Monday, April 20, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Harvard Islamic Legal Studies Program launches SHARIASource digital platform | Harvard Magazine May-Jun 2015

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 04:38 AM PDT

"A simple Google search for the word "sharia" illustrates the magnitude of the gap Harvard Law School (HLS) professor Intisar A. Rabb wants to fill. Up top, there's a 2,000-word overview from the Council on Foreign Relations, along with the usual Wikipedia link. But even on that first page of results, there's also a far less neutral take from a Christian missionary website, and an alarmist article on sharia law in Dearborn, Michigan, that on further investigation turns out to come from the satirical news site National Report....As co-director of the Law School's Islamic Legal Studies Program (ILSP), Rabb has set out to change that. Her answer is SHARIASource, a website that aims to serve as the go-to resource on Islamic legal issues by gathering basic information, primary and secondary sources, and scholarly debates on topics spanning dozens of countries and more than 1,400 years of history. Though explicitly designed for easy public consumption, the site's foundation will be in academic discussions, with a strong emphasis on connecting scholars from different disciplines to new sources and to each other. As a result, SHARIASource is part of a twenty-first-century digitization revolution that will change not only how knowledge is collected, but also how it is created...."

Review of The Access Principle

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 03:44 AM PDT

"I have an ingenious idea for a company. My company will be in the business of selling computer games. But, unlike other computer game companies, mine will never have to hire a single programmer, game designer, or graphic artist. Instead I'll simply find people who know how to make games, and ask them to donate their games to me. Naturally, anyone generous enough to donate a game will immediately relinquish all further rights to it. From then on, I alone will be the copyright-holder, distributor, and collector of royalties. This is not to say, however, that I'll provide no 'value-added.' My company will be the one that packages the games in 25-cent cardboard boxes, then resells the boxes for up to $300 apiece. But why would developers donate their games to me? Because they'll need my seal of approval. I'll convince developers that, if a game isn't distributed by my company, then the game doesn't 'count' -- indeed, barely even exists -- and all their labor on it has been in vain. Admittedly, for the scheme to work, my seal of approval will have to mean something. So before putting it on a game, I'll first send the game out to a team of experts who will test it, debug it, and recommend changes. But will I pay the experts for that service? Not at all: as the final cherry atop my chutzpah sundae, I'll tell the experts that it's their professional duty to evaluate, test, and debug my games for free! On reflection, perhaps no game developer would be gullible enough to fall for my scheme. I need a community that has a higher tolerance for the ridiculous -- a community that, even after my operation is unmasked, will study it and hold meetings, but not 'rush to judgment' by dissociating itself from me. But who on Earth could possibly be so paralyzed by indecision, so averse to change, so immune to common sense? I've got it: academics! Everything I described with computer games would work even better with academic papers ... In my view, once we've mustered a level of anger commensurate with what's happening, we can then debate what to do next, which journals are overpriced and which aren't, what qualifies as 'open access,' and so on. But the first step is for a critical mass of us to acknowledge that we are being had.  This article is supposed to be a review of a book called The Access Principle by John Willinsky (MIT Press, 2006). So let me now turn to reviewing it ... For me, the most important idea in the The Access Principle is that scholars have a duty to make their work available, not only to their colleagues, but ideally to anyone who wants it ..."

Overlay Journals and Peer Review | Open Library of Humanities

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 03:35 AM PDT

"Jefferson Pooley (Muhlenberg College, US) has recently published an article that considers how overlay journals can transform communication studies research. "Sinking the Flagship: Why Communication Studies is Better Off Without One" was published in the International Journal of Communication (Vol. 9, 2015) and suggests that since there is no single flagship journal in communication studies, the traditional understanding of such a journal as a proxy for academic quality does not apply to the discipline.  Communication studies research is therefore in a position to experiment with new forms of scholarly publishing that 'unbundle' journal titles and are not constrained by issues of artificial scarcity (length of articles, number of pages within each issue). In the digital age, open access journals like the Open Library of Humanities can therefore provide what Pooley calls an "ingenious alternative" model for publication which dispenses with author-facing charges: 'a sprawling, open-access journal that takes submissions without regard to specialism, then sends articles out to qualified specialists. The review remains double-blind, but there is no artificial, page-limit backlog.' In particular, the Overlay Journals that the OLH will provide through its platform offer an opportunity to retain journal brand and autonomy within a large-scale megajournal – enabling editorial boards to open up the discoverability of their articles whilst also preserving the niche specialism and focus of their particular research. As Pooley continues ..."

Learned Societies and Open Access | History of Science Society

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 03:31 AM PDT

" ... Today, the executive directors and presidents of humanities learned societies must ask: To what question is Open Access the answer? They see two separate dimensions of the Open Access movement. First, it is a policy prescription aiming to cure an instance of market-failure in the system of scholarly communication. At the end of the twentieth century, commercial for-profit publishers realized that the economic structure of academic publishing was premised on a third party payer. Faculty expected their university libraries to subscribe to leading journals without regard to cost. With little price resistance from the payer, subscription prices went up steadily and library budgets were overtaxed. The Open Access movement was a treatment for the fever of predatory pricing. This problem emerged in the sciences and proposed solutions assumed the environment of scientific research and publishing. But journals published by societies in the humanities and interpretive social sciences are not part of this policy problem and the solutions proposed do not fit our domain. There is, however, a second, more normative, dimension of Open Access. It is a vision of scholarly and cultural commonwealth more equal than that we enjoy today, a vision wherein the greater accessibility of scholarship increases its consumption, transmission, and, ultimately, production. This vision is integral to the basic conception of the modern American learned society and, therefore, society leaders in the humanities and adjacent social sciences are exploring how it might be approached without getting waist deep in a Big Muddy of red ink that would imperil their journals and perhaps even the associations themselves. Most of learned societies in the humanities have roughly the same business model: a three-legged stool of membership dues, conference registration and exhibition revenues, and publications. Publications are mostly journals, although some also issue monographs and reference sources. Almost all societies live close to the margin of their operating income. Their modest reserves could not sustain them for very long without other revenue. Each leg of this business model is very uncertain now ... 

Project MUSE - Open-Access Monograph Publishing and the Origins of the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing at Penn State University

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 03:24 AM PDT

[ABSTRACT] This essay explains the background of open-access monograph publishing as developed principally by university presses, often in association with libraries. It begins with discussions at Princeton University Press in the early 1970s about how to deal with the crisis of scholarly monograph publishing and moves on to describe a joint library/press project in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) in the early 1990s. The failure of that project to be funded led the library and press at Penn State to launch a jointly operated Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing in 2005, which supported one of the pioneering programs in open-access monograph publishing. The CIC project, in particular, anticipated the proposal by the Association of American Universities / Association of Research Libraries, announced in June 2014, to subvent the publication of first monographs using an open-access model.

Publications | Free Full-Text | Landscapes of Research: Perceptions of Open Access (OA) Publishing in the Arts and Humanities | HTML

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 03:20 AM PDT

Use the link to access the full text article.  "Abstract: It is widely known now that scholarly communication is in crisis, resting on an academic publishing model that is unsustainable. One response to this crisis has been the emergence of Open Access (OA) publishing, bringing scholarly literature out from behind a paywall and making it freely available to anyone online. Many research and academic libraries are facilitating the change to OA by establishing institutional repositories, supporting OA policies, and hosting OA journals. In addition, research funding bodies, such as the Australian Research Council (ARC), are mandating that all published grant research outputs be made available in OA, unless legal and contractual obligations prevent this. Despite these broader changes, not all scholars are aware of the new publishing environment. In particular, the rate of adoption of OA models in the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) has historically been lower than Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) disciplines. Nevertheless, some local and international OA exemplars exist in HSS. At Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia, the faculty-administered environmental humanities journal, Landscapes, was migrated to the institutional open access repository in 2013. Subsequently, researchers in the Faculty of Education and Arts were surveyed regarding their knowledge, understandings, and perceptions of OA publishing. The survey was also designed to elicit the barriers to OA publishing perceived or experienced by HSS researchers. This article will present the findings of our small faculty-based OA survey, with particular attention to HSS academics (and within this subject group, particular attention to the arts and humanities), their perceptions of OA, and the impediments they encounter. We argue that OA publishing will continue to transform scholarship within the arts and humanities, especially through the role of institutional repositories. The 'library-as-publisher' role offers the potential to transform academic and university-specific publishing activities. However, the ongoing training of university researchers and personnel is required to bring into balance their understandings of OA publisher and the demands of the broader Australian and international research environment."

It Takes More than a Mandate: Factors that Contribute to Increased Rates of Article Deposit to an Institutional Repository

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 03:13 AM PDT

"Introduction Many institutions have open access (OA) policies that require faculty members to deposit their articles in an institutional repository (IR). A clear motivation is that a policy will result in increased self-archiving. The purpose of this longitudinal study is to compare the impact of a campus-wide OA policy and mediated solicitation of author manuscripts, using quantitative analysis to determine the rate of article deposits over time. Methods Metadata for faculty articles published by authors at Oregon State University between 2011 and 2014 was produced by integrating citation metadata from a bibliographic database and the IR. Author names, affiliations, and other metadata were parsed and matched to compare rates of deposit for three separate time periods relating to different OA promotional strategies. results Direct solicitation of author manuscripts is more successful in facilitating OA than an OA policy—by number of articles deposited as well as the number of unique authors participating. Author affiliation and research areas also have an impact on faculty participation in OA. DISCUSSION Outreach to colleges and departments has had a positive effect on rate of deposit for those communities of scholars. Additionally, disciplinary practice may have more influence on its members' participation in OA. Conclusion Until more federal policies require open access to articles funded by grants, or institutional policies are in place that require article deposit for promotion and tenure, policies will only be as effective as the library mediated processes that are put in place to identify and solicit articles from faculty"

Faculty and EPA Librarians: Help support the Open Access Resolution at April 24's Faculty Council Meeting | UNC Health Sciences Library

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 02:54 AM PDT

"There will be discussion and a vote on UNC Faculty Resolution 2015-9, 'On Endorsing a University Open Access Policy,' at the April 24 Faculty Council meeting. This resolution grew out of a unanimous recommendation from the UNC Faculty Open Access Task Force (OATF) and encourages UNC to adopt a new policy on rights retention. If the recommendation is accepted by the administration, it could take effect as early as January 2016. With this policy, UNC would join a long list of prestigious institutions in achieving 'green' open access by reserving a nonexclusive, noncommercial license for the university to preserve and disseminate scholarly articles authored by its faculty. Passage of this resolution would allow faculty authors to take advantage of UNC's repository to make their articles available to a much wider readership than would otherwise have access (including many UNC alumni). View the full report of the Task Force's recommendation and FAQ. Please consider attending the April 24 Faculty Council meeting and supporting the resolution ..."

Library discovery service components and an open access alternative

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 02:47 AM PDT

"My consortium employs Ex Libris Alma and Primo to support management and discovery services. Given the multi-year battle between EBSCO and Ex Libris over the inclusion of EBSCO metadata in the Primo Central Index, it's clear that institutions using Primo (as well as other discovery product) need to given increased attention to strategic issues related to discovery. A good and current overview is provided by Marshall Breeding in the Spring 2015 issue of Information Standards Quarterly ..."

Getting the Word Out: Academic Libraries as Scholarly Publishers

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 01:53 AM PDT

A collection of 11 article on library-based scholarly publishing, from ACRL.

Future of Library Discovery Systems (Marshall Breeding) - National Information Standards Organization

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 01:52 AM PDT

"NISO's Discovery to Delivery Topic Committee commissioned a white paper on The Future of Library Resource Discovery from Marshall Breeding as part of its ongoing examination of areas in the discovery landscape that the information community could potentially standardize. The white paper was published in February 2015. This article provides an extracted summary of the paper. The full paper is available for download from the NISO website."

Open Access Keys

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 01:45 AM PDT

"We thank and contribute to interesting debate on Free Access 1.2 . An Archaeology of IP 3 to appreciate that upon initial protection of printers companies, which eventually paid to / the authors / s, rights moved to these / os are second / os, to return unduly businesses printers For scientific publications, as these do not pay authors / s or revisionary / es, from whom depends the prestige of its masthead, which is a transfer of rights without compensation. Now, with the new models in which people produce content authors and borne dissemination, increase incentives to publish more, as the proceeds of the magazine are maximized with the volume of items processed; a particularly powerful incentive prestigious open access journals know how to control, but it can severely affect quality in all types of publishers. In this scenario, research budgets, financed mostly with public funds, are fundamentally continue to face the expense, before and subscribers and now through authorship. In exchange for funding a public good (have someone read an article does not prevent someone else does too) and do reach wider populations, are also contributing to spread more trash, though initiatives such as Beall help limit excesses 1 2 . For now cost reduction that favors the digital migration and new payment models has not substantially reduced the amount of resources devoted to the dissemination of knowledge, not been properly transferred to / the authors / is facing very different cost-effectiveness ratios 4 . For promoting open by the agencies responsible for publicly funded research be consistent with the scientific political access would require that both the selection of research projects such as the race of the / the researchers / s (recruitment, promotion) not favored to magazines with classically prestigious gated access. This will be achieved on the new open access journals reach the prestige of traditional (input largest discharges predict more appointments), or when Nature and the Proceedings of the Royal Society are free at the time of reading in May . The extension of the 'green way' of archiving -with a proper indexation also help new forms of dissemination of scientific knowledge more in line with the nature of its financing, production and revision appear ..."

DisGeNET: a discovery platform for the dynamical exploration of human diseases and their genes

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 01:41 AM PDT

Use the link to access the full text article from the Journal of Biological Databases and Curation.  "DisGeNET is a comprehensive discovery platform designed to address a variety of questions concerning the genetic underpinning of human diseases. DisGeNET contains over 380 000 associations between >16 000 genes and 13 000 diseases, which makes it one of the largest repositories currently available of its kind. DisGeNET integrates expert-curated databases with text-mined data, covers information on Mendelian and complex diseases, and includes data from animal disease models. It features a score based on the supporting evidence to prioritize gene-disease associations. It is an open access resource available through a web interface, a Cytoscape plugin and as a Semantic Web resource. The web interface supports user-friendly data exploration and navigation. DisGeNET data can also be analysed via the DisGeNET Cytoscape plugin, and enriched with the annotations of other plugins of this popular network analysis software suite. Finally, the information contained in DisGeNET can be expanded and complemented using Semantic Web technologies and linked to a variety of resources already present in the Linked Data cloud. Hence, DisGeNET offers one of the most comprehensive collections of human gene-disease associations and a valuable set of tools for investigating the molecular mechanisms underlying diseases of genetic origin, designed to fulfill the needs of different user profiles, including bioinformaticians, biologists and health-care practitioners. Database URL: http://www.disgenet.org/ Previous Section Next Section ..."

chem-bla-ics: CC-BY with the ACS Author Choice: CDK and Blue Obelisk papers liberated

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 01:32 AM PDT

"Already a while ago, the American Chemical Society (ACS) decided to allow the Creative Commons Attribution license (version 4.0) to be used on their papers, via their Author Choice program. ACS members pay $1500, which is low for a traditional publisher. While I even rather seem them move to a gold Open Access journal, it is a very welcome option! For the ACS business model it means a guaranteed sell of some 40 copies of this paper (at about $35 dollar each), because it will not immediately affect the sale of the full journal (much). Some papers may sell more than that had the paper remained closed access, but many for papers that sounds like a smart move money wise. Of course, they also buy themselves some goodwill and green Open Access is just around the corner anyway. Better, perhaps, is that you can also use this option to make a past paper Open Access under a CC-BY license! And that is exactly what Christoph Steinbeck did with five of his papers, including two on which I am co-author. And these are not the least papers either. The first is the first CDK paper from 2003 (doi:10.1021/ci050400b), which featured a screenshot of JChemPaint shown above. Note that in those days, the print journal was still the target, so the screenshot is in gray scale :) BTW, given that this paper is cited 329 times (according to ImpactStory), maybe the ACS could have sold more than 40 copies. But for me, it means that finally people can read this paper about Open Science in chemistry, even after so many years. BTW, there is little chance the second CDK paper will be freed in a similar way. The second paper that was liberated this way, is the first Blue Obelisk paper (doi:10.1021/ci050400b), which was cited 276 times (see ImpactStory) ..."

The global relevance of Open Access - Video Dailymotion

Posted: 20 Apr 2015 01:25 AM PDT

Use the link to access the video.
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