Thursday, April 23, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in History, American Historical Association Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians, April 2015 Draft

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 11:58 AM PDT

"Some scholars may seek to incubate genuinely new approaches to historical reasoning. Those
strategies might include new digital short-form genres such as blogs, social media or multimedia
storytelling, participating in strong activist forms of open-access distribution of scholarly work,
or creating digital platforms and tools as alternative modalities of scholarly production.
Wherever possible, historians should be ready to explore and consider new modes and forms of
intellectual work within the discipline and to expand their understanding of what constitutes the
discipline accordingly. The shared commitment of all historians to the informed and evidence-based
conversation that is history can smooth our discipline's integration of new possibilities.
With agreement on the purpose of our work, new and varying forms of that work can be seen as
a strength rather than an impediment...."

Marketing Manager - Open Research

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 11:38 AM PDT

"Nature Publishing Group are recruiting a Marketing Manager to join its Open Research team.   The Marketing Manager, Open Research, is responsible for the planning and implementation of the marketing plans for two of Nature Publishing Group's open access titles, Scientific Data and Scientific Reports- the largest and fastest growing title within the portfolio. The role will also involve wider support of the departments open access initiatives...."

Open Access Vs. Closed Access | Taylor's blog

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 09:01 AM PDT

"t is hard to picture a world without it, but I imagine those who lived their entire lives without knowing the internet still got along just fine. That being said, I would bet those same people would be jealous of the access to information we have available through the internet. And to me it is as simple as that. Every person who has access to the internet (that isn't censored) has such an unbelievable amount of information available to them that to not utilize it is an insult to those in the past who strived for knowledge, but could not obtain it. But this isn't enough. While we truly do have access to an amazing amount of information it is important to remember that knowledge isn't static"

Americans’ Views on Open Government Data | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 07:52 AM PDT

"Government reformers and advocates believe that two contemporary phenomena hold the potential to change how people engage with governments at all levels. The first is data. There is more of it than ever before and there are more effective tools for sharing it. This creates new service-delivery possibilities for government through use of data that government agencies themselves collect and generate. The second is public desire to make government more responsive, transparent and effective in serving citizens — an impulse driven by tight budgets and declining citizens' trust in government." This article discusses finding by the Pew Internet Research in a survey on open government data and the public.

Who Cares About Open Data?

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 07:50 AM PDT

"Every day there's a new initiative, portal or project that intends to transform the life of a city's residents using the power of data. Just yesterday, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a $42 million initiative to incubate open data projects in 100 mid-sized cities. But a unique report published by the Pew Research Center on April 21 shows that the public's awareness and enthusiasm for open data does not match that of government's. The report, called Americans' Views on Open Government Data, takes data from a survey that aimed to answer questions about how and whether people engage with their governments online, their awareness and attitudes toward open data programs, and their expectations for the future."

Arizona State and edX Will Offer an Online Freshman Year, Open to All – The Ticker - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 07:41 AM PDT

Arizona State University will join the EdX program.  "The project, called the Global Freshman Academy, will offer a set of eight courses designed to fulfill the general-education requirements of a freshman year at Arizona State at a fraction of the cost students typically pay, and students can begin taking courses without going through the traditional application process, the university said in a news release on Wednesday. Because the classes are offered as massive open online courses, or MOOCs, there is no limit on how many students can enroll."

Agencies push public access with new article repositories -- GCN

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 07:35 AM PDT

"There is good news for researchers and analysts looking for research papers produced or sponsored by the government. The National Institute for Standards and Technology will be establishing a "free-to-read" repository of academic articles." This article discusses the NIST plan to provide further public access to information and literature. This includes three parts: data management, enterprise data inventory, and common access platforms, which the article discusses in detail.

UK Open access: review of implementation of the RCUK policy | Australian Open Access Support Group

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 07:26 AM PDT

"Opening up access to research outputs is undoubtedly vital to achieve optimal return on public investment in research, increase national benefit from research, increase international visibility and future research collaboration." This article is a summary review of the RCUK policy in the UK and discusses gold open access, APCs, author confusion, and more.

The big medical data miss: challenges in establishing an open medical resource | The Governance Lab @ NYUThe Governance Lab @ NYU

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 07:11 AM PDT

Stefaan Verhulst discusses the idea that we are all "one person clinical trials," an idea that journalist Laurie Becklund coined when discussing using data as a resource and her experiences with breast cancer, and MOOMs, (massive open, online medicine resources), the "Internet of things," and the "Internet of DNA."

Digital Public Library of America » Blog Archive » DPLA and HathiTrust Partnership Supports Open E-Book Programs

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 06:59 AM PDT

"The Digital Public Library of America and HathiTrust have had a strong relationship since DPLA's inception in 2013." In this article, authors Cohen and Furlough discuss the collaborations that are ongoing between the HathiTrust and DPLA, and support of an open e-book program.

Digital Public Library of America » Blog Archive » The Digital Public Library of America Announces New Partnerships, Initiatives, and Milestones at DPLAfest 2015

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 06:55 AM PDT

"On the second anniversary of the Digital Public Library of America's launch, DPLA announced a number of new partnerships, initiatives, and milestones that highlight its rapid growth, and prepare it to have an even larger impact in the years ahead" This press release discusses content milestones and new hub partnerships for DPLA, and partnerships.

Measure the thing you’re interested in | Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 06:51 AM PDT

"The REF (Research Excellence Framework) is a time-consuming exercise that UK universities have to go through every few years to assess and demonstrate the value of their research to the government; the way funding is allocated between universities is largely dependent on the results of the REF. The exercise is widely resented, in part because the processes of preparing and reviewing the submissions are so time-consuming." This article is a post discussing the importance of working on what you have an interest in, the REF process, and H-indicies.

Free Knowledge:Confronting the Commodification of Human Discovery

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 05:07 AM PDT

"Broadly speaking, this collection looks at the question of knowledge: how it is generated and shared, and to what purpose. This includes both applied knowledge and what contributor Arthur Schafer refers to as "knowledge for its own sake" (page 46 )—for one can hardly exist without the other. The devaluing and withdrawal of public support for the latter, and simultaneous profit-seeking commandeering of the former, leads us toward a future when human knowledge, in all its myriad forms, is diminished in the public sphere." The book, Free Knowledge:Confronting the Commodification of Human Discovery, discusses free knowledge, open knowledge, open communication, scholarly communication, and more, is edited by  Patricia W. Elliott and Daryl H. Hepting (University of Regina Press, 2015). It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license.

Announcement of Appointment of University Librarian | Office of the President

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 04:45 AM PDT

Ms. Joy Kirchner has been appointed to the position of University Librarian of York University.

Open Access Vs. Closed Access | Taylor's blog

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 04:41 AM PDT

It is hard to picture a world without it, but I imagine those who lived their entire lives without knowing the internet still got along just fine. That being said, I would bet those same people would be jealous of the access to information we have available through the internet. And to me it is as simple as that. Every person who has access to the internet (that isn't censored) has such an unbelievable amount of information available to them that to not utilize it is an insult to those in the past who strived for knowledge, but could not obtain it. But this isn't enough. While we truly do have access to an amazing amount of information it is important to remember that knowledge isn't static.

Issues in Open Scholarship: ‘If Data Sharing is the Answer, What is the Question?’ | Advances in the History of Psychology

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 04:35 AM PDT

Shayna Fox Lee provides a review of Christine Borgman's new book, Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press, 2015). Fox Lee also discusses definitions of data management and  the need for data management from the library and research perspectives, although different, and discusses intersections of open data, open access, and data management.

Scholarly Communication and Peer Review: the Current Landscape and Future Trends

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 04:21 AM PDT

Scholarly Communication and Peer Review: the Current Landscape and Future Trends is a Wellcome Trust report released in March 2015. According to the report, the "aim in this brief report is to examine the current landscape of peer review for research publications including recent innovations and how they have worked in practice; and to gather and appraise the views of publishers as to how systems and processes may change over the next four to five years."

BRCA gene datashare will help detect cancer risk

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 04:08 AM PDT

"A first-of-its-kind genetic datashare program is being launched to zero in on patients with unclear BRCA test results — and save more women from the devastation of breast and ovarian cancer." This article discusses use of a datashare program to advance cancer research.

Survey: Many Americans Doubt Government Open Data Efforts | Re/code

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 03:47 AM PDT

Abstract: "Just 5 percent of Americans say that federal or state governments are very effectively sharing the data they've collected, according to a new survey released Tuesday by the Pew Research Center.

The research shows that a little more than half of Americans (more Democrats than Republicans) think that access to government data could help journalists and others keep elected officials and bureaucrats more accountable, but they have doubts that government officials are any good at actually sharing that information."

This article is a review and summary of the Pew Internet Center survey on Governent Open Data, recently released.

How to Get Open Access Mandates on the Fast Track - Open Access Archivangelism

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 01:09 AM PDT

In yet another effort to try to get mandates on the fast track — requiring Gratis Green OA — we have now analyzed the few existing OA policies' effectiveness to identify which conditions maximize compliance, in the hope that the research community can at last be persuaded to adopt evidence-based policies instead of ideology-driven ones: Vincent-Lamarre, Philippe, Boivin, Jade, Gargouri, Yassine, Larivière, Vincent and Harnad, Stevan (2015) Estimating Open Access Mandate Effectiveness: I. The MELIBEA Score. Swan, Alma; Gargouri, Yassine; Hunt, Megan; & Harnad, Stevan (2015) Open Access Policy: Numbers, Analysis, Effectiveness. Pasteur4OA Workpackage 3 Report.

PLOS Science Wednesday: I'm Dr. Andy Beck, open access is the future of cancer treatment, AMA! : science

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 12:41 AM PDT

"Hi Reddit! My name is Dr. Andy Beck, and I am an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, and the director of becklab, a molecular epidemiology research lab at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. My research focuses on solving problems in cancer research by strengthening methods in computational and molecular pathology. I recently published an editorial in PLOS Medicine arguing that open access to data from large populations of cancer patients helps researchers translate knowledge of different cancers at the molecular level into new diagnostic tools and improved health outcomes for patients. The ability to access clinical information from large, high-quality data sets has already helped researchers make important progress in our understanding of the clinical significance of the differences in cancers at the molecular level. Two studies published in PLOS journals, the Brenton et al. study and Rocco et al. study, made important discoveries regarding the association of molecular complexity within a cancer sample and patient clinical outcomes in head and neck cancers and in ovarian cancers. I will be answering your questions at 1pm EDT (10 am PDT, 6 pm UTC). Ask me anything! Don't forget to follow me on Twitter @AndyBeck. Edit: Thanks for all the great questions, and thanks to reddit and PLOS for inviting me! ..."

Writing and Publishing in the Digital Age discussion at Wesleyan University | Jack Dougherty

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 12:32 AM PDT

"Have online writing and editing tools changed how you and your students collaborate in (or outside of) class? Or have you considered publishing your next peer-reviewed journal article, or perhaps a digital book, with an open-access scholarly press? Explore these questions with Mark Edington, Director of Amherst College Press, a digital-first open access publisher, and Jack Dougherty, Harber Fellow in Education and Entrepreneurship at Wesleyan and Associate Professor of Educational Studies at Trinity College ..."

A ‘Facebook for Science’? Neuroskeptic talks with Brett Buttliere | PLOS SciComm

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 12:23 AM PDT

"I spoke to Brett Buttliere, of the Knowledge Media Research Center at the University of Tübingen in Germany (and formerly of the Department of Methodology and Statistics, Tilburg University in the Netherlands). He's the author of 'Using science and psychology to improve the dissemination and evaluation of scientific work,' in Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. In that paper, Buttliere proposes that science would run better if we had a single online network, a 'Facebook for science', instead of the many different publishers and academic tools that we currently use ..."

Reflecting on Appropriate Technologies Open Science Café Kennedy Library | Home

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 12:19 AM PDT

"Hosting Appropriate Technologies, Near and Far, an Open Science Café (OSC) with Lonny Grafman, was a memorable experience for me. One reason was our collaborative planning process. Karen Lauritsen, Lonny, and I set up several video conferences prior to the event to ensure that it would be interactive for our audience and personal to our campus community. We discussed different ways that we would run the show and agreed on what would be the best plan of attack, given the short amount of time. While Lonny did have a plan, he encouraged Karen and I to offer other ideas – which I think really revealed the collaborative aspects of appropriate technologies. Appropriate technologies require not just the collaboration of engineers and scientists, but also the community. In addition, in order for the technologies to be sustainable, scalable, and environmentally sound, solutions may involve ..."

Open Textbook Summit May 28-29 2015 | BCcampus

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 12:11 AM PDT

"It was October 2012 when the BC Ministry of Advanced Education first announced its support for the creation of the open textbook project. Today we have 146 adoptions of open textbooks that are being used throughout 14 institutions in BC. The resulting student savings on textbooks is between $475 K and – $700 K. The Open Textbook Project, coordinated by BCcampus, provides flexible and affordable access to higher education resources in B.C. Open digital version textbooks are available free for use by both B.C. faculty and students. Printed copies are also available at a low cost. The project's Accessibility Toolkit ensures textbooks are accessible to students with disabilities.  Two and one half years after its creation, the Open Textbook Project is inviting faculty, students, librarians, government officials, and policy makers, to participate in the 3rd Open Textbook Summit.  The Open Textbook Summit will be held May 28-29 2015 at Simon Fraser University – Harbour Centre, Fletcher Challenge Canada Theatre in Vancouver, BC ..."

Obama administration freeing up 20 terabytes of environmental data

Posted: 23 Apr 2015 12:04 AM PDT

"The Commerce Department is partnering with five leading technology outfits to make 20 terabytes of environmental data available for easier access and analysis by the public. The move, announced by Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker in an address at the American Meteorological Society on Tuesday morning, could open up new markets for environmental information just as profound challenges related to global warming and other environmental threats come to the fore. With much more data made available, existing companies and new startups can innovate to provide new products that help predict climate change, issue life-saving weather warnings and protect depleted fisheries, for example.  The partnerships are with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, IBM, Microsoft and the Open Cloud Consortium. The collaborations are being established through cooperative research and development agreements, which outline the data alliances led by each of the companies.  In addition, such information provides the foundation for research in the private and public sectors, and more data could lead to breakthroughs that are impossible to foresee at this point but hold potentially huge economic benefits. According to a Commerce Department press release, these alliances will consist of public and private sector organizations, which will help test solutions for bringing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) information to the cloud. Data from NOAA already supports the multi-billion dollar weather, climate and fishing industries.  Every day, NOAA generates 20 terabytes of data, which is more than twice the data of the entire printed collection of the United States Library of Congress, per an agency press release; this data comes from satellites orbiting in space to buoys bobbing in the Pacific Ocean. The agency also runs sophisticated models of the climate system generates severe weather warnings nationwide ..."

Why The Data On California's Biggest Water Hogs Isn't Public 

Posted: 22 Apr 2015 11:56 PM PDT

"It might seem like all of California is busy naming scapegoats who consume unfair shares of water during the state's historic drought. But there's actually no way for the public to go after the state's worst water wasters because there's no way of knowing who they are. Legislation has ensured that much of the state's water data will never be made public. In fact, California is the only state in the west that does not make its water data public. While the state has promised to call out cities with exceptionally high per capita water usage—information which was only released by the state for the first time last year—that's one small part of the water data story. Due to several measures that challenge open government policies, what should be boundless flows of open data about our most squandered resource are as dry as the wells in much of the state. And right now California needs all the data it can get—not only to find out who the biggest water hogs are, but so data scientists, visualization designers, developers, and engineers can work together to find better and more relevant ways for the state's residents to weather the drought ..."

UN urged to demand free access to crop data - SciDev.Net

Posted: 22 Apr 2015 11:49 PM PDT

"A petition has been filed urging the UN to create a legal framework requiring governments to make data from the genetic sequencing of plants freely available.   The move would speed up plant breeding and increase food production for a growing human population, one of the UN's proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), say the plant scientist and lawyer behind the document.   They want the creation of such a framework to be part of the SDGs, and have submitted their proposal as part of a UN consultation for issues to be included in the 2015 Global Sustainable Development Report, which is due to be launched in June to provide science advice for development.  The proposal was made last month by Norman Warthmann, a plant geneticist at the Australian National University, and Claudio Chiarolla, a researcher on biodiversity governance at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in France. They warn that most genetic information on crops is collected, analysed and stored in isolation in national databases, and often comprises small samples collected under specific circumstances.  This hampers studies that compare crops across continents and research on how wider environmentalvariables influence plant growth, they say ..."

SIUE “Taking Back Research” with Launch of Institutional Repository

Posted: 22 Apr 2015 11:45 PM PDT

"The implementation of a publishing platform at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville is allowing the University to preserve and provide access to more of its faculty's research. The initiative will aid in reducing the ongoing million-dollar expense of gaining access to research that's been conducted at SIUE, but published by an outside company. SPARK, Scholarly Publications and Repository of Knowledge, is an institutional repository that provides a central location to gather the research, creative activity and other work that comes out of the University and the community. The open access, publishing platform complies with the State of Illinois Open Access to Research Articles Act, signed into law in August 2013 ..."

Open Trials | Planet Open Knowledge Foundation

Posted: 22 Apr 2015 11:37 PM PDT

"Open Knowledge today announced plans to develop Open Trials, an open, online database of information about the world's clinical research trials funded by The Laura and John Arnold Foundation. The project, which is designed to increase transparency and improve access to research, will be directed by Dr. Ben Goldacre, an internationally known leader on clinical transparency ... Open Trials will aggregate information from a wide variety of existing sources in order to provide a comprehensive picture of the data and documents related to all trials of medicines and other treatments around the world. Conducted in partnership with the Center for Open Science and supported by the Center's Open Science Framework, the project will also track whether essential information about clinical trials is transparent and publicly accessible so as to improve understanding of whether specific treatments are effective and safe ..."

Looking back at the 5th Plenary of the Research Data Alliance | Science and the Web

Posted: 22 Apr 2015 11:33 PM PDT

" ... My stay in San Diego was made possible by the generous financial support provided by RDA Europe's Early Career Programme. I applied as I was especially interested in the Data Citation working group headed by fellow Austrian Andreas Rauber and his co-chairs Ari Asmi and Dieter van Uytvanck. I was closely following the activities of this group throughout the meeting and acted as a scribe for the group in the working group meeting, their presentation in the plenary and the Data Publishing interest group. The Data Citation WG has come up with a way to make dynamic and highly volatile dataets and parts thereof citable. Data citations of this kind are very important for reproducibility of science and they are not supported by current solutions. I was very impressed with the results of the working group – and by the pilots and workshops that are being carried out by NERC, ESIP, CLARIN, and NASA. If I have sparked your interest, I'd encourage you to check out the website of the WG and join the group. In a way, the Data Citation WG embodies the RDA's spirit: solution-oriented, focused and implementation-driven. Nevertheless there was also plenty of room for high-level talk at the meeting. I was impressed by the keynote by Stephen Friend of SAGE Bionetworks (check out the recording of his and other talk here). He provided a look into a data-driven future in biomedical research illustrated by a number of projects that have turned heads beyond the research community. These include Accelerating Medicines Partnership in Alzheimer's Disease (AMP-AD) and Apple's ResearchKit.  Bibliometrics and altmetrics, which are two of my main research foci, were also discussed in the course of the Plenary; most notably during the Publishing Data Bibliometrics WG of course, but also in the Publishing Data Interest Group. There, I presented two recent studies that I had been part of, dealing with the distribution of data citations and altmetrics. More information can be found in the accompanying slides ..."
Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)