Saturday, April 11, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

National Science Foundation Releases Plan for Public Access to NSF-Funded Research | Association of Research Libraries® | ARL®

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 12:07 PM PDT

"Today, March 18, 2015, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) released, 'NSF's Public Access Plan: Today's Data, Tomorrow's Discoveries—Increasing Access to the Results of Research Funded by the National Science Foundation' (PDF). The detailed and thorough plan presents how NSF and the researchers it funds will meet the requirements of the February 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memorandum on enhancing public access to federally funded research. NSF is collaborating with the US Department of Energy (DOE) in making NSF-funded, peer-reviewed journal articles—either final, accepted manuscripts or the version of record—publicly available. NSF-funded researchers will be required to deposit their peer-reviewed articles and juried conference papers in DOE PAGES (Public Access Gateway for Energy and Science) in PDF/A format and then report that deposit has occurred to NSF through annual and final project reports. NSF employees will also be required to deposit peer-reviewed articles and juried papers in PAGES. Future expansions of the NSF public access plan may designate other repository services in addition to PAGES ..."

Dramatically Bringing Down the Cost of Education with OER | Center for American Progress

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 12:03 PM PDT

"We are in the midst of a revolution in education. For the first time in human history we have the tools to enable everyone to attain all the education they desire. And best of all this education is available at almost no cost. The key to this sea change in learning is open education resources, or OER. OER are educational materials produced by one party that are licensed to be used free of charge by others. OER come in many forms—from curriculum to homework assignment to textbooks. And OER exist for all levels of education, from kindergarten through college. OER are starting to hit the public consciousness in the form of initiatives like the Khan Academy, MIT OpenCourseware, and Washington's Open Course Library. At the end of January, California lawmakers proposed legislation that would create a digital library of free college textbooks that could save the state's college students millions of dollars each year in education costs ..."

Don't Think Open Access Is Important? It Might Have Prevented Much Of The Ebola Outbreak | Techdirt

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 11:53 AM PDT

"For years now, we've been talking up the importance of open access to scientific research. Big journals like Elsevier have generally fought against this at every point, arguing that its profits are more important that some hippy dippy idea around sharing knowledge. Except, as we've been trying to explain, it's that sharing of knowledge that leads to innovation and big health breakthroughs. Unfortunately, it's often pretty difficult to come up with a concrete example of what didn't happen because of locked up knowledge. And yet, it appears we have one new example that's rather stunning: it looks like the worst of the Ebola outbreak from the past few months might have been avoided if key research had been open access, rather than locked up. That, at least, appears to be the main takeaway of a recent NY Times article by the team in charge of drafting Liberia's Ebola recovery plan ..."

CERN Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI9) (17-19 June 2015)

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 11:51 AM PDT

"The OAI9 Workshop on Current Developments in Scholarly Communication is taking place in the University of Geneva, 17-19 June 2015. See http://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/. This is one of the most prestigious events on scholarly communication developments in Europe, and is held only every two years. The academic programme for papers is now full, but we are here issuing a call for Posters for the Poster session. You are invited to submit a description in the form of a short abstract if you wish to bring a poster to the workshop giving details of your project. The poster should be of interest to OAI9 participants and directly related to the general themes of the workshop (http://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/page/6).  Posters will be displayed in Campus Biotech and an extended coffee break will take place on Thursday 18 June 2015. This will give attendees the chance to view these and discuss them with the author. Attendees will also have the opportunity to vote for the poster which delivers the most impact. Posters should be A0 in size (841 x 1189 mm) for portrait or A1 (594 x 841 mm) for landscape. Any special equipment requests should be addressed to the workshop organisers when a poster has been accepted. If your poster is accepted you should still register for the workshop as normal and you will be expected to pay your own expenses. Owing to the large demand on accommodation, we advise you to register early - you may cancel your registration later if your submission is not successful. Poster abstracts can be submitted between 16 March 2015 - 17 April 2015 after a quick Lightweight Accounts registration process (different from the conference registration). Decisions will be made on an ongoing basis (and no later than the end April) and communicated to the submitters (http://indico.cern.ch/event/332370/call-for-abstracts/)"

The data science ecosystem, part 3: Data applications | Computerworld

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 11:39 AM PDT

"... Broadly, I've broken this column of our ecosystem into two main branches: insights and models. Insights let you learn something from your data, while models let you build something with your data. They're the tools that data scientists use to explain the past and to predict the future. We'll start with insights ..."

IUPUI University Library to co-host Digital Public Library of America's national conference : Newscenter : IUPUI

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 11:36 AM PDT

"With 90-plus digitized collections of unique and historically important materials accessible to any user via the Web, the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis University Library is gaining recognition as a national leader in digital scholarship. That leadership role will expand this month as the library co-hosts the Digital Public Library of America's national conference. The conference, DPLAfest 2015 takes place April 17 and 18 in Indianapolis. As co-hosts, IUPUI University Library, the Indianapolis Public Library, the Indiana State Library and the Indiana Historical Society are helping to organize and staff the event and will serve as meeting sites for conference workshops, presentations and discussions. The four local groups had submitted a proposal to host the conference, which 300 people from across the country are currently registered to attend ..."

Assessing the research potential of access to clinical trial data | Wellcome Trust Blog

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 11:23 AM PDT

"Access to the data generated by clinical trials is key to realising the full benefits of trials of new health interventions, and a valuable opportunity to generate new insights. There has been much recent discussion of how to maximise the impact of sharing of data from clinical trials, and with our track record of encouraging open access and data sharing, the Wellcome Trust is fully engaged with the issue. To help inform these discussions, we commissioned an independent study to look at research potential of increased access to trial data, and what mechanisms are needed to facilitate it. Will Greenacre, from the Wellcome Trust policy team, discusses the findings…"

Users and creators react to Dartmouth’s first MOOC | The Dartmouth

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:59 AM PDT

"By engaging with students through the virtual screen during the College's first massive online open course, 'Introduction to Environmental Science,' environmental studies professor and course lead Andrew Friedland said that he and his team frequently found themselves surprised by the universality of environmental science, despite students' varied perspectives ... The course, which began on Feb. 3, invited 10,306 students from 168 countries to join the conversation on the natural world. The six-week course launched on edX, a non-profit education website started by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ... In developing the course, Friedland teamed up with instructional designer in educational technologies Michael Goudzwaard, associate director of Dartmouth's media production group Mike Murray, director of digital learning at Dartmouth Center for Advancement of Learning Josh Kim and the director of digital resources and scholarly communication programs, as well as both graduate and undergraduate students.  With an average rating of five stars and 169 reviews on Coursetalk, a site where users can review MOOCs, the class attracted students from around the world. While the largest numbers of students came from the United States, the United Kingdom and India, enrollments also came from Indonesia, West Africa, Australia and more. Of those enrolled in the class, the median student age was 28. Forty-one percent of students had bachelor's degrees, while as many as 32 percent had advanced degrees ..."

Open Hardware for Open Science – Interview with Charles Fracchia | Hackaday

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:52 AM PDT

" ... At this year's SXSW Interactive, we had an opportunity to talk with [Charles Fracchia], a renaissance hacker at the MIT Media Lab. Reinforcing the Media Lab's "eclectic genius" stereotype, [Charles]'s background spans an impressive range of fields—from Synthetic Biology to Biomedical Engineering and beyond. A biologist by training, he is also a self-taught hardware hacker and, these days, is spending most of his time building 'hybrid' systems at the intersection of Biology, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering. True to the hacker spirit of open collaboration and sharing, he is also a big proponent of Open Science and is committed to making it a reality in the field of Biomedical Research. Most of [Charles'] recent work has been motivated by the surprising fact that a vast proportion of peer-reviewed biological research is not independently reproducible[1]. Reproducibility is a huge challenge in this field, and part of the problem lies in the fact that a number of environmental factors that could impact the results of the experiments are currently not captured at all. The solution that [Charles] and his team are working on is a range of environmental sensor nodes, designed to be packaged as a part of the standard biological lab equipment. Such nodes could enable an easy collection of necessary data in a 'natural' environment of the experiment, making it easier to pinpoint the exact conditions under which the results were obtained. It is projects like this, especially if created as Open Hardware, which have the potential to change the Open Science game in Biomedical Research. Affordable, peer-reviewed hardware that every lab can independently manufacture can show the way to standardization in the sharing of experimental data. [Charles] and his team are committed to this mission and are taking things beyond academia and into the real world. They are starting a project called BioBright, which aims at revolutionizing the biology lab and making Open Science in this space a reality ..."

Open the portal door to Alzheimer’s Big Data | National Institute on Aging

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:48 AM PDT

"The explosion of Big Data promises to transform biomedical research, but all too often researchers are stymied by limited access to these complex biomedical data sets. To overcome some of these barriers, we've recently helped launch an important new data resource—the AMP-AD Knowledge Portal. Freely accessible to the wider research community, it provides entrée to large scale human 'omics' data sets needed to discover and select the next generation of therapeutic targets for Alzheimer's disease. Just a few weeks ago, the first wave of data was released—I invite you to take a look at what's available and consider using it in your research ... The Alzheimer's Knowledge Portal is the first product of the Accelerating Medicines Partnership (AMP), an exciting new collaborative, risk-sharing model of drug development. The venture is led by NIH and involves the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, industry, and academia and non-profits. It has programs in three chronic disease areas: Alzheimer's disease, type 2 diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis/lupus ..."

Palo Alto College Projects $225,000 savings from Saylor OER Textbook Adoption | Saylor Academy

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:46 AM PDT

"We want to share some great news out of San Antonio, Texas. Palo Alto College, part of the Alamo College family, has adopted an openly licensed textbook that was originally published as part of our Open Textbook Challenge. Professor John Dunn, who serves as Department Chair, informed us that a faculty review committee officially adopted Information Systems for Business and Beyond by David T. Bourgeois, Ph.D., as the primary source for theory information in the college's introductory computer courses (COSC1301, BCIS1305, and ITSC1301) and one upper level course (ITSC1309) starting in fall of 2015 and continuing for at least the next two years ..."

Collabra. Changing the rules of Open Access journal publishing | University of California Press Blog

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:42 AM PDT

"We are pleased to announce the launch of Collabra, our new Open Access journal. We are now open for submissions in three core fields of study: Life and Biomedical Sciences; Ecology and Environmental Science; Social and Behavioral Sciences. We aim to have a different model, one that gives back to the research community. Here's a look at the process behind the creation of Collabra: Why did UC Press decide to get into Open Access? Because the idea of Open Access — making important scientific and scholarly work accessible to anyone — aligns perfectly with our mission. We believe in driving progressive change, and we decided we were in a great position to do something interesting and new. There are many Open Access journals out there, how is Collabra different? Collabra is the first Open Access journal created to not only share the research but also the value contributed by the research community through the review process. More often than not, all the direct value and revenue in scholarly publishing flows only to publishers. We aim to change that. When people volunteer their time and expertise as an editor or reviewer, their efforts will generate a tangible value, and they can decide what to do with it. We offer the option of either receiving payment for the work provided or paying that value forward to the research community. Importantly, the decision of how the funds will be used is left to the editors and reviewers, not Collabra. How do you fund these payments to editors and reviewers? Our Article Processing Charge (APC) is $875. Of that sum, $625 goes toward publishing and other operational costs. The remaining $250 is paid into an account from which funds are made available to editors and reviewers for all work on the journal — regardless of decisions to accept or reject articles. Editors and reviewers can choose to either keep their earnings or pay them forward to the Collabra Waiver Fund or to their institution's OA APC fund. The Collabra Waiver Fund is there for authors who do not have the funds to pay the APCs, and pays the APC on their behalf. (So it's really a sponsorship fund.) ..."

Open access: a national licence is not the answer | Reciprocal Space

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:38 AM PDT

"'Open Access: Is a national licence the answer?' is a proposal by David Price and Sarah Chaytor of University College London for a mechanism to provide full access to everyone within the UK to all published research. It was published on 31 March 2015 by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) whose director, Nick Hillman, wrote the foreword.  The proposal is presented as a HEPI yellow 'occasional paper', so it is designed to be provocative and to stimulate debate rather than being, as Hillman writes, 'a fully-formed ready-to-bake policy'. It is certainly provocative but so far there hasn't been much debate. The paper provoked an angry, heartfelt riposte from from Mike Taylor and a satirical one from Dermot Kernohan. Hillman responded by accusing Taylor of wanting 'to 'close' down debate about the different options without fully engaging', but part of the problem is that the proposal itself does not fully engage with the complexities of the issue at hand, and this has made it difficult to grapple with. In my own mind the national licence idea has provoked so many thoughts that I have struggled to assemble them coherently but, in the interests of a fuller debate, let me have a go. I hope to amplify some of the key issues but am aware that there are further aspects that should be turned over for consideration. I confess that the issue of open access stirs the heart as well as the head, which can make it tricky to discipline arguments. This post is therefore rather long, so my apologies in advance ..."

Journals And Publication Pollution Denialism

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:25 AM PDT

"The scientific community is facing a 'pollution problem' in academic publishing, one that poses a serious threat to the 'trustworthiness, utility, and value of science and medicine,' according to Arthur L. Caplan, PhD, director of the Division of Medical Ethics in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Medical Center. That is a maturity issue. While open access - freeing publicly-funded research from copyright corporations and allowing the public to read the results they paid for with taxes - was hailed as a good thing, early on there were concerns that once it became popular, separating the good from the bad would be difficult. When open access publishers became corporate juggernauts in their own right, generating tens of millions in dollars in revenue by publishing hundreds of articles each day with little more than editorial review, it was easy to see that some journals would become predatory and just publish anything for money. Fraud and plagiarism were always concerns in traditional publishing as well. Along with PLOS and BioMed Central, Nature Publishing Group, Wiley, Sage and more have been caught publishing obviously plagiarized articles. It will get fixed, but not without some hurt feelings ..."

Putting open data into policy: lessons from leaders around the world | News | Open Data Institute

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:20 AM PDT

"In February, the Open Data Institute brought together outstanding open data leaders from governments around the world as the inaugural cohort of the Open Data Leaders Network, starting with an intensive week of peer-to-peer learning and discussing shared challenges, led by experts Liz Carolan and David Tarrant. The open data leaders came from four continents and seven countries: Malaysia, Macedonia, Chile, Morocco, Moldova, the UK and Mexico. One of the exciting things about open data as a policy area is that even the longest-running and most successful open data programmes are little more than five years old. 'Best practice' is not fully entrenched, and collaboration between government, the private sector, academia and civil society is not only desirable but essential to the success of an initiative. Without use and reuse of open data, an open data policy has very limited usefulness. With all this in mind, there is more space than in other, more established policy areas for officials from different countries to learn from one another and innovate together ..."

White House Releases 150 Data Sets to Fight Climate Change

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:16 AM PDT

"To support the president's Climate Data Initiative, the White House revealed on Tuesday, April 7, a series of data projects and partnerships that includes more than 150 new open data sets, as well as commitments from Google, Microsoft and others to cultivate climate analysis. The undertakings were released at a White House climate and health conference where John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, pressed the need for greater data to compel decreases to greenhouse emissions ... The data initiative touches multiple agencies — including NASA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency — and is part of the White House proclamation of a new National Public Health Week, from April 6 to April 12, to spur national health solutions and awareness.  The 150-plus data sets are all connected to health, and are among the 560 climate-related data sets available on Data.gov, the U.S. government's open data portal. Accompanying the release, the Department of Health and Human Services added a Health Care Facilities Toolkit onToolkit.climate.gov, a site that delivers climate resilience techniques, strategies, case studies and tools for organizations attempting climate change initiatives ..."

eScholarship@UMMS - University of Massachusetts and New England Area Librarian e-Science Symposium: Usability Testing Driven Redesign of Dataverse, an Open Source Data Repository

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:12 AM PDT

"Description ...  Purpose: This study focuses on improvements in the usability of the Dataverse data repository open source software over the course of development of the latest version, 4.0, through iterative usability testing. Subjects:Thirty current international users of Dataverse comprised of researchers, librarians, and data archivists. Method: Users were selected to participate after either volunteering or being recommended by a member of the Dataverse development team. Users participated either in person or remotely (via Skype, Google Hangout or join.me) and sessions lasted for around 45 minutes. Each session involved a user completing specific tasks in Dataverse 4.0 to validate design decisions made for workflows. Each session was recorded with Morae software in order for the data to be later analyzed. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected through observation and surveys. The System Usability Scale was used as the post­session questionnaire as a way to track the perceived usability of Dataverse 4.0 as it was developed. To identify patterns in workflow issues, affinity diagrams were used to determine which usability issues happened most frequently and when workflows were interrupted. Results: This study began in December of 2013 and concluded in February 2015 lasted throughout the development of Dataverse 4.0 therefore results varied depending on what piece of functionality or feature was being developed at the time. With iterative usability testing, the taxonomy for Dataverse 4.0 was able to come straight from users not understanding labels that had been used and suggesting labels that were more logical to them, ways to provide users with multiple entry points to editing datasets was added based off user feedback, and faceted navigation for searching dataverses, datasets, and files was improved to allow users to narrow down to only one type easily. Conclusion: Overall, Dataverse 4.0 was able to quickly be tested and designs were able to be validated when they were developed rather than waiting months for users to interact with them. Most importantly, the Dataverse development team was able to release a product that had already been through extensive user review therefore eliminating potentially large issues that could or would impact a user being able to find or add data to Dataverse."

SOLAS Open Science Conference 2015

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:06 AM PDT

"The Surface Ocean–Lower Atmosphere Study (SOLAS) is an international and interdisciplinary research project on biogeochemical-physical air-sea interactions and processes. With its Open Science Conference, SOLAS offers the ideal programme for scientists who wish to learn and exchange about cutting edge research in the field and present their own findings via a talk or a poster."

Text and Data Mining and the Need for a Science-friendly EU Copyright Reform

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 10:03 AM PDT

"The steadily-growing amount of digitally-available research data and publications enables researchers to search and analyse these sources with the help of special software. The application of such text and data (content) mining techniques (TDM) is not limited to research. In fact, most users of the internet use them on a daily basis via companies offering search engine services. The use of TDM techniques beyond those employed by search engines is already of great importance in some research fields (for example bio-genetics, linguistics) and interest in these technologies is growing rapidly. The publishing industry – including academic publishers – strives to benefit by developing TDM services, but, in doing so, hinders the ability of third parties (subscribers) to mine their content. This has led the research community advocating a reform of copyright law to ensure that legally-accessed content can be freely mined without additional permission and cost. After years of debate, the European Commission and European Parliament appear to be ready to amend the European Union (EU) Copyright Directive. This paper gives a brief overview of the legal regulations under which TDM practices fall and the issues arising from increasing use of licensing by publishers."

Digital Public Library of America » Blog Archive » DPLA and Education: Findings and Recommendations from our Whiting Study

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 09:57 AM PDT

"During the last nine months, the Digital Public Library of America has been researching educational use with generous support from the Whiting Foundation. We've been learning from other online education resource providers in the cultural heritage world and beyond about what they have offered and how teachers and students have responded. We also convened focus groups of instructors in both K-12 and undergraduate higher education to hear about what they use and would like to see from DPLA. Today, we are proud to release our research findings and recommendations for DPLA's future education work. Preliminary feedback from educators suggested that DPLA was exciting as a single place to find content but occasionally overwhelming because of the volume of accessible material.  In our focus groups, we learned that educators are eager to incorporate primary sources into instructional activities and independent student research projects, but we can better help them by organizing source highlights topically and giving them robust context. We also discovered how important it was to educators and students to be able to create their own primary-sourced based projects with tools supported by DPLA. From other education projects, including many supported by our Hubs, we learned that sustainable education projects require teacher involvement, deep standards research, and specific outreach strategies. Based on this research, we recommend that DPLA and its teacher advocates build curated content for student use with teacher guidance, and that DPLA use its position at the center of a diverse mix of cultural heritage institutions to continue to facilitate conversations about educational use. We see this report as the beginning of a process of working with our many partners and educators to make large digital collections like DPLA more useful and used."

U.S. agencies fall in line on public access

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 09:52 AM PDT

After a decade of often fierce debate over whether the public should have free access to the scientific papers produced by their tax dollars, advocates for so-called open access celebrated a notable victory last month: The National Science Foundation (NSF) unveiled a plan to require its grantees to make their research freely available. NSF's move meant that the federal agencies that provide the bulk of the nation's basic and applied research funding have now complied with a 2013 White House order to make the peer-reviewed papers they fund freely available within 12 months of publication. The order, which applies to federal agencies that spend more than $100 million a year on research and development, will ultimately make hundreds of thousands of scientific papers once hidden behind paywalls available to anyone with an Internet connection (see table).  For the typical U.S. scientist with a federal research grant, the new public access mandate means they will need to follow the example of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Since 2008, NIH grantees have been required to send their accepted manuscripts or final published paper to the agency's PubMed Central full-text archive. Researchers may deposit the paper themselves through a special Web portal, or the journal may do it for them. At most agencies, those who ignore the mandate will not get credit for their papers during reviews of funding proposals or job performance.  The details of how the public will get access to the full-text papers vary by agency. Some, including NASA, will share papers through a full-text archive similar to PubMed Central, which has grown to hold more than 3 million full-text papers (see graph). Open-access advocates prefer this model because they say it allows for simpler text and data mining across an entire corpus of articles. But two agencies, NSF and the Department of Energy, have heeded concerns from publishers that full-text archives will divert eyeballs from their sites and cut into advertising revenue. They are building portals that provide only a paper's abstract and other metadata; links will take users to the full-text article on the publisher's website."

Licence absurdity | Letters | Times Higher Education

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 09:47 AM PDT

"The proposal by the Higher Education Policy Institute for a UK national open access licence was announced on 30 March. If only Hepi had delayed the announcement by two days, it could have been written off as an April Fool's Day joke, albeit one in bad taste ('National licence mooted to free up research access', 31 March). Hepi styles itself as 'the UK's only independent think tank devoted to higher education', although I note that it routinely partners with Elsevier ..."

Why journals should not forget their past | Opinion | Times Higher Education

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 09:43 AM PDT

"The publishing giant Reed Elsevier recently reported that its scientific publishing division made an adjusted operating profit of £762 million last year, amounting to a profit margin of 37 per cent. Others may decry the fairness of such high profits being made by commercial publishers from the publicly funded labour of academics. But I'm a historian, and the immediate question raised for me by these figures is not so much whether they are fair but how they ever came to pass. I spend a lot of my life investigating the publication of scientific books and periodicals. And what I see is that, until quite recently, profits have been very rare.  It's true that, back in 1665, when the world's first scientific journal was founded, Henry Oldenburg did hope that Philosophical Transactionswould be a money-making enterprise for him, putting to good use the news that came his way as secretary to the recently founded Royal Society. Oldenburg had some success, but admitted to a correspondent that it had never brought anything like as much income as he had hoped. Fifty years later, Hans Sloane reported that during his time as editor ofTransactions he had spent £1,500 on keeping it afloat, an enormous sum in those days. And when, in 1752, the Royal Society formally took over the journal, its officers saw it not as a route to income generation but as a worthy enterprise that would be subsidised by membership fees ... For editors of journals without a sponsoring society, keeping their journals afloat was a perpetual battle, often lost. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, journals failed almost as frequently as they were started. Editors routinely bemoaned the smallness of the potential market and the higher cost of illustrations and technical typesetting. It was almost a cliché that even the more successful scientific journals did not – could not – do much more than cover their costs.  One of the more successful journal editors of the 19th century was Richard Taylor, the founder of Taylor & Francis. A printer rather than a scholar by training, he had a shrewd business sense and extensive contacts in the scientific community. None of the stable of journals he built up made much profit, but they made enough to be worth continuing ... It was only during the post-war boom in science – both in manpower and in funding – that publishers finally managed to make significant profits from scientific journals. For the learned societies, this must have been a huge relief, as it both freed up existing funds for other purposes and generated an income stream with no restrictions set by donors. Last year, the Royal Society was able to report a surplus from its publishing division of some £3 million.  We can hardly blame learned societies for playing the profit-game when we see all the worthwhile ways they use it to support their disciplines. But librarians keep telling us that publishers' ever-higher profits – brought about by consistently above-inflation price rises, exacerbated by shrewd bundling on journals in 'big deals' – is putting library budgets in crisis ..."

Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness - ePrints Soton

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 09:37 AM PDT

Use the link to access the full text article from the institutional repository of the University of Southampton.  "The PASTEUR4OA project analyses what makes an Open Access (OA) policy effective. The total number of institutional or funder OA policies worldwide is now 663 (March 2015), over half of them mandatory. ROARMAP, the policy registry, has been rebuilt to record more policy detail and provide more extensive search functionality. Deposit rates were measured for articles in institutions' repositories and compared to the total number of WoS-indexed articles published from those institutions. Average deposit rate was over four times as high for institutions with a mandatory policy. Six positive correlations were found between deposit rates and (1) Must-Deposit; (2) Cannot-Waive-Deposit; (3) Deposit-Linked-to-Research-Evaluation; (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention;  (5) Must-Make-Deposit-OA (after allowable embargo) and (6) Can-Waive-OA. For deposit latency, there is a positive correlation between earlier deposit and (7) Must-Deposit-Immediately as well as with (4) Cannot-Waive-Rights-Retention and with mandate age. There are not yet enough OA policies to test whether still further policy conditions would contribute to mandate effectiveness but the present findings already suggest that it would be useful for current and future OA policies to adopt the seven positive conditions so as to accelerate and maximise the growth of OA."

Keeping Your Books Available | Authors Alliance

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 09:31 AM PDT

"That book you published a few years ago is no longer selling like it used to, but it still contains useful information. Why don't you ask your publisher for your rights back? You may be surprised to know that your publisher might be quite willing to give you back your rights if you ask. In fact, your publisher might also be quite willing to work with you to increase your book's availability. Don't worry if you are unsure about how to approach your publisher. A new guide created by Authors Alliance will help you through the process, each step of the way.  Today, Authors Alliance releases Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available, a guide that arms authors with the information and strategies they need to revive their books. This guide is the product of extensive outreach to the publishing industry. In the process, we interviewed authors, publishers, and literary agents, ranging from a CEO of a major publishing house to contracts and rights managers of trade and academic presses, editorial assistants, novelists, and academic authors.  We were happily surprised by the consistency of publishers' responses: across the board, publishers told us that they want to work together with their authors and that they are often willing to give authors their rights back if its in the books' best interests. ..."

Twelve exciting and important developments due for release | News Service

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 09:26 AM PDT

"If the SPARC piece we recently featured in didn't give you a good idea into the amount of work that we're undertaking to improve DOAJ—and ultimately the overall quality of open access publishing—then this [incomplete] list of our developments for 2015 should provide you with a fuller picture. We're coming to the end of a fairly small but significant and, in my opinion, very exciting project that will do the following ..."

U of R Press -- Free Knowledge: Confronting the Commodification of Human Discovery

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 09:22 AM PDT

Use the link to access the book form the University of Regina Press.  "Alarms are being sounded around the globe over the increasing commercialization of public knowledge for private profit. Whether you are a farmer, a university student, a medical patient, or a library user, these developments impact your daily life.  Knowledge privatization holds growing sway over the choice of the foods you eat, the medicine you take, the software you use, the music you hear, and even the flowers you plant in your own backyard. This is the result of a world where plant seeds have become subject to patents, medical research is overseen by pharmaceutical giants, universities are beholden to corporate funders, and Indigenous knowledge is expropriated.  The good news is that people are fighting back, working to create spaces where humanity's knowledge can be reclaimed and shared for the public good. Composed of fifteen essays from seventeen writers, ranging from academics to farmers to Indigenous knowledge keepers, Free Knowledge is a book on the front lines in the shared project of creating and protecting our Knowledge Commons."

Working Together to Promote Open Access Policy Alignment in Europe – Work Package 3 report: Open Access policies

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 09:11 AM PDT

"The PASTEUR4OA project is focused on Open Access policy developments and is undertaking a number of activities relating to policy, including mapping policies and policy-related activities, and engaging with policymakers and providing them with information about the general policy picture and what makes a policy effective. Work Package 3 involved a set of tasks as follows:  Describe and enumerate the policy picture in Europe and around the world  Rebuild ROARMAP, the registry of OA policies, including the development of a new, detailed classification scheme that describes policy elements  Collect data on the levels of Open Access material in institutional repositories around the world  Measure policy outcomes and analyse what elements of a policy contribute to its effectiveness The project sought out policies that exist but had not been registered in ROARMAP, and added more than 250 new entries to the database. The total number of policies globally is now 663 (March 2015), 60% of them from Europe. Of these, approximately two-thirds are institutional policies and about 10% are funder policies. Over half are mandatory, requiring some action rather than simply requesting it and over 60% of these mandatory policies are European. ROARMAP, the policy registry, has been rebuilt with a new classification scheme for policies that records far more detail about them than before and permits much more extensive search functionality than previously. The scheme includes criteria for deposit and licensing conditions, rights holding, embargo lengths and 'Gold' Open Access publishing options. Links to policy documents are provided. Repository managers at policy institutions were contacted to check that we had the correct details for their policy and where necessary corrections were made. As it stands, at the end of this period of concentrated and meticulous work, ROARMAP reflects an accurate and detailed picture of the Open Access policy situation around the world ..."

Working Together to Promote Open Access Policy Alignment in Europe – Synthesis Report

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 09:06 AM PDT

"The PASTEUR4OA Europe-wide project meeting of national experts was held on 2-3 December in London and was attended by 55 participants representing the PASTEUR4OA consortium and the recently founded Knowledge Net. The meeting aimed to build on the experience of Member States (MS) and neighbouring countries in developing and implementing national Open Access (OA) policies. Moreover, it aimed to provide information on the rationale for advancing an aligned OA policy agenda across Europe which is in agreement with the European Commission (EC) Recommendation on Access to and Preservation of Scientific Information and the Open Access Mandate for Horizon 2020 (H2020). In addition, it aimed to promote discussions on the role, priorities, framework and strategy of the nascent Knowledge Net. The synthesis report outlines the key topics presented by the PASTEUR4OA project speakers and the invited speakers. It summarises the main conclusions drawn from the regional work groups' sessions. It reviews the key issues discussed during the meeting and considers what the next steps are ..." 

PASTEUR4OA Briefing Paper: Working Together to Promote Open Access Policy Alignment in Europe

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 09:02 AM PDT

"In the past decade various stakeholders engaged in the debate about making free open access to scientific publications and data. The benefits resulting from open access – acceleration of scientific research, advancement of technological progress, promotion of social well-being – have driven the debate that open access to scientific publications is required. A number of universities, research institutions, research funders and international organisations have already adopted Open Access (OA) mandates. The European Commission (EC), as a major research funding body, is committed to advance the OA agenda. After various studies having been conducted on access to and preservation of scientific information, the EC issued an OA mandate requiring that research outputs from Horizon 2020 funded projects are made available on open access. Despite encountering challenges in promoting open access to scientific publications, the EC is working with Member States (MS), neighbouring countries and stakeholder communities to search for solutions to support OA policy implementation and alignment, and to facilitate coordination at the European level. The PASTEUR4OA project builds on the EC's OA agenda by promoting the development and implementation of aligned OA policies and the coordination of activities between MS and neighbouring countries. This paper overviews the open access movement, defines open access, summarises international developments on open access, and examines the advances made on open access at the EC, MS and neighbouring countries levels."

arkiv.dk | The entrance to your Denmark history

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 08:53 AM PDT

Use the link to access the archive.  

Danes access nearly two million historic images - BBC News

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 08:48 AM PDT

"Denmark is posting its national photo album online today, with free access to nearly two million pictures, diaries, letters, and sound and video recordings. The project has been making electronic records of the country's 550 archives since the late 1980s, working its way through the 50 million images and more than 100 kilometres (62 miles) of shelving of original documents that the Association of Local Archives estimates it holds. Archivists see free access to the digital archive as a landmark moment. 'This opens up an important part of Denmark's cultural heritage, and is the greatest day of my professional life since I began work as an archivist in 1980,' Odense city archivist Jorgen Thomsen told the DR state broadcaster. The oldest documents in the digital archive date back to the 1600s, and all are covered by the general rules of copyright. The project, largely funded by a grant from the Moller shipping empire, plans to make 25,000 new searchable images a month available to the public. Amateur genealogists in particular are excited about chances to track down elusive images from their family past ..."

Open Data Platform: the answer to a question no one asked?

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 08:39 AM PDT

" ... To recap: the ODP was announced in mid-February by a group of suppliers led by Hortonworks and Pivotal, but also including EMC, IBM, SAS, Teradata and VMware. They are advocating a standard version of the core Hadoop stack, upon which all suppliers – at least those that have paid for membership of their club – can agree. These core components will be the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), cluster management technology YARN, and Hadoop management console Ambari. By establishing this 'kernel', ODP members say they will "take the guesswork" out of developing applications to run further up the Hadoop stack – a process they say is too fragmented, too slow and plagued by duplicated effort for ISVs (independent software vendors). That seems reasonable enough, but the fact is that ODP does not represent the entire Hadoop ecosystem. Most notable by its absence is Hortonworks' arch-rival Cloudera. Then there is MapR, another Hadoop distributor that trails Hortonworks and Cloudera. Also missing is cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), which gives the customers of its Elastic MapReduce (EMR) Hadoop-in-the-cloud service the option of using its own Hadoop distribution or MapR's. And therein lies the problem: the Open Data Platform just isn't very 'open' ..."

Innovators Look To Bridge the Gap Between Open Data and Consumers - iHealthBeat

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 08:34 AM PDT

"Efforts to boost health care transparency have unlocked thousands of data sets, but the sheer amount and density of information available has made it difficult for consumers to use in meaningful ways. This gap has created a market for innovators to step in and develop easy-to-use tools that leverage open data. The federal government in many ways has been leading the effort to make information on health care cost and quality available to the public. In 2009, the Obama administration launched data.gov, an open-source website where the public can access thousands of data sets on various topics. As of April, the site contained 820 health care-related data sets. Further, the Affordable Care Act's Sunshine Act required CMS to create an Open Payments System that aims to boost transparency by making public payments that health care providers have received from drugmakers and medical device manufacturers. Then, in 2013, President Obama issued an executive order that required federal information to be open and machine readable in an effort to make the data easy to access, find and use. Most recently, the government launched Healthdata.gov, which aims to make high-value health data more accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers and policymakers in an effort to improve health outcomes. According to the site, more than 1,900 health care data sets on topics ranging from Medicare to patient safety are available ..."

Opening data up for business access (From York Press)

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 08:19 AM PDT

"BUSINESSES in York are being given access to open data, bringing together information from public, private and third sector organisations. City of York Council has launched a new website giving residents and businesses free access to information about their city in a bid to enable new solutions to challenges such as those around sustainability, transport, energy and community engagement.  York Open Data is a place for businesses and organisations to publicly share their data so that anybody can connect to hundreds of up-to-date, searchable data sets and use them to make a difference in their local area.

The site has around 250 initial data sets which cover a range of topics such as council and city performance, community assets and individual business sectors in York.  Over the next few months, new data sets will be published regularly from sectors and individual organisations across the city ..."

Open Humans Aims to Be the Social Network for Science Volunteerism - Bio-IT World

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 08:13 AM PDT

"Jason Bobe, Executive Director of the nonprofit PersonalGenomes.org, is a serial research participant. He is a proud donor of skin cells to the New York Stem Cell Foundation, and fondly remembers swabbing his cheek with super glue to provide facial mites for a study at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. As a member of the Harvard Personal Genome Project (PGP), he has also made himself a subject of one of the most comprehensive personal exams in the world, sharing his genetic data and filling out exhaustive surveys about his health and physical traits. But Bobe recognizes that, as a frequent volunteer for science, he's part of a small minority ... At PersonalGenomes.org, Bobe is working to drum up much higher levels of public engagement with science. That mission, he feels, will be best served if scientists realize that engagement is a two-way street. Rather than collecting data and keeping it locked up in their own records, scientists could offer research participants copies of any personal data they generate, whether just to satisfy their own curiosity or to share information with more studies in turn ... This March, PersonalGenomes.org launched Open Humans, a sort of social media site for participants in scientific studies. Backed by $1 million in grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Open Humans aims to create a public meeting ground for citizen scientists. Through their Open Humans profiles, members can gather together datasets from multiple studies they participate in, and share or publicize that data however they choose ..."

EUA > EUA launches Open Access checklist for universities

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 08:07 AM PDT

"EUA this week launched the 'Open Access checklist for universities: A practical guide on implementation', a concise document to support universities in developing institutional policies on Open Access to research publications.  The Open Access checklist is addressed to higher education and research institutions that are developing, or planning to develop, a policy on Open Access to research publications. It is intended as a general guide in the development of institutional policies on Open Access and can be useful for different stakeholders, including the leadership, administration, librarians and researchers.  The checklist contains key information on Open Access, such as benefits, challenges and ways of implementing it, as well as strategic, practical and economic aspects that should be considered when developing Open Access policy. It also includes links to resources and highlights some of the main findings of the EUA survey on Open Access conducted in 2014 ..."

EUA ’S OPEN ACCESS CHECKLIST FOR UNIVERSITIES: A PRACTICAL GUIDE ON IMPLEMENTATION

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 08:01 AM PDT

Use the link to access the guide.  

Online-consultation “scientific publication system”: documentation and main results

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 07:56 AM PDT

Use the link to access the full text report from ScienceOpen.  "This short report provides a description of an online-consultation on the scientific publication system. German-speaking scientists from all disciplines were invited to articulate their perspectives on principles and current problems in scientific publishing in the dialogical procedure. 697 participants addressed their opinion in two areas of consultation (a) Consultation area "evaluate principles": the goal in this section was to find out whether there is a general consensus throughout academia of what constitutes a good publication system. For this purpose, principles of a good scientific publication system could be commented on and evaluated with positive or negative votes. (b) Consultation area "name problems": this section aimed at obtaining the perspective of the participants on current challenges and problems of the publication system. The contributions of the participants focus on eight topics: (1) printed vs. digital publication, (2) business models of large publishing houses, (3) open access, (4) publication-based performance indicators, (5) authorship, (6) peer review, (7) publication bias, and (8) research data."

A Data Commons for Scientific Discovery -- Campus Technology

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 02:01 AM PDT

Teams of science researchers with big-data needs who want to collaborate often have difficulty finding venues to host their work. While the very largest projects, such as the Large Hadron Collider and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, have the resources to build their own infrastructure, and individual researchers with smaller projects can outsource to providers like Amazon Web Services, those in the middle range have fewer options. So in 2008, a group of researchers came together to form the nonprofit Open Cloud Consortium (OCC), a shared cloud-computing infrastructure for medium-size, multi-institution big-data projects. The OCC has grown to include 10 universities, 15 companies and five government agencies and national laboratories. In a recent interview with Campus Technology, OCC Director Robert Grossman discussed the organization's relationship to research universities' IT departments, as well as its business model and sustainability challenges ... How It Works  In line with the concept of a commons, each OCC project is managed and governed by a working group that sets up the rules for that project in a collaborative way. [1] The OCC Open Science Data Cloud Working Group manages and operates the OSDC, which is a petabyte-scale science cloud for researchers to manage, analyze and share their large data sets. It is one of the largest general-purpose science clouds in the world. [2] The OCC Biomedical Commons Cloud Working Group is developing an open cloud-based infrastructure for sharing medical and healthcare data in a secure and compliant fashion to support biomedical research. [3] Project Matsu is a collaboration between the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Open Cloud Consortium to develop open source technology for cloud-based processing of satellite imagery to support the earth science research community as well as human-assisted disaster relief. This working group develops and operates the OCC Matsu Cloud ... The basic business model is that some of the larger projects earmark a portion of their grant funding to be used for computing infrastructure services. In addition, OCC sometimes receives block grants or donations of equipment, and it will donate core hours through an allocation committee to meritorious projects. The third way is that projects can pay as they go ..."

Open research and collaborations | Erin C. McKiernan

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 01:51 AM PDT

"A few days ago, I posted this tweet: 'Please help me out, tweeps. Looking for examples of collaborations arising from #openaccess #opendata #openscience #opensource. Anyone?' The response has been amazing. People have sent me links to all kinds of interesting projects: open collaborative transcription and editing of humanities texts; biomedical research made possible by publicly available data; projects creating open source tools that can be used by all and continue to be improved by online communities;  and personal stories about how they got PhDs, jobs, and authorships through open science. I've collected some of the examples sent to me below, and hope to keep adding to this list. These examples illustrate why open science/open research is so important and how we can advance both our careers and our fields when we share ..."

Radiopaedia.org, the wiki-based collaborative Radiology resource

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 01:45 AM PDT

"Radiopaedia.org is a rapidly growing open-edit radiology resource primarily complied by radiologists and radiology residents/registrars and fellows from across the globe. The site aims to create the best radiology reference available, and to make it available for free, forever and for all.  It is designed to facilitate a meaningful collaboration between all our contributing users, as well as allow non-contributors to browse through thousands of articles and interesting and illustrative cases. Read more about getting involved.  The open credentials and desire to create a free world-class resource are similar to those of Wikipedia. However, the importance of accurate information means that checks and balances of additions are required for Radiopaedia.org and our section editors provide this. They constantly review additions and changes to articles and cases, something that is facilitated by being spread around the globe through a variety of time zones."

Know Center == KNOW-CENTER JOINS THE OPEN ACCESS NETWORK AUSTRIA

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 01:41 AM PDT

"The Open Access Network Austria (OANA) is a joint action programme organized by FWF and Universities Austria (UNIKO). It unifies 50 institutions with over 100 persons who have been participating at various events so far ..."

Open Science in Österreich: Ansätze und Status

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 01:37 AM PDT

Use the link to access the full text report. "Particularly in the last two years Austria made considerable progress in the area of Open Science, especially in terms of Open Access and Open Data. The foundation of the Open Access Network Austria (OANA) and the launch of the E-Infrastructures Austria project early 2014 can be seen as important cornerstones of a developing Austrian Open Science landscape. The Austrian Chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation substantially contributes to Open Science practice- and awareness building as well. Among others, these initiatives are the basis for setting up a national Open Access strategy as well as a nationwide Open Access and Open (Research) Data infrastructure. This paper describes these and similar national as well as local Open Science projects and initiatives, and gives a potential overview of Austria's Open Science future ..."

Elsevier you know is not the only Elsevier | SciELO in Perspective

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 01:30 AM PDT

[From Google's English] "Recently when talking to my friend Abel Packer on 350 years of scientific publication, the Elsevier name emerged. It is no surprise, of course. But Abel mentioned that many people seem to think that today's Elsevier is the same as that ancient, venerable and respected publishing house that published the works of great scientists and thinkers such as Galileo, Snellius, Stevin, Grotius, Pascal, Erasmus, and many others . Not quite. The old, venerable and respected editors were members of the family Elsevier (alternative spellings: Elzevier, Elzevir - was still a non-standard spelling of the time), which began publishing in 1580 and ceased its activity in the late 18th century in sometime between the beginning of the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon to power. These conditions probably had nothing to do, but, anyway, their businesses were interrupted ..."

Michigan Publishing launches Altmetric pilot - Michigan Publishing

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 01:22 AM PDT

"We are pleased to announce that we have just launched a pilot of Altmetric, a tool that will provide easy access to article-level alternative metrics for our digital publications. This tool has been implemented first on our open access journals content, with open monographs and materials in Deep Blue, the University of Michigan's institutional repository, to follow soon. Altmetric searches the web for mentions of Michigan Publishing content (as well as for Nature, Science, Oxford University Press, Wiley, and many other publishers and journals—we are in good company). Then, Altmetric calculates a "score of attention" for each item based on an algorithmic assessment of the relevance, value, and impact of each mention. For example, being cited in a CNN article carries more weight than a single tweet. The attention score is displayed at the top of each article, and can be clicked on to drill down into all of the instances of sharing, posting, or linking that have occurred. Take a look at an iconic article from The Journal of Electronic Publishing as an example ..."

A review of the RCUK review of implementation of its OA policy | Unlocking Research

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 01:18 AM PDT

"The RCUK released its 'Review of the implementation of the RCUK Policy on Open Access' today and it makes interesting reading. First I should state that I think this is a good report, it seems well researched and balanced in tone and it is well written and laid out. Jisc also welcomes the report. Overall findings ...  It seems that a 'common factor' amongst all of the people and groups interviewed was 'a general acceptance and welcome given to the concept of open access'. However, the administrative effort to implement the policy and distribute the funds is significant. This is not helped by a level of confusion about different funding policies, particularly relating to embargo length, licence usage and expectations of data collection for compliance monitoring. Not only is this an administrative problem but it is 'leading to researchers ultimately not engaging with open access at all as it was perceived as being 'too difficult'.' (p16) Certainly there have been instances of this view expressed by researchers at Cambridge University. This blog will concentrate on a few aspects of the review I thought interesting – support or otherwise of hybrid, reporting issues, non-compliance amongst publishers, lack of awareness amongst researchers and licenses. It finishes with an observation that the review validates some of the decisions Cambridge has made in relation to implementing the RCUK policy. I should note the review includes some interesting information about learned societies, embargo periods and monographs but these are big issues that need teasing out on their own ..."

Provost responds to FASTR refiling | The University of Kansas

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 01:12 AM PDT

"The Fair Access to Science and Technology (FASTR) Act of 2015 was refiled last month in both the Senate and the House of Representatives for the 114th Congress with continued bipartisan support. The University of Kansas has played a pioneering role in open access for over a decade, supporting both local and national efforts, policies and legislation. Jeffrey S. Vitter, provost and executive vice chancellor at KU, the first public institution to pass a faculty-led open access policy, provided the following comments on this significant progress and KU's institutional support for FASTR ..."

On Double Duty: Open Standards & Open Access | CCC's Beyond the Book

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 01:06 AM PDT

"In laboratories and universities, Open Access can make for a two-headed menace.  Funding mandates for publishers and authors that require Open Access policies feed one head of this double dragon. Compliance reporting obligations for institutions feed the other. 'We can minimize these problems and overcome many of these issues by identifying and describing our shared data with common vocabularies,' says David Baker, Co-founder/Executive Director of  CASRAI – Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information – that is dedicated to reducing the administrative burden on researchers and improving business intelligence capacity of research institutions and funders. As part of an ongoing Open Access program series from Copyright Clearance Center, Baker joined Anna Clements, Head of Research Data and Information Services, University of St Andrews, to help sort out for publishers exactly how open standards for publication data are the best and quickest way to enable Open Access. Also speaking with CCC's Chris Kenneally was Jennifer Goodrich, Director, Product Management , CCC, who is closely involved with developing the company's RightsLink for Open Access solution."

Who is served by for-profit gold open access publishing? A case study of Hindawi and Egypt | Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir les savoirs communs

Posted: 11 Apr 2015 01:00 AM PDT

Use the link to access the full text article.  "The highly successful Egypt-based open access publisher Hindawi is presented as a model of quality publishing and commercial success. However, this success is not accompanied by obvious benefits to Egypt's own research and researchers. Even in the best-case scenario for academics in Egypt's public university system, it would take three month's salary for a full professor to pay the $1,500 USD OA APC of Hindawi's high-end Disease Markers. Egypt's largest public university, Cairo University, has no institutional repository. Fortunately for Egyptian researchers, there are open access journals that do not charge APCs, and not all open access repositories are institutional repositories. Open access may not be the most salient issue for Egyptian researchers at any rate. It is not clear that the pre-revolutionary state interference with research detailed in a 2005 Human Rights Watch report has been resolved, and the need to take on other work due to low salaries leaves many academics with little to no time to do research. In this instance, commercial success is not correlated with social benefit."
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