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A legally remixable, open-source documentary Open Source Cinema has released its first open-source documentary, RiP: A Remix Manifesto. From the blurb:
Kaltura, whose open-source technology helps power Open Source Cinema, calls RiP "the first legally remixable documentary about copyright and remix culture...." No surprise, viewers haven't wasted any time in remixing it. Building consensus for the MIT policy Hal Abelson is the leading architect and entrepreneur behind the new OA mandate at MIT. Here's an article he wrote late last year, showing the process of persuasion at work. (Thanks to Jennifer Papin-Ramcharan.) Remember that this process of persuasion eventually yielded a unanimous faculty vote. Open Access Publishing: The Future of Scholarly Journal Publishing, MIT Faculty Newsletter, Nov/Dec 2008. Excerpt:
MIT opens access to its research articles, CBC News, March 20, 2009. Excerpt:
On-demand digitization from OSTI
Tim Byrne, What’s in the OSTI Legacy Collection?, OSTIblog, March 20, 2009.
See also our past posts on OSTI. 10-year review of the Astrophysics Data System
Michael J. Kurtz, et al., The Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) Decennial Report, white paper submitted to the National Research Council Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey, self-archived March 18, 2009. Abstract:
Eight years after the ADS first appeared the last decadal survey wrote: "NASA's initiative for the Astrophysics Data System has vastly increased the accessibility of the scientific literature for astronomers. NASA deserves credit for this valuable initiative and is urged to continue it." Here we summarize some of the changes concerning the ADS which have occurred in the past ten years, and we describe the current status of the ADS. We then point out two areas where the ADS is building an improved capability which could benefit from a policy statement of support in the ASTRO2010 report. These are: The Semantic Interlinking of Astronomy Observations and Datasets and The Indexing of the Full Text of Astronomy Research Publications.See also our past posts on the ADS. Publishers collaborating with Scribd
Jason Kincaid, Major Book Publishers Start Turning To Scribd, TechCrunch, March 17, 2009. (Thanks to Michel Bauwens.)
Data-sharing advocate named Obama's health IT coordinator
HHS Names David Blumenthal As National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, press release, March 20, 2009.
Comment. What's the OA connection? In 2002, Blumenthal was co-author of a Journal of the American Medical Association paper titled Data Withholding in Academic Genetics, studying the data-sharing behavior of geneticists, followed by a Science column, The Selfish Gene: Data Sharing and Withholding in Academic Genetics. From the latter: A scientific world completely free of data withholding is probably unachievable and, indeed, may be undesirable. Some types of data withholding are necessary to ensure that investigators get the credit that they deserve and that partly motivates their effort. However, research and policy development should optimize scientific progress by identifying and combating the remediable causes of data withholding (such as those due to a lack of funds). Furthermore, when faced with decisions about sharing, scientists should consider seriously the broader impact of their decisions on the fundamental characteristics of the scientific enterprise and, when at all possible, err on the side of openness. Doing so may increase the likelihood that our system of science will function to its maximum capacity in the years to come.What's that mean for health IT? A key question for a national health IT infrastructure will involve what patient information to make available for medical research and how. (See e.g. our recent post on the topic.) Blumenthal's background suggests he sees a value in data sharing, which may influence the way he handles that question. Comparing OA searches for drug info
Maisha Kelly Freeman, et al., Google Scholar Versus PubMed in Locating Primary Literature to Answer Drug-Related Questions, Annals of Pharmacotherapy, March 3, 2009. (Thanks to Dean Giustini.)
Two new reports from MIT on its two day-old OA mandate: (1) MIT faculty open access to their scholarly articles, MIT's official press release on the policy, March 20, 2009. Excerpt:
(2) Natasha Plotkin, MIT Will Publish All Faculty Articles Free In Online Repository, The Tech (from MIT), March 20, 2009. Excerpt:
Translating the metadata of the World Digital Library The Library of Congress is arranging for the metadata of the OA World Digital Library to be translated into seven languages. The contract went to Lingotek. For more detail, see the March 10 press release. PS: Read the press release. Lingotek isn't just a group of translators. It's a "collaborative translation platform" harnessing the power of a social network of translators. Also see our past posts on the WDL. Obama administration heard criticism of secret trade negotiations James Love, Obama trade officials promise thorough review of transparency policies, Knowledge Ecology Notes, March 20, 2009. Excerpt:
Comment. For some of the background, see our post from last week on the Obama administration's denial of FOIA requests to see the US documents on the ACTA negotiations. Thanks to Daniel Sepulveda and the USTR for listening to public criticism and agreeing to this review. Kudos to KEI and the other participating NGOs for arranging this welcome opportunity. Douglas MacMillan, Sony: Take That, Amazon! Business Week, March 20, 2009. Excerpt:
Comments
OA can improve research metrics Stevan Harnad, The Need to Cross-Validate and Initialize Multiple Metrics Jointly Against Peer Ratings, Open Access Archivangelism, March 19, 2009. Excerpt:
Expert Group recommends OA for publicly-funded research in Europe In early 2008, the European Commission assembled an Expert Group of 13 academics to rethink how the EU funds research and, in particular, "to undertake an evidence-based, ex-post evaluation of FP6." As group chairman, it appointed Ernst Th. Rietschel, President of the Leibniz Association and Professor Emeritus at the University of Lübeck. The group met six times between July 2008 and January 2009, and in February submitted its final report, Evaluation Of The Sixth Framework Programmes For Research And Technological Development 2002-2006, February 2009. From recommendation 5.2.3 (p. 60):
Labels: Hot Report on the Ghana repository seminar AAU holds seminar to improve access to African scholarly works, Modern Ghana, March 17, 2009. A report on the Institutional Repository Advocacy Seminar (Accra, March 16-18). Excerpt:
Caleb Fleming, Library to cut nearly $1 million, Collegiate Times, March 19, 2009. Excerpt:
ATA action center for communicating with Congress The Alliance for Taxpayer Access has launched a legislative action center to make it easy for US citizens to contact their Congressional delegations about bills affecting OA. Right now the center hosts a user-modifiable ATA letter supporting the NIH policy and opposing the Conyers bill. If you haven't already written to your House representative to oppose the bill, please take a moment to do so. Unless you want to edit the default letter, it just takes a few clicks. And please spread the word. More on privacy and medical data sharing
Alison Hall and Philippa Brice, Data sharing: privacy concerns and public attitudes, PHG Foundation, March 16, 2009.
How extensively should governments be able to share personal data without consent for the public good? This question has vexed many of those involved in medical research who have sought more effective means of carrying out large scale research studies without the need to take consent from every patient. ... Not consulting the US Register of Copyrights Andrew Albanese, Register of Copyrights Not Asked by Congress To Weigh in on Google Book Search? Library Journal, March 19, 2009. Excerpt:
Comment. Not only was Peters not asked to testify at last year's hearing on the Conyers bill, her office made it known that it didn't like the bill. As Albanese reported at the time,
Shay David, Industry Perspectives: The Promise of Open Source Video, Streaming Media, March 18, 2009. Excerpt:
JISC briefing paper on CC licenses
JISC, Creative Commons Licences, briefing paper, March 9, 2009.
The purpose of this briefing paper is to provide JISC-funded projects, as well as content creators and others within higher (HE) and further education (FE) institutions, with information that can be used to make judgements as to when the use of open content licences, particularly CC licences, may be appropriate.See also e.g. our past post on the briefing paper on CC licenses from the Digital Curation Centre. Openness and the future of libraries
Nisha Doshi, Is Society Biased Against "Openness"? A PLoS Board Member’s Perspective on the Future of the Library in the Digital World, Public Library of Science, March 19, 2009. Notes on Cultural Agoraphobia and The Future of The Library (Cambridge, March 12, 2009).
See also the podcast of the event.
The Polymath1 project is an open collaborative mathematics project initiated on Timothy Gowers's blog and continued in further blog posts and comments and on a wiki. See also the project timeline. (Thanks to Entertaining Research.) See also this later post from Gowers:
Without anyone being particularly aware of it, a race has been taking place. Which would happen first: the comment count reaching 1000, or the discovery of a new proof of the density Hales-Jewett theorem for lines of length 3? Very satisfyingly, it appears that DHJ(3) has won. If this were a conventional way of producing mathematics, then it would be premature to make such an announcement — one would wait until the proof was completely written up with every single i dotted and every t crossed — but this is blog maths and we’re free to make up conventions as we go along. So I hereby state that I am basically sure that the problem is solved (though not in the way originally envisaged). ... DRIVER survey of repository managers
DRIVER is conducting a survey of European repository managers.
See also our past post on DRIVER's companion survey of researchers. OCLC's FirstSearch now includes OAIster. See OCLC's press release from March 16. This marriage was part of the plan when OCLC acquired OAIster back in January. While the FirstSearch version of OAIster is is behind a price wall, OCLC has promised that "OAIster will remain a permanently free, open access service." Freeing 90 years of bird migration data Alexis Madrigal, Open Data: Help Migratory Bird Observations Fly into the Digital Age, Wired Science, March 19, 2009. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) Excerpt:
PS: Also see the crowdsourcing project to make an OA transcription of handwritten records from the 1875 Norwegian census. On publishing raw clinical trial data
Iain Hrynaszkiewicz and Douglas G. Altman, Towards agreement on best practice for publishing raw clinical trial data, Trials, editorial, March 18, 2009. Abstract:
Many research-funding agencies now require open access to the results of research they have funded, and some also require that researchers make available the raw data generated from that research. Similarly, the journal Trials aims to address inadequate reporting in randomised controlled trials, and in order to fulfil this objective, the journal is working with the scientific and publishing communities to try to establish best practice for publishing raw data from clinical trials in peer-reviewed biomedical journals. Common issues encountered when considering raw data for publication include patient privacy - unless explicit consent for publication is obtained - and ownership, but agreed-upon policies for tackling these concerns do not appear to be addressed in the guidance or mandates currently established. Potential next steps for journal editors and publishers, ethics committees, research-funding agencies, and researchers are proposed, and alternatives to journal publication, such as restricted access repositories, are outlined.See also Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, Can we establish best practice for publishing raw clinical trial data?, BioMed Central Blog, March 18, 2009. Milestones for University of Nebraska-Lincoln IR
Charles Bailey, Two Million Plus Downloads: University of Nebraska-Lincoln Institutional Repository, DigitalKoans, March 18, 2009.
As of today, the DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska-Lincoln repository contains over 31,000 documents, has had 2,132,581 full-text downloads to date, and 1,307,822 downloads in the past year ... Forthcoming OA journal of chemistry
The Journal of Systems Chemistry is a forthcoming peer-reviewed OA journal published by Chemistry Central. See the March 19 announcement. There are currently no author-side fees. Authors retain copyright and articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License.
An OA book-scanning program from the Library of Congress The Library of Congress describes its new "Digitizing American Imprints" Program in a 21-minute webcast from January 14, 2009. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) From the blurb:
PS: The new pilot project is the the LOC's first mass-digitization effort for books, and aims to digitize 100,000 public-domain books for OA. The occasion for the webcast was the digitization of the 25,000th book. "Openness" is one of the project's four guiding principles --quality, quantity, openness, and leadership. Also see the press release issued on the same date (which we blogged at at the time).
MIT adopts a university-wide OA mandate This afternoon, the MIT faculty unanimously adopted a university-wide OA mandate. Here's the resolution the faculty approved (thanks to Hal Abelson, MIT professor of computer science and engineering, who chaired the committee to formulate it):
Comments
Update (3/19/09). Also see Hal Abelson's 'comments:
Labels: Hot
Dorothea Salo, A post-Roach-Motel world, Caveat Lector, March 17, 2009.
Gut Pathogens is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by the International Society for Genomic and Evolutionary Microbiology and BioMed Central. The article-processing charge is £850/US$1190/€920, subject to discounts or waiver. Authors retain copyright and articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution License. See the inaugural editorial, published February 3, 2009:
Nisha Doshi, Open Access Archaeology and PLoS, Public Library of Science, March 17, 2009.
Google: Why we believe in sharing geodata
Dylan Lorime, Why we believe in geospatial data sharing, Google Public Policy Blog, March 17, 2009.
OA to collection of medical history images
Alexis Madrigal, Rare Trove of Army Medical Photos Heads to Flickr, Wired Science, March 17, 2009. (Thanks to Boing Boing.)
See also the project's blog. More on a UK Research Data Service
Slides from An International Conference on the UK Research Data Service Feasibility Study (London, February 26, 2009) are now available. See also JISC, Managing UK research data for future use, press release, March 5, 2009.
An executive summary of the (undated) final report is also available. See also notes by:
Heather Morrison, Growing Canadian membership in DOAJ!, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, March 15, 2009.
The list of Canadian members of the Directory of Open Access Journals is growing! As of today, there are 7 Canadian individual library members, 1 Canadian library consortium, and at least 1 individual member that I know of. ...
Anand Chitipothu, Open Library software upgrade, ol-discuss list, March 16, 2009. (Thanks to Open Sesame.)
Notes on Columbia OA conference
Open Access and Libraries Columbia University March 17, 2009, Book Calendar, March 17, 2009. Notes on Open Access and Libraries (New York, March 17, 2009).
Notes and audio on OA in religion
Bryan Bibb, Open-Access Scholarship: Audio Podcast, Hevel.org: A Chasing after Wind, March 16, 2009.
Political support for OA in India
Sridhar Gutam, Political Support to Open Access, Gutam Sridhar on Open Access, March 17, 2009.
All research universities in Alberta publish OA journals
Heather Morrison, Alberta: 100% of research universities publish open access journals, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, March 15, 2009.
Was just browsing DOAJ Canada and noticed that all 4 research universities in Alberta (University of Alberta, University of Calgary, University of Lethbridge, and Athabasca University) are publishing open access journals! Athabasca University is the early leader as the world's first university all-open-access publisher. Is Alberta the first jurisdiction to have OA publishing services available at every research university? ... More on the new Harvard OA mandate Niha S. Jain, HKS Allows Article Access, Harvard Crimson, March 18, 2009. Excerpt:
Also see John Lauerman, Harvard Government School to Offer Access to Faculty Papers, Bloomberg News, March 17, 2009. Excerpt:
Streamlining the production of OA webcasts openEyA is a new tool to convert classroom lectures or conference presentations to OA video. From today's announcement:
From the web site:
Swedish archaeology journal converts to novel form of delayed OA Fornvännen, the Swedish journal of archaeology published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, has converted to a novel form of delayed OA. From the annnouncement by Martin Rundkvist, its managing editor:
From the English version of the Fornvännen "about" page:
Comment. Very few journals have been able to make OA digital editions and priced print editions coexist without some delay in the digital edition. It's not impossible; Medknow does it. But Fornvännen is trying a new form of delayed OA: The full-text digital edition is OA from the moment it appears online, but it doesn't appear online until six months after the print edition.
The March/April 2009 issue of D-Lib is now available. See especially:
Library responses to the NIH policy Joseph Thomas is conducting a survey of library responses to the NIH policy. See his call for participants (dated today):
Peter Murray-Rust, Closed Data at Chemical Abstracts leads to Bad Science, A Scientist and the Web, March 17, 2009. Comments on Alan H. Lipkus, et al., Structural Diversity of Organic Chemistry. A Scaffold Analysis of the CAS Registry, Journal of Organic Chemistry, May 28, 2008.
Nominations wanted for 2009 SPARC Europe Award It's time to send SPARC Europe your nominations for its 2009 Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications. From today's announcement:
Crowdsourced annotation of a Flickr photo collection
Patrick Peccatte, Flickr et PhotosNormandie: une entreprise collective de redocumentarisation, Documentaliste - Sciences de l'information, 2009; self-archived March 12, 2009. English abstract:
Originally a collection of 2,763 copyright-free photos on the Battle of Normandy, and a private initiative to correct errors and enhance the quality of descriptions. A choice : to use the features of the photos sharing platform Flickr to improve indexation of this [source].See also the collection.
Claudio Marconi, Open Access e archivi aperti: nuove modalità di diffusione della letteratura scientifica, BA thesis, Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”, Facoltà di Scienze della Comunicazione, 2008; self-archived March 16, 2009. English abstract:
Knowledge as primary good of modern society is a topic widely discussed, so that the latter is often defined in terms of the first as "information society". But what about its particular form which much of today well-being depends on: scientific knowledge? Scholar needs to publish. Academic careers depend on publishing and without scientific pubblications it would not be possible for those who decide to undertake research, build anything: "we are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants". Scholar, however, soon learns that the traditional scientific publications, except for the text adopted as manuals, are by no means profitable. Equally, the resulting texts are not public but private. In the hands of the publishers they become subject to restrictive policies aimed at maximizing profit, not at dissemination, as any scholar would like. Libraries are forced to buy back for their users something their colleagues have produced without any expectation, except the broader circulation. A third party, the publisher, becomes the filter and a real obstacle to dissemination of scientific knowledge. The argument presented here is based on this paradox, in the belief that speech technology and markets affect the word itself, suggesting a review of recent developments which have affected the scientific communication system and discussing the movement for Open Access to scientific literature, whose goal is precisely the reconciliation between the cultural practices of scholars and the economy these practices are based on. African statement on access to knowledge
Representatives of the parliaments of 27 African countries and 4 intergovernmental organizations signed the Kigali Declaration on the Development of an Equitable Information Society in Africa at a recent conference in Kigali, Rwanda. (Thanks to the Association for Progressive Communications.)
OA to Finnish economics research Päivi Kanerva, Open access -julkaiseminen Turun Kauppakorkeakoulussa, a Master's thesis approved by the University of Tampere on December 17, 2008. (Thanks to Jyrki Ilva.) Read it in Finnish or Google's English. The title in Google's English = Open Access Publication of the Turku School of Economics. The Turku School of Economics is in Turku, Finland. Roger Lancefield, Free Culture versus Freetard, Ralpress, March 16, 2009. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Excerpt:
A plan for open access and open data in chemistry Steven M. Bachrach, Chemistry publication - making the revolution, Journal of Cheminformatics, March 17, 2009. (The DOI-based URL doesn't work at the moment.)
From the body of the paper:
Comments
Update (3/17/09). Bill Hooker has done the manual tallies of fee-based and no-fee OA journals in chemistry. Looking at the full OA journals only, as opposed to hybrid OA journals, here are the results: 42% (= 38) charge publication fees, 49% (= 44) charge no fees, and 9% (= 8) are not classified one way or the other by the DOAJ. (Thanks, Bill!) University of Chicago requires electronic submission of theses and dissertations The University of Chicago has stopped accepting paper copies of theses and dissertations and now requires electronic submission. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) Comment. But does Chicago require or even provide OA for these electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs)? After studying many university ETD policies in 2006, I concluded:
I believe that's still true. However, Chicago appears to be one of the exceptions. As far as I can tell (from ROAR and OpenDOAR) Chicago doesn't have an institutional repository, either for faculty research or for student ETDs. The new page on ETDs says nothing about deposit in any other OA repository (such as the NDLTD, which functions as a universal or fall-back OA repository for ETDs). The same page seems to limit ETD access to ProQuest UMI. That's not necessarily a bar to OA. ProQuest will provide OA, but it charges an author-side fee to do so and requires an affirmative request. Chicago students would be much better off if the university launched a repository and deposited all new ETDs there, with reasonable exceptions and permissible embargoes, but without charge. This is entirely compatible with maintaining a relationship with ProQuest. Recommendations and working examples for the Obama administration Erik Wilde, Eric C. Kansa, and Raymond Yee, Proposed Guideline Clarifications for American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, University of California School of Information, working paper, March 16, 2009.
From the body of the report:
For more perspective, see the blog posts by the report co-authors Erik Wilde and Eric Kansa. Supporting Australian repositories The Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) has launched the CAUL Australian Institutional Repository Support Service (CAIRSS). From yesterday's announcement:
PS: For related initiatives see the OAD list of Services to support repository managers. OpenStreetMap has 100,000 users OpenStreetMap has passed the milestone of 100,000 registered users. (Thanks to Glyn Moody.) Gaming download numbers at an OA repository Benjamin Edelman and Ian Larkin, Demographics, Career Concerns or Social Comparison: Who Games SSRN Download Counts? Harvard Business School Working Papers, February 19, 2009. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
Harvard's Kennedy School adopts an OA mandate Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government has adopted an OA mandate. From today's announcement:
Comment. This is the third Harvard OA mandate, after the mandates at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Law School. A fourth is in development at the Medical School. It's also the third Harvard OA mandate adopted by faculty vote. It follows the exemplary pattern of the FAS and Law School policies, requiring OA through the IR but offering the possibility of an op-out (which applies only to OA, not to both OA and deposit). Kudos to Stuart Shieber, the Office of Scholarly Communication, and all involved at the Kennedy School. Update (3/17/09). Also see Andrew Albanese's article in Library Journal:
Labels: Hot OA advocates among LJ's Movers & Shakers 2009 Library Journal has named Dean Giustini and Dorothea Salo among of the Movers & Shakers of 2009. The citation on Dean doesn't mention his OA work. But for details, see our past posts on him. From the citation on Dorothea:
PS: Congratulations to Dean and Dorothea. Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable, Clay Shirky, March 13, 2009. This thoughtful piece is about newspapers, not scholarly journals. But how far do the insights carry over? Excerpt:
PRC report confirms majority publisher support for green OA The Publishing Research Consortium has released a new report by Sally Morris, Journal Authors’ Rights: perception and reality (March 2009). From today's announcement:
Comments
Update (3/16/09). Also see Stevan Harnad's comments:
EPA Releases Comprehensive Database on Environmental Chemicals Agency continues efforts to provide new level of transparency, press release, March 12, 2009. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
Interview with Google on its book settlement Andrew Albanese, In Wide-Ranging Interview, Google Talks Books, Library Journal, March 12, 2009. Excerpt:
More on the Google Book settlement Here are some blog comments on Columbia Law School conference, Google Books Settlement: What Will It Mean for the Long Term? (March 13, 2009). From Peter Hirtle, Part 1:
From Peter Hirtle, Part 2:
From Adam Hodgkin:
Update (3/17/09). Also see Paul Courant's notes on the meeting:
Also see Peter Brantley's notes, and Norman Oder's two stories in Library Journal (1, 2). The Journal of the Northern Renaissance is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by the Scottish Institute of Northern Renaissance Studies. (Thanks to Karen Baston.) The inaugural issue was published on March 3, 2009. New issues will be published annually, with reviews published on a rolling basis. Using the journal system's incentives to open data
Gavin Baker, Why not publish data?, A Journal of Insignificant Inquiry, March 16, 2009.
See also comments on the open-science list. Robert Darnton and critics on the Google Book settlement Google & Books: An Exchange, letters to the editor of the New York Review of Books in response to Robert Darnton's article, Google and the Future of Books, NYRB, February 12, 2009 (blogged here in January). The new exchange includes Darnton's response. Excerpt: From Paul Courant:
From Ann Kjellberg (and six other literary executors to major authors):
From Darnton's response:
Open raw data + tools = the new primary "literature" of science Jan Velterop, Open wider, The Parachute, March 15, 2009. Excerpt:
Roland Detsch, Urheberrecht: „Je freier Information ist, desto mehr kann damit verdient werden“, Goethe Institut, March 2009. An interview with Rainer Kuhlen. Read it in German or Google's English. (The title is: Copyright: The freer information is, the more can be earned.) Also see our past posts on Kuhlen.
Luis Martinez Uribe, Research data into Fedora at Oxford, DataShare Blog, March 6, 2009.
Presentations from library conference
The presentations from Upgrading the eLibrary: Enhanced Information Services Driven by Technology and Economics (Bielefeld, Germany, February 3-5, 2009) are now online. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) Several are on OA.
Automated identification of copyright status of a work
Rufus Pollock, Computing Copyright (or Public Domain) Status of Cultural Works, miscellaneous factZ, March 12, 2009.
Journal of Medicine Use in Developing Countries is a new peer-reviewed OA journal published by the Discipline of Social and Administrative Pharmacy of Universiti Sains Malaysia. (Thanks to Imran Masood.)
A literature review limited to OA literature Cathy S. Cavanaugh, Michael K. Barbour, and Tom Clark, Research and Practice in K-12 Online Learning: A Review of Open Access Literature, The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, February 2009.
Comment. This is the first literature review I've seen which deliberately limits itself to OA literature. Don't jump to conclusions about why the authors did it this way. They do not believe "if it's not OA, then it's not worth reading". They did not decide to review what was ready to hand because they lacked access to much of the TA literature. (Some of the co-authors have published previous literature reviews focusing on the TA literature.) They did not assume that OA literature and TA literature differ in the topics they cover or conclusions they draw, which one could only know by reviewing of the TA literature as well. From the body of the paper:
One day soon we'll see another kind of literature review limited to OA literature: one based on sophisticated text mining. The authors will explain that only OA literature is technically and legally amenable to that kind of analysis. Update (3/18/09). See the blog post by co-author Michael Barbour, responding to mine. In the comment section I clarify and extend what I said here. Tim Berners-Lee, The next Web of open, linked data, a 16:23 minute video of a TED talk, presented last month and posted this month. M. Sreelata, Key Indian research organisation goes open access, SciDev.Net, March 13, 2009. Excerpt:
PS: Also see our post on the CSIR decision, and all our past posts on CSIR. |