Wednesday, January 28, 2015

Cultural Institutions Behaving Badly: Stupid Reactions to 3D Scanning and Copyright Bullies - Public Knowledge


 

Posted: 27 Jan 2015 03:19 AM PST
"The College of Wooster Libraries seeks an innovative and service-oriented colleague to become our Digital Scholarship Librarian. This newly created faculty position reports to the Director of Libraries and provides leadership in creating, organizing, promoting, and curating digital materials. The librarian will play a key role in supporting our Open Access resolution, our institutional repository (Open Works), digital projects developed under our current grant, institutional research data, born digital scholarship, and digitized content...."
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 03:05 AM PST
"Should you, as a scientist, care about federally mandated free public access to journal articles and data? You should if you value the work of your scientific society. You should if you care about the sustainability and integrity of scholarly communication. Open access entered a new phase in the summer of 2014 with the release by the US Department of Energy of its public access plan in July and the opening of its PAGES (Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science) portal system in August (see Physics Today, October 2014, page 29). DOE is the first of 20 agencies that will issue new mandates pursuant to a 22 February 2013 memorandum from the Office of Science and Technology Policy regarding increased public access to the results of federally funded scientific research. For work done and written up under DOE grants received on or after 1 October 2014, PAGES will include each paper's metadata—title, authors, journal issue—and abstract and will link to a full-text PDF. That PDF will either be on the publisher's website or on PAGES or at a grantee's institution. The full text of the papers must be freely available 12 months from publication date. To a reader, free access to journal articles after 12 months sounds great. But as an author, you will have no say about anyone's access to your paper, even if it is only partially based on grant data, or is one for which you already submitted the required grant report to the funding agency, or is a paper written on the author's own time. And authors will have to make sure that the journal they want to publish with can and will support the DOE policy. Arguments that government-financed research be made available at no charge within a year are overly simplistic. Clearly, publishing a journal is not free. It requires hardware, software, management of the peer-review process, editorial work, maintenance of the database over decades, and printing the product. The real question is, Who pays? ‣ Authors, either personally or through their institution or the grants in question. ‣ Users, whether libraries, companies, or individuals. ‣ A third party, such as government (that is, taxpayers) or donors. If costs are not addressed, the continued existence of the system of scholarly communication on which science depends is at risk ..."
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 03:01 AM PST
"This study sought to investigate the faculty's awareness, attitudes and use of open access, and the role of information professionals in supporting open access (OA) scholarly communication in Tanzanian health sciences universities.
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 02:57 AM PST
"For more than a century, the long, stately rows of Encyclopædia Britannica have been a fixture on the shelves of many an educated person's home—the smooshed-together diphthong in the first word a symbol of old-world erudition and gravitas. So it was a shock to many when, in 2012, the venerable institution announced it would no longer publish a print version of its multivolume compendium of knowledge. Though the Britannica would still be available online, the writing on the virtual wall was clear: It had been supplanted by the Internet. And more specifically, by an upstart phenomenon Wikipedia, the free, crowd-sourced encyclopedia that since its inception in 2001 had rapidly become the new go-to source for knowledge ... But is objectivity better achieved by considering one viewpoint or thousands? Along with cowriter Shane Greenstein of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, Zhu asks that question in a new paper, Do Experts or Collective Intelligence Write with More Bias? Evidence fromEncyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia ... Zhu and Greenstein have long been interested in the question of crowd bias, which itself has been hotly debated by scholars in many fields including psychology and politics over the centuries. Are two heads better than one, or do too many cooks spoil the broth? Does the collective will of the majority lead to democratic consensus or fundamentalist groupthink?  The massive, ongoing natural experiment of Wikipedia offers a unique view into these questions. 'The Internet makes it so easy for people to aggregate; some scholars worry that people will self-select into groups with a similar ideology,' says Zhu. As a result, the Internet may lead to more biased opinions, which only harden over time as users separate into rival virtual camps.  To test this theory, Zhu and Greenstein took a database of terms developed by University of Chicago economists Matthew Gentzkow and Jesse Shapiro to examine newspaper bias. Gentzkow and Shapiro studied speeches in the 2005 Congressional Record to scientifically identify the top 500 unique phrases used by Democrats (e.g., tax breaks, minimum wage, fuel efficiency) and Republicans (e.g., death tax, border security, war on terror), rating each according to political slant.  Zhu and Greenstein then identified some 4,000 articles that appeared in both Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia, and determined how many of each of these code words were included, in an effort to determine overall bias and direction ..."
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 02:54 AM PST
In my occupation, tenure and promotion are big deals. University professors who want to get tenure or be promoted are usually expected not only to conduct research, but also to publish that research in academic journals. And in the last decade or so, the traditional model of academic journal publishing has been disrupted by the emergence of online-only journals and by open access journals.
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 02:39 AM PST
"Last week, Royal Philips and Massachusetts Institute of Technology answered Park's call. Together with MIT, Philips has launched a new initiative that gives healthcare researchers access to what the company's executives call one of the largest data sources available on critical care. Philips will be providing MIT access to data from more than 100,000 patients that have been collected and de-identified through the Philips Hospital to Home eICU telehealth program. The Laboratory of Computational Physiology within the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science will serve as the academic research hub for the initiative, and will provide and maintain access, as well as help educate researchers on the database and offer a platform for collaboration. The type of data made available matters. Researchers today are limited mostly to insurance claims data, which offers just a summary of a patient's stay ..."
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 02:37 AM PST
"Making data openly available enables other researchers to validate and to attempt the replication of research results. Just as importantly, completely new work might spring from the same data when it is seen through different eyes. But in practice researchers are often reluctant to make their data available for use by others. They feel that there could still be untapped potential for them to exploit, or they worry that they might be out-competed by a larger, more generously funded research team. More off-putting still, getting data ready for other people to examine could prove to be a time-consuming process that brings little direct benefit, as data sharing is often not rewarded in formal research assessment. Nonetheless, many researchers do share their data, for a variety of reasons. While a number of studies have assessed data sharing practices, barriers and enablers, until recently there has been little work to explore specifically what motivates those who do it. However, insight into what drives them may help policy makers and research funders to devise strategies that make data sharing a more appealing prospect in the future. Knowledge Exchange (KE), a partnership between organisations in Denmark (DEFF), Finland (CSC), Germany (DFG), the Netherlands (SRUF) and the UK (Jisc) designed to support the use and development of ICT in higher education and research, has been working on uncovering the motivations of researchers to share their data. The result is a new report, 'Sowing the seed: Incentives and motivations for sharing research data'. Interviews with researchers or groups of researchers in each KE country reveal what made it worthwhile for them to share data in their own particular case, and highlight the obstacles that had to be overcome to do so. Of course, the report is based on a small and deliberately non-representative sample. In the work we chose research projects at a range of sizes and maturity, alongside a subject, methodological and geographic split. But, by design, they are all projects with a commitment to data sharing already. The incentives that motivate researchers to share data fell into four main areas ..."
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 02:27 AM PST
"Purpose This Notice serves to remind the NIH extramural scientific community that the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy becomes effective with NIH grant applications submitted for the January 25, 2015, due date and thereafter. Background The National Institutes of Health (NIH) issued the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy (NOT-OD-14-124) and Implementation of the NIH Genomic Data Sharing Policy for NIH Grant Applications and Awards (NOT-OD-14-111) on August 27, 2014. Both announcements specified the effective implementation date of January 25, 2015, for NIH grant application submissions. Reminders for Grant Applicants Investigators preparing grant applications for those due dates should prepare now if the work proposed involves the generation or use of large-scale genomic data. The following highlights should be noted ..."
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 02:21 AM PST
"The amount of plant biodiversity data available via the web has exploded in the last decade, but making these data available requires a considerable investment of time and work, both vital considerations for organizations and institutions looking to validate the impact factors of these online works. Here we used Google Analytics (GA), to measure the value of this digital presence. In this paper we examine usage trends using 15 different GA accounts, spread across 451 institutions or botanical projects that comprise over five percent of the world's herbaria. They were studied at both one year and total years. User data from the sample reveal: 1) over 17 million web sessions, 2) on five primary operating systems, 3) search and direct traffic dominates with minimal impact from social media, 4) mobile and new device types have doubled each year for the past three years, 5) and web browsers, the tools we use to interact with the web, are changing. Server-side analytics differ from site to site making the comparison of their data sets difficult. However, use of Google Analytics erases the reporting heterogeneity of unique server-side analytics, as they can now be examined with a standard that provides a clarity for data-driven decisions. The knowledge gained here empowers any collection-based environment regardless of size, with metrics about usability, design, and possible directions for future development."
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 02:17 AM PST
Use the link to access the full text article from the journal philosophy and technology available from Springer.   "The debate on Open Data and Data Protection focuses on individual privacy. How can the latter be protected while taking advantage of the enormous potentialities offered by ever-bigger Open Data and ever-smarter algorithms and applications? The tension is sometimes presented as being asymmetric: between the ethics of privacy and the politics of security. In fact, it is ultimately ethical. Two moral duties need to be reconciled: fostering human rights and improving human welfare. The tension is obvious if one considers medical contexts and biomedical Big Data, for example, where protection of patients' records and cure or prevention of diseases need to go hand in hand (Howe et al. 2008; Groves et al. 2013)."
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 01:46 AM PST
Use the link to access the study.  "This preliminary report is part of a larger study on Open Access publishing by Dutch
scientists and scholars over roughly the last decade. The wider study includes more data sources, which are not yet all sorted out properly, and are in this stage of the research not sufficiently well analyzed to include and draw firm conclusions on this data. In this text we will primarily focus on the way Open Access (OA from now on) publications are represented
in the Web of Science database. We have collected data for this analysis in two different ways, which leads to different perspectives on OA publishing in the Netherlands. We focus on the output of three smaller scientific nations in Europe, next to the Netherlands we focus on Denmark and Switzerland, as these countries do contest the scientific runner up
positions globally after the USA, and are more or less of comparable volume in economic terms."
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 01:34 AM PST
"OPEN DATA DAY 2015 is coming and a coalition of partners have come together to provide a limited number of micro-grants designed to support communities organise ODD activities all over the world ! Open Data Day (ODD) is one of the most exciting events of the year. As a volunteer led event, with no organisation behind it, Open Data Day provides the perfect opportunity for communities all over the world to convene, celebrate and promote open data in ways most relevant to their fellow citizens. This year, Open Data Day will take place on Saturday, the 21st of February 2015 and a coalition of partners have gotten together to help make the event bigger (and hopefully better) than its has ever been before! ..."
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 01:22 AM PST
"The OA mandate of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) is one of the few ROARMAP entries from Hungary. The mandate has been effective since 2013 and is itself quite unusual as MTA is a complex organisation. MTA comprises a network of research centres and institutes and also acts as a research funder, supporting several research groups from various Hungarian Universities. MTA is also a learning society. This mandate is colour-neutral: it accepts both the Green and Gold OA routes for compliance. For Green OA, publications can be deposited in the MTA repository – REAL – or in subject repositories like arXiv or PubMed Central. Deposit in institutional repositories hosting MTA-supported research groups is also acceptable. Without the existence of the Hungarian Scientific Bibliography database (Magyar Tudományos Művek Tára, MTMT), the effectiveness of such a mandate could not be monitored. In 2014 MTMT developed an OA compliance monitoring tool with support from SIM4RDM (a FP7 research data management project, see the final report). The monitoring tool can deliver OA publication statistics both for organisations and for individual researchers. Researchers are able to view their individual OA statistics for a chosen range of years, showing all of their OA or closed access publications. Institutional administrators can check the OA scores of their organisation – for MTA, joint statistics can be displayed on the whole research centre network as well as specific statistics on individual centres, institutions and researchers. The MTA mandate not only requires researchers to make publications openly available, but OA compliance also features in the evaluation of research centres and institutes. As a result, this tool may well increase compliance rates. MTA has created an OA fund to cover for APCs that started operating in the end of 2013. In line with other European OA funds, APCs for articles published in Open Access journals are eligible for refund by MTA but OA charges in hybrid journals are not. Another possible funding source for APCs is the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund, which earmarks 1/8th of the project budget overheads for supporting Open Access. Furthermore, Hungary participates in SCOAP3 that seeks to promote access to journals in high energy physics at no cost for authors. More recently, MTA has agreed with Elsevier the conditions of repository deposit. The possibilities of negotiating prepaid OA plans with major publishers will be explored. The MTA Committee on Publishing Scientific Books and Journals has recently decided to require open access for supported publications by requesting mandatory deposit in REAL. Different embargo periods are acceptable for deposits: one year for individual journal articles, two years for full issues or volumes, and up to eight years for books. However, publishers may apply for exemptions (closed access deposit). If the publication is accessible immediately, repositories other than REAL can also be used. For publication grants awarded from 2015, OTKA also requires OA for book publishing grants. See PASTEUR4OA Hungarian National Case Study for more information on the Hungarian OA landscape."
Posted: 27 Jan 2015 01:04 AM PST
"Late last year we highlighted the fantastic work that the Cooper Hewitt Museum is doing to set an example for how museums and other cultural institutions can make high quality 3D scans available to the public.  Unfortunately, just as long summer days must turn to cold winter nights, we now have an example of a different cultural institution doing a fantastic job of setting an example of how not to handle the same types of issues.  Sioux Falls is home to a high quality cast of Michelangelo's Moses, one of his best-known sculptures.*  The cast itself co-owned by the City of Sioux Falls and Augustana College and is on public display on the campus of Augustana College.   Local photographer Jerry Fisher decided to use the sculpture as his subject while he honed his 3D capture skills, documenting his progress on Twitter and Google +.  Unfortunately, this completely reasonable and legal act caught the attention of representatives of Augustana College.  Citing an unspecified (and ultimately nonexistent) mixture of copyright and other intellectual property rights concerns, the College asked Fisher to remove his 3D files from the internet.  Fearing some sort of liability, Fisher complied with this groundless request, thus depriving himself and everyone else of the opportunity to use the files.  Let's get one thing out of the way right now: Augustana College had no legal right or basis to threaten Fisher with the specter of infringement.  There is no copyright protection for a sculpture that was created at the dawn of the 16th century by a sculptor who died 450 years ago.  All of Michelangelo's work is firmly in the public domain.  If fact, copyright didn't even exist during Michelangelo's lifetime.  From the moment he sculpted his Moses anyone could copy, remix, and build upon it for any reason, without having to ask permission.  Of course, the sculpture in Sioux Falls is not Michelangelo's original sculpture.  The original Moses is still in Italy.  The Sioux Falls sculptures are exact replicas made in the early 1970s - exact replicas, it seems appropriate to mention, that were made without permission of Michelangelo's estate because the originals are not protected by copyright.  There was no copyright on the original sculpture, and there is no copyright in the exact copies of the original sculpture ..."
Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)