Monday, February 9, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

About - Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 11:59 AM PST

"Open Payments is a federal program that collects and makes information public about financial relationships between the health care industry, physicians, and teaching hospitals. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) collects information from manufacturers of drugs and devices about payments and other transfers of value they make to physicians and teaching hospitals. These payments and other transfers of value can be for many purposes, like research, consulting, travel, and gifts. We'll make this data publicly available and searchable on this site each year...."

New OA mandate from the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). …

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 05:17 AM PST

"The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) just became the second US federal agency to adopt an OA mandate under the Obama White House directive of February 2013....Here's my quick take on the AHRQ policy strengths and weaknesses:
Strengths
* The AHRQ policy does not rely on CHORUS or publisher-hosted OA. For articles, it will use PubMed Central. For data, it will outsource to a still-unnamed commercial repository.
* It covers data as well as articles.
* It wants data to be freely available at time of publication, without embargo.
* It adopts the NIH mechanism to enforce the deposit requirement, including the potential withholding of funds to non-compliant grantees.
Weaknesses
* It's silent on the timing of the deposit of articles. For example, it doesn't require deposit at the time of acceptance or before the time of publication.
* It's silent on open licensing and reuse...."

Impact of Social Sciences – Self-archived articles receive higher citation counts than non-OA articles from same political science journals.

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:58 AM PST

"In recent years, the Impact Blog has hosted a wide-ranging conversation about Open Access publishing. The posts have included discussions about the true cost of [Gold] OA, the benefits that a Green OA mandate could bring to the academic publishing model, the possibility of funding the costs of transitioning to OA by canceling journal subscriptions, and the academic and societal benefits of open academic data, just to name a few. What the majority of the posts have in common is that they focus on the macro-level effects of OA publishing. These are important discussions, and ones that help the field to evolve both in terms of research and practice. However, if one wants social scientists to adopt an Open Access model, it is also important to discuss the micro-level/personal benefits of OA.  In this post, we focus on the benefits of Green OA to individual social scientists.  We focus on Green OA for two micro-level reasons: perception and cost.  First there is anecdotal and empirical evidence that authors are skeptical about the quality of OA articles. Anecdotally, when we first began researching OA citation effects in political science several political scientists asked why we were bothering to study OA in the discipline given that OA articles are poorly peer reviewed or are not peer reviewed at all.  Empirically, Xia (2010) finds that while scholars (across all fields) do see some advantages to OA publishing, they also tend to view OA publishing as low-prestige, low quality, and/or potentially harmful to their careers. The negative perception seems to stem from concerns that OA is pay-to-play publishing which leads to lower standards. These concerns indicate that there is a clear lack of understanding about the differences between Green and Gold OA; however, the nature of the concerns indicates that Green OA would be the more palatable OA option.  Second, in the United States the social sciences receive far less funding than do the physical sciences.  For example, the National Science Foundation's Science and Engineering Indicators, 2014 indicates that in 2012, the total amount of federal research and development spending on Chemistry was nearly fifteen times the total spent on Political Science. More generally, federal agencies spent about eight times more on the Physical Sciences (Astronomy, Chemistry, and Physics) than on the Social Sciences (Economics, Political Science, and Sociology).   To be clear: we are not arguing that the Social Sciences should be receiving the same level of funding as the Physical Sciences. We are arguing, however, that the low level of research funding in the US is likely to have a direct and negative effect on social scientists' ability to pay the article processing charges associated with the most common Gold OA business model.  Thus, Green OA is not simply the more palatable option; it is also the more practical option for American Social Scientists ..."

Open Knowledge Belgium: Bringing Together Open Communities, Policy Makers & Industry | Open Knowledge Blog

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:56 AM PST

"On 23 February, Open Knowledge Belgium is hosting the second edition of Open Belgium, an event expected to attract over 200 people, coming together to learn and discuss the growing open knowledge movement in Belgium. This year Open Knowledge Belgium is hosting the conference, together with our Walloon colleagues and partners, at the Palais des Congrès in Namur. OpenBelgium 2015 Teaser from Open Knowledge Belgium on Vimeo. The jam-packed programme is not to be missed! With over 35 speakers, the objective of the day is unpack challenges, explore opportunities and learn about technological developments as they relate to Open Data and Open Knowledge. The event presents an ideal opportunity to exchange best practices with national and international experts ..."

Social media and Open Access | The Ed Techie

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:53 AM PST

"I often make this point in talks on digital scholarship, but don't think I've done it in a blog sized chunk before. There is an interesting relationship between social media and open access. As you develop an online identity as an academic, so the role of social media (twitter, blogs, academia.edu – whatever is your preferred mix) takes on a more central role in your activity. So it is natural that you use these to disseminate research findings and publications. And this is where the relationship with open access comes in. If you want to disseminate your recent article via your carefully cultivated online network, then it is anathema to share a link that then asks the user to "pay $40 to access this article". As I like to quip in my presentations, in social media terms you may as well go and bury your article in your back garden for all the access it means in this network. There are a set of cultural assumptions that are associated with social networks, one of which is that content can be freely accessed and easily shared. Now, you can argue about the economics of this, and whether content should be free, but those are the assumptions that come with this culture, so you either accept them or go elsewhere. So if you want to utilise social networks as part of your academic practice, then it really puts an emphasis on you to publish open access. Whether this is self-archived or gold route published isn't that relevant – it needs to be accessible, now, and by everyone. If we assume that social networks aren't going away and are going to become more and more pervasive as part of academic practice, then this becomes a strong, almost irresistible driver for open access. No wonder publishers are scared..."

Academic publishing: Oath market | The Economist

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:49 AM PST

"THE process by which academics check the work of their colleagues before it goes to print—peer review, in the argot—is nearly as old as scientific publishing itself. But like every human endeavour, it is fraught with human frailties and the process can be hijacked in a variety of ways. As a result, and as with many other aspects of publishing, peer review is the subject of much experimentation. One upstart publisher is trying to codify good behaviour. Peer review's current incarnation took shape in the middle of the 20th century: authors submit a manuscript to a publisher, who then seeks out academics suitable to comment on it; they then submit critiques anonymously to the authors, who amend the work to reflect the critiques. The system nearly works. The reasons for anonymity are manifold, but that information asymmetry often causes trouble, with reviewers shooting down rivals' work, pinching ideas, or just plain dragging their feet (overwhelmingly, reviewing is unpaid). There are a few green shoots of innovation in the field, though. One idea is to remove the veil and carry out peer review publicly: reviewers' identities and their reports are published online for all to see. Proponents reckon this provides incentives for both honesty and courtesy. Faculty of 1000, an online biology and medicine publisher, has taken this tack with F1000 Research, its flagship journal. Indeed it is taking the idea further. Michael Markie, an associate publisher for F1000 Research, believes that a commitment to change must also come from authors and reviewers, not just journal editors and publishers. Mr Markie was a co-author of a paper—itself the subject of fervent open peer-review—which proposed a kind of oath and a set of guidelines to encourage even-handed and helpful behaviours for reviewers. The oath reads ..."

"Freedom is absolutely necessary for scientific progress" - European Commission

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:46 AM PST

" ... I realise 2015 and 2016 will be important for the Dutch. First the preparations, then the responsibility of your forthcoming Presidency of the EU. This will be a vital chance to leave your very inspiring mark on our community until the next one comes around. My services and I are ready to provide you with every support. Your emphasis on Open Access to scientific publications, in particular, could not be more in line with what I hope to achieve through Open Science over the course of my mandate. I think the Netherlands can contribute a great deal to policy discussions on this matter. You are already leading by example. We need to shift our focus from publishing as soon as possible, to sharing and collaborating as soon as possible. Public investment in research and innovation should have the greatest social and economic benefits possible: improving the public relationship with our science systems and opening research results to new innovation and business opportunities. Big and open data alone, could be worth an extra 1.9% to EU-28 GDP by 2020. To remain prosperous and competitive, to continue leading the forefront of learning, this is an opportunity we simply cannot afford to miss. But I know I'm preaching to the converted. I know Dutch universities are determined to remove fee-paying access to their academics' publications. I know your Minister for education announced last year that all Dutch research publications should be open access by the year 2024. Expensive fees for publically funded research results, that could be of benefit to citizens, must end, and new business models put in place. This is one of many areas where your leadership and experience could bring new standards to Europe's science and research community. Open Science, of which Open Access is an important part, will be vital to ensuring European progress and prosperity in the future ..."

Aaron Swartz stood up for freedom and fairness – and was hounded to his death | Comment is free | The Guardian

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:44 AM PST

"On Monday, BBC Four screened a remarkable film in its Storyville series. The Internet's Own Boy told the story of the life and tragic death of Aaron Swartz, the leading geek wunderkind of his generation who was hounded to suicide at the age of 26 by a vindictive US administration. The film is still available on BBC iPlayer, and if you do nothing else this weekend make time to watch it, because it's the most revealing source of insights about how the state approaches the internet since Edward Snowden first broke cover ..."

The SciELO Network publishes more than 500,000 articles in open access during its 17 years of operation | SciELO in Perspective

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:37 AM PST

"The SciELO Network began 2015 with a record number of more than 500,000 articles indexed and published online in open access. This milestone is the result of the ongoing publication of the 13 journal collections which have been certified by the network, which this coming March celebrates 17 years of operation since its launch in 1998. This post summarizes the current structure of the SciELO Network. A more in-depth and detailed analysis of the evolution and development of the SciELO Program and the SciELO Network itself is documented in a book published jointly by UNESCO and SciELO1 as part of the 15 Year Program celebrations which took place in October 20132 ... There are 16 national collections from 13 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, plus South Africa, Spain and Portugal, and 2 thematic collections. Amongst the national collections, 12 are certified since they adhere to the operating criteria for network sites which were established by the SciELO methodology. Of the two thematic collections, the Public Health collection is certified and contains 16 journals broken down as follows: ten from Latin American national collections, two from Spain, one from Italy, one from the USA and two from the World Health Organization. The Social Sciences collection, an experiment whose purpose was the translation into English of articles selected from social science journals published in Latin America, was discontinued in 2010.  The scielo.org portal hosts all the collections, their journals and articles, and offers search functionality, access to the texts themselves and interoperability.  Since its creation, more than 1,200 titles have been indexed by the SciELO Network. Of these, around 1,040 remain active. However, this number drops down to just over 800 when onlyjournals whose publication has been ongoing within the last six months are taken into account. This is the criterion which has been laid down for participation in the SciELO Citation Index (SciELO CI) on the Web of Science platform ..."

Users of #openaccess research speak. These stories volunteered by the users of…

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:24 AM PST

"These stories volunteered by the users of our open-access repository are the best evidence that OA serves real people with real needs, that OA meets unmet demand, that the demand unmet by conventional journals includes academic and non-academic readers, and that for scholars who publish in conventional journals, deposit in an OA repository is not a superfluous extra step but a social and academic gift, even a responsibility, for which uncounted readers will be deeply grateful.  For scholars who publish in conventional journals and want to reach everyone who could benefit from their work, or everyone wishing to read, cite, apply, extend, or build on it, these stories are the best incentive to deposit that work in an OA repository. 'The Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication is very pleased to launch Your Story Matters, a new site featuring stories and anecdotes from users of DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard), Harvard's open-access repository. With nearly 1,000 user stories from 83 countries, 'Your Story Matters' offers moving evidence that DASH readers are deeply grateful for barrier-free access to Harvard research. Since DASH launched in 2009, users have downloaded its articles 4.6 million times, from every country on Earth. Even the subset of users who volunteered stories to DASH includes a remarkable variety of people , from faculty and students at institutions unable to afford the high prices of scholarly journals, to non-academics such as physicians, nurses, clergy, writers, journalists, public officials, social workers, political activists, retirees, and ordinary citizens in countries that try to limit what people may read. The visual interface of 'Your Story Matters,' and the easy way it supports rapid scrolling through stories from different countries, make vivid who is using DASH, from where, and with what impact....'"

Open Access » Rowman & Littlefield International

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:20 AM PST

"We are pleased to announce a new open access publishing strand at Rowman & Littlefield International. This publishing model is open to all our authors. Our open access list will include monographs and edited collections across all our disciplines: Philosophy, Politics and International Relations, Cultural Studies and Economics. We are offering a 'gold' route open access model, where a full-text PDF is made available to view free of charge on our website (and your funding body's repository, as required) immediately on publication. We are implementing a hybrid model, whereby we will continue to print and sell hardback and paperback editions on a POD basis internationally, and we will continue to sell downloadable PDF and ePub editions to institutions and individuals. We will charge an APC (Author Processing Charge), based on a fixed price of £20 (+ VAT) per typeset page. Additional charges for images and diagrams will apply.  The full cost will be invoiced prior to publication. All open access titles will be fully peer reviewed and will follow the same production processes (i.e. copyediting, typesetting and proofreading) as our non-OA titles ..."

COAR Roadmap: Future Directions for Repository Interoperability

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:16 AM PST

Use the link to access the report.  

Why I Don't Care About Open Access to Research—and Why You Should - Pacific Standard

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:14 AM PST

"Should paywalls stand between the taxpaying public and publicly funded research? Congress recently decided that the answer should be 'no.' As part of the post-government-shutdown spending bill passed earlier this month, Congress included an 'open access' provision requiring that research papers funded by the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education be made freely available to everyone within 12 months of publication in a scientific journal. This move is the latest step in a movement toward increasing public access to publicly funded research. The National Institutes of Health, which accounts for almost half of federal non-defense R&D, put a similar policy in place in 2008, and last year, the White House instructed all federal agencies that fund research to prepare open-access plans (PDF). But does this achieve anything important? Giving the public what it paid for sounds noble, but from where I sit, a scientist at a well-funded research university, ensuring that research papers are available to the public for free seems pointless.  It's hard for me to see why I should care about open access. Through my university's library, I already have access to all of the publications I need in order to do my job, and so do all of my colleagues at other research universities. Making these publications available in an open online repository after a 12-month embargo does nothing for me because I need to read these papers as soon as they're published. The idea that the public should be able to access the research it paid for sounds nice, but these papers are highly technical, narrowly focused, and generally useless to anyone without specialized training. Someone who really wants a free copy of a particular paper can almost certainly get it by emailing a request to one of the authors ... THERE ACTUALLY ARE GOOD reasons for why the federal government cares about open access, and why you should care about it too. The push for open access gets to the heart of why the government is in the business of funding non-defense scientific research: to produce a resource that the private sector lacks the incentives to make in the quantities our society needs. If federally funded research is going to broadly benefit society, it has to be widely accessible, not just to curious private citizens, but also to industries, private organizations, and federal, state, and local governments where scientific knowledge can help create new products, solve problems, educate students, and make policy decisions ..."

Archaeology | Explore Taylor & Francis Online

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 02:05 AM PST

"Access the 25 most read Archaeology articles free today! This collection brings together the 25 top read articles of 2014 from a variety of Routledge journals in the Archaeology portfolio. Click on an article title to read it for free online."

Impact of Social Sciences – Let’s not get too excited about the new University of California open access policy

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 01:47 AM PST

" ... I'm already seeing lots of people celebrating this step as a great advance for open access. But color me skeptical. This policy has a major, major hole – an optional faculty opt-out. This is there because enough faculty wanted the right to publish their works in ways that were incompatible with the policy that the policy would not have passed without the provision. Unfortunately, this means that the policy is completely toothless. It provides a ready means for people to make their works available – which is great. And having the default be open is great. But nobody is compelled to do it in any meaningful way – therefore it is little more than a voluntary system. More importantly, the opt-out provides journals with a way of ensuring that works published in their journals are not subject to the policy. At UCSF and MIT and other places, many large publishers, especially in biomedicine, are requiring that authors at institutions with policies like the UC policy opt-out of the system as a condition of publishing. At MIT, these publishers include AAAS, Nature, PNAS, Elsevier and many others. We can expect more and more publishers to demand opt-outs as the number of institutions with open/public access policies grows. In the early days of such "green" open access, publishers were pretty open about allowing authors to post manuscript versions of their papers in university archives. They were open because there was no cost to them. Nobody was going to cancel a subscription because they could get a tiny fraction of the articles in a journal for free somewhere on the internet. However, as more universities – especially big ones like UC – move towards institutional archiving policies, an increasing fraction of the papers published in subscription journals could end up in archives – which WOULD threaten their business models. So, of course (and as I and others predicted a decade ago), subscription publishers are now doing their best to prevent these articles from becoming available. So long as the incentives in academia push people to publish in journals of high prestige, authors are going to do whatever the journal wants with respect to voluntary policies at their universities ..."

News from Ubiquity Press: Feb 2015

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 01:43 AM PST

"We are delighted to share the beta version of our new journal design. This has been launched on The Comics Grid initially and we now seek feedback from the community as we begin to roll out the design to all journals. The new design can be viewed here: http://www.comicsgrid.com/ and your comments are welcomed ..."

THE OPEN SCIENCE INITIATIVE WORKING GROUP:Mapping the Future of Scholarly Publishing

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 01:15 AM PST

Use the link to access the report.  

Publications | Free Full-Text | Open Access Article Processing Charges: DOAJ Survey May 2014

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 01:12 AM PST

Use the link to access the full text article from the journal MDPI Publications.  "As of May 2014, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) listed close to ten thousand fully open access, peer reviewed, scholarly journals. Most of these journals do not charge article processing charges (APCs). This article reports the results of a survey of the 2567 journals, or 26% of journals listed in DOAJ, that do have APCs based on a sample of 1432 of these journals. Results indicate a volatile sector that would make future APCs difficult to predict for budgeting purposes. DOAJ and publisher title lists often did not closely match. A number of journals were found on examination not to have APCs. A wide range of publication costs was found for every publisher type. The average (mean) APC of $964 contrasts with a mode of $0. At least 61% of publishers using APCs are commercial in nature, while many publishers are of unknown types. The vast majority of journals charging APCs (80%) were found to offer one or more variations on pricing, such as discounts for authors from mid to low income countries, differential pricing based on article type, institutional or society membership, and/or optional charges for extras such as English language editing services or fast track of articles. The complexity and volatility of this publishing landscape is discussed."

Figshare -- 2015 - The year of open data mandates

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 01:08 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 ..."

Open Library of Humanities Update, Part 2: More about disciplinary curation; a first Religious Studies content initiative; and partnering with libraries for sustainable funding | Omega Alpha | Open Access

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 01:04 AM PST

What Do Public Domain & Creative Commons Mean? - Finding Public Domain & Creative Commons Media - Research Guides at Harvard Library

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 01:03 AM PST

"When you are adding images, videos and other content that you did not create to your presentation, it is important to make sure that you are not violating anyone's copyright. One way to do so is to find public domain images for your presentations ... If you can't find Public Domain media that fit your needs, you can also use Creative Commons-licensed content as long as you ensure that you correctly attribute this content to its creator and otherwise meet the terms of the license under which the image is offered. You can find more information about this on the Creative Commons FAQ ..."

Researcher workshop: Open Access - REF, research funders and more - Library training, events and room bookings - Robert Gordon University

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 01:00 AM PST

"This session is aimed at researchers and will cover various open access topics such as the benefits, green and gold routes, research funders, REF requirements and OpenAIR. There will also be the chance to ask questions."

OpenAIRE Guide for Research Institutions | Research Institutions Toolkit

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 12:58 AM PST

"The OpenAIRE Guide for Research Institutions will assist Research Institutions and Policy Makers to implement viable Open Access policies and procedures. The recommendations are based on best practices from a range of leading universities and research institutions in Europe. In the guide you will find the following general topics ..."

Scientific publishing in the times of open access

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 12:54 AM PST

"The push for 'Open Access' publications may have captured the largest mindshare of librarians and policy-makers, yet other aspects may turn out to become even more important in the years to come. The Open Access movement derives its strength from its unquestionable idealism. Given that the prime purpose of science is to advance the knowledge of mankind, shouldn't all mankind be made privy to such knowledge, directly, with no strings attached, and – most importantly – without having to pay for it? The moral justification for Open Access becomes all the more compelling when one considers that most research (including, notably, much of the research carried out at private companies) is funded by the tax-paying public. While the big publishing houses have initially resisted, and often derided, the propositions of the Open Access movement, the validity of the model is now almost universally ­accepted ... What is more rarely discussed, however, is the darker side of the Open Access model (at least as it is generally practiced today). You see, Open Access does not magically make the costs of publishing a journal disappear. What it does, instead, is to shift the cost of publishing from the readers to the authors, who are typically requested to pay a fee for seeing their paper published. In truth, this 'dirty little secret' of Open Access publishing creates a conflict of interest which is virtually impossible to resolve: the more scientific papers get published, the higher the revenues of the publisher. Consequently, human nature being what it is, any fledgling (or struggling) journal may feel tempted to subordinate the scientific soundness of any submitted manuscript to the harsh pressure of economic realities. This conflict of interests is intrinsic to the ­author-pays model and, of course, this is the reason why a plethora of Open Access pseudopublishers have opened shop, whose business models range from the slightly malodorous to the blatantly fraudulent. The names of these so-called 'science publishers' are well known to the scientific community, whose inboxes are regularly flooded by their email spam campaigns ..."

Public draft of the open data maturity model | News | Open Data Institute

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 12:50 AM PST

"In partnership with the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), the ODI has been developing a maturity model to help assess how effective organisations are at publishing and consuming open data. We are pleased to launch a public draft of the model and invite feedback on it from the wider community. Last year we announced the start of a project to develop an open data maturity model. Funded through the Release of Data Fund, the project aims to support organisations in mapping out their open data journey and comparing their progress with others. The model will be of immediate value to Defra in implementing its open data strategy, but the aim has always been to develop a model that can be applied by a wide range of organisations. Since November we've run a series of requirements workshops to explore this idea in more detail with representatives from 10 different organisations, including members of the Defra network and the wider open data community. The results have been used to create a maturity model that will help organisations assess their maturity as both publishers and reusers of open data in several areas ... The documents are at a stage where we would like to invite input from the open data community. We'd welcome all feedback ..."

Solutions For A Sustainable World! | NASA World Wind Europa Challange

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 12:42 AM PST

"The Europa Challenge provides the opportunity for Europe's *best and brightest* to deliver sustainable solutions to the European community. And do this in ways that serve local, regional, national or international interests, while also advancing the career opportunities for those who accept the challenge. This is an international challenge open to all on our home planet. See the 2014 Projects and 2013 Projects, China had one of the top teams both years. The top four teams, two Professional Projects and two University Projects, will take home the crystal Europa Challenge bull! ..."

FOSS4G Europe | Home

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 12:37 AM PST

Use the link to access more information about the upcoming event.  "The second edition of the FOSS4G-Europe Conference will be held at Politecnico di Milano in Como, Italy, from July 15th to 17th, 2015. A day of workshops will precede the conference on 14th July, and a code sprint will close the event on 18th July.  The Conference aims to bring together FOSS4G users and developers worldwide and foster closer interactions with and amongst European communities in order to share ideas for improving geodata, software and applications openess."

OSGeo Discuss - Nominations invited for "Geo for All - Open Education Award 2015"

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 12:30 AM PST

"On behalf of Geo for All  http://www.geoforall.org , it is my great pleasure to inform you  that we will be strongly supporting and participating  in the Open Education Week 2015 and build synergies with the training events, workshops, webinars etc planned. Open Education Week (9-13 March 2015) is an annual opportunity to raise awareness about open education and its impact on teaching and learning worldwide. Open education encompasses resources, tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing to improve educational access and effectiveness. Participation in all events and use of all resources are free and open to everyone.Details at http://www.openeducationweek.org/ We are pleased to welcome nominations for 'Geo for All - Open Education Award 2015'. This is an opportunity for us to  thank our colleagues for the greatest contributions to Open Education principles in the Geo domain ..."

Ford Foundation, Open Access and Really Sharing Knowledge | Full Circle Associates

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 12:24 AM PST

"Knowledge sharing can be enabled or blocked based on organizational policies and infrastructure. This is essential in sectors that are (or claim to be) for the public good, like non profits, donors and foundations, NGOs and educational institutions. I was happy to read that the Ford Foundation has added Creative Commons approach to all their work, joining the Open Society Foundations, the Packard Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the CGIAR and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ..."

EuRoman » Blog Archive » EurActiv 2015: Open Access, Open Debates, Open Borders, Open Minds & Open Data

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 12:18 AM PST

"The year 2015 started well for you? We are emerging from a policy year renewal of European leaders and priorities. Now is the time debated legislation and actions implemented in the country.The EurActiv network in 12 languages will play her part in 12 capitals. We have completed the integration strengthened between four of them: Berlin, Paris, London, Brussels. We are ready for the next phase of modernization of tools at your disposal, and journalisme.EurActiv Change focuses on current events and open political debate. This opening is in tune with the times and deserves to be distinguished here ..."

COBRA - or what makes up the serpent in the library? | Blog of the University Library Kassel

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 12:15 AM PST

[From Google's English] "KOBRA (Kassel online library, repository and archive) is our second online platform where we provide documents freely available for your convenience. Unlike ORKA but no photos or letters to upload, but scientific work of academic staff of the University of Kassel, Germany. All documents are open access published and made ​​available to all people around the world for free. The beauty of COBRA is that the work submitted by departments or document types to choose from. Did you know that all books are published on COBRA like a very topical issue as TTIP or that you can also find new trends, such as urban gardening . Choose the scientists to upload their work on COBRA, they are enriched with further important additional bibliographic data and demonstrated in the national and international library catalogs. In addition, the Kassel works on search engines such as. Google can be researched. By the way: publishing on COBRA is free - and not in vain."

Impact of Social Sciences – Reference rot in web-based scholarly communication and link decoration as a path to mitigation

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 12:07 AM PST

"Referencing sources is a fundamental part of the scholarly discourse. This was true 50 years ago and still holds true today, even though, with the emergence of the web, scholarly communication has undergone a dramatic shift from a paper-based to a web-based endeavor. What has changed, however, is the variety of scholarly assets being referenced. Increasingly, we see references to software, ontologies, project websites, presentations, blogs, videos, tweets, etc. Such resources are usually referenced by means of their HTTP URI as they exist on the web at large. These HTTP URIs allow for immediate access on the web, but also introduce one of the detrimental characteristics of the web to scholarly communication: reference rot. We introduced the term reference rot as a combination of two problems common for URI references: link rot and content drift. Link rot represents the case where a URI ceases to exist and hence the request typically returns a '404 – Page not found' response. Content drift describes the case where the resource identified by its URI changes over time and hence, as time goes by, the request returns content that becomes less and less representative of what was originally referenced. Our recent study, part of the research track of the Hiberlink project, investigates the extent to which science, technology, and medicine (STM) articles are subject to reference rot ... We assembled three corpora (arXiv, Elsevier, PubMed Central) consisting of more than 3.5 million scholarly articles published between 1997 and 2012. Out of the 4 million URIs that we found (in about 1.8 million of the considered articles), more than 1 million became subject to our analysis as they referenced web at large resources (blogs, project websites, etc.) as described above. URIs that referenced STM articles were excluded from our study on the assumption that existing persistent identifier and archival infrastructure makes such links immune to reference rot.  Our results show an alarming link rot ratio for all three corpora: 13% of arXiv, 22% of Elsevier, and 14% of PMC articles published in 2012 suffer from link rot. These numbers only increase for older articles, for example, for articles published in 2005 the corresponding numbers are 18%, 41%, and 36% ..."

Equitable Access, Public Stewardship, and Access to Scholarly Information | CSU Libraries Network

Posted: 09 Feb 2015 12:02 AM PST

"The twenty-three libraries serving nearly 500,000 students and scholars at California State University's diverse campuses are firmly committed to their mission of providing equitable access to academic and professional information resources to every student and scholar.  We are equally committed to the principle of responsible stewardship of the public funds entrusted to us to meet our mission of service to these students and scholars. It is therefore with deep regret that we share the news with our colleagues and the students and faculty we serve, that on December 19, 2014, we made the decision not to continue, as a system, to provide system-wide access to a collection of over 1300 electronic journals published by a major publisher of scholarly and professional journals, John Wiley and Company. We were unable to reach an agreement with Wiley and Company that met our fundamental goal of providing equitable access to information across all 23 campuses.  The terms offered to the CSU by Wiley and Company would have cost more than many of our campuses could afford.  This meant that several campuses would be forced to cancel their subscriptions, and that these campuses' share of the total package costs would be remanded to other campuses. This was not acceptable to us. As well, we were unable to reach an agreement with Wiley that met our responsibility for careful stewardship of limited public funds.  The terms offered by Wiley and Company would have meant a cost increase of 10-12% across the CSU system: nearly double the average reported 2014 journal inflation rates reported by Library Journal in 2014. While Wiley and Company offered access to additional content as part of their terms, the CSU libraries did not find the value of the additional content compelling.  Our records showed that most of this additional content was unneeded and seldom-consulted. The CSU libraries offered to maintain their system-wide license with a smaller package of several hundred electronic journals that would have met both these core principles: equitable access, and responsible stewardship.  This offer was rejected by Wiley and Company ..."

The Valuation of Unprotected Works: A Case Study of Public Domain Photographs on Wikipedia by Paul J. Heald, Kris Erickson, Martin Kretschmer :: SSRN

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 11:57 PM PST

"What is the value of works in the public domain? We study the biographical Wikipedia pages of a large data set of authors, composers, and lyricists to determine whether the public domain status of available images leads to a higher rate of inclusion of illustrated supplementary material and whether such inclusion increases visitorship to individual pages. We attempt to objectively place a value on the body of public domain photographs and illustrations which are used in this global resource. We find that the most historically remote subjects are more likely to have images on their web pages because their biographical life-spans pre-date the existence of in-copyright imagery. We find that the large majority of photos and illustrations used on subject pages were obtained from the public domain, and we estimate their value in terms of costs saved to Wikipedia page builders and in terms of increased traffic corresponding to the inclusion of an image. Then, extrapolating from the characteristics of a random sample of a further 300 Wikipedia pages, we estimate a total value of public domain photographs on Wikipedia of between $246 to $270 million dollars per year ..."

Articles from Open Knowledge in Agricultural Development (OKAD) - F1000Research

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 11:53 PM PST

"Progress in science and technology can only be achieved by building upon a community knowledge base. This is as true for agricultural development as for anything else. However, current technical, financial, legal and cultural barriers can make it difficult to access and use existing agricultural knowledge.  Open Knowledge initiatives that promote free, unrestricted access to research, data, software and learning materials promise to further accelerate agricultural development, reduce hunger and poverty, and improve food security in less economically developed countries. The Open Knowledge in Agricultural Development (OKAD) article collection will be a platform for authors to share their original research findings, initiatives, case studies, perspectives and opinions relating to Open Knowledge initiatives within all areas in the context of agriculture, agri-food and agro-biodiversity. We encourage the submission of articles on topics including, but not limited to ..."

Ac#ng on “Open.”

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 04:32 AM PST

Use the link to access the presentation.

Saving Human Knowledge at 800 Pages an Hour | Motherboard

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 04:12 AM PST

"On the top floor of the Wellcome Library, 12 people sit in the darkness of blackout blinds, illuminated by the white LEDs of a scanning machine. This is the Euston Scan Centre, currently home to a team from the Internet Archive. They are part of an ambitious project to digitise the 19th century book collections of 10 UK libraries relating to the topic of medicine. They each aim to scan 800 pages an hour. They've scanned over 2.5 million since they started with a full staff in October, and will have done 16-17 million by 2016 ..."

When can we legally share protected data? - Sunlight Foundation Blog

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 04:00 AM PST

"As Sunlight explores the public use of individual-level data — with a special focus on how this works in the criminal justice system — we are also exploring the practical, legal and ethical challenges of working with individual-level data. One big reason why individual-level data is often prevented from being shared publicly is for the protection of individual privacy. In thinking about this tension between privacy rights and open government data, we have so far focused on the legal and technical context underlying the open sharing of individual-level 'microdata.' At the same time we investigate open data sharing — meaning data that anyone can download and analyze anytime, anywhere — we recognize that it can also be useful to consider how the public can benefit from data shared privately, not openly. Though average citizens cannot access a number of data sets maintained by government because of privacy concerns, they do nonetheless benefit from the work of researchers, both inside and outside of government, who have been able to share that data with each other. For instance, many states have created integrated justice information systems to allow law enforcement, courts and corrections to coordinate more effectively. States like Washington and Oregon have also used interagency data sharing programs to evaluate the effectiveness of programs, like re-entry programs for prisoners and rehabilitation for minors with mental health concerns. While these datasets cannot be legally shared in the open, they can be shared privately in highly valuable ways. Because of privacy law, some datasets are not only not 'open,' but they are in fact very 'closed' and only made available through highly restrictive procedures. Under typical privacy law, data users must meet high standards and establish relationships with the data providers to create credibility and trust. While one of the strengths of the open data movement is the potential for unexpected benefits that come from the free and unrestricted release of data, the open release of individual-level data can come with certain risks. Fears of harm stemming from the release of identified data has led to many legal restrictions on publishing it openly. What is "microdata" — and why is it so powerful? We're exploring the challenges and opportunities of utilizing individual-level data. Read more about microdata in our "OpenData1" collection. In the arena of criminal justice, there is an unusual degree of variation in whether personally identifiable information (PII) is protected. On the one hand, some criminal justice data is entirely unprotected — think of mugshots on page one of the morning paper or details from public courtroom testimony. On the other hand, the field has many, many datasets that are protected with the same care and confidentiality granted to medical records. While the criminal justice system disseminates sensitive, PII-containing data every day, it restricts access to much of it. Knowing this, we sought to understand what is currently happening with this restricted information. How are the agencies which hold this valuable, individual-level data currently getting value from it? ..."

OPEN GLOSSARY

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 03:55 AM PST

Use the link to access the glossary.  "This glossary is designed to to be a resource to help inform people about the culture of 'open scholarship'."

Financing for fee-driven gold open access

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 03:49 AM PST

"The most well-known, although neither the most common nor the only, way of providing gold open access to research material is through article or book processing charges (APCs/BPCs). These are problematic in some disciplines where most research work is unfunded (hint: the social sciences and the humanities). It also tends to concentrate costs/risk. To clarify: it is not, in these instances, about paying to bypass quality control. It is paying for the labour of publishing as a service to the author so that research material can be made openly available to read and re-use. Stuart Lawson contends that the UK's Finch Report, acting on incorrect and outdated information, has now created a self-fulfilling prophecy whereby a narrow range of £1,600-£2,000 has become the norm for APCs. For books, there is a greater range but a much higher cost. The current rates requested by established presses under such a system are high and pose real, possibly insurmountable, challenges for unfunded research: $2450/chapter from de Gruyter; €640/chapter from InTech; £5,900 from Manchester University Press for books of up to 80,000 words; £11,000 from Palgrave; and approximately €15,000 from Springer, to name but a few. Given how keen some publishers (and the UK government, who loves OA for its market perspectives) are on market phenomena, I have a question: why has nobody considered financing schemes to spread APC/BPC costs over a longer period of time? After all, in other market environments, if I want to buy something expensive, I have repayment schemes over a longer term thrust at me ..."

A tactical strategy to bypass predatory journals | The BMJ

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 03:38 AM PST

"Prompted by the editorial by Clark and Smith (1) inciting us to take firm action against predatory journals – an almost impossible task though some might approve it – we wish instead to suggest helping researchers in low and middle income countries by giving them a space to publish their articles in open access as peer-reviewed research in reputable scientific journals thus ensuring a wider readership. This more positive strategy might overcome the problems arising when research papers from low and middle income countries face publication refusals from peer-reviewed journals yet contain scientifically valid evidence that those who conduct independent systematic reviews could otherwise miss.(2,3) In offering to publish well-selected articles from poorer countries, high-impact, reputable journals might also humbly acknowledge that some on occasions have had to retract misconducted, insidious and even dangerous research.(4,5) Given today's corrupted research environment, another step forward that reputable journals need to take is to improve their control over three barriers that mine scientific integrity, by ensuring that authors honestly and fully publish their study protocol, disclose research funding and all indirect conflicting interests.(6) The advantages reputable journals might gain by helping researchers from low and middle-income countries, rather than fighting against predatory journals, include making reliable information from these countries available to their readers and broadening their market.(7)"

Ireland: The Transition to Open Access

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 03:34 AM PST

"Ireland's transition to Open Access has been iterative and substantive, with government bodies and funding agencies adopting Open Access policies over a period of several years. These policies have been developed through consensus building amongst different stakeholders and culminated in the establishment of the National Steering Committee on Open Access in 20121 . The committee had representation from all Irish funding agencies and in October 2012 it successfully formulated the 'National Principles for Open Access Policy Statement' which outlines a framework for Open Access in Ireland2 . The principles, which have placed Ireland in an exemplar position in Europe, consist of a green way mandate and encouragement publishing in Gold Open Access journals. The policy is supported by all Irish funders and uses existing infrastructure including the use of RIAN3 , a national portal that harvests content from Institutional Repositories of the Irish seven university libraries. The framework includes a set of common principles, general principles and other supporting statements on infrastructure, advocacy, coordination and exploiting Open Access."

Hungary Open Access Case Study

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 03:30 AM PST

"Hungarian OA landscape, policies, challenges are reviewed. There are a few mandates, and a few declarations or policy documents which have relevance for Open Access. The role of the Hungarian Scientific Bibliography Database (MTMT) is discussed – as it can be used for monitoring OA mandate compliance. From infrastructural point of view, the OA status is considered fairly good, from the policy side much further efforts are needed, though the mandate of the Academy of Sciences is elaborate and seems to be effective. For research data the OA situation is dire in the country. For small countries, like Hungary, the significance of EU-level coordination in shaping OA policies is enormous."

Education, Research and Open Access in Norway

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 03:22 AM PST

"The CRIStin organisation was established in January 2011 under the ownership of the Ministry of Education and Research in cooperation with the Ministry of Health and Care services. CRIStin has three main functions: to manage and further develop the national CRIS system, to coordinate the implementation of Open Access in Norway and to negotiate licence agreements for e-resources on behalf of consortia of research institutions.  Norway is a small country with a quite centralised research infrastructure. Building good services for Open Access infrastructure is simplified by having one major research funder, one national CRIS and one key provider of repository services. Politically the Government has expressed in a White paper its commitment to making Norwegian research results openly available. Despite Norwegian research institutions focus on Open Access, institutional policies tend to be vague and based on good intentions. The need for alignment and policy reinforcement is there for evident, and the PASTEUR4OA project provides a great opportunity for this ..." 

UK Open Access Case Study

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 03:17 AM PST

"Recent Open Access (OA) policy developments in the United Kingdom (UK) have caused stakeholders such as universities and academic libraries to have to consider how to adapt to distinct funders OA policies and to ensure compliance with those policies. Following an independent study on 'how to expand access to research publications', also referred to as the Finch Report, the UK Government adopted a new OA policy and the Research Councils UK (RCUK) revised their OA policy. The newly adopted OA policies require research findings to be made OA through publication in open access or hybrid journals (Gold OA). More recently, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) announced that its OA policy for the next Research Evaluation Framework (REF) – the system that assesses UK universities research – will require the deposit of research findings in institutional or subject repositories (Green OA). By and large, the two distinct paths being currently promoted by the UK Government and RCUK (Gold OA) and the Funding Councils (Green OA) require that continued efforts be made to ensure that advice and support are provided to universities, academic libraries and researchers. They also require that coordinated efforts endure so that progress towards making research findings freely available online continues. Despite the distinct OA policies adopted by policymakers and national research funders, the UK's movement towards OA has been a result of stakeholders coordinated efforts and is considered a case of good practice ..." 

Portugal Open Access Policy Landscape

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 03:15 AM PST

"This case study includes a brief description of the Portuguese higher education and research systems, followed by a short history of the development of Open Access policies in the country, including all aspects of implementation and supported infrastructures. It concludes listing some challenges and ongoing developments ..."

"Analysis of Open Access Scholarly Journals in Chemistry" by Faizul Nisha Dr and Hilal Ahmad Dr

Posted: 08 Feb 2015 03:12 AM PST

Use the link to access the full text article from the institutional repository of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.  "The present study has investigated the trends of open access journals appeared in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). It provides an insight to the open access publishing in the field of chemistry based on the data collected from DOAJ. The DOAJ available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website lists Open Access Journals and is maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). Notably, it has listed about 9804 journals across 124 countries till 8th January 2014. Out of 9804 journals, 164 (1.67%) journals are listed under Chemistry. The data was extracted in excel format and analysis was carried out on the basis of subject coverage, decade and year, country of origin, publisher, language, format and Indian contribution to OA journals. The select subject i.e. Chemistry is being categorised into Chemistry General, Chemical Engineering, Analytical Chemistry, Organic Chemistry and Inorganic Chemistry. It was found that out of 164 journals from chemistry, majority of the open access journals belong to the category chemistry general and contribute some about 68.9% of the total chemistry journals in DOAJ. Though the maximum growth of these journals has been recorded in the decade 2000s, however in 2011, a record number of 30 journals of Chemistry appeared in DOAJ. Interestingly, India contributed 24 OA journals and is placed second after Egypt in publishing OA journals in chemistry. Further, it has been found that commercial publishers with 29 journals are the major contributors to OA in DOAJ with Hindawi Publishing Corporation as the leading contributor. Moreover, English has been found as the most popular language of OA journals. While as Indian Academy of Sciences: Chemical Sciences is reported to be the oldest journal publishing since 2005."
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