Sunday, April 26, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Reusing Open Access content & HEFCE policy on Open Access

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 09:18 AM PDT

Presented at the FOSTER - UNESCO Open Science for Doctoral Schools, 24 April 2015 (https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/event/foster-unesco-open-science-doctoral-schools)

Oer15: Window Boxes, Battles, and Bandwagons | Open Education Working Group

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 02:24 AM PDT

"So OER15, with its theme of 'Mainstreaming Open Education', introduced a bit of a quandary. On the one hand recent times have seen a fair amount of Open Washing (Audrey Watters definition: "having an appearance of open-source and open-licensing for marketing purposes, while continuing proprietary practices"), and on the other mainstreaming often means compromises. Changing the world is never easy… The OER conference is now in its 6th year and continues to be organised as a community event by stakeholders interested in the progression of OER. This year the host city was Cardiff, a seemingly perfect fit due to the recent Open Education Wales policy. There is no doubt that there a buzzing community interested in OER in the UK and beyond exists, but is this still the same players who saw the potential of OER many moons ago, or have things moved on? Has OER moved into the mainstream and are Open Practitioners becoming the norm? ... With over 27 million buttons (licenses) created per day Creative Commons have officially made it, but to some extent openness is now a victim of its own success. Cable Green, Director of Global Learning at Creative Commons, gave an opening plenary in which he called out those who are using the term open content when not adhering to the 5 Rs – reuse, revise, remix, redistribute, retain. Cable explained that we should not tolerate 'rented content' in education and that currently the way we spend money on public education is immoral and unethical – all publicly funded educational resources should be open. In the US the cost of textbooks and the implications of this on students has really driven the open movement. Creative Commons would like to see a world where all textbooks are online and can be printed out, resulting in the saved money being spent on teachers. There is still work to be done raising awareness by faculty but projects including z-degree (entire degree programme is OER) have made progress. Alongside open textbook work Creative Commons have been carrying out extensive policy activity (see the Open Policy Network and theInstitute for open leadership) advocating for public funding bodies to set the default when giving money to open i.e. an open licence requirement – all publicly funded resources should be CC0 licence with no embargo period. Cable highlighted new work which involves shifting our learning to solving global grand challenges – water shortages; environmental issues; complex problems, and also a look forward to how open data fits in the space. Cable concluded by highlighting work they are doing to see what market penetration looks like for OER. Add your insights to the Google doc ..."

Unleashing the potential of open data | Information Age

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 02:20 AM PDT

"The 2012 Open Data White Paper, appositely entitled 'Unleashing the Potential', set out the Government's vision to make access to data 'simpler, cleaner, and faster'.   The UK is already a world leader in open data and, joining South Korea, Estonia, Israel and New Zealand as members of D5, a global network of the most digitally advanced governments in the world. Government-as-a-platform (GaaP) is the idea of common, shared technology and services that provide a flexible foundation for IT reuse and APIs to enable innovation across government and third parties ..."

OpenCorporates Heralds Open Data as a Public Good | ProgrammableWeb

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 02:17 AM PDT

"Speaking at API Strategy and Practice / APIDays in Berlin today — and only three days after the release of Version 4 of the OpenCorporates API — Taggart shared some of the origin and unique challenges facing the open data business that aims to build the world's most comprehensive underlying dataset of company information ..."

An overview of open science and open data in Horizon 2020 | Foster

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 02:10 AM PDT

"This presentation was delivered at 'Open research in Horizon 2020 - how to increase your chances of success' on Tuesday 14th April, 2015 in University College Cork , Ireland as part of a 2 day training event titled "Open Access and Research Data Management: Horizon 2020 and Beyond'."

Universities seek alternatives to expensive textbooks | Deseret News National

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 02:06 AM PDT

"And the problem isn't isolated to Tacoma Community College. A 2014 study conducted by the Student Public Interest Research Group found 65 percent of students skipped purchasing a textbook because of cost. Students made the decision knowing it could harm their academic performance. According to College Board, the average college student in America spends about $1,200 per year on textbooks and supplies. That amounts to approximately 13 percent of tuition at a traditional, four-year university. Schools across the country are responding with policies that allow so-called open source textbooks, written by faculty, peer reviewed and available for free online to students. Research has shown open source textbooks can potentially lop millions of dollars off the higher-education price tag while improving student engagement with more interactive, digital publications ..."

Conference "Open Science - the 21th century benefits for researchers" | National Library of Latvia

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 02:02 AM PDT

"This conference is co-organised by the National Library of Latvia, the University of Latvia and the Riga Technical University and will take place in the framework of Open Access week. Its goals are to raise awareness of importance, benefits and impact of Open Access, Open Data and Open Science, to enhance awareness of decision makers of the necessity to formulate national and institutional Open Access policies and to introduce them with the best practice in Open Access policies, to introduce concepts and themes around Open Science to researchers and provide practical help in engaging with Open Access to research information, to inform researchers about Research Data Management policies and practices in research institutions, to develop skills necessary for publishing research publications in Open Access for librarians, focusing on the newly launched National Open Access repository service of the National Library of Latvia ..."

UMass Boston Libraries and OER: What Can You and Your Students Access for Free?

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 01:57 AM PDT

Use the link to access the presentation. 

Introduction to the special issue on digital scholarship - Springer

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 01:51 AM PDT

Use the link to access the full text article published in the International Journal on Digital Libraries.  "Digital scholarship, or 'cyberscholarship'—that based on data and computation—is radically reshaping knowledge discovery, creation, analysis, presentation and dissemination in many scholarly domains. Distinguishing features of digital scholarship are multi-stage workflows that often involve cross-disciplinary collaborations, use of a large variety of information objects from multiple sources, new research methodologies, innovative data analytics and multiple forms of presentation of research outcomes. The enabling environment for digital scholarship is a rapidly expanding global digital ecology composed of richly annotated datasets, open source tools and a growing appreciation of open access digital publication of text and data as a measure and driver of scholarly productivity. This special issue contains papers that report on research related to the broad set of activities that enable digital scholarship. For digital scholarship to flourish, consideration must be given to the entire data lifecycle. The digital libraries community has laid the foundation for digital scholarship by developing information environments and resources and by exploring new interdisciplinary problem domains. As large volumes of 'born digital' data are created and legacy collections are converted to digital form, new possibilities for scholarly work appear. To the degree that repositories can be interlinked at the data element level, interoperability and functionality is greatly increased. The result is knowledge infrastuctures capable of supporting a broad spectrum of scholarly activities. Semantic web and linked open data activities are developing standards, protocols and best practices for achieving this. Michael Lesk's introduction to the Issue offers a rich historic perspective on digital libraries research and digital scholarship. He reminds us that the current information environment is a result of the efforts of many people from many kinds of organizations. Often they were focused on different goals. What is seen as essential is the communication of ideas and this we must continue to value and improve through new models of scholarly communication. The special issue contains six papers that describe work that describe outstanding examples of contemporary digital scholarship. They are ..."

The new knowledge infrastructure - Springer

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 01:43 AM PDT

Use the link to access the full text article from the International Journal on Digital Libraries.  " ... Increasingly, we also study using algorithms. Projects like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey collect so much data that it cannot be viewed by a single individual. Instead, the purpose of the data is for data mining. We have computational studies of authorship, stylometrics, analyses of paintings and musical performance, and other topics of scholarship to complement the scientific data mining of galaxies, chemical molecules, or weather events. How do we enable these new kinds of scholarship? We need a new kind of knowledge infrastructure that will offer more than the rudimentary search and retrieval capabilities possible today. Conventional library subject indexing for books may be old-fashioned now that we have full text searching. A few years ago the Library of Congress floated a study even suggesting that the assignment of LCSH categories be phased out (the community objected). But we now need to search images, data, and other resources where text search is not immediately applicable. In addition, we have problems of quantity. The more material to be studied, the more accurate searching must be, so retrieval algorithms of greater resolving power are needed. And it is not just that individual projects are gathering more data, but that data availability is extending across disciplines and around the world. The knowledge infrastructure we need must emphasize interoperability across areas and institutions. Libraries led the way with cooperative cataloging and standards for electronic records.  Open Archives protocol use has now spread as well, but museums are trying an even more ambitious kind of description with 'linked open data.' In the spirit of the Semantic Web, museums are putting their catalog information into RDF (resource description format). In this methodology, all information about an object is recorded as a subject–predicate–object triple, with the predicates and objects taken from official ontologies with very precise definitions. The British Museum and the Rijksmuseum are leaders in this effort, with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ..."

Doubling the number of articles with support for open publishing | University of Bergen

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 01:34 AM PDT

" ... After UiB established budget item to cover the costs of Open Access publishing, has increasingly more become aware of the opportunity to seek support to publish their articles so they are available free of charge and open to all.   - The significant increase is due to more become familiar with the offer. We have received many positive feedbacks on simple and quick processing by granting applications. There is also increased attention round open publishing nationally and internationally. More and more research and forskninsgsfinansiører now require that the research they fund to be made openly available, and they create budget items to support open publishing. Most importantly it is enough that the Norwegian Research Council and the EU program Horizon 2020 stipulate Open Access. We look specifically an increase in the number of open articles published in traditional subscription journals, which may indicate that several researchers who have not previously published open use of the scheme, explains Ingrid Cutler, Adviser at Department of Digital Systems and Services at UB ..."

Call for Manuscripts, Studies in Latin America Series | UNC Press Blog

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 01:28 AM PDT

"The Institute for the Study of the Americas at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UNC Press invite manuscript submissions for a new joint initiative in open-access scholarly publishing. Studies in Latin America is a series of short, peer-reviewed works, approximately 20,000 to 35,000 words in length, to be published by the Institute for the Study of the Americas and distributed by UNC Press in digital open-access format as well as print and e-book formats. The Institute and UNC Press anticipate a wide distribution of the scholarship included in Studies in Latin America by taking advantage of the digital publishing environment. Studies in Latin America will promote new scholarship on Latin America and the Caribbean focusing on the social sciences—principally anthropology, geography, history, political science, and sociology—and feature diverse methodological approaches and perspectives on vital issues concerning Latin America and the Caribbean, past and present. Studies in Latin America welcomes English-language manuscripts by senior scholars as well as by junior scholars. A formal peer-review process will be conducted as part of the publication decision. For more information and inquiries about submissions, please contact Louis A. Pérez Jr., Director, Institute for the Study of the Americas, at perez@email.unc.edu or at Global Education Center, CB 3205, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27599. Questions may also be addressed to Elaine Maisner, Senior Executive Editor, UNC Press, at emaisner@email.unc.edu or tel. 919-962-0810."

WHO Makes Drug Side Effects Easier to Find With New Database | RAPS

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 01:24 AM PDT

" ... The practice of post-market drug monitoring, or pharmacovigilance, is an important part of ensuring patient safety after a product has been approved. During clinical trials, it is not possible to determine every possible side effect or reaction to a drug or vaccine. By monitoring drugs and collecting reports of suspected adverse drug reactions (ADRs), companies, regulators and healthcare providers can continue to assess a product's safety using real world data. WHO has promoted the collection of ARDs on an international level since 1968, when it formed the Programme for International Drug Monitoring (PIDM). According to WHO, 120 countries are PIDM members, with 29 additional countries awaiting full membership. The goal of PIDM is to identify emerging adverse reaction signals using individual case safety reports (ICSRs) by analyzing individual case study reports (ICSR) submitted by member countries. These ICSRs are catalogued in VigiBase, WHO's ADR database, which is maintained by the Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC). To date, VigiBase has received more than 10 million ADRs related to 150,000 medicines and vaccines from around the world. According to WHO, VigiBase is the 'largest and most comprehensive [pharmacovigilance] database in the world,' and is 'the only global database that contains safety reports from both high- and low-income countries' ... Recently, WHO has taken several strides to increase transparency and promote open access to information. Earlier this month, WHO published a statement to its website calling for the public disclosure of clinical trial results. The move was made to address concerns that many clinical trials with poor results were not being published. In its statement, WHO asks that the main findings of clinical trials be submitted to a peer review journal within a year of the trial's end date. Additionally, WHO says that the key outcomes of the trial should be published to a clinical trial registry within the same one-year timeframe. In July 2014, WHO updated its open access policy to require all articles authored or co-authored by WHO staff to be publically available, and to encourage the use of open licenses such as the Creative Commons license, for such publications."

DuraSpace | Open technologies for durable digital content

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 01:15 AM PDT

"Since it was founded in 1966, the Asian Development Bank has been the leading organization fighting poverty in the Asian and Pacific region. The organisation set its goal to enhance economic collaboration by investing in regional projects. Currently, the Asian Development Bank has 67 members. All of them are countries funding the projects. The Asian development bank uses scientific research to optimise the use of available funds. Since February, all of their publications are collected in the Open Access Repository (OAR). Together with the launch of their new repository, the ADB stated in their news article they decided to switch to an open access mindset. They also adopted more liberal terms of use for their published content, argumenting that publicly funded research should be accessible to all without requiring any form of payment. The underlying idea is when access to information is restricted for some, this will slow down further scientific research, which is disadvantageous for all parties involved.  Currently the Open Access repository holds more than 3000 research items from the Asian Development Bank. In the near future the repository will grow until it holds over 5000 items including research dating back to ADB's early days. Even non digitized content or content that's currently not archived will eventually be added to the repository. In this video, ADB's senior communications specialist Matthew Howells explains the current and future development plans for the Open Access Repository ..."

Open Access: Institutional Repositories - Video Dailymotion

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 01:10 AM PDT

Use the link to access the video.

OpenAccess@StAndrews: Our lives in a year of Open Access support

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 01:02 AM PDT

"As part of our contribution to the Jisc Pathfinder project Lessons in Open Access Compliance for Higher Education (LOCH), the Library has now published its case study. A year in the life of Open Access support: continuous improvement at University of St Andrews tells the story of our engagement with the University's well-established Lean method to streamline OA processes and how this impacted on team activities. It is hoped that along with our partners' case studies this will help in defining an Open Access support service within higher education institutions that face a range of different challenges. Since publication on 3 April there have been 92 downloads of the study which is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY) ..."

PASTEUR4OA (Open Access Policy Alignment Strategies for European Union Research) | Foster

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 12:53 AM PDT

"This presentation was delivered at 'Research data management – institutional needs, targets and training' on Wednesday 15th April, 2015 in University College Cork , Ireland as part of a 2 day training event titled 'Open Access and Research Data Management: Horizon 2020 and Beyond'."

Gearing up for OLH in the UK and the resolution to the VAT question

Posted: 26 Apr 2015 12:39 AM PDT

"A while ago, I wrote of the tricky situation potentially faced by UK OA publishers operating on a cost-pool basis/consortial basis. After our accountants gave a report on this about a month or so ago, I sought confirmation from HMRC that it was, indeed, the case that these models do not count as a direct supply of a service. Models that provide enormous and efficient sector-wide benefits, like open access, may not, in such scenarios, constitute a "direct and immediate" supply to the organizations that pay, because everyone can read the material. HMRC wrote to me today to give the full, official response. Three initial points/warnings: This may not apply to different organizations with a different structure or system of benefits. I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. The following may be very boring for anyone not interested in the technicalities of financial models for open access. In any case, HMRC advised the following ..."
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