Sunday, January 25, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Policies | The Library | University of Salford, Manchester

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 02:11 AM PST

"The University of Salford Open Access Policy was adopted in January 2015. This policy sets out open access publishing requirements for all peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers authored or co-authored by staff and postgraduate research students at the University of Salford and accepted for publication from April 2015 onwards. Researchers will also need to comply with the policies of all funders who have supported their research. If you would like advice on how to meet the requirements of these policies, please contact the Repository Team ..."

Open Data Collaborations | Crisis Text Line

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 02:07 AM PST

"While we use data to make our products and services better–ie, make us a better company–we also believe our data can make a better world. There has not been a large comprehensive study on youth and mental health since 1997. There is almost no real-time open data on most mental health issues. And, very few data sets are as general (cutting across issues) or as large. Simply, Crisis Text Line has a unique and large set of data on teens and mental health that can (1) inform the public and media, (2) shape government and school policies, and (3) drive cutting edge academic research ..."

Be part of Openness in Geoeducation | OSGeo.org

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 01:40 AM PST

"On behalf of Geo for All we are pleased to invite you to join our efforts in creating Openness in GeoEducation. You are invited to register and participate in free course on "Introduction to Geospatial Technology Using QGIS". Over 1000 students have already registered for the next course starting Feb 23- Mar 29, 2015 being run by GeoAcademy. For Educators, please note that the curriculum (lecture materials, tutorials etc) is also free for you to share and share alike under the Creative Commons BY 3.0 license. Please find all the materials at GitHub repository. For universities and educators it is an excellent opportunity to build your own Geospatial courses using Free and Open Source Geospatial Software. OSGeo software and technologies are the major contributor for the global geospatial economy and used by hundreds of thousands of users in academia, governments and business worldwide and rapidly increasing. GeoAcademy and OSGeo Live are going to be the two key instruments that Geo for All will be using to accelerate Openness in Geoeducation worldwide and the International Map Year 2015 (lead by the International Cartographic Association and supported by the United Nations) is the opportunity we will be using to implement this action. GeoAcademy will not only expand geospatial education opportunities to thousands of students but more importantly by making all the lectures, tutorials available in GitHub under Creative Commons licence enables other educators globally to build up their own teaching resources to suit their requirements. Creating openness in Geo Education is important for developing creative and open minds in students which is critical for building open innovation and contributes to building up Open Knowledge for the benefit of the whole society and for our future generations. We look forward to your participation for Openness in Geoeducation worldwide and successful International Map Year activities ..."

Help us build an evidence base on the social impact of open data! - Sunlight Foundation Blog

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 01:37 AM PST

" ... Much of the existing literature seeking to measure the impact and effectiveness of transparency and open data accountability initiatives seem to face a common challenge: It is incredibly difficult to come up with definitive, evidence-based generalizations about how 'x' type of initiatives produce 'y' kinds of effects. The field has yet to coalesce around a theory of change, for one, and there are significant methodological challenges around comparability and unevenness of evidence. At Sunlight, we would like to help change that. As a continuation of our work to provide examples of how opening up information makes a difference in communities across the U.S., we want to tackle some of these challenges through a new research project to explore and analyze the social impact of open data outside the U.S. Our goal is to build a strong evidence base that might empower further generalizations and to develop a few potential theories of change that capture the nuances, complexity and messiness of this broad agenda. With generous support from the Open Data for Development Research Fund of the OGP Open Data Working Group, our research aims to identify the factors that increase the likelihood that open data initiatives will achieve their stated goals in a particular context. We also seek to understand why and how these factors lead to success or failure. As a first step, we are asking you — the community of transparency and open government advocates, civic hackers, investigative journalists and policy makers — to provide us with illustrative examples of how open data and transparency projects are having impact on our societies ..."

Textbooks still pricey, but University of Massachusetts Amherst students and staff look for ways to reduce costs | GazetteNet.com

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 01:27 AM PST

"At a time when University of Massachusetts Amherst students spend about $1,200 a year on textbooks, one wonders whether the authors of the nearly $300 "Essentials of Investments" would advise students to actually buy a new copy of their own book. That was not the path chosen by finance major Curtis Kowalski of Boxford, for whom the book is a required text in a required course. The UMass junior went online to rent it from Amazon for $55 rather than pay the $270 to get a new copy from the UMass Textbook Annex ... For years, students, administrators and faculty alike have bemoaned the seemingly unchecked spiraling cost of textbooks. Some students say they've tried creative ways to avoid having the cost of textbooks add to the already burdensome expense of their college education by avoiding, when possible, courses with inflated textbook prices, renting texts or buying them used whenever possible.  To that end, the university announced this month it would replace the Textbook Annex with an online university store run by Amazon that would offer lower prices to students and a cut of the sales to the university. But that still leaves students paying hundreds of dollars each semester for books, even as they search for lower-cost alternatives to buying books outright ... Meanwhile, the school has been awarding small grants through its Open Education Initiative to encourage faculty to revamp their courses to include free educational materials, usually online, to students instead of traditional textbooks ... That is where the Open Education Initiative comes in, according to UMass Director of Libraries Jay Schafer.  Started five years ago, the initiative offers faculty members $1,000 to $2,500 grants to go through their course curriculum and see whether free course materials can be used, Schafer said. The university has so far spent $39,000 on grants for 30 faculty members and saved students more than $1 million in textbook prices, he said ..."

Programme meetings | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 01:21 AM PST

"UNESCO will support Network of African Science Academies (NASAC) to hold an Open Access Consultative Forum from 29th-30th January 2015 in Nairobi, Kenya. The forum aims at initiating dialogue between scientists and policy-makers to support the development of science-based advice on Open Access for Africa and establish relationships with organizations keen on using Open Access. It will also discuss the new models of scholarly communication based on open access, its practical challenges, and the possible solutions to be adopted. This activity will attract participation of scientists, policy-makers, researchers, academics, scholars and librarians from Africa to include: Kenyan Ministry of Education, Science and Technology, Kenya National Academy of Sciences (KNAS), Network of African Science Academies (NASAC), African Academy of Sciences (AAS), and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW). This activity falls within the framework of UNESCO's Main Line of Actions to enable universal access and preservation of information and knowledge and the Expected Result to promote Open Solutions for Knowledge Societies ..."

Blog 2015 - Why the Digitization of Dissertations and Theses is Important to Researchers, Universities AND Libraries

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 01:19 AM PST

"Publication of dissertations is not new; in fact, a dissertation or thesis* has to be published (in the sense of being made available to potential readers) before it earns its title. And while institutional repositories can capture the work of the university's own researchers, they achieve only limited success in dissemination to other institutions. In pre-digital times, dissertations were submitted in print format, and were normally read by only a few people who knew how to find and access them ... But digital dissertations are not new, either; digitization facilities have been available since 1998.  ProQuest was the first company to offer them, having provided a print-to-microfilm service since 1938. Its digitization program, set up in 1997, was given a major boost in 1998 when the Library of Congress recognized ProQuest as the offsite repository of the USA's Digital Dissertations Library.  It now works with more than 700 US universities, and this year alone will have digitized more than 100,000 dissertations.  ProQuest also digitizes dissertations from countries across the world, including the UK. Since 1988, the ProQuest database has included citations for theses/dissertations from many British universities (via the British Document Supply Centre at Boston Spa).  Other commercial providers have now entered the market as well. In the UK, the British Library's EThOS service (partly funded by JISC) was launched in 2009. It digitizes theses from 130 British universities, and contains about three times as many records of dissertations as full-text documents, though the remainder can be scanned and supplied via on-demand services for a fee ... Digitization programs have only attracted significant interest in academia over the past three to five years, a phenomenon that has been driven by two main catalysts: the rise of the Institutional Repository (IR), and the simultaneous momentum of the Open Access movement, both of which have spurred universities to issue publication mandates to their academics and researchers.   As with many new services now being required by universities, the library provides the pivotal link. Librarians may take responsibility for both educating graduate researchers about copyright, and explaining the program options available. Sometimes the library will work with another department in the institution – the research office, if it has one, or individual faculty members – to raise awareness of a program, or locate funding.  Researchers can be baffled and/or suspicious about what might happen to their work with these required services.  Many might ask, when libraries have to cope with cuts both in revenues and staff, why increasing manpower and money is being devoted to this area ..."

Genetics Society of America names Louisa Stark as recipient of Elizabeth W. Jones Award | EurekAlert! Science News

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 01:15 AM PST

"The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is pleased to announce that Louisa A. Stark, PhD (University of Utah) has been awarded the Society's Elizabeth W. Jones Award for Excellence in Education in recognition of her significant and sustained impact in genetics education. The award, whose namesake was a renowned geneticist and educator, honors the remarkable advances in global access to genetics education enabled by Dr. Stark's work ... Dr. Stark has had a major impact on improving genetics literacy worldwide. She has 20 years of experience in planning and teaching professional development programs for K-12 teachers. The University of Utah Genetic Science Learning Center, which she directs, excels at developing interactive, multimedia materials that focus on making genetics easy for everyone to understand. These materials are freely disseminated via the Center'sLearn.Genetics and Teach.Genetics websites. The sites constitute the most widely-used online genetics education resource in the world. In 2014, they were visited by almost 20 million students, educators, scientists, and members of the public who came from every country. With over 80 million page views annually, Learn.Genetics is among the most used sites on the Web. In 2010, the sites received the first award of the Science Prize for Online Resources in Education from AAAS/Science Magazine. Stark's work also has been recognized by awards from the American Society of Human Genetics, the governor of Utah, the National Association of Biology Teachers, and the Utah Science Teachers Association ..."

Philosophy for the masses | NIU Today

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 01:10 AM PST

"With the help of substantial donation from the John Templeton Foundation, NIU's philosophy department is teaming up with Wi-Phi, an open access philosophy web site that aims to increase the role of philosophy in the public sphere. Launched in 2013 by Gaurav Vazirani, a graduate student at Yale, Wi-Phi publishes videos on philosophical topics and critical thinking at a level accessible to viewers without any prior training. The site is now run by Vazirani and a team of 15 collaborators across North America, including NIU philosophy professor Geoff Pynn. Video contributions so far have come from 35 faculty members at 22 leading philosophy departments, including NIU, Cambridge, Columbia, Duke, MIT, Yale and others. The videos, now averaging more than 45,000 views per month, consist of audio recordings by professional philosophers with animations created by Wi-Phi's team. The site is quickly winning wide recognition: Wi-Phi is partnered with Khan Academy, a leading free online education provider, to distribute its content worldwide, and has nearly 5,000 YouTube subscribers ..."

Open Education » Rowman & Littlefield International

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 01:03 AM PST

Use the link to access pay-per-view options for the book available from Rowman & Littlefield.  "What for decades could only be dreamt of is now almost within reach: the widespread provision of free online education, regardless of a geographic location, financial status, or ability to access conventional institutions of learning. But does open education really offer the openness, democracy and cost-effectiveness its supporters promise? Or will it lead to a two-tier system, where those who can't afford to attend a traditional university will have to make do with online, second-rate alternatives? Open Education engages critically with the creative disruption of the university through free online education. It puts into political context not just the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) but also TED Talks, Wikiversity along with self-organised 'pirate' libraries and 'free universities' associated with the anti-austerity protests and the global Occupy movement. Questioning many of the ideas open education projects take for granted, including Creative Commons, it proposes a radically different model for the university and education in the twenty-first century."

What the Web Said Yesterday - The New Yorker

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 12:56 AM PST

"Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 took off from Amsterdam at 10:31 A.M. G.M.T. on July 17, 2014, for a twelve-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur. Not much more than three hours later, the plane, a Boeing 777, crashed in a field outside Donetsk, Ukraine. All two hundred and ninety-eight people on board were killed. The plane's last radio contact was at 1:20 P.M. G.M.T. At 2:50 P.M. G.M.T., Igor Girkin, a Ukrainian separatist leader also known as Strelkov, or someone acting on his behalf, posted a message on VKontakte, a Russian social-media site: 'We just downed a plane, an AN-26.' (An Antonov 26 is a Soviet-built military cargo plane.) The post includes links to video of the wreckage of a plane; it appears to be a Boeing 777. Two weeks before the crash, Anatol Shmelev, the curator of the Russia and Eurasia collection at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford, had submitted to the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library in California, a list of Ukrainian and Russian Web sites and blogs that ought to be recorded as part of the archive's Ukraine Conflict collection. Shmelev is one of about a thousand librarians and archivists around the world who identify possible acquisitions for the Internet Archive's subject collections, which are stored in its Wayback Machine, in San Francisco. Strelkov's VKontakte page was on Shmelev's list. 'Strelkov is the field commander in Slaviansk and one of the most important figures in the conflict,' Shmelev had written in an e-mail to the Internet Archive on July 1st, and his page 'deserves to be recorded twice a day.' On July 17th, at 3:22 P.M. G.M.T., the Wayback Machine saved a screenshot of Strelkov's VKontakte post about downing a plane. Two hours and twenty-two minutes later, Arthur Bright, the Europe editor of the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a picture of the screenshot, along with the message 'Grab of Donetsk militant Strelkov's claim of downing what appears to have been MH17.' By then, Strelkov's VKontakte page had already been edited: the claim about shooting down a plane was deleted. The only real evidence of the original claim lies in the Wayback Machine ..."

Why We Still Can't Really Put Anything In The Public Domain... And Why That Needs To Change | Techdirt

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 12:44 AM PST

"More than five years ago, we wrote about just how difficult it was to actually put something into the public domain legally. For years, we've said that all of our Techdirt posts (where we have the right to do so) are subject to a public domain dedication, but there's nothing specifically in the law that says how or if you can really put something into the public domain. While you can make a public domain dedication or (more recently) use the Creative Commons CC0 tool to do so, there's no clear way within the law to actually declare something in the public domain. Instead, the public domain declarations are really more of a promise not to make use of the exclusionary rights provided under copyright. On the 'public domain day' of Copyright Week, Public Knowledge has pointed out that it's time that it became much easier to put things into the public domain. Specifically, the PK post highlights that thanks to the way copyright termination works, even someone who puts their works into the public domain could pull them back out of the public domain after 35 years. As you may recall, termination rights cannot be signed away, and they were designed to allow copyright holders the ability to take back their work from whomever they licensed it to for the second half of the copyright's term. We've long pointed out why this is a stupid concept (while finding it amusing to see the legacy copyright industry -- mainly in the music space -- desperate to try to pretend that copyright termination doesn't really exist). But they do exist and they make a true public domain declaration effectively impossible ..."

Journal Metrics - Perspective from an Open Access Publisher // Speaker Deck

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 12:39 AM PST

Use the link to access the presentation.  

College Claims Copyright On 16th Century Michelangelo Sculpture, Blocks 3D Printing Files | Techdirt

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 12:27 AM PST

"For many years we've been warning that intellectual property wars over things like music and movies were just a preview to the sort of insanity that would come about when 3D printing goes mainstream. We've seen some copyright takedowns of 3D printed objects in the past, but here's an absolutely crazy one. Jerry Fisher, a photographer in Sioux Falls South Dakota, was interested in 3D printing and 3D image capture. So he went and photographed two local bronze casts of Michelangelo statues, one of Moses which is on display at Augustana College and is co-owned by Augustana and the City of Sioux Falls, and another of David, which is in a local city park. He documented his efforts to take the photos and turn them into 3D printer plans. However, the folks at Augustana College demanded that he stop, arguing a bizarre mix of copyright and... 'we don't like this.' Fisher asked the city of Sioux Falls for its opinion and got back a ridiculous response: 'Fisher took the fight a bit further to the city, where he was informed that the photos were probably not a problem, but transforming them into models (especially if they were to be sold) could be a copyright violation. Attempting to get the issue of contemporary photogrammetry into the light, Fisher pointed out that the statues are in the public domain — not to mention their age — or true owner of the copyright on them. What is the actual law on what can and cannot be done? After getting nowhere with the entities who started the potential battle, Fisher really had no answers.' Even while Fisher seems to recognize that there's no copyright issue here, fearing liability, he apparently still removed his images and plans from the internet. As Public Knowledge's Michael Weinberg explains, there is absolutely no legal basis whatsoever for the demand ..."

UKSG eNews: Open access and authors: two questions for the future

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 12:23 AM PST

"Over the past ten years, the open access (OA) movement has achieved significant progress and high profile successes, especially in the United Kingdom and Europe, where centralised (and predominantly public) systems of higher education have made possible the establishment of mandatory OA policies at the national level. In the United States, where private higher education is more prevalent and where public institutions are governed at the state level, such mandates as exist are generally imposed by research funding bodies such as the National Institutes of Health, and usually require 'public access' rather than OA as strictly defined. (While some American colleges and universities have adopted institutional OA policies of various kinds, few if any of these can meaningfully be characterised as 'mandates'.) The fact that so much of OA's growth has come as the result of mandates often passes unmentioned, but it is a fact that has real and sobering implications for OA's future. While there are certainly many individual scholars and researchers who have enthusiastically adopted OA practices on their own, their numbers are still dwarfed by those who have not done so, either because they have actively chosen not to, or simply due to some combination of inertia, disinterest, and unawareness of the options available. That this remains the case some 20 years after OA first became a household word in scholarly communication circles is not particularly surprising or alarming – change is a slow process in our world – but it does raise two difficult, and possibly uncomfortable, but nevertheless very important questions for the future of the movement. First: What percentage of scholarly and scientific authors will, if left to their own devices, ultimately choose to adopt OA? Second: To what degree should that choice be left in the hands of authors? ..."

Thinking about monographs in a world of open access | HEFCE blog

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 12:20 AM PST

"In this post, Professor Geoffrey Crossick introduces his report on monographs and open access, outlining the key messages of the report and giving his personal take on the issues and the wider contexts. Professor Crossick is Distinguished Professor of the Humanities, School of Advanced Study, University of London and led the HEFCE Monographs and Open Access Project."

European Space Scientists Unwilling To Release High-Quality Images From Publicly-Funded Rosetta Mission | Techdirt

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 12:07 AM PST

"One of the most exciting scientific explorations currently underway is the Rosetta space probe, which succeeded in placing a lander on the surface of the comet 67P, and which continues to send back some astonishing pictures. But according to an article on the BBC News site, those pictures come from Rosetta's navigation cameras, not from the main science cameras, which produce higher-quality images. Here's why that's happening: These images are subject to a six-month embargo to allow the mission team to make discoveries without being scooped. That's strange, since Rosetta comes from the publicly-funded European Space Agency (ESA), so there is obviously a good case for them being released immediately, especially given the high level of interest from many people. But as the BBC article explains, it's not ESA that is holding things back ..."

Monographs have to adapt to keep a place in the future | News | Times Higher Education

Posted: 25 Jan 2015 12:02 AM PST

"Claims that monograph publishing is in crisis are exaggerated, and any move to open access ought to be motivated by the considerable opportunities it offers rather than by fear for the format's future. This is the view of Geoffrey Crossick, the author of a major report on monographs and open access in the humanities and social science, commissioned by the Higher Education Funding Council for England and published on 22 January. The funding councils have said that monographs will be exempt from the open access mandate that will apply to journals in the next research excellence framework, but they are contemplating ending the exemption for the following exercise, probably in the mid-2020s. Some observers have suggested that declining sales mean that making monographs open access might be the only way of preserving the format. But Professor Crossick, a former vice-chancellor of the University of London and now distinguished professor of the humanities at the School of Advanced Study, said that during the past decade the four largest monograph publishers in the UK had doubled the number they publish each year, to 5,000. And although the rising cost of journal subscriptions was squeezing libraries' monographs budget, Professor Crossick had not detected that academics have a 'serious problem' accessing the books they need ..."
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