) Dutch agreement on digitizing orphan works FOBID (Netherlands Library Forum) and VOI©E (Vereniging van Organisaties die Intellectueel eigendom Collectief Exploiteren, or Netherlands Association of Organisations for the Collective Management of Intellectual Property Rights) have issued a joint declaration on the digitization of orphan works. From yesterday's press release:
From yesterday's declaration:
Comment. This agreement does not directly grant rightsholder consent to OA. But it does grant consent for digitization and restricted online access, and it streamlines the process of obtaining consent for OA. For orphan works still under copyright, these are significant steps forward.
Presentations and notes from National Academies meeting on data
I attended and liveblogged the public sessions of the National Academies' Board on Research Data and Information meeting (Washington, DC, January 29-30, 2009). Many of the presentations are also online.
Views of SCOAP3 from the U of Texas Bavi Selk, Physicists push for free online journal access, Daily Texan, January 30, 2009. Excerpt:
An argument for irreversible libre OA licenses Klaus Graf, Embargo-Zeitschriften: Kein Open Access, Archivalia, January 30, 2009. An argument for libre OA licenses. Because these licenses are irreversible, they prevent publishers from adding access restrictions to an article retroactively. Read it in German or Google's English. EDINA launches an OA repository for geospatial data ShareGeo launched, a press release from EDINA, January 28, 2009. Excerpt:
PS: ShareGeo is the successor to EDINA's GRADE (Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction). See our past posts on GRADE and EDINA's other geospatial projects. Wikileaks will create OA for 10,000 CRS reports Clay Shirky reprints a message from the Wikileaks announcement list:
Comment. This is excellent news. It's not the first project to provide retroactive OA to CRS reports, but it's probably the largest. I don't say "retroactive and unauthorized OA" because CRS reports are uncopyrightable from birth, and no permission or authority is needed. All that is needed is to get one's hands on a copy. For details on the other CRS OA projects, and background on the quality and access barriers to CRS reports, see our past posts. Overview of OA, especially in Australia Arthur Sale, Beyond Open Source, a slide presentation at Free as in Freedom (Hobart, Tasmania, January 20, 2009). (Thanks to Dorothea Salo.)
ALA site on the Google settlement The American Library Association (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy has launched Google Books Settlement --"a small informational site about the Google Books settlement." (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) It contains the settlement documents and a blog to track new developments and commentary. ALA panel on the Google settlement Norman Oder, At Panel on Google Book Settlement, Support, Criticism, Contentiousness, Library Journal, January 29, 2009. Excerpt:
Call for OA to publicly-funded research in Canada
Jonathan Vianou, L'infrastructure technologique devra attendre, Le Devoir, January 29, 2009. Read it in the original French or Google's English. (Thanks to Olivier Charbonneau.) Le Devoir is a daily newspaper in Montréal.
... Another disappointment: that the government invests close to three billion dollars in research of all kinds, but it does not implement a technology infrastructure allowing free access to results that will result. ... Cairn and Revues.org collaborate
Partenariat Cairn/Revues.org, announcement, undated but apparently recent. Read it in the original French or Google's English. A partnership to cross-publish between the two sites, similar the agreement between Revues.org and Persée which we covered recently. (Thanks to Marlène Delhaye.)
More on OA to bibliographic data
Norman Oder, As ‡biblios.net Emerges, a New Opportunity for Catalogers (and Competition with OCLC)?, Library Journal, January 27, 2009.
Norman Oder, OCLC Defends Records Policy, Faces Questions, Suggestions, and Criticisms, Library Journal, January 27, 2009. Richard Wallis, Sharing Usage Data – Dave Pattern & Patrick Murray-John, Talking With Talis, January 22, 2009; podcast.
Notes from academic publishing conference Janneke Adema, Highlights from APE 2009 – Preconference Day, Open Reflections, January 27, 2009. Notes on Academic Publishing in Europe (Berlin, January 19-21, 2009). Consultation on access management for repositories
JISC has launched a consultation on "scenarios in which access to material in repositories needs to be managed" (i.e. restricted). See background here, or see the consultation site, open until the end of February.
HathiTrust items to get WorldCat entries
HathiTrust and OCLC to work together to enhance discovery of digital collections, press release, January 26, 2009.
Gideon Burton, The Coming Change in Humanities Publishing (7): The Online Archive, Gideon Burton's Blog, January 28, 2009.
John Wonderlich, Recovery.gov: an Important Moment, The Sunlight Foundation Blog, January 28, 2009.
Comment. One wonders how widely this thinking applies. Lawmakers have recognized public access as vital for government spending data -- to what extent does the same thinking carry to other types of public sector information, or to publicly-funded scientific information? Collective action and open science
Michael Nielsen, The Logic of Collective Action, Michael Nielsen, January 28, 2009.
New issue of Library and Information Research
A new issue of Library and Information Research is now available. (Thanks to Jose Sanchez Lugo.) Relevant to OA:
New OA journal of political philosophy
Dissensus is a new OA journal of political philosophy published in French by the Université de Liège. The first issue was released in December 2008. (Thanks to Michel Bauwens.)
Dorothea Salo, Light at the end of the tunnel, Caveat Lector, January 25, 2009. Notes on ALCTS Acquisition Managers and Vendor Discussion Group (Denver, January 25, 2009).
Launch of a new collection of OA video lectures Academic Earth is a new collection of OA "video lectures from the world's top scholars". (Thanks to Richard Ludlow.) From the about page:
The videos are OA. Registered users may create their own collection of favorites, but even unregistered users may grade the lectures. (From the FAQ: "Lectures start out with a grade of B. From there the grade is an average of the grades that our users have given it. Course grades are based on the grades given to the lectures in that course. Highly rated content will show up first in browse results and in the Top Rated sections in our homepage.") Update (2/2/09). More from Jeffrey Young at Wired Campus:
Two approaches to OA for public domain art I saw these two developments within two days of one another and thought they should be blogged together.
The Winter 2008 issue of the INASP Newsletter is now online. (There are no deep links to individual articles.) From Sara Gwynn, Launch of PERii!:
From Lucy Browse, PERii: Information Delivery:
From Peter Burnett, PERii: Library Development:
From Julie Walker, Publishing Support at INASP:
Visualizing lines of research impact The Eigenfactor Project and Moritz Stefaner have produced some stunning visualizations of Eigenfactor data. (Thanks to Emma Marris.) Comment. Eigenfactor is an OA measurement of research impact. For background, see our past posts on it. Because Eigenfactor data are OA, they are free for mashing up or analysis by other projects as well. It's easy to be inspired by the beauty and intelligibility of these images. But we should also be inspired by their suggestion of what can be done with open data. Guide for developing a scholarly communication program The ARL has launched a new web site to help libraries develop a scholarly communication program, January 29, 2009. Excerpt:
The site was created by Kris Fowler, Gail Persily, and Jim Stemper. GreyNet buys rights to deposit papers in its OA repository GreyNet secures open access for its former collections in the GL-Series, a press release from GreyNet, January 26, 2009. Excerpt:
Comment. GreyNet started making its conference proceedings OA through its repository in May 2008. I applaud its determination to complete the collection retroactively, even if it means buying permission from a publisher. Note to other conference organizers: This is a reason to self-archive your proceedings as you go, or at least to retain the right to self-archive them without a fee. More on the EU's sui generis database right John Wilbanks, Data, Copyrights, And Slogans, Part II, Common Knowledge, January 26, 2009. Excerpt:
PS: See John's first post in this series (1/24/09) or the excerpt blogged here. Stephanie Taylor, Repositories - The Future, a five-slide presentation at Repository Services Day (Bath, January 15, 2009). Peter Brantley, A fire on the plain, Peter Brantley's thoughts and speculations, January 26, 2009. Excerpt:
Two mechanisms for treating knowledge as a public good James Love, Knowledge as a Public Good: Two Mechanisms, a presentation at the Fórum Mundial Ciência E Democracia (Belém, Parã, Brazil, January 26, 2009). The two mechanisms are medical innovation prizes and WTO agreements. Kunstgeschichte is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from DiPP. For more detail, see the announcement (January 2009). The journal posts submissions first as discussion papers, and after six months of peer review accepts some of them as journal articles. The first wave of 10 discussion papers is now online. Notifying authors when they are cited Elsevier has launched CiteAlert, a free service notifying authors when one of their papers is cited by an Elsevier journal. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) The service only covers citations to articles published since 2005 in journals indexed by Scopus. Comments
Update. In my list of players in the final bullet, I should have mentioned ISI Web of Knowledge, which has offered citation alerts since 1965. (Thanks to Eugene Garfield.) I knew about ISI, of course, but I didn't know (or forgot) about its email citation alerts. They come very close to the service I was describing, if only they covered citations published in any journal (not just ISI-indexed journals) and were available without charge to any user (not just those at ISI-subscribing institutions). Update. Also see Stevan Harnad's comments on this post. [They are now also on his blog.] Excerpt:
A brief response: Of course I agree with Stevan that authors should self-archive, and that the service I was describing would be easier to build if 100% of peer-reviewed research articles were on deposit (with accurate metadata) in OA repositories. And I imagine that Stevan agrees with my point that, until we reach that goal, the service will be thwarted by the difficulty of harvesting citations published in TA journals. My question was not whether to launch this service instead of working toward 100% OA, but who could launch this service, or make a significant start on it, before we reach 100% OA. Update (1/29/09). From Michael Kurtz on the AmSci OA Forum:
Update (1/31/09). Christian Zimmermann of RePEc tells me that "RePEc has been notifying authors about found citations for several years already. Our CitEc project is analyzing bibliographies of all documents it can grasp in OA, plus bibliographies that some publishers provide. Interestingly, Elsevier explicitly prohibits RePEc from analyzing its articles." Also see the CitEc FAQ. From the CitEc home page:
Notes on Free as in Freedom workshop
Brianna Laugher, Free as in Freedom miniconf recap + slides, All The Modern Things, January 26, 2009. Notes on Free as in Freedom (Hobart, January 20, 2009).
Richard Poynder interviews Tom Hill of Libertas Academica Richard Poynder, The Open Access Interviews: Libertas Academica, Open and Shut? January 28, 2009. Excerpt:
Eduardo Martínez, The world’s first free, open access astronomical observatory officially opened, Innovations Report, January 27, 2009. Excerpt:
PS: If I understand it, the Montegancedo observatory provides open access to the equipment as well as --or because-- it provides open access to its data.
Leslie Carr, Repositories vs Learning Object Repositories, RepositoryMan, January 27, 2009.
The UN Office of Legal Affairs launched new OA research tools on January 23, 2009. (Thanks to Marlène Delhaye.)
Interview with OKF's Rufus Pollock
Jed Sundwall, Interview with Rufus Pollock of the Open Knowledge Foundation, NetSquared, January 22, 2009.
... [M]ost science people don't give out the data. They give out the research results, i.e., the summary of the data. There's huge incentive to do that: "A," it's actually secrecy, you don't want to give out your data because you can keep using it, and "B," it's much harder to check whether you've did some weird stuff with the stats to get your nice results if your data isn't actually available there, right? So there are large incentives to not put it out there ...
Roddy MacLeod, I want to be completely honest with you about ticTOCs, News from ticTOCs, January 27, 2009. Discusses feedback on the OA indexing and current awareness system ticTOCs, including which features are under development (and which aren't).
Alexey Maslov, et al., Cooperation or Control? Web 2.0 and the Digital Library, Journal of Digital Information, 2009. (Thanks to Fabrizio Tinti.) Abstract:
The Web 2.0 trend has placed a renewed emphasis on interoperability and cooperation between systems and people. The digital libraries community is familiar with interoperability through technologies like OAI-PMH, but is disconnected from the general Web 2.0 community. This disconnect prevents the digital library from taking advantage of the rich network of data, services and interfaces offered by that community. This paper presents a case study of a collection within the Texas A&M Repository that was improved by adopting the principles of cooperation embodied by the term Web 2.0. Cancer journal converts to OA with BMC
Hereditary Cancer in Clinical Practice has converted to OA with BioMed Central. The article-processing charge is £850/US$1175/€900, subject to discounts and waivers. Authors retain copyright and articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
New OA legal education project launches
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, Legal Education Commons Launches with Open Access to 700,000 Court Decisions, press release, January 26, 2009.
See also our past post announcing the project.
Joel Garreau, Smithsonian Click-n-Drags Itself Forward, Washington Post, January 26, 2009. (Thanks to techPresident.)
See also Peter's recent post on the Smithsonian's new chief. Update (Peter). Also see Dan Cohen's notes on the same meeting.
Mirosław Garbacz, et al., Krajowe czasopisma Open Access, presented at Komputerowe wspomaganie badań naukowych (Polanica Zdrój, Poland, October 22-24, 2008); self-archived January 25, 2009. English abstract:
This paper elaborates on basic definitions of Open Access (OA) and principles concerning a journal publication in this module. The paper presents the origins of so called Open Access idea, putting a great emphasis on its role in Poland. The report includes the analysis of OA journal home market based on data from the DOAJ service and WWW publishers’ pages. A great emphasis was put on the status of OA journal editors, the availability of journals, the cost of the article publication and the issues connected with the copyrights.
Hélène Bosc, Open access to the scientific literature: a peer commons open to the public, presented at Copyright Regulation in Europe – An Enabling or Disabling Factor for Science Communication (Berlin, November 14-15, 2008); self-archived January 19, 2009. (Thanks to Fabrizio Tinti.) Abstract:
Ninety percent of research worldwide is publicly funded, hence the results of these research should be made publicly accessible online. Research publications, a common good, created by researchers for researchers, need to be freely accessible to all. Immediate "open access" can be provided through author self-archiving in the growing number of institutional repositories (IRs) (1100) created in recent years. But these IRs currently contain only about 15% of global research output today and are not filling rapidly and reliably enough. Self-archiving mandates by funders and institutions are accordingly needed. Arthur Sale has shown that if deposit mandated, IRs achieve 100% self-archiving within 2 years. The number of mandates is steadily increasing worldwide, particularly from research funders. In 2008, the library association SPART (together with Creative Commons) called on universities, in particular to adopt IR deposit mandates. In Australia, September 2008, at the Brisbane Conference on Open Access, academics and politicians called for the adoption of both funder and institutional mandates, stressing especially the benefits to industrial R&D applications and progress from the open online sharing of access to research results. Open online access to research is creating a distributed "cognitive commons" that endows the human mind with a new power to accelerate research progress at the speed of thought (Dror and Harnad). New discussion list on OA in India Indian Open Access Forum is a new discussion list devoted to achieving OA in India, now open for new subscribers. New OA journal of oral microbiology The Journal of Oral Microbiology is a new peer-reviewed OA journal from Co-Action Publishing. For more detail, see today's press release or Ingar Olsen's editorial in the inaugural issue. From the editorial:
AccessEcon is a new OA portal for the field of economics, launched January 1, 2009. (Thanks to Mike Carroll.) From the home page:
From the mission statement:
From the page of services and costs:
Also see the co-founders' undated article (apparently a preprint), providing more of the background and rationale. Excerpt:
Labels: Hot
Michael Nielsen, Doing science online, Michael Nielsen, January 26, 2009; presented at Quantum Information Processing 2009 (Santa Fe, January 12-16, 2009).
E-Science Talking Points now under a CC license The E-Science Talking Points for ARL Deans and Directors from October 2008, which cover OA and open data in Point 8, now carry a CC-BY-NC-SA license. If you weren't already spreading them around, start now. Comparing LOC on Flickr and German Archives on Wikimedia Commons
Noam Cohen, Historical Photos in Web Archives Gain Vivid New Lives, New York Times, January 18, 2009.
Jeanne Kramer-Smyth, German Federal Archives, Crowdsourcing & the Wikimedia Commons, Spellbound Blog, January 26, 2009. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)
OA to archival material vs. contractual restrictions
Peter Hirtle, Recent News on Open Access to Archives, LibraryLaw Blog, January 26, 2009. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.)
See also our past post on the Max Planck Institute recommendations. Comparison of biological wikis
Andrew Su has posted a spreadsheet comparing various wikis in biology and related fields, including topical focus, number of recent edits and number of recent editors. See also the related FriendFeed discussion. (Thanks to Michael Nielsen.)
Dutch funder supports 12 OA-related projects SURFshare has funded 12 projects for the online dissemination of knowledge:
Wheeler Declaration now in Polish The Wheeler Declaration on open universities has been translated into Polish. OA to 56 year run of Portuguese science journal Biblioteca Digital Camões has provided OA to the full run (1887-1943) of Revista Lusitana. Read the details in Portuguese or Google's English. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) This is at least gratis OA. I can't find any licensing information on the scanned articles. OA for UK oil paintings and Arts Council films Leigh Holmwood, BBC to put nation's oil paintings online, The Guardian, January 28, 2009. Excerpt:
William New, Inside Views: The Last Defence Of The IP System: An Interview With Jamie Boyle, Intellectual Property Watch, January 28, 2009. Read the whole interview; Boyle makes great good sense. I've had to limit this excerpt to the parts with the strongest OA connection:
Update (2/4/09). Boyle has given another interview to Powell's Books and elaborates his position on OA:
Free university launches, building on OERs
The University of the People is a forthcoming university that plans to offer tuition-free classes. UoP will begin enrolling students in April 2009, will offer degrees and plans to seek accreditation. See coverage by the New York Times or Wired Campus. (Thanks to Ellen Marie Murphy.) From the NYT story:
Cato Institute meeting on open government data A video and podcast of the presentations at the Cato Institute meeting, Just Give Us the Data! Prospects for Putting Government Information to Revolutionary New Uses (Washington DC, December 10, 2008), are now online. (Thanks to Jonathan Gray.) New storage features for EPrints
David Tarrant, EPrints gets Cloud Storage Support, EPrints News, January 23, 2009.
MediaCommons re-opened on January 20. See also our past posts on MediaCommons; from this past description: ... At its core, MediaCommons will be a social networking site where academics, students, and other interested members of the public can write and critically converse about a mediated world, in a mediated environment. ...At the same time, MediaCommons will be a full-fledged electronic press dedicated to the development of born-digital scholarship ... Study of social media in science
BioInformatics, LLC, The Brave New World of Scientific Publishing, report, November 2008. From the description:
The report itself is not OA, but a description, table of contents, and methodology are, along with this executive summary and topline findings.
Emilie Doolittle, Foothill-De Anza receives award for online texts, Palo Alto Online, January 20, 2009.
See also our past posts on CCCOER. Persée and Revues.org collaborate
See the January 22 announcement in the original French or Google's English. Persée, which provides access to digitized backfiles, and Revues.org, which hosts recent issues, will link to each other for issues of the same journal, and will offer full-text searching of both sites. Journals currently included:
On the Public Knowledge Project
G. W. Brian Owen and Kevin Stranack, The Public Knowledge Project and the Simon Fraser University Library: A partnership in open source and open access, Serials Librarian, July 2008; self-archived January 23, 2009. Abstract:
The Public Knowledge Project is an ongoing collaboration between academics, librarians, publishers, editors, and software developers, working together to build alternatives in scholarly publishing. The project has developed a suite of open source software that significantly reduces the time and expense required for producing academic journals and conferences, and facilitates making research results freely available through open access. This article examines the history of the project, provides an overview of its open source software, discusses the growing community participating in the project, and considers its future directions. More on the Conyers bill to overturn the NIH policy John Willinsky, The Publisher's Pushback against NIH's Public Access and Scholarly Publishing Sustainability, PLoS Biology, January 27, 2009. Excerpt:
PS: Hear, hear. See my article from October 2008, analyzing the Conyers bill in detail and showing the false assumptions in the rhetoric of the publishing lobby in support of it. Also see my point by point rebuttal to the STM briefing document. PubMed flags articles that are OA from journal or PubMed Central Annette M. Nahin, Free Article Indicators on PubMed Summary Display, NLM Technical Bulletin, January 26, 2009. Excerpt:
Comments
Labels: Hot More on OA from the Smithsonian Wayne Clough, the current secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, is already leagues ahead of his predecessor, Lawrence Small, on access issues as well as ethics issues. See Brett Zongker's story today from the Associate Press:
Comments
January edition of repository rankings The January 2009 edition of the Ranking Web of World Repositories is now online. See today's announcement in plain text or Stevan Harnad's edition enhanced with links. From the latter:
Jeffrey Young, Physicists Set Plan in Motion to Change Publishing System, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2009. Excerpt:
Major new report on the economic implications of OA John Houghton and eight co-authors, Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models: Exploring the costs and benefits, January 2009. A major (256 pp.) report to JISC. From the press release:
From the summary on the landing page:
From the section on comparing costs and benefits (pp. 211f) in the body of the report:
From the conclusions and recommendations (pp. 231f):
PS: Also see our past posts on John Houghton's research on the economic impact of OA. Update (2/6/09). For interactive what-if analysis, see the online model which makes a small subset of the the EI-ASPM Project cost-benefit modelling available to those interested in further exploring results and wanting to explore national, sectoral or institutional costs and benefits. It runs as an executable application within MS Excel, by simply clicking on the file after downloading. Each of the model elements is presented as a single screen worksheet. Copies of the model can be saved locally to record results and each of the worksheet models can be printed as a single page. Simply enter your preferred values into the Variables column of the Parameters Table and the results will be recalculated automatically. You can TAB between the active cells. Update (2/13/09). For a response from publishers, see the joint statement from the Publishers Association, the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, and the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers, February 13, 2009. Labels: Hot
Richard Poynder's Basement Interviews at Bloomsbury Academic Richard Poynder's Basement Interviews "with leaders and thinkers from the growing number of free and open initiatives" should now have a higher profile and reach more readers. A new page collecting links to the interviews, and a preface introducing them, has been posted at the site of Bloomsbury Academic, the OA imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. (Disclosure: I'm the subject of one of the interviews.) From his preface:
Open SA! is a recently-launched project by SA Rocks and the African Commons Project. (Thanks to Tectonic.) From the announcement:
OpenSA! launches in Johannesburg today with a pilot project to make South African heritage more accessible for remixing and re-publishing by online creators. In collaboration with SA Rocks and the African Commons Project, OpenSA! is collecting, tagging and managing donations from people who are willing to make their material freely available online. ... LOC to study distribution of bibliographic data
Library of Congress Announces Study of Bibliographic Record Publication, press release, January 23, 2009. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
Richard Wallis, Interview with Josh Ferraro of biblios.net, Talking with Talis, January 23, 2009. A podcast.
See also our past post on biblios.net. Progress report on OA in Indonesia L. T. Handoko, A New Approach for Scientific Data Dissemination in Developing Countries: A Case of Indonesia, Earth, Moon, and Planets, January 14, 2009. Only an abstract and short preview are free online, at least so far.
PS: Does anyone know what "ARSIP" stands for in this context? Is it the old US military acronym for "Accuracy, Reliability, Supportability Improvement Program" or is it something more data-specific? Update. Stian Håklev, who once lived in Indonesia, tells me that arsip is Indonesian for archive. That explains why they chose that acronym but not what the acronym stands for. (Thanks, Stian.) Anyone have the missing piece of the puzzle --or access to full text? Update (1/27/09). Stian Håklev has solved the rest of the puzzle:
Update (3/8/09). An OA edition of the paper is now available from arXiv. Jennifer A. Flexman, Open access to biomedical engineering publications, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, August 25, 2008. Only this abstract is free online, at least so far.
Advantages of converting to OA and electronic-only Back in June 2008 we learned that Computational Linguistics would convert to OA with the first issue in 2009. Here are the editor's reflections on the conversion, in the last issue of 2008: Robert Dale, What’s the Future for Computational Linguistics? Computational Linguistics, December 2008. An editorial. (Thanks to the Alex Project.) Excerpt:
Digesting some recent literature on scholarly information behavior Carole L. Palmer, Lauren C. Teffeau, and Carrie M. Pirmann, Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development, OCLC Research, January 2009. (Thanks to the JISC Information Environment Team.) Excerpt:
John Wilbanks, Data, Copyrights, And Slogans, Oh My, Common Knowledge, January 24, 2009. Excerpt:
If you recall (1, 2), the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (ESPRC) is the only one of the seven Research Councils UK which hasn't already adopted an OA mandate. Back in 2006, when the other councils were adopting or announcing theirs, the ESPRC said it would wait until 2008. The new policy isn't public yet but over the weekend we got the first public clue. The ESPRC updated a key paragraph on its OA policy page. Old paragraph:
New paragraph:
Labels: Hot
Dulcinea is a recently-launched database of the self-archiving and copyright policies of Spanish journals. Named for the Quixote character (by comparison to SHERPA's RoMEO), the beta service currently lists 249 journals. (Thanks to Universo Abierto.)
On the signifiance of wiki knowledge projects
Larry Sanger, Why wiki knowledge projects are so fascinating to so many, Citizendium Blog, January 23, 2009.
Inderscience offers a hybrid OA option
On January 24, Inderscience Publishers launched an OA option for its journals. (Thanks to Jim Till.) Key points:
Thesis finds 16% of LIS journals are OA
Sebastian K. Boell, A Scientometric Method to Analyze Scientific Journals as Exemplified by the Area of Information Science, thesis, Saarland University, 2007; self-archived January 23, 2009. Abstract:
Rufus Pollock, Open Economics: Recent Progress, Open Knowledge Foundation Blog, January 23, 2009.
Australia asks for comments on OA to PSI Australia's Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy has issued a consultation paper asking for public input on, among other topics, OA to public sector information. Background and how to comment: Industry and other stakeholders are invited to provide input to and comments on the specific topics raised below. Please forward your responses to DEFutureDirections@dbcde.gov.au by Wednesday 11 February 2009, clearly indicating any material that is commercial-in-confidence. The Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy will collate and edit input for the Digital Economy Future Directions paper before publishing it in the first half of 2009. From the introduction to the issue, see especially: ... There is considerable interest in increasing access to publicly-funded cultural, educational and scientific collections. In some instances, publicly-funded institutions have already made their material available on open access terms. For example, in 2008, the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney became the first museum in the world to release publicly-held historical photographs on the photo-sharing platform Flickr under a ‘no known copyright’ identifier. Geotags are added to create an interactive map documenting the position of the photographic content. The Museum is also releasing its ‘Photo of the Day’ online under a Creative Commons license. Similarly, in January 2008, the NSW State Library released 100 images of historical Australian ‘firsts’ on Flickr, also under a ‘no known copyright’ identifier. In the educational space, the University of Southern Queensland’s OpenCourseWare program provides access to free and open educational resources across several disciplines for students and teachers worldwide. ... The questions:
Comment. The paper's overview of OA to PSI is worth reading and generally favorable. It's especially promising to include "publicly-funded cultural, educational and scientific collections" in the discussion alongside government data. Australians shouldn't miss this opportunity to weigh in. See also our previous post about the government's blog on the issue.
Speak up on dropping the Ingelfinger rule David Linden, Chief Editor at the Journal of Neurophysiology, is soliciting opinions on whether to consider submissions which have already circulated as preprints (i.e. whether to drop the journal's use of the Ingelfinger rule). Thanks to DrugMonkey for the alert and for reprinting Linden's letter and survey. Excerpt:
Comment. It's time to retire the dinosaur Ingelfinger rule, and Linden's argument for doing so is beautifully done. Until the rule is publicly dropped, many researchers will hesitate to make their preprints OA through preprint servers or repositories, fearing that it would disqualify them from publishing the same manuscripts later in a journal. Please take a moment to fill out Linden's survey question and send it in. Law journal editor calls for OA to law journals Benjamin J. Keele, Open access to student-edited law journals, Student Lawyer, February 2009. Keele is a third-year student at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, and editor in chief of the Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies. Excerpt:
Another example of free editions stimulating sales of the same content Adam Frucci, Monty Python Puts Free Videos Online, Sells 23,000% More DVDs, Gizmodo, January 23, 2009. Excerpt:
PS: Another in a series with this footnote: It's not about research literature, but how far does it transfer? Presentations on OA in Germany The presentations from the HBZ symposium, The Open Access Landscape in Germany (a session within the Berlin 6 meeting, Düsseldorf, November 11-13, 2008), are now online. Bayh-Dole-style tech transfer laws threaten open science in developing countries David Dickson, Time to rethink intellectual property laws? SciDev.Net, January 23, 2009. An editorial. Excerpt:
PS: See our past posts on the new tech transfer laws in India and South Africa, inspired by the US Bayh-Dole Act. Wikipedia may tighten restrictions on user contributions At the same time that the Encyclopedia Britannica is inviting user contributions, Wikipedia is tightening restrictions. For details, see Noam Cohen's article in Friday's New York Times, Wikipedia May Restrict Public’s Ability to Change Entries. Excerpt:
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