Thursday, January 8, 2015

Developers Of Chrome Extension That Finds Cheaper Textbook Prices Receives Legal Threats From Major Textbook Supplier | Techdirt


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Posted: 07 Jan 2015 03:50 AM PST
"At this time last year, I had just arrived in Ecuador as a researcher for the FLOK Society Project at the National Institute for Advanced Studies (IAEN). I was part of an international research team that had been recruited to develop policies for a 'social knowledge economy' that could transform Ecuador's productive matrix away from neo-liberalism and the dependence on oil extraction, to an economy based on the free and open access to knowledge. Ecuador was the first country to explicitly promote open knowledge and the development of the commons as a strategy for systemic transformation of the nation's economic model. I was responsible for co-ordinating the research stream focusing on Social Infrastructure and Institutional Innovation. In this, I was bringing my own background in co-operative economic development and social economy to examine how the notion of a social knowledge economy relates to the kinds of social institutions that could both reflect and sustain such a model. It was the first time I had engaged seriously on the interface between commons, co-operatives, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), and the broader civil society as components of an integrated strategy for changing the idea and praxis of political economy as practiced both by the neo-liberal right and the traditional statist left. It was a period of intense intellectual stimulation and engagement with fields of study and practice that extended and challenged my previous experience with the co-operative movement as a factor of progressive economic social change. To this, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Michel Bauwens as my key interlocutor and collaborator during this period. It is a collaboration that has continued beyond our joint work in Ecuador to extend now into the broader terrain of envisioning and articulating how the notion of an open, co-operative commonwealth can be implemented in regions across the globe. The work completed by FLOK provides a crucial first reference and basis of analysis and policy development for adaptations and applications abroad ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 03:48 AM PST
"Presents several accounts of ways in which scholarship can be and is made open to all—gives examples of map collections, these and dissertations, IR content building and where measures of scholarly merit fit in."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 03:46 AM PST
"This second e-book on the subject of open access in the academic field also presents several accounts of ways in which scholarship can be and is made open to all - it gives examples of an Australian study into repository advocacy, the implementation of a university Digital Library, exclusionary practices in publishing surrounding digital objects, and a case study of a digital collection of anatomical sketches of elephants at the University of Pretoria."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 03:41 AM PST
"Includes perspectives from CERN and BioMed Central; and articles about open source software and open access funding"
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 03:39 AM PST
This fourth e-book on the subject of open access in the academic field includes a Latin American case study on open access penetration, a paper from Germany on the promotion of OA illustrated by a project at the University of Konstanz, and a case study on OA at Bioline International, a non-profit scholarly publications aggregator, distributor, publisher and publishing assistance service.
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 03:34 AM PST
"The Open Access to Research: Understanding policy, preparing for the future, organized by the Westminster Briefing will take place on 15th April 2015 at the Westminster Suite in London, UK. The conference will cover areas like Cost: examining the expenditure of making research open to all & the funding available for this Strategy: how should HEIs respond to funders' different and changing OA expectations."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 03:32 AM PST
"Many, including me, have written about who is making money in healthcare. Sure doctors do very well, but not as well as hospitals, hospital administrators, insurance companies and their corporate officers, drug companies, device manufacturers, and others. Another lucrative area is medical journal publication, especially if you are the publisher. A researcher gets an idea, plans and carries out a study, writes a manuscript, and submits it to a journal. The research may have been funded by the government, i.e., you and me. An associate editor or a member of the journal's editorial board looks at the manuscript, and if it is deemed worthy, it is sent out to two or more people in the same field for peer review. This process may be repeated for papers that require revision. All of the players in the above scenario—the researchers, most of the editorial board members except maybe the editor, and the peer reviewers—are paid nothing for their work. Factor in that the cost of producing a journal has plummeted in the computer era. How much money do journal publishers make? Here are some impressive numbers from an article that appeared on a French website called 'Rue89.' The figures are for the year 2011 and are in euros. They include revenue from all science publishing, not just medicine ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 03:30 AM PST
"Which of the following open content licenses can be chosen for the metadata description of the open access full-texts (apart from the deposit license)? n=81*  * This survey question is part of the 2014 Census of Open Access Repositories in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, see: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:11-100222687 For the research data see: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10734 ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 03:27 AM PST
"If you've wanted to make a difference in the world, now might be a good time to stick your head into the machine. 2015 is a test moment for the United Nations as it works to get its member states to agree on a joint set of ambitious new goals: the 'Sustainable Development Goals' (or SDGs for short). The way data is turned into good decisions is going to play centre stage. On that front, there is still much to be worked out. Since 2000, billions of dollars in investment were shaped by a series of global poverty reduction goals called the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Aid and investment in fields such as sanitation, food, healthcare, and education—especially in the poorest countries in the world—have usually aligned with at least one of these MDGs. They set 15-year targets such as, for example, halving the number of people who lack access to clean water. The MDGs were the first attempt of their kind to create goals that had to steer international development for a long period—to try to come together as a world, to set goals that would be a focal point for international cooperation. There have been lots of lessons learned, but in general they've worked quite well. They have provided a focus for activities in a number of key areas, and served to gather funds for specific goals ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 03:25 AM PST
"I'm playing around with some machine learning software I've written. It would be theoretically possible to code this to answer real word questions (like those asked on this site). Of course any answers are only as complete as the sources the answer is constructed from. Are there any plain text document repositories for the field of space exploration? ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 02:53 AM PST
[From Google's English] " ... Researchers have begun to ask for what they paid: in the editorial process of a scientific publication is they who write the text, usually without perceive rights for its publication, and shall generally free of charge to the peer review process, ie the anonymous peer review of the contributions that their colleagues propose to publishers for publication (if the evaluation is positive, it is public, directly or with modifications and additions proposed by the evaluators; otherwise, the text is rejected). When, finally, the article is published, the authors, namely the universities for which they work, to read often have to pay exorbitant prices. What justifies these prices? The editors call on production costs and management of the IT infrastructure, indeed fundamental to the dissemination of the products of scientific research, but margins as those of the big publishers mentioned above, as well as increases progressive and constant applied in recent years by various publishers to its publications, raise more than one question.   The situation, especially, has something of a paradox: the publicly-funded research produces results that are published by commercial publishers and researchers, who produce research, can be accessed only through a new cash outlay. The public, in essence, pay twice for the same asset. If, in addition, are lacking the funds for the purchase of scientific publications - is the case, for example, the current state of severe underfunding of the Italian university, whose physical and digital libraries have been forced in recent years, to drastically cut magazine subscriptions and purchase of monographs - even happens that the state should fund research which its researchers will not know the results.   One might ask, then, why researchers continue to publish these magazines. The fact is that the researchers want to publish in the most prestigious journals, to ensure a greater spread to his work and because the number and quality of their publications have an impact on their careers. Many of these journals are published by large commercial publishers and neither researchers nor the university libraries can simply ignore them or abandon them. Added to this is the vantage point of the large publishers, who concentrate in their hands the ownership of hundreds of magazines and so fail to impose libraries purchases packet, which prevent a narrower selection of titles to buy ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 02:50 AM PST
"In this study, we present an analysis of data citation practices in full text research articles and their corresponding supplementary data files, made available in the Open Access set of articles from Europe PubMed Central. Our aim is to investigate whether supplementary data files should be considered as a source of information for integrating the literature with biomolecular databases. Results: Using text-mining methods to identify and extract a variety of core biological database accession numbers, we found that the supplemental data files contain many more database citations than the body of the article, and that those citations often take the form of a relatively small number of articles citing large collections of accession numbers in text-based files. Moreover, citation of value-added databases derived from submission databases (such as Pfam, UniProt or Ensembl) is common, demonstrating the reuse of these resources as datasets in themselves. All the database accession numbers extracted from the supplementary data are publicly accessible from http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11771. Conclusions: Our study suggests that supplementary data should be considered when linking articles with data, in curation pipelines, and in information retrieval tasks in order to make full use of the entire research article. These observations highlight the need to improve the management of supplemental data in general, in order to make this information more discoverable and useful."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 02:30 AM PST
[From Google's English] "The Episciences IAM project (Informatics and Applied Mathematics) was the subject of an Article published in the proceedings of the international conference ICOA / CILA in Tunis on 27 and 28 November 2014. This project is in the context of open access to scientific production by fostering the creation of epi-newspapers ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 02:11 AM PST
"The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals has rejected an unusual bid by the three publisher plaintiffs in the Georgia State University copyright case to have the case reheard 'en banc' by the full Eleventh Circuit—despite the fact that a three-judge panel handed them a victory last October when it unanimously reversed a 2012 district court verdict against them. The court declined the publishers' motions for a rehearing last Friday, without comment. The closely-watched case, Cambridge University Press v. Patton (known as the Georgia State University (GSU) e-reserves case) involves what three academic publishers allege was a systematic effort by GSU administrators to use unlicensed digital readings as a no-cost alternative to traditionally licensed coursepacks. In 2012, Judge Orinda Evans ruled against the publishers. But last October, the Eleventh Circuit reversed Evans. While on its face that reversal stands as a legal victory for the publishers, observers were quick to note that the Eleventh Circuit in fact largely rejected the publishers' core arguments. By petitioning for hearing by the full Eleventh Circuit, the publishers appeared to agree ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 01:58 AM PST
"The Associate Dean for Technology and Digital Strategies will provide leadership and advocacy for information technology, digital initiatives, repository services and resource discovery and access services. The position will serve as administrator for the Libraries' Department for Information Technologies, Publishing and Curation Services, and Media Technology and Support Services as well as for cross-organizational teams such as the Digital Preservation Strategies Team, ScholarSphere (institutional repository) Service Team, and Hydra Strategy Team. The Associate Dean for Technology and Digital Strategies will partner with University Information Technology Services and other Penn State units and colleges in building our digital future, continuing to enhance already strong collaborations in repository services and learning technologies as well as exploring new opportunities for collaboration across campus, the CIC (Committee for Institutional Cooperation), and other universities and institutions...."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 01:55 AM PST
"Back in October the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling in the Georgia State copyright infringement suit brought by three publishers and the Copyright Clearance Center to try to end reliance on fair use for course readings that are digitized and made available to students in a closed online forum.  As has been widely reported, that decision looked like a win for publishers, in that it vacated the lower court decision that largely favored Georgia State University, and it remanded the case back to the District Court for further proceedings.   But what looked like a win was very dissatisfying to the publisher plaintiffs — Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press and Sage Publishing.  In the course of the opinion, all of the radical changes to copyright law that they hoped to advance with the lawsuit – the imposition of the 1976 Classroom Copying guidelines as a maximum limit rather than a safe harbor, the idea that the copy shop cases involving commercial course packs were appropriate precedents for in-house electronic reserves, a move from analysis of individual claims of fair use to a comprehensive impact analysis, and a statement that non-profit educational use did not necessarily favor fair use — were rejected by the Court of Appeals. The publishers were very unhappy with this decision, even though it gave them the outcome they desired in the specific conflict.  They are looking for a radical realignment of fair use; the actual case is relatively unimportant, I think, compared to this desire to change the landscape so that many more licenses for educational institutions would be required.  So they asked the entire 11th Circuit to rehear the case (en banc) instead of letting the decision of the usual three judge panel stand.  Their petition for rehearing is a wish list of the principles they would like to have govern copyright in academia, which, of course, all point to paying those publishers more money. On Friday the 11th Circuit rejected this petition for an en banc rehearing, as well as the petition for rehearing filed by GSU.  The Court did not comment on the rejection; they simply denied both petitions, thus leaving the opinion of the Appellate panel as the Court's final word on the case. For libraries, this means we are still in the uncertain and murky position I describe back in October. For the publishers, there are a dwindling number of options left for them ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 01:15 AM PST
"The OPENPediatrics program at Boston Children's Hospital announced the launch today of a new open educational resource (OER), a multimedia library that presents animations and illustrations from OPENPediatrics instructional videos under CC BY-NC-SA for use by clinicians and academics in their own instructional materials.  OPENPediatrics provides online learning opportunities for pediatric clinicians worldwide on a website specifically for medical professionals, but some of the resources created for that site—including those in the new multimedia library—are now being made available to the general public as well. 'An important part of our production process is the addition of high quality animations and illustrations to our didactic and procedural videos,' said Steve Carson, Director of Operations for the program.  'Until now these resources have been embedded in our videos and only accessible to clinicians.  Now, inspired by MIT OpenCourseWare and other OER projects, we are making the animations and illustrations available under open licenses and in downloadable formats to encourage wide usage.' The initial 48 animations and illustrations are among the hundreds that will eventually be made available. The first set of resources illustrates key concepts of airway management, respiratory care, neurology, clinical procedures and other areas of pediatric care. The animations and illustrations have all been peer reviewed for accuracy.  In the coming months, OPENPediatrics will continue publishing animations and illustrations from its back catalog as well as from newly released videos and other resources. The multimedia library is the second publicly available resource from OPENPediatrics, joining a collection of World Shared Practice Forum videos, which share global perspectives on key aspects of pediatric care."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 01:11 AM PST
"Academic Senate faculty are currently the only University of California authors covered by a UC open access policy, but that may soon change. Provost Aimée Dorr recently distributed a draft proposal for a broader open access policy that would cover all other UC employees. Comments on the proposed policy are due by January 15, 2015. The text of the policy and its accompanying documents can be found on the UCOP Academic Affairs website. If adopted, the draft policy will cover all new scholarly articles written by non-Senate UC employees. It reserves the right for authors to make their final versions of these articles publicly available and directs the authors to submit a copy of them to eScholarship, UC's open access repository. Alternately, authors can provide a link to a location where the article is already openly available in another repository or at the publisher's site. If an article's publication agreement is signed before the policy is adopted, that article is not covered by the policy. The proposed policy is similar to the UC-wide and the UCSF Academic Senate policies – and others like them around the world – in many ways. It does, however, have some distinct terms to keep in mind ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 01:07 AM PST
"While the rest of the world was engaged in various year-end activities and celebrating the holidays, the open access (OA) movement continued to chalk up a number of key victories—and faced an unexpected curveball along the way. From late September to December, we witnessed the adoption of the first public access policy for state-funded research, a shift to put students and early career researchers at the center of the OA movement, a high-profile battle between 'Big Deal' subscriptions and libraries in connection with OA, and the adoption of even more OA policies by big research funders ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 01:05 AM PST
Use the link to access the full text article from the Swiss Electronic Journal of Information Science.  [From Google's English] "The Linked Open Data (LOD) are gradually revealed considerable challenges for information professionals and libraries. This article is a survey of the issue by addressing several aspects tower. After introducing the key concepts of this theme, it attempts to determine the usefulness of LOD library presenting some innovative applications. Prerequisites for creating such applications, data conversion in LOD is described as a generalized process. The article then changes perspective and examines the information professional, identifying the most relevant skills needed to cope with these changes. Finally, it describes the concrete realization of a remote training on LOD, accessible to all on the web ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 01:02 AM PST
Use the link to access the full text article.  [From Google's English] "The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) [1] is run by the Library of the University of Lund (Sweden) and is considered, although not complete, yet comprehensive directory of open access journals. An analysis of the DOAJ therefore provides insight into the incidence and characteristics of Open Access Journals - this also applies to their legal characteristics. Overhead is guided in the DOAJ journals that their content (read: their articles as full texts) can be read and downloaded free of charge. However, many journals do not settle for readers to provide their texts purely free, but concede further use options and make their content under this special content licenses, Creative Commons licenses (CC licenses). With the spread and use of these licenses under the journals of the DOAJ this contribution the data and tables online open access are available (Tart, 2014) is concerned. The basis for the survey were DOAJ metadata to the listed journals that have been downloaded as a CSV file on 22/08/2014 by the DOAJ site. [2] Where necessary, this information was supplemented by research in the DOAJ database. To date, the mentioned DOAJ showed 9,967 Open Access journals ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 12:59 AM PST
[From Google's English] "Last July, Esri announced the availability of ArcGIS Open Data , a free application included as standard in ArcGIS Online portals organizations to publish their open data via a configurable web site. The approach Esri ArcGIS Open Data is to simplify the data sharing process using data directly from your existing GIS infrastructure (Online, On-premises or hybrid). This approach allows organizations to focus their efforts on strategy, license conditions and the promotion of their data open approach rather than technical or operational aspects.  The ease of configuration and deployment of ArcGIS Open Data has led to a very rapid adoption in the second half of 2014.This application demonstrates this with a retrospective of the adoption of ArcGIS Open Data since last summer more 700 organizations that have activated these capabilities on their portal for ArcGIS number of published datasets 15000. These data sets from services hosted on ArcGIS Online and ArcGIS Server services internal organizations. Since the launch of ArcGIS Open Data as a global platform for publishing open data, available in 24 languages, the adoption has been particularly rapid in the United States with numerous local and regional governments ( City of Houston ,  Data Driven Detroit , City of Charlotte ,  Maryland iMAP , North Frontenac (Ontario) , Miami-Dade County , Atlanta Regional Commission ,Washington / District of Columbia , ...) but also national and international government agencies ( Collaborative Crop Research Program Andean Region ...) "
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 12:56 AM PST
"This year, fair use law experienced mostly positive developments. The biggest trend, which harkens back to Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley Ltd., 448 F.3d 605 (2d Cir. 2006) and Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146 (9th Cir. 2007), involves fair use findings in cases where the new work transforms the 'function or purpose' of the original work without altering or actually adding to it. We saw a series of decisions concluding that aggregating content (e.g., television clips, digitized books, legal briefs, etc.) into searchable databases for new uses can be transformative, even if little or nothing about the original content itself changes. In another, more disturbing trend, we continued to see cases where people acquired copyright registrations for the sole purpose of trying to silence their critics. Thankfully, in each of these cases, fair use (even when poorly applied by Judge Easterbrook) protected freedom of speech. Finally, we saw a biographical film about the life of a pornography actress protected for its critical content and an even-handed (albeit monstrously long) opinion involving digital coursepacks at Georgia State University. Without further ado, these are my 'Top 10' fair use cases for 2014 in chronological order ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 12:52 AM PST
"The Technical University of Ilmenau is the first university in Thuringia, which allows free online access to research publications. To make scientific publications already on their appearance in professional journals over the Internet for free accessible, it offers its scientists from 2015 through a newly established publication fund financial resources available ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 12:49 AM PST
"The textbook publishing industry has turned books of facts into overvalued goods on par with 'priceless' finds at antique stores. To keep margins high and the revenue stream flowing, publishers screw with pagination in order to create 'new' editions every year, turning textbooks into useless piles of paper the moment they're purchased. Trading one in at the end of the class means receiving pennies on the dollar for your original investment. Stocking up for another semester's worth of classes means shelling out hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. Rinse. Repeat. So, when someone comes along and threatens this business model, publishers are swift to react. Offensive efforts -- like locking schools into yearly purchases for instructors' versions and acting as 'partners' in campus bookstores -- have mitigated most of the damage caused by outside forces like Amazon and used book retailers. But the publishers also play defense. A side project from Texts.com (a service that helps students scour the web for the best prices on textbooks) has caught the attention of Follett, one of the nation's largest suppliers of campus bookstores. OccupyTheBookstore is a Chrome extension that allows users to find better prices on textbooks while browsing bookstore websites. Follett doesn't like this because the extension draws sales away from the stores it supplies. It sent a cease-and-desist request to the team behind the extension, asking (nicely, at this point) to knock it off or it will be 'forced' to involve its legal team ..."
Posted: 07 Jan 2015 12:46 AM PST
"As part of its new Open Access policy, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) recently adopted Creative Commons content licences, which allow for free and open distribution of most of its published works. UNESCO was the first United Nations agency to enact an open access policy, and advocates hope that this will stimulate other global health organisations to make their content open-access. Indrajit Banerjee, Director of UNESCO's Knowledge Societies Division, explained UNESCO's motives in an interview with open-access advocate Richard Poynder ..."
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