Thursday, January 29, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Academic Scandal: Elsevier public money quenches

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 02:05 AM PST

[From Google's English] "The process is known, but hotly contested for many years, and for good reason: researchers and other scientists, including when their studies are funded by public money, spend part of their budget to pay for a publisher to to publish their research in a magazine, if possible world famous.   Once the study published in a scientific or academic journal, still charged for access to these reviews, to make the results available to other researchers. In other words, as Rue89 title that reveals the contract and the amount,  France is rather pay (twice) for the articles of its researchers .   Each new bargaining contract, the conditions are discussed by the consortia as Couperin negotiating 'the purchase of digital information resources for the benefit of its members, higher education and research': end of 2013, the consortium had encountered difficulties to complete an agreement with Elsevier .   Faced with complaints of researchers who wish to see their most widely circulated publications such as an open access model, publishers often respond with their own models based on purchasing access and that opening the floodgates threaten the sustainability their activities. Yet Elsevier finances are good: the Reed Elsevier Group recently reported a 4% increase in sales for the first 9 months of 2014.   The agreement between the Ministry and Elsevier'  amounts to € 171,697,159.27 for a perimeter of 476 universities and hospitals  ,'says Rue89. The ministry has supported the establishment of a national license, which allows negotiations to cover all French institutions. However, the newspaper is surprised'  the total lack of transparency in the supplier selection (why Elsevier in particular?) and the non-implementation of market competition among several actors (for that amount, a public tender opening is mandatory)  .'   A monopoly, which extends over the years clearly and acquisitions: Reed Elsevier and announced the purchase of  Health Market Science (HMS) , data provider for medical professionals ..."

The Feedback Loop Between Open Access & Altmetrics | Tech

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 02:02 AM PST

"In honor of Open Access Week 2014, Mike Showalter, Plum Analytics Product Manger, talks about the role metrics can play in Open Access Publishing."

Open access must be open at both ends | Exchanges

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 01:54 AM PST

" ... Gold open access, which requires an upfront fee paid to publishers to allow articles to be made freely available, is increasingly becoming the favored model by UK research councils. The argument that publically funded research should be publically available is a compelling one and pay walls represent a barrier to innovation and scientific progress. However, the sheer scale of the literature and rate at which it is growing means that identifying relevant and reliable research is a challenging one. Free access to something you don't know exists and can't trust is of no value to anyone. If publishers can add value to the scientific process by creating innovative platforms to search and access content, efficient mechanisms to scrutinize, administer and promote worthwhile and groundbreaking research, then surely this is a service worth paying for. The danger of this model is that upfront fees provide short term incentives for journals to accept papers from anyone who has the money to pay, regardless of their scientific value or accuracy.  In the longer term, damage to the reputation of journals, and researchers, that take this approach will mean such papers are not worth the silicon they are encoded in and the market should correct itself. Opening up science to a larger audience by removing pay walls is a good idea but reputable publishers still have an important role to play in ensuring the public have easy access to the high quality science they paid for. However, shifting the costs of publishing from the reader to the authors brings access problems of its own. Having always worked in institutions with good access to subscription journals and in a field where open access journals aren't well recognized, the cost of publication has never factored into my decision of where to publish. For well-established academics with access to the considerable funds required to make publications open access in the best journals this is unlikely to change. However, where funds are limited, the question of whether you can afford to publish may become an increasing factor alongside the quality of your science. Funding for positions is often scraped together from multiple grants meaning some researchers won't have access to a pot of money assigned for publishing open access. Research is often published years after a thesis has been written or a grant has run out. Many early career fellowships have fixed stipends which often scarcely cover salary and consumables let alone publishing costs meaning fellows will be more dependent on PI's and departments. With publications being such a vital metric for individual students and post-docs (as well as their supervisors) it is important that group politics doesn't become the determining factor of whose research gets published. If we are to go down the gold open access route and ensure the best research is brought to the widest possible audience, we need a fair funding process that provides open access for authors as well as readers."

Research Data Alliance/US and CENDI Federal Information Managers Group Announce Partnership to Jointly Promote Innovations in Data Sharing and Exchange | RDA

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 01:52 AM PST

Last week in Washington DC, the Research Data Alliance/United States (RDA/US) and CENDI Federal Information Managers Group announced an agreement to jointly sponsor events related to the advancement of data management innovation.   RDA/US and CENDI will also share information about ongoing and planned activities at each organization. With a shared interest in effective data infrastructure, this alliance will particularly benefit CENDI membership and US members of RDA, as well as the entire international data sharing community.

Baring it all | Science Careers

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 01:36 AM PST

"Facebook knows your friends. Google knows your Internet searches. Your cellphone provider knows who you talk to. Yet, in the competitive world of scientific research, secrecy rules. Scientists tend to be hesitant to share too much about their work prior to publication, and the venerated peer-review processes at most journals are anonymous and opaque. Some researchers, though, are pushing back against these norms, believing that openness can promote constructive communication and enable science to move forward faster. While some scientists remain concerned that sharing work via online 'open notebooks' or preprint servers and publishing in journals with new peer-review models is risky (and perhaps introduces even more vulnerability into an already challenging career path), the researchers who are already participating insist that the benefits can outweigh the disadvantages—as long as you're careful ..."

The new scientific revolution: Reproducibility at last - The Washington Post

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 01:08 AM PST

Diederik Stapel, a professor of social psychology in the Netherlands, had been a rock-star scientist — regularly appearing on television and publishing in top journals. Among his striking discoveries was that people exposed to litter and abandoned objects are more likely to be bigoted. And yet there was often something odd about Stapel's research. When students asked to see the data behind his work, he couldn't produce it readily. And colleagues would sometimes look at his data and think: It's beautiful. Too beautiful. Most scientists have messy data, contradictory data, incomplete data, ambiguous data. This data was too good to be true.  In late 2011, Stapel admitted that he'd been fabricating data for many years.  The Stapel case was an outlier, an extreme example of scientific fraud. But this and several other high-profile cases of misconduct resonated in the scientific community because of a much broader, more pernicious problem: Too often, experimental results can't be reproduced.  That doesn't mean the results are fraudulent or even wrong. But in science, a result is supposed to be verifiable by a subsequent experiment. An irreproducible result is inherently squishy.  And so there's a movement afoot, and building momentum rapidly. Roughly four centuries after the invention of the scientific method, the leaders of the scientific community are recalibrating their requirements, pushing for the sharing of data and greater experimental transparency.  Top-tier journals, such as Science and Nature, have announced new guidelines for the research they publish ... The pharmaceutical companies are part of this movement. Big Pharma has massive amounts of money at stake and wants to see more rigorous pre-clinical results from outside laboratories. The academic laboratories act as lead-generators for companies that make drugs and put them into clinical trials. Too often these leads turn out to be dead ends ... But Ivan Oransky, founder of the blog Retraction Watch, says data-sharing isn't enough. The incentive structure in science remains a problem, because there is too much emphasis on getting published in top journals, he said. Science is competitive, funding is hard to get and tenure harder, and so even an honest researcher may wind up stretching the data to fit a publishable conclusion ..."

Report on 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication @insidehighered

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 01:03 AM PST

"The poster session is an important but usually humble component of an academic conference -- though you'd never know that from a promotional video for one held at the University of Oxford this month. The clip looks like the trailer for a sci-fi Hollywood blockbuster. The name of the conference, Force 2015, sounds like one, too. Besides its snappy acronym, the Future of Research Communication and e-Scholarship group ('a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders') has a manifesto offering a comprehensive vision of post-Gutenbergian intellectual life. Issued in 2011, it forecasts 'a future in which scientific information and scholarly communication more generally become part of a global, universal and explicit network of knowledge; where every claim, hypothesis, argument -- every significant element of the discourse -- can be explicitly represented, along with supporting data, software, workflows, multimedia, external commentary and information about provenance. In this world of networked knowledge objects, it would be clear how the entities and discourse components are related to each other, including relationships to previous scholarship; learning about a new topic means absorbing networks of information, not individually reading thousands of documents' ... The new Web site 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication may not have been intended as an interim report on how that future is shaping up, but it has the features of one even so. It's the online complement to the Force 2015 poster of the same name, prepared by Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer, both from Utrecht University Library in the Netherlands ... Bosman is the subject librarian in the geosciences; Kramer, in the life sciences and medicine ... The most striking element of both the poster and the site is a multicolored circular chart that looks something like a zodiac or gaming wheel. (See bottom of this article for a larger version than appears on top.) It flashes by in the opening seconds of the aforementioned video, too fast for the viewer to notice that it is divided into six sectors: discovery, analysis, writing, publication, outreach and assessment. There are little logos in each, representing digital tools and products ... It's the Great Cycle of Research Life, so to speak -- beginning with, and ever returning to, the zone marked 'discovery' ... After contemplating the 101 Innovations mandala for a while, I contacted the site's creators in hopes of understanding its mysteries. At a poster session, there's usually someone around to explain things only implicit in the poster itself, which can otherwise be puzzling ... My best guess had been that the workflow charts might have been intended as recommendations of how researchers could combine the available digital tools. That, it turns out, was wide of the mark. The charts are heuristic rather than prescriptive. 'None of the workflow charts are meant as templates for researchers to adopt,' Kramer and Bosman explained, 'more as primers for them to think about the tools they use and the type of workflow that best characterizes the way they work.' The charts provide 'a starting point for discussions with researcher groups, such as graduate students, postdocs and faculty,' in order to determine existing practices and developing needs ... Bosman and Kramer also developed a typology of scholarly workflows, ranging from the neo-Luddite to the way-early adopter ..."

Confidentiality of clinical trials information could be maintained if relevant to chain of research, EMA proposes

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 12:52 AM PST

"The EMA has launched a consultation (28-page / 278KB PDF) on proposals which would flesh out more detail on what information pharmaceutical companies and other medical researchers would need to publish on a new publically-accessible database, as well as the timings of those disclosures, under the EU's new Clinical Trials Regulation. The EMA is responsible for developing and maintaining the database under the new framework.  The Regulation sets new standards on transparency for clinical trials conducted in the EU. The framework, which was finalised last year, is scheduled to be applied to new clinical trial tests beginning on or after 28 May 2016.  Information to be disclosed via the database under the new regime will include descriptions about the kind of trials being conducted and a summary of the results, whilst clinical study reports will also have to be published after medicines have been approved for sale.  However, there are some exceptions to the disclosure requirements. One exception is where information about clinical trials is 'commercially confidential' and where there is not an overriding public interest in its disclosure.  The EMA said that 'commercially confidential information' under the new EU clinical trials rules, should be defined as 'any information contained in the data or documents submitted to the database that is not in the public domain or publicly available and where disclosure may undermine the legitimate economic interest of the sponsor' ..."

Open access symposium on March 10 - IP

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 12:50 AM PST

"On March 10, Eindhoven University of Technology organizes the open-access symposium 'Opening up your research and results. '   News about open access, big deals with publishers, financing conditions and political ambitions in rapid succession. Netherlands is nationally and internationally under a magnifying glass, when one speaks of open science. Open access, research data management and open science are concepts that we hear a lot in politics, research funders and to publishers.   What does this mean for researchers? That is the central question on Tuesday, March 10th at the symposium 'Opening up your research and results' at the Technical University of Eindhoven. The day will be led by chairman Martijn van Calmthout, science journalist at De Volkskrant and radio host of The Knowledge of Now ..."

Open Knowledge Foundation Germany awarded H2020 project to improve transparency in public spending and support whistleblowing | Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland - Förderung von offenem Wissen im digitalen Zeitalter

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 12:42 AM PST

"The tell-tale signs of public spending gone wrong are easy to spot. For example, an airport that is many years behind schedule and billions of Euro over budget, or a highway which leads to nowhere. What has been harder up to now is to how to shine a light on the problem and engage civil society in helping to curb it. The Open Knowledge Foundation Germany has just been awarded a new Horizon 2020 research project, DIGIWHIST, which aims to do just that. The full project name is: The Digital Whistleblower:  Fiscal Transparency, Risk Assessment and Impact of Good Governance Policies Assessed (DIGIWHIST) and will run for 3 years (March 2015 – February 2018). Open Knowledge Foundation Germany is in charge of the development of digital transparency tools.  The total amount of the grant is 3,026,360 Euro. The central objective of DIGIWHIST is to improve trust in governments and efficiency of public spending across Europe by empowering civil society, investigative journalists and civil servants with the information and tools they need to increase transparency in public spending and thus accountability of public officials in all EU and in some neighbouring countries. Specifically, the project will create several interactive transparency tools intended for use by civil society, investigative journalists, and civil servants ..."

How open science is accelerating cancer research | The Agenda

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 12:31 AM PST

" ... Five years ago, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) began collaborating with other companies and research universities by opening access to its research on diseases with lower profit potential. Among the largest of the open science initiatives to launch from the GSK data release was the Open Source Malaria project, headed by Mat Todd at the University of Sydney. The project is currently working on its fourth series of tests evaluating a compounds set that originated with Pfizer.   In 2014, an even larger open science initiative launched in the United States—Project Data Sphere. A big data project that makes pharmaceutical research from clinical trials freely accessible among doctors and universities through a shared database, Project Data Sphere quickly pushed to the forefront of the open science movement. In February, it will launch the Prostrate Cancer Dream Challenge, a collaboration with universities and big pharma that aims to find new models for predicting survival for prostate cancer patients. The project's potential is vast. Can it prove the power of open science?"

Open access at Elsevier – 2014 in retrospect and a look at 2015 | Elsevier Connect

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 12:26 AM PST

"Each January, we like to reflect upon how the open access landscape has evolved in the past year and what the year ahead might hold. Key themes for 2014 were again collaboration and steady progress on both gold and green open access. These trends, unsurprisingly, are set to continue in 2015 and are part of broader activities to accelerate open science, including open research data ... On the closely related topic of open research data, 2014 was a busy year. We continue to engage with an array of external partners, some focused on policy and others on practice and some on both. Great examples are RECODE and the Research Data Alliance. We launched an Open Data pilot, giving authors the option to make their supplementary data files publicly available under a CC-BY license. In addition we continue to support authors who wish to archive their data in a public repository through our database linking program. We will take this one step further in 2015, through new collaborations between Elsevier and data centers, where we encourage researchers to submit data DOIs with their articles so that their data will be indexed and easily accessible.  In 2015, we will further clarify our commitment to making research data accessible and useable through ourresearch data policy.  On open science or Science 2.0 more broadly, we again are working on an array of international initiatives. This includes collaborating with the European Commission in support of their Open Science agenda; withScience 2.0, participating in the Open Science forum facilitated by the National Academies of Science; and similar initiatives in many other parts of the world with key stakeholders ... As you may be aware, Elsevier has had a test-and-learn approach to open access licensing. We have decided to make some changes to our OA licensing policy to simplify our communication to authors and operations and take advantage of new Creative Commons licenses. We will continue to offer authors a choice between a commercial user license (CC-BY) and a noncommercial user license (CC BY-NC-ND), but we will no longer offer the CC-BY-NC-SA version of license in our proprietary journals – only 11 percent of authors chose that option. We have also migrated from version 3.0 to version 4.0 of the Creative Commons licenses ... To support the growth in OA publishing and our commitment to author choice, there is a tremendous flurry of helpful activity throughout our Operations departments and from the ScienceDirect team to ensure that we can disseminate OA articles widely and correctly. This is much more fiddly and hard than it might first appear, with numerous changes required in formatting, labelling, licensing, metadata and production. There have been occasional bumps on the road of our OA journey  which we can share and learn from, but I'm amazed at the amount of cheerful and creative effort that goes into making OA publishing a real success ... While much of our externally visible effort in 2014 focused on scaling up gold open access, we never forget that many parts of the world are more enthusiastic about green open access. For example, in 2014, new green OA mandates emerged in China, the UK and the US. We have engaged closely in each of these countries and many others.  We've also had pilots with institutional repositories going for several years, for example, with theWorld Bank. While we've been learning from others in the research community, and reflecting carefully on green open access, we look forward to communicating more about our vision, approach and services.  At the industry level, Elsevier is very active in CHORUS, an initiative to provide access to author manuscripts after their embargo period expires. Access is provided on the publisher's platform, saving researchers the administrative burden of self-archiving. Research institutions want to showcase their research via institutional repositories, and so we have been piloting an array of metadata, API and other technical too

Against the odds, Yale improves access to data | Yale Daily News

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 12:22 AM PST

"The Yale University Open Data Access Project made clinical trial data for medical devices and diagnostics publicly available for the first time on Jan. 14. YODA's partnership with pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, which began with an agreement to share pharmaceutical trial data on Jan. 6, will allow medical researchers to access the company's clinical trial results for medical devices and diagnostics, providing those researchers with troves of medical data they had not been able to access until now. YODA, acting as an independent intermediary, will review proposals from investigators to view anonymous patient data and grant or deny access. Although this new step is meant to address the fact that only around a third of experiments involving human subjects are openly published, it faced significant opposition during its development ..."

Science Guide - By the sea is a small country never

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 12:15 AM PST

[From Google's English] "The Portuguese Commissioner for R & D, Carlos Moedas places high personal and has high expectations of what the Netherlands in the European knowledge policy, in innovation and research can contribute. He fervently supports the starter Sander Dekker in to see open access. In a speech at the Neth-ER jubilee in Brussels Moedas presented itself as a dynamic and ambitious driver within the 'Team Juncker. In addition, he wants the innovative policy concepts that has put our country in motion in recent years with the necessary degree or take advantage of innovations elsewhere in the EU ..."

Läkartidningen - »Individual researchers must take the battle against the publishers« 

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 12:12 AM PST

[From Google's English] "Many publishers applies today 12 month embargo period before scientific articles are freely available. Research Council, however, requires several years of open access after six months for the research funding of, a limit to words from this year would be applicable to all Swedish public funded research . An engaged in the issue of open access is Jonas F Ludvigsson, a pediatrician in Örebro and professor at the Karolinska Institute. He believes that it is basically correct that the results should be freely available. The problem is, according to him it is the individual researchers who are expected to take brawl on shorter embargoes. - There can be only one winner and that's the publishers, who may require upwards of 30 to 40,000 dollars to make an article freely available, says Jonas Ludvigsson, who has personal experience of negotiating with publishers. - I tried to argue that an article would be freely available on one occasion without paying the cost, and there was definitely no, despite the fact that I even wrote to the editor. Though it is supposed that researchers should receive compensation for the additional costs they have for publication, it may order a productive scientists become concerned about the large sums that it is doubtful whether the funders want to pay, says Jonas F Ludvigsson. - It feels somewhat absurd if one would not be able to make important discoveries available to you have used up their money. Jonas Ludvigsson think that the Swedish Research Council and other funding agencies should take the discussion about open access by the publishers, preferably at EU level ..."

Open science: scientific knowledge liberated from paywall

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 12:10 AM PST

[From Google's English] "On the pages of What the Future! it is often discussed the importance of open science, or the 'open science' and hence the need to promote an appropriate model of data sharing and the results of scientific research. The appeals to the adoption of this model open also coming from the highest political and administrative institutions, as evidenced by the speech in Rome on 11 April 2012 by Neelie Kroes , at that time vice president of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda . Despite this sensitivity and wide recognition of the need to open science, instead of the news last week that the publishing group Springer acquired the group MacMillan (the editorial head of the prestigious "Nature"). The publishing group becomes a giant with a turnover of 1.3 billion Euros (yes, billion, you did not misread) which controls more than 3,000 newspapers, most of which can be defined as 'close access', that is only accessible through costly subscriptions that even major universities and research centers are struggling to buy ..."

UNESCO and SciELO launch a new publication on 15 years of Open Access | United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

Posted: 29 Jan 2015 12:00 AM PST

"UNESCO and SciELO jointly launch SciELO - 15 years of Open Access in three languages, English, Portuguese and Spanish. The publication provides a detailed account on the origin, context, significance and raison d'être of SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online, which is a model for cooperative electronic publishing of scientific journals on the Internet. The publication summarizes the contribution of SciELO in scientific communication, notes its efficient ways to assure universal visibility and accessibility of scientific literature."
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