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I just mailed the May issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. This issue takes a close look at open access tracking project (OATP), a collaborative tagging effort to capture new OA developments comprehensively and in real time. The round-up section briefly notes 151 OA developments from April. Labels: Hot OAD home page for the OA tracking project The Open Access Directory (OAD) has opened a set of lists on the Open access tracking project (OATP) for community editing. OATP is the collaborative tagging project I launched in beta about two weeks ago. The new OAD page will function as the project home page. The new home page supports user-maintained lists of project links (including feeds), project tags, project mashups, and (shortly) a project FAQ. The May issue of SOAN, to mail later today, will include a longer introduction to the project.
3 new journals from Revues.org
Three journals have joined Revues.org recently; each is OA:
María del Rosario Tissera, Repositorios institucionales en bibliotecas académicas, apparently a pre-print, self-archived April 30, 2009. English abstract:
Starting from the concept and current functioning of academic libraries, there is a planning to adherence to the open access international movement to digital files, installed as repositories via Internet to allow free access to intellectual production of a discipline or an institution or several consortia libraries in order to increase the visibility and accessibility to information produced at universities. There are some examples of institutional repositories offered by consortia libraries of Spain and North America, as well as Latin America and Argentina. Considering some barriers faced by institutions, publishers and authors to the creation of digital repositories offers some basic guidelines for their training. Milestone for RePEc Author Service
Christian Zimmermann, RePEc Author Service now 20,000 strong, The RePEc Blog, April 30, 2009.
Another argument that the Google settlement should support OA David Weinberger, Pros and cons of the Google book deal, KM World, May 1, 2009. Excerpt:
More on OA journals which offer gratis but not libre OA Bill Hooker, Open Access, copyright transfer and NC licensing: caveat emptor! Open Reading Frame, May 1, 2009. Excerpt:
Comments
OA repository for refereed conference proceedings in CS The Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (EPTCS) is a new OA repository of refereed conference proceedings in CS. See yesterday's announcement. (Thanks to Michael Greenburg.) From the site:
Harnessing open innovation, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, May 2009. Accessible only to subscribers. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.) Excerpt:
PS: Also see our past posts on Sage and pre-competitive sharing. Amazon Web Services grants for researchers Amazon Web Services has launched AWS in Education, a set of programs including grants for free use of AWS for research purposes (such as providing OA to large datasets). (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) See also our past posts on AWS: New OA publications from Oriental Institute backlist The Oriental Institute has released OA editions of 11 documents originally published 1929-1992. (Thanks to Charles Ellwood Jones.) The Institute is also developing an OA database of its collection of pottery sherds and providing OA to recordings of some of its members' lectures. See also our past posts on the Oriental Institute.
The IR at University College Dublin has passed 1,000 items.
Release candidate of Open Database License v1.0 available for public comment Open Database License (ODbL) v1.0 Release Candidate Available, Open Data Commons, April 29, 2009. Excerpt:
PS: Also see our post on the beta release of this license, in March 2009, and our other past posts on the Open Data Commons. Christopher Dyer has launched a suite of tools called Sci-Mate (for Scientific Material Transfer Exchange) for sharing research information and physical specimens. From today's announcement:
SPARC has released a birthday greeting to the Open Access Directory (OAD). Excerpt:
Four presentations on OA in Canada Heather Morrison, Donald Taylor, Andrew Waller, and Devon Greyson, Open Access in Canada - Overview and Update, four slide presentation at the BC Library Conference 2009 (Burnaby, April 16-18, 2009). (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
Eliminating quality bias in explaining the OA impact advantage Yassine Gargouri and Stevan Harnad are measuring how OA mandates affect the OA citation advantage. They've posted two docs with preliminary versions of their findings (1, 2). Here's Stevan's summary, by email:
Comments
Four more Indian journals convert to OA India's National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources (NISCAIR) has converted four more of its 17 journals to OA and plans to convert the rest this summer. Details from Subbiah Arunachalam:
Philip Davis, Paying for Open Access Publication Charges, Scholarly Kitchen, April 30, 2009. Excerpt:
Comment. Davis is right that universities launching these funds should be designing procedures to deal with appeals and conflicts. If the demand on the funds is low today, it may grow steadily over time, just as the number of funds continues to grow. He has raised these issues before (1, 2), and I responded to an earlier version this way:
Harvard computer scientist Michael Mitzenmacher reports that the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) does not accept Harvard's author addendum and asks Harvard authors to seek a waiver from the school's OA mandate. In a clarification sent to Mizenmacher's colleague, Salil Vadhan, the ACM explained that it does allow OA archiving in the Harvard repository but does not allow all the reuse rights required by the Harvard addendum. The ACM and Harvard's Office of Scholarly Communication are discussing the matter. See Mitzenmacher's post, The ACM Does NOT Support Open Access, My Biased Coin, April 29, 2009. Stevan Harnad underscores the ACM clarification: that the ACM journals are green and allow author-initiated preprint and postprint archiving. See his post, APA Kerfuffle Redux: No, ACM is NOT Anti-OA, Open Access Archivangelism, April 30, 2009. Comment. I suspect that many publishers are like the ACM, either in permitting gratis but not libre OA archiving, or in permitting only a more limited form of libre archiving than Harvard would like. Hence, the result of the Harvard-ACM discussions should have wider application. Update (5/1/09). See the second installment of Stevan Harnad's comments. Excerpt:
Jane Park, CK-12 Foundation’s Neeru Khosla on Open Textbooks, Creative Commons, April 28, 2009. Interview with Neeru Khosla of the CK-12 Foundation. See also our past post on CK-12.
Food Aid Information System is a new OA database from the World Food Programme, containing "the most reliable and comprehensive data on food aid flows". (Thanks to ResourceShelf.)
2 new members of Flickr Commons
The Nantucket Historical Association Research Library and the Swedish National Heritage Board have joined Flickr Commons. For more information on the latter, see this page. (Thanks to Klaus Graf.)
Forthcoming OA journal of African arts
Afro-beat Journal is a forthcoming peer-reviewed journal published by the New York Afrobeat Festival. Authors retain copyright. (Thanks to Olumide Abimbola.)
Google adds search for public data
Ola Rosling, Adding search power to public data, Official Google Blog, April 28, 2009.
See also Google's Information for public data publishers: Update. See also coverage by Nextgov:
APA adds Wellcome-compliant OA option
Robert Kiley, American Psychological Association develops Wellcome-compliant OA option, UK PubMed Central Blog, April 28, 2009.
The NCBI is posting OA genomic data on the H1N1 (aka swine flu) virus. (Thanks to Scritto.) Stimulus for cyberinfrastructure
James Boyle, What the information superhighways aren’t built of..., Financial Times, April 17, 2009. (Thanks to Lawrence Lessig.)
More on the deepening access crisis Charles Bailey, Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Planned or Potential Budget Cuts, DigitalKoans, April 28, 2009. Excerpt:
PS: I've argued that the recession will have mixed results for OA, but will strengthen the case for it. Wolfram Research previewed its question-answering service, Wolfram/Alpha, at Harvard yesterday. See the 105':57" webcast or David Weinberger's blog notes. Also see Larry Dignan's preview of Wolfram/Alpha at ZDNet or Frederic Lardinois' preview at ReadWriteWeb. Comment. At first glance Alpha looks like any other free search engine. But it returns direct answers, sometimes with graphs of relevant data, not just links to pages which might contain answers. I'm looking forward to its launch next month. This kind of service --from humans or machines-- is what I meant (in an article last summer) by solving the last-mile problem for knowledge. More on the NIH policy and Conyers bill in the MSM Brian Blank, Copyright Battle Looms for Docs Who 'Grew Up Google', ABC News, April 22, 2009. Excerpt:
Public radio story on the NIH policy Publicly funded research for a price, Marketplace (American public media), April 28, 2009. A four-minute radio story on the NIH policy and Conyers bill by Janet Babin. The web site contains a full transcript and comments from listeners. Mike Rossner, A challenge to Goliath, Journal of Experimental Medicine, April 27, 2009. An editorial. Rossner is the Executive Director of Rockefeller University Press, and this editorial appeared in the latest issues of all three RUP journals --Journal of Cell Biology, Journal of Experimental Medicine, and the Journal of General Physiology. Excerpt:
Peter Murray-Rust, Open Chemistry Data at NIST, A Scientist and the Web, April 24, 2009.
Kathleen Sebelius is the new US Secretary of HHS The US Senate has confirmed Kathleen Sebelius as the new US Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). Comment. Here's a bit of what I said when President Obama nominated her in February:
Peter Murray-Rust, BioIT in Boston: What is Open?, A Scientist and the Web, April 27, 2009.
Update. See also Where do we get Semantic Open Data?. Interview with OA conservation magazine
Daniel Cull, Exclusive: Interview with E-Conservation, Dan Cull Weblog, April 27, 2009. Interview with Rui Bordalo of e-conservation magazine.
PLoS Medicine turns 5 this year
A Medical Journal for the World's Health Priorities, PLoS Medicine Editors, editorial, April 28, 2009. See also the press release:
More on the 2004 Cornell calculation In discussing the vote at the University of Maryland, Philip Davis makes this claim: Comments
New SCOAP3 FAQ addressed to US libraries SPARC and ACRL have produced a new FAQ for CERN's SCOAP3 project. Excerpt:
PS: SCOAP3 produced an FAQ for US libraries back in 2007. The new FAQ is an update of the old one, and CERN's links now point to the new edition. Globethics.net provides, endorses OA The Globethics.net Library and the Open Access Movement, Globethics.net Newsletter, April 2009. An editorial. Excerpt:
Universities as active supporters of OA Tíscar Lara, El papel de la Universidad en la construcción de su identidad digital, Revista de Universidad y Sociedad del Conocimiento, 6, 1 (2009). In Spanish but with this English-language abstract:
Review of ticTOCs and Gold Dust Lisa J. Rogers, Simon Hodson, and Roddy MacLeod, Transforming Current Awareness through RSS: How two projects (ticTOCs and Gold Dust) are using RSS to improve the information landscape for the 21st century researcher, a presentation at the European Library Automation Group Conference (ELAG 09), University Library in Bratislava, April 22-24, 2009.
We've blogged the fact that President Obama named OA supporters Harold Varmus and Eric Lander to co-chair the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), with John Holdren. Today President Obama named all 20 members of PCAST. (Thanks to the Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog.) PS: I haven't had time to check the OA records of the 17 new names. If anyone else has the time and makes a notable discovery, please drop me a line. Biosciences Federation supports recommendations on paying OA journal fees The Biosciences Federation has released a statement (April 14, 2009) in support of last month's report from Universities UK and the Research Information Network on Paying for open access publication charges. In particular, it supports the recommendations that universities launch funds to pay publication fees and that funding agencies clarify when they will pay publication fees. PS: Also see our past posts on the Biosciences Federation. Since 2007, BF has supported the idea of OA journals, provided they are "adequately funded".
Bioalma Announces Full-Text Search Capabilities From Open Access Journals Through novo|seek, press release, April 27, 2009.
See also our past post on novo|seek. The presentations from the 2009 UKSG Conference (Torquay, March 30 - April 1, 2009) are now online. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) See also our past posts on UKSG 2009: Trends in citations to PLoS journals
Abhishek Tiwari, Citation Trend Line For PLoS Journals, Fisheye Perspective, April 25, 2009.
Higher Ed Tag Lines is a five year old database newly converted to OA by its compiler, the Richard Harrison Bailey Agency. Thanks to Don Troop in the Chronicle of Higher Education, who offers this background:
Comment. This isn't the human genome project. What's blogworthy here is not the value of the content for research (though historians and anthropologists should take a look), but Bailey's realization that he had no reason to keep his offline database to himself and that others might enjoy it. Sometimes you need to hear a strong argument. But sometimes it's enough just to ask, "why not OA?" BTW, not a single institution in the database uses the word "sharing" in its tagline.
New on Revues.org:
Barbara Kirsop, Reassuring Open Access-waverers, EPT, April 27, 2009. Excerpt:
Editorial on the Maryland faculty vote If you recall, last week the University of Maryland University Senate voted down a mixed green/gold OA policy. Here's an editorial from the UMaryland student paper in response: Free at last, free at last, Diamondback Online, April 27, 2009. Excerpt:
Comment. The editorial is right to criticize the Senate vote and point out that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles. (Antelman's study was not the first to show this effect, which has been confirmed by many other studies.) But the editorial makes one of the same mistakes as the Senate it criticizes: overlooking green OA (through repositories) in order to focus on gold OA (through journals). The Senate resolution would have encouraged both, but the editorial only mentions the gold OA provision. Most faculty opposition, likewise, seems to have focused on the gold OA provision. (See my comments on the vote.) In summarizing the Harvard policy, the editorial leaves the false impression that it too focuses more on gold OA than green OA ("The transition to publishing academic research in free online journals may not yet be a done deal, but the shift has begun....") But the reverse is true. The Harvard policy focuses on green OA more than gold OA. It's about depositing peer-reviewed journal articles in OA repositories even when they were not published in OA journals. I suspect there would have been less contention at the Maryland Senate meeting, and fewer negative votes, if the proposal had been closer to Harvard's green OA policy and if faculty had understood that it is entirely compatible with the freedom to submit work to the journals of one's choice. |