Monday, January 12, 2015

"Scholarly Communication Coaching: Liaison Librarians' Shifting Roles" by Todd Bruns, et al.


OATP primary

Posted: 09 Jan 2015 04:13 AM PST
"The open access , meaning the free and open access to published research content, at first glance seems irrefutable. More still in fields such as public health, which, in most cases, researchers and research are organized and financed with public funds. In fact, own administrations and governments and directly enhance the open access publication of research financed by public funds; for example, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology 1 , and with a much stronger character the National Institutes of Health of the United States 2 , the European Union in March and the very British government following the instructions known as Finch Report 4 ( yes, charged with the explicit instruction that their findings should not harm the strong local publishing industry 5 ). All these initiatives are choosing officers called gold road , referred to the publication in open access journals in which authors pay the costs. But this model is not unique. Some scientific disciplines (mathematics, astronomy and physics) are using formulas published in open access without additional costs 6 (to include the proposed arXiv.org 7 ), not only to share data with colleagues and research, but Also as an alternative to some clearly be improved processes in traditional scientific journals, such as peer-review as it functions and 'malfunctions' in the media in August . It seems that even BioMed Central PubMedCentral initially tried to emulate this formula, but they stayed well away from the original nine . Still, in that Finch Report 4 mentions (p. 86) concerns publishing companies about the impact of repositories such as arXiv.org or PubMedCentral in reducing discharges from their own platforms, which puts 'nerve' these companies by 'the loss of subscriptions' (mainly from universities and public institutions, as the number of downloads is a criterion to renew or not these subscriptions with publishers) ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 04:10 AM PST
"Open access and open data are becoming more prominent on the global research agenda. Funders are increasingly requiring grantees to deposit their raw research data in appropriate public archives or stores in order to facilitate the validation of results and further work by other researchers. According to the JISC and RLUK funded Sherpa Juliet site, globally there are now 34 funders who require data archiving and 16 who encourage it. While the rise of open access has fundamentally changed the academic publishing landscape, the policies around data are reigniting the conversation around what universities can and should be doing to protect the assets generated at their institution. The main difference between an open access and open data policy is that there is not already a precedent or status quo of how academia deals with the dissemination of research that is not in the form of a traditional 'paper' publication. As governments and funders of research see the benefit of open content, the creation of recommendations, mandates and enforcement of mandates are coming thick and fast. There appears to be a 6-step route which many funding bodies globally have already passed the halfway mark of ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 04:09 AM PST
"3TU.Datacentrum offers the knowledge, experience and the tools to archive research data in a standardized, secure and well-documented manner.  It provides the research community with: A long-term archive for storing scientific research data Permanent access to, and tools for reuse of research data Advice and support on data management 3TU.Datacentrum currently hosts thousands of datasets. To see examples please visit: http://data.3tu.nl ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 04:04 AM PST
"When it comes to publishing, there is no one-size-fits-all approach or format. In years gone by, getting published was largely limited to presenting research in a specialized field. But with the vast increase in research output – and more and more researchers collaborating across borders and disciplines – things are changing rapidly. While there is still a vital role for the traditional field-specific journal, researchers want more choices of where and how to publish their research. Journals that feature sound research across all disciplines significantly broaden those much-coveted publishing options.  To expand and refine that concept even further, Elsevier is preparing to collaborate with the research community to develop an open access journal covering all disciplines on a platform that will enable continual experimentation and innovation. Plans include improving the end-to-end publishing process and integrating our smart technologies to improve search and discovery.  The new journal will offer researchers a streamlined, simple and intuitive publishing platform that connects their research to the relevant communities. Articles will be assessed for sound research rather than their scope or impact.  The journal reflects Elsevier's goal to provide a home for all sound research ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 04:00 AM PST
"For the past several years, the HathiTrust and five of its member universities have been engaged in litigation after being sued by the Authors Guild. On January 6, 2015, the parties entered a settlement on the sole issue remaining before the district court, ending the litigation in a victory for HathiTrust and fair use. In its litigation, the Authors Guild alleged that HathiTrust Digital Library's (HDL) digitization of works for the purposes of use in a full-text search database, providing access to the print disabled, and preservation, as well as the Orphan Works Project developed by the University of Michigan, constituted copyright infringement. The Orphan Works Project was abandoned and not considered ripe for adjudication, while the other issues advanced. The district court found in favor of HDL's motions for summary judgment on the remaining three issues. In June 2014, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit strongly affirmed fair use, finding that HathiTrust Digital Library's creation of a full-text search database and providing access to the print disabled constituted fair use. On the issue of preservation, the Second Circuit remanded back to the district court – without determining the merits of whether such preservation constituted fair use – to determine whether the plaintiffs had standing to bring the claim ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 03:58 AM PST
"While successive UK government and research funders' policy announcements have kept open access (OA) high on the agenda for the UK's researchers and universities, is it a similar priority for their European counterparts? By Mafalda Picarra, PASTEUR4OA project officer, Jisc This is no idle question; as more of the UK's researchers collaborate on multinational, interdisciplinary European Union (EU)-funded research projects, they can't simply assume that the same rules on OA apply across the board, and that the way they work in the UK will make them compliant with policy made elsewhere. Certainly, OA is a very hot topic across the EU. In part, this is in response to policy announcements in 2o13 from the European Commission (EC) mandating that outputs from research funded under Horizon 2020 – the EU framework for research and innovation – must be made open access. Regardless of where they are based, researchers and their universities are anxious both to comply with funder policies and to optimise the impact of their OA outputs; greater consensus on OA across the EU would make it much easier for them to do both. There would be far less chance of them getting it wrong simply because they misunderstood their obligations ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 03:48 AM PST
"Open access is still growing; the number of its supporters is growing, along with their influence in many decisive bodies. On the other hand, people still cannot get access to works funded with public money. Here is a subjective review of 2014 and some thoughts on what can be made better in 2015. The sad coincidence is that the usual time for writing summaries and end of year reviews falls just weeks before the bitter anniversary for open access advocates, the anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death. This is what turned my attention this year not only to the glorious victories of the OA community, but also to the hardships that we still face. A huge share of human knowledge, the development of which continues to be supported by public money, remains hidden behind pay walls. Access to this knowledge is still problematic for a big part of the research community around the world. What is even more shocking is that unauthorised dissemination of publicly founded research can still lead to criminal charges. One of the most important events of 2014 was the revelation of the Diego Gomez case, a biology student who might be sent to prison for sharing on the Internet a master's degree thesis that he found in the library. As he claimed 'My main motivation to share this work on the Internet was to give access to this information to a biodiversity group study in my region'. The case of Diego Gomez is clearly something that should not have happened. No one should face criminal charges for fostering scientific research and it is sad that something like that occurred in the year that was on balance another good one for open access ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 03:15 AM PST
" ... Looking back two years, I was hopeful that higher education was entering a new era of openness that would deliver some of the advances in scholarly communication and publishing reforms that academic librarians have had on their agenda now for far too long. Near this year's end, some of that optimism was confirmed when I attended the 11th Annual Open Education Conference for the first time. OpenEd 14 brings together individuals to discuss and explore the world of open educational resources (OER), from open courses to open textbooks. Like many other academic librarians, it was my first time attending. What impressed me most was simply the number of higher education professionals, especially those from non-U.S. countries, gathered to share their expertise and learn from each other. The conference reinforced our collective belief that real progress was being made to create openness in higher education. While there is much work that needs to happen, the projects showcased at OpenEd 14 gave great cause for enthusiasm ... What made this OpenEd 14 unique is that it offered, for the first time, a dedicated track for library-related OER projects. An attempt at such a program two years ago would likely have failed for lack of interest or qualified participants. That the call for proposals for the library track drew nearly double the number of applications for the available slots speaks volumes about the growing leadership role academic librarians are taking in advocating for OER at their institutions. Adding the library track brought many new faces to the conference. At the opening session, when first-time attendees were asked to stand, more than a third of the audience rose. As an active participant in the nascent community known as LibOER I was already somewhat familiar with some of the great projects led by academic librarians. What face-to-face programs like OpenEd offer is the opportunity to meet those virtual colleagues and to use that time to learn from each other. Beyond that, we all learned that there are some incredible higher education projects promoting student learning with open content—some of which the students themselves are authoring ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 03:12 AM PST
"Over the past year, I have attended a number of events in the US and the UK sponsored by their respective open data communities. Clearly, the UK is well ahead of the US – as well as many other countries across the globe – in seeing its vision of empowering citizens and organisations via the wide availability of government-created data come to fruition. I recently attended the Open Data Institute's annual summit in London, where all of the major participants in this community – including government, academia and industry – gathered to learn and celebrate their accomplishments to date ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 03:07 AM PST
"The Insight Centre for Data Analytics is a joint initiative between researchers at Dublin City University, NUI Galway, University College Cork, University College Dublin and other partner institutions. Insight brings together more than 200 researchers from these institutions, with over 30 industry partners, to position Ireland at the heart of global data analytics research."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 03:02 AM PST
"Predictions, schmedictions. No-one can guess the future but we can at least say what we would like to see. So here are my five wishes for 2015, with a guess at the odds of them happening ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 02:59 AM PST
Use the link to access the full text article from BMC Genome Biology.  "Scientific publishers must shake off three centuries of publishing on paper and embrace 21st century technology to make scientific communication more intelligible, reproducible, engaging and rapidly available."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 02:56 AM PST
"From ordering pizza online to pinpointing the exact location of a breaking news story, an overwhelming portion of data on the Web has geographic elements. Yet for Web developers, wrangling the most value from geospatial information remains an arduous task. Now the standards body for the Web has partnered with the standards body for geographic information systems (GIS) to help make better use of the Web for sharing geospatial data. Both the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) have launched working groups devoted to the task. They are pledging to closely coordinate their activities and publish joint recommendations ... As much as 80 percent of data has some geospatial element to it, IT research firm Gartner has estimated. In the U.S. alone, geospatial services generate approximately $75 billion a year in annual revenue, according to the Boston Consulting Group.  Making use of geospatial data still can be a complex task for the programmer, however. An untold amount of developer time is frittered away trying to understand multiple formats and sussing out the best ways to bridge them together ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 02:54 AM PST
"Commons Transition is a database of practical experiences and policy proposals aimed toward achieving a more humane and environmentally grounded mode of societal organization. Basing a civil society on the Commons (including the collaborative stewardship of our shared resources) would enable a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally stable society. The proposals presented in our web platform go beyond rhetoric and are inspired by successful, self-organized working communities that maintain themselves and their environments through Commons Based Peer Production, Property and Governance. The Commons, together with Peer to Peer dynamics, represent a third mode of societal organization evolving away from the competitive Market State and obsolete, centrally-planned systems. It is a system based on the practices and needs of civil society and the environment it inhabits at the local, regional, national and global levels. The main three policy documents you'll find in the platform, authored by Michel Bauwens, John Restakis and George Dafermos, were originally created for Ecuador's groundbreaking FLOK Society Project. Commons Transition, however, features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these documents. We share them in order to provide an overview of the many precedents and possibilities pointing toward a fairer societal order, and to inspire civil society collectives at the local, regional, national and global levels to adapt them to their particular contexts. As a matter of fact, the proposals originally developed for FLOK are currently being discussed and adapted by the Catalan Integral Cooperative. There is a stark difference between these projects, the former being a state-sponsored study and the latter a completely pre-figurative, stateless initiative. The Commons Transition website features material related to both and will reflect the ongoing development of these projects. In parallel with these pilot projects, we also highlight the valuable work of other transnational, commons-oriented collectives, such as Share the World's Resources, the Post Growth Institute, and the Sustainable Economies Law Center. These, among others, are presented in the Related Projects section of the website. Other highlights include an FAQ on Commons Transition, a News and Articles section with exclusive interviews (in which we will feature regular updates on Commons Transition activities) and a Wiki entirely dedicated to Commons-oriented policy proposals and transition-oriented projects. To give you a taste of the material contained in this web platform, here is Michel Bauwens' and John Restakis' overview of the Commons Transition project. This text has been adapted from their introduction to our Commons Transition Book, which features the newly updated policy in an easy to read, downloadable format ..."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 02:47 AM PST
Use the link to access the full text article from the institutional repository of Eastern Illinois University.  "Two and a half decades into the open access (OA) movement, rapid changes in scholarly communication are creating significant demands on scholars. Today's scholars must wrestle with meeting funder mandates for providing public access to their research, managing and preserving raw data, establishing/publishing open access journals, understanding the difference between "green OA" and "gold OA," navigating the complicated issues around copyright and intellectual property, avoiding potentially predatory publishers, adapting their tenure plans to OA, and discovering increasing amounts of OA resources for their research and their curricular materials. These demands present an opportunity and a need for librarians to step in and assist scholars with the scholarly communication process."
Posted: 09 Jan 2015 01:33 AM PST
"When I got together with Amy Brand (Digital Science) and Chris Erdman (Center for Astrophysics library at Harvard) in August to kickstart planning for the workshop that would become Shaking it Up, our goal was to continue an earlier conversation started by Tony Hey and Lee Dirks (Microsoft Research) at a 2011 workshop on eScience, Transforming Scholarly Communication.  Its objective, according to my notes, was to present a roadmap for action with a four- to five-year time horizon specifying recommendations for the whole scholarly communications ecosystems. Having already passed the halfway mark, this was an opportune time to check in and take stock of the evolving scholarly communication ecosystem, and raise key questions: How are we doing? Where are we on this path? What's working? What's still broken? What progress have we made?   Providing definitive answers to these open-ended questions was decidedly out of scope, so we focused business models – on one of the major obstacles in the evolution of scholarly communication ecosystem. The willingness to consider alternatives to traditional models, coupled with the proliferation of startups in this space, demonstrated some progress in changing attitudes and expectations of scholars and researchers, and to other stakeholders. Yet the greater institutional forces lagged behind with a willful yet full understandable deference to an aging knowledge infrastructure. Our theme would be hacking business models, and we set out to assemble those people in scholarly communication who landed somewhere between the  disruptive innovation of Clay Christensen and the creative destructive of Joseph Schumpeter.  Our delegates would report on new pathways, models, and formats in scholarly communication, and we could get a snapshot of our progress at this midpoint check-up ... The six categories – platforms, media, literature, review, resources, and recognition – ran the gamut of the processes (and products) of the scholarly communication ecosystem. Each group was to consider the following issues: essential elements in successful systems, failure mode of unsuccessful experiments, promising future technologies, key unsolved problems, and interdependencies with other topics. (The notes from each section are accessible in full on the Tumblr page). The focus and recommendations varied with each topic: the Resources group, with its extensive listing of tools for each stage of the research process, was particularly concerned with the differences between formats and the lack of universal search capabilities across platforms and topics; the Platform group lamented the low participation rates for developing tools and worried over the blurring between platforms for personal and professional use; and the Recognition group cautioned that new tools should augment rather than supplant established forms of published communication ..."
Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)