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Jan Velterop at the UKSG meeting Abstracts of the presentations from the 32nd UKSG Annual Conference and Exhibition (Torquay, March 30 - April 1, 2009) are now online. For example, see Jan Velterop, Beyond Open Access:
Also see the Charlie Rapple's blog notes on Jan's presentation, from the conference blog. Jane Kaye and four co-authors, Data sharing in genomics — re-shaping scientific practice, Nature Reviews Genetics, May 2009. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.)
Growing international consensus on OA to law Enrico Francesconi and Ginevra Peruginelli, The Florentine Debate on Free Access to Law, VoxPopuLII, April 9, 2009. (Thanks to Joe Hodnicki.) A report on Law via the Internet: Free Access, Quality of Information, Effectiveness of Rights (Florence, October 30-31, 2008). Excerpt:
Recent developments on repository software John Robertson, Repository software update, John’s JISCCETIS blog, April 17, 2009. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) A review of recent news from Fedora, DuraSpace, DSpace, EPrints, and the new Microsoft tools. Stevan Harnad, Harvard's Stuart Shieber on Open Access at CalTech and Berkeley, Open Access Archivangelism, April 17, 2009. Excerpt:
arXiview is a new iPhone app from Dave Bacon, for searching and browsing arXiv. From the website:
Also see James Dacey's review in Physics World (thanks to Garrett Eastman):
Update (5/5/09). Also see Simeon Warner's post about two older, related apps: arXiv mobi and ArXivReader.
The Open Source Paleontologist has posted a list of OA journals in paleontology. Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week has also posted a related list of Open Access Bio and Paleo. Comment. See also the search results in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Update. See also: What Are the Best Open Access Journals for Paleontologists?. Update. See also: About the Ratings and Open Access Paleontology Rankings - Part II. New OA journal of tolerance and intolerance Tolerantia: Beiträge für Toleranz- & Intoleranzforschung is a new peer-reviewed OA journal using open review. Apparent experiments with OA from major publishers
Jim Till, Are prominent publishers experimenting with OA?, Be openly accessible or be obscure, April 16, 2009.
Comment. I seem to be able to access the free full text to the complete backfile of Cancer Cell, as well as the current issue. One outcome of last month's International Repositories Workshop (Amsterdam, March 16-17, 2009) is the International Repositories Infrastructure wiki. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) From the front page:
Update (4/21/09). Also see Alma Swan's announcement:
Video of Stuart Shieber at Caltech
Stuart M. Shieber, The Harvard Initiatives for Open Access to the Scholarly Literature, presentation at California Institute of Technology, March 26, 2009; video (Microsoft Silverlight format), 90 minutes. See also notes by Lindsay Cleary.
Nicole Harris, Where is the I in Open Content?, JISC Access Management Team, April 14, 2009. Compares OA and OER on six axes: author identifiers, standards, preservation, added value, platform, and business model.
Bill Hooker, What's wrong with copyleft?, Open Reading Frame, April 15, 2009.
... Although copyleft and [noncommercial] clauses achieve their own immediate goals, widespread license incompatibility means that they often (perhaps usually) defeat part of the larger purpose of Open licensing. The use case where this is most prominent is remix, since reuse and redistribution of individual copylefted or NC-licensed works or their derivatives is usually just a matter of retaining the original license. But multiple works can only be recombined into new works if their respective licenses are compatible -- otherwise, there's no licensing option for the remix that doesn't violate the licensing terms of at least one of the ingredients. Not only that, but if any of the works in the mix carries a copyleft license, that license takes over the entire remix and everything downstream of it, thus propagating the incompatibility problem. ... Digital library of biochemistry and pharmacy
The Biblioteca Digital de Bioquímica y Farmacia is a new project from 10 university faculties in Argentina. The project will be advised by Bienes Comunes.
DC Public Library joins Flickr Commons The District of Columbia Public Library has joined Flickr Commons. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) See also our past posts on Flickr Commons. The open access tracking project (OATP) I've started to tag new OA developments at Connotea. Over time I'd like to recruit others to do the same. If we work together, we'll notice many more new developments than any individual or smaller group could notice on its own. Everything we notice could be OA through a group feed. I call it the open access tracking project (OATP). Consider this the launch of the project beta. The project feed is available in three forms:
The feed already exists. In fact, you can see the 10 most recent feed items in the sidebar of this blog --and soon, I hope, in many other blogs. More important, the feed is already more comprehensive than Open Access News. I know that it's more comprehensive because Gavin and I tag everything we blog. We also tag a good number of things we don't blog. You can participate as a reader, a tagger, or both, starting immediately. To participate as a reader, just follow or subscribe to some version of the project feed. To participate as a tagger, you'll need to create a Connotea account, if you don't already have one. I recommending putting the "Add to Connotea" bookmarklet on your browser. When you see a new OA development, tag it with oa.new. If you have time, write a brief description in the "description" box of the tagging dialog. My rule of rule of thumb here at OAN is to limit new posts to developments from the past six months or so. I'm using the oa.new tag with the same understanding of what counts as new. Long-term, the tracking project will go beyond an alert system for new developments to a classification system for older developments. For example, you could mark an article about the NIH policy with oa.article, oa.nih, oa.mandate, oa.medicine, oa.legislation, and oa.usa. You could tag items by field (oa.anthropology), country (oa.brazil), language (oa.chinese), date (oa.2009, oa.apr.2009), and genre (oa.article, oa.comment, oa.dissertation, oa.presentation). If an item is not new, then just remember not to use the oa.new tag. At this stage in the project, I don't want to propose a systematic set of subtopic tags (an ontology for OA) or a procedure for developing one. The project has no official tags except oa.new, and is open to any subtopic tags you care to create. For example, all my examples are in English, but there's no reason why subtopic tags couldn't be other languages as well. However, for several reasons, it would help if the subtopic tags followed a common format (oa.something). The Connotea guide includes instructions on how to build an RSS feed for multiple users and tags --for example, for all items tagged by you OR me, or all items tagged oa.new AND oa.german. I'll have more to say about the project in the May issue of SOAN. In the meantime here are a few quick notes:
In my review of OA in 2008, I foreshadowed two crowdsourcing projects. One was moving my timeline of the OA movement to the OAD wiki. This is the other one. Update (4/17/09). I'm happy to report that I was wrong that Connotea RSS feeds are limited to the 10 most recent items. Ten is the default, but it's easy to build feeds which contain the most recent 25, 50, 100, or even 1000 items. For the same reason, I was wrong that the email feeds are limited to 10 items. If you build an email feed from a longer RSS feed, then the email feed is longer as well. But you don't have to build any of these feeds yourself. I've posted a new array of feed links to the OAD page on the tracking project. Update (4/18/09). As I mentioned, Connotea feeds include duplicates ("If two or more users tag the same item with the same tag, like oa.new, then the item will appear in the feed two or more times"). But like any other RSS feeds, they are beautifully susceptible to mashups. You can use Yahoo Pipes to create a new feed which filters out the duplicates (thanks to Hilary Spencer). Here's an RSS feed, for example, which starts with Connotea feed of the most recent 100 items and then removes any duplicates. It defines "duplicate" items as those with the same URL, regardless of how they are titled or described. And here's an email feed built from the filtered RSS feed. Labels: Hot
Jason Stirnaman, Notes from Increasing Use and Content Through Creative Service-Repository Bundling, wire, April 15, 2009. Notes on Increasing Use and Content Through Creative Service Repository Bundling (online, April 15, 2009).
Reflections Upon: Open Access in a Closed Institution, OER@UCT, April 3, 2009. (Thanks to Eve Gray.)
Tips for authors to improve their RePEc ranking
Christian Zimmermann, Tips for authors to improve their RePEc ranking, The RePEc Blog, April 16, 2009.
By far the most popular topic on this blog is material about rankings. People love to know who the best are and how they fare. This post is about optimizing one’s ranking within RePEc, and doing so in a way that does not trigger our safeguards against cheating. It turns out all the following points are points we actually want to encourage anyway so as to improve the quality of the data collected in RePEc. ... Stats on Spanish university's IR after one year
e-spacioUNED, the IR at Spain's Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, is one year old. It has more than 19,000 OA deposits which have received more than 1 million downloads.
Open data to unmask deliberate distortion Carol Gorman reflects on the problem of drug industry marketeers ghostwriting one-sided articles for peer-reviewed journals. How can we prevent and detect the distortions? After mentioning several other steps, she concludes:
PS: In short, open data is not just to accelerate research and facilitate replication. OA to the backfiles of four German journals The Deutsche Morgenlaendische Gesellschaft (German Oriental Society) has digitized its journal backfiles for OA. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) Three of its four journals are no longer published, and ran from 1886-1938, 1922-1936, and 1922-1935. But the oldest was launched in 1847 and is still going strong. The digitization project was funded by the DFG. Another misleading study of the costs of OA journals Uwe Jochum, Was "Open Access" kostet: Ein Beispiel aus den Geisteswissenschaften, TextKritik, March 22, 2009. PS: Thanks to Klaus Graf for noticing, and for pointing out, that Jochum assumes that all OA journals charge publication fees, when of course most do not. Presentations from Spanish OA conference
The presentations from I Jornadas Interuniversitarias de la Comunidad Valenciana sobre Acceso Abierto al Conocimiento (Valencia, March 24, 2009) are now online. (Thanks to Jordi Adell.)
Presentations from French ETDs conference
The presentations from Les thèses électroniques: réglementation, gestion, diffusion (Nancy, March 26, 2009) are now online. (Thanks to Fabrizio Tinti.)
Colorado libraries catalog HathiTrust books
Tens of Thousands of Open Access Digitized Books Now Available Through the Prospector Catalog, press release, April 10, 2009.
See also our past posts on HathiTrust. SSRN opens new cognitive science section
Mark Turner, Announcing New Cognitive Science Network, Social Science Research Network, April 14, 2009.
The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) has added several significant improvements. For example, it now displays the OA repositories it harvests by continent and country. Each country on the map of Europe, for example, shows the number of that country's repositories in the BASE index. Click on a number and jump to a page showing statistics on the country, including the number of documents on deposit in its repositories, a list of those documents, and flexible ways to search and sort through them. The list of documents is in XML for others to use, re-use, and mashup as they like. (Thanks to Dirk Pieper.)
Self-archiving at Carnegie Mellon Denise Troll Covey, Self-Archiving Journal Articles: A Case Study of Faculty Practice and Missed Opportunity, Portal, April 2009. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)
PS: The published edition is not OA, but a preprint from July 2008 is OA. From the preprint:
BMC announces OA research award winners
Charlotte Webber, Open access research celebrated at BioMed Central's Research Awards ceremony, BioMed Central Blog, April 15, 2009.
More on the Durham Statement on OA to law
J. Paul Lomio, Law Journals and Open Access: A Call to Action, Speaking of Computers, April 13, 2009.
See also our past post on the Durham Statement.
Welcome to the World of OER!, OER@UCT, April 1, 2009. (Thanks to Eve Gray.)
Milestone for digitization at U. Illinois
Paul Wood, UI's effort to digitize books surpasses 15,000 volumes, The News-Gazette, April 13, 2009.
New OA journal on ICT in Indonesia
Internetworking Indonesia Journal is a new OA journal published by the editors in Bahasa Indonesia or English. The inaugural issue is now available.
Wikipedia re-licensing vote now open The Wikimedia Foundation is now conducting a vote of users on whether to re-license its content under the CC BY-SA license. Voting is open to logged-in users with at least 25 prior edits on a Wikimedia project. See also comments by Creative Commons and Lawrence Lessig. On access and the impact of research
danah boyd, Remarks from Panel on 'Scientometric Analysis of the CHI Proceedings' at CHI 2009, presented at CHI 2009 (Boston, April 7, 2009).
Harvard negotiates OA agreement with APS
Harvard and American Physical Society Reach Accord on Journal Publications, press release, April 9, 2009.
Seeking "free, fair use of orphaned works" from the Google settlement A2K and orphaned work: the rise of the Open Access Trust Inc, Open Education News, April 14, 2009. Excerpt:
The state of OA, and journal prices, in 2009 Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born, Reality Bites: Periodicals Price Survey 2009, Library Journal, April 15, 2009. Excerpt:
Comments
Draft report from the PEER project The PEER project (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research) has released its Draft report on the provision of usage data and manuscript procedures for publishers and repository managers, March 31, 2009. From today's announcement:
From the body of the report:
Comment. As far as I can tell, this draft doesn't give us a glimpse of the project conclusions on the main question: the effect of high-volume OA archiving on TA journal subscriptions. If I missed it, I hope someone will let me know. Also see our past posts on the PEER project. The World Bank has released the API to four major data collections. OA and other innovations in electronic publishing K.H. Ng, Exploring new frontiers of electronic publishing in biomedical science, Singapore Medical Journal, March 2009.
Toward consensus on open proteomics data Henry Rodriguez and 27 co-authors, Recommendations from the 2008 International Summit on Proteomics Data Release and Sharing Policy - A Summit Report, Journal of Proteome Research, April 3, 2009. Accessible only to subscribers, at least so far.
Is the economy helping OA legal resources gain on the TA resources? Joe Hodnicki, Should LexisNexis and Thomson West Be Worried About the Economy's Turbulence? Law Librarian Blog, April 13, 2009.
PS: Also see our post on Hodnicki's September 2008 poll. Visit his new post to take his new poll on free and low cost online legal research services. Advocating OA policies for Russian universities V. M. Moskovkin, Institutional policies for open access to the results of scientific research, Scientific and Technical Information Processing, February 5, 2009. (Thanks to Glen Newton.) Accessible only to subscribers, at least so far.
This article was originally published in Russian in Nauchno-Technicheskaya Informatsiya, Seriya 1, 2008, No. 12, pp. 7–11. Leslie Chan making the case for OA Leslie Chan, Open Access: Promises and Challenges of Scholarship in the Digital Age, Academic Matters, April 14, 2009. Excerpt:
Heather Joseph on the Conyers bill Heather Joseph, Fair to whom? New House bill challenges public access, College & Research Libraries News, April 2009. Excerpt:
Dennis Carter, Site gives students free science articles, eCampus News, April 10, 2009.
See also our past post on Scitable. What does data re-use look like?
Craig Bellamy, Institutional repositories and data re-use for the humanities, arts-humanities.net, April 8, 2009.
Interview with a PLoS ONE editor
Bora Zivkovic, Academic Editor Interview - Adam Ratner, everyONE, April 6, 2009.
NEH grant for digization, OA to manuscripts
Andrew Albanese, Penn Lands NEH Grant To Digitize Medieval, Renaissance Manuscripts, Library Journal, April 9, 2009.
See also our past post on the Digital Scriptorium. Open science in action: an anecdote
Ivan Baxter, Open science helps reviewers!, Ionomics Blog, April 3, 2009.
See also comments by Richard Gayle:
OA collection of books about Aceh, Indonesia
Aceh Books is a recently-launched site from the Dutch Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)
OA repository of Greek cultural history Pandektis is a new OA repository of digitized primary sources from Greek cultural history. (Thanks to OpenArchives.gr.) See the April 1 press release in Greek or Google's English. Comment. The digital works in this repository are libre OA, but not because they are in the public domain. On the contrary, Greece is claiming copyright in these works, while granting broad re-use rights. For example, see the copyright statement attached to the collection of Ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions from Upper Macedonia, Aegean Thrace and Achaia:
In most other countries, the inscriptions would be in the public domain (because of their age) and so would digital photographs of the inscriptions (because of their lack of originality). But a country could expand its copyright law to cover antiquities and unoriginal reproductions. Does anyone know whether Greece has done so? Egypt considered doing so in 2007. (Did Egypt go through with it?) Update (4/18/09). Also see Eric Kansa's discussion of the copyright antiquity problem from last November. (Thanks to Chuck Jones.) Database of nuclear docs goes OA
Nuclear Knowledge at the Click of a Button, IAEA, April 8, 2009.
The backfiles of several journals were added to Revistes Catalanes amb Accés Obert (RACO), the OA collection of Catalan journals, in March 2009. The additions bring RACO's totals to 232 journals and 48 participating publishers. (Thanks to Judit Bellostes.)
See also our past post on RACO. A Canadian perspective on the MIT OA mandate MIT Faculty to Make Articles Freely Available to Public, CAUT Bulletin, April 2009. Excerpt:
Thomas Anz has conducted two interviews on OA for the April issue of Literaturkritik: one with Gerhard Lauer, who criticized the anti-OA Heidelberg Appeal, and one with Albrecht Götz von Olenhusen, who signed it. Read the interviews in German or Google's English (1, 2). (Thanks to Klaus Graf.) Also see our past posts on the Heidelberg Appeal. Philosophy repository funded by JISC JISC has funded PhilPapers, the disciplinary repository and index for philosophy. Details in the April 6 press release:
PS: Also see our past posts on PhilPapers. The case, and place, for OA textbooks Gary W. Matkin, Open Learning: What Do Open Textbooks Tell Us About the Revolution in Education? Center for Studies in Higher Education, March 2009. (Thanks to the OKAPI Spotlight.)
More evidence that downloads predict citations Andrew B. Watson, Comparing citations and downloads for individual articles, Journal of Vision, April 3, 2009. Editorial. Excerpt:
PS: Also see the journal's press release and our past posts on this correlation (1, 2). Update (4/13/09). Also see Bill Hooker's comments. |