Sunday, April 5, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Should You Boycott Traditional Journals? | Social Media Collective

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 03:35 AM PDT

Is it time to boycott "traditional" scholarly publishing? Perhaps you are an academic researcher, just like me. Perhaps, just like me, you think that there are a lot of exciting developments in scholarly publishing thanks to the Internet. And you want to support them. And you also want people to read your research. But you also still need to be sure that your publication venues are held in high regard. Or maybe you just receive research funding that is subject to new open access requirements.  Academia is a funny place. We are supposedly self-governing. So if we don't like how our scholarly communications are organized we should be able to fix this ourselves. If we are dissatisfied with the journal system, we're going to have to do something about it. The question of whether or not it is now time to eschew closed access journals is something that comes up a fair amount among my peers.

It comes up often enough that a group of us at Michigan decided to write an article on the topic. Here's the article.  It just came out yesterday (open access, of course): 'Carl Lagoze, Paul Edwards, Christian Sandvig, & Jean-Christophe Plantin. (2015). Should I stay or Should I Go? Alternative Infrastructures in Scholarly Publishing. International Journal of Communication 9: 1072-1081.'  The article is intended for those who want some help figuring out the answer to the question the article title poses: Should I stay or should I go? It's meant help you decipher the unstable landscape of scholarly publishing these days ..."

Should I Stay or Should I Go? Alternative Infrastructures in Scholarly Publishing | Lagoze | International Journal of Communication

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 03:32 AM PDT

Use the link to access the full text article from the International Journal of Communication.  "For more than three-and-a-half centuries, the scholarly infrastructure—composed of commercial publishers, learned societies, libraries, and the scholars themselves—has provided the foundation functions of certification, registration, access, preservation, and reward. However, over the last two decades, the stability of this infrastructure has been disrupted by profound changes in the technological, economic, cultural, and political climate. We examine the actions of scholars in response to this infrastructure instability through the lens of Hirschman's 'exit, voice, and loyalty' framework. We describe the motivations and actions by scholars, especially those with tenure, who have chosen exit from the mainstream scholarly communication infrastructure to a proliferation of newly available alternative infrastructures. However, this option is not practical for all scholars due to the 'enforced loyalty' imposed by reward systems based on metrics that are intricately tied to the traditional infrastructure. We examine the alternative of voice exercised by these scholars, combined with the threat of exit that has changed policies that are the source of dissatisfaction with the system."

Steps that HEIs can take to meet the EPSRC research data policy

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 03:29 AM PDT

"This guide suggests approaches to research data management (RDM) that will enable universities to meet the requirements of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council's (EPSRC's) research data policy. We have included an overview of the EPSRC's policy expectations, outlined particular implementation challenges and we offer some examples of how these have been addressed successfully. There are signposts to further resources and tools. This guide will be of interest to university senior managers and research data management support staff, including those who are responsible for giving advice to researchers on the storage, management, publication and archiving of research data ..."

Open access -- University of Texas Libraries

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 03:25 AM PDT

Use the link to access the guide.

LOCH Project from Update from Heriot-Watt University

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 03:19 AM PDT

"As part of the work to embed good Open Access Policy within the institution, three awareness sessions were held within Schools with research staff.  Two of those sessions were led by Research Administration staff and one by the Library, reflecting the spread of open access support within the institution.  At Heriot-Watt University, RCUK OA administration is within the Schools, with over-all  OA coordination by the Library in close cooperation with the research office (Research and Knowledge Exchange Services).  So good coordination of effort and information is essential, and we are working to consistently achieve this objective. The message at the sessions led by research administrative staff for academic staff was kept very simple, using the opportunity to update staff on RCUK Open Access, research data requirements, ResearchFish  and the HEFCE Open Access Policy.   Representatives from the Library and Research Office were present to provide extra information if needed. As an outcome of those sessions, it is clear that academic staff see open access is one stage in the administration of their research – from the grant application though to final reporting and publication, with research somewhere in the middle.   Although attendance at the sessions was about 10% of the total academic staff, the slides were circulated afterwards, and as a result of those sessions we saw a direct increase in the number of full-text uploads to Pure ..."

REF Open Access Planning Documentation

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 03:14 AM PDT

"Here at the University of Edinburgh, we finally getting to grips with the implementation of the REF Open Access Requirements.  The Scholarly Communications Team has undertaken a wealth of outreach activities over recent months and has now been to visit over two thirds of the University's 22 Schools to talk about OA and to start to make plans for how the REF requirements will work in practice. As this is a large, Russell Group University, we are taking a more devolved approach to the implementation of the policy, with responsibility for the policy resting at a local level within Schools and Colleges.  Each School is working with the Scholarly Communications Team to formulate a plan of action that will work for them – based on a number of variable factors, including publishing patterns, staffing levels and the nature of the publishing process in that particular discipline. I'm pleased to be able to include here some documentation which may be of use to other institutions ..."

Are you addressing research data management? | Jisc

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 03:11 AM PDT

"No-one who works in academic research today – from researchers, to librarians, IT specialists, research office staff, funders and service providers – can fail to notice that ours is a sector in constant flux. What you've told us From speaking to the research data management (RDM) community we've found there's a strong desire for research data to be given the same importance as outputs in traditional publications, which means incentive structures in research need to change to encourage the sharing of research data in ways in which it can be cited and re-used.    What skills does a research data management professional need?  We have been exploring this question with our colleagues at with the Association of Research Managers and Administrators (ARMA), Research Libraries UK (RLUK), the Russell Universities Group of IT Directors (RUGIT), the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) and the Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association (UCISA) and with those directly responsible for RDM in universities.  Our conversations have highlighted the need for a research data specialist at universities to support researchers in managing their data ..."

Understanding Open Access

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 02:52 AM PDT

"This issue of JPC Letters includes five Viewpoint articles that provide different perspectives on the Open Access (OA) movement, with four articles concerned with OA publications and one with OA to software and data. The ideas and thoughts presented in these Viewpoints (Table 1) highlight the complexities of the issue, which is often poorly understood by authors and readers; therefore, I hope that by covering this from different perspectives, our readers will better appreciate the issues ..."

A local licence for Henbury! (a response to @HEPI_news) | FOLLOWERS OF THE APOCALYPSE

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 02:46 AM PDT

"In line with proposals published by the most august and esteemed of our Higher Education think tanks, I've decided to experiment with 'local' licences. Whilst there is much to commend the idea of a 'national' licence, such as a splendid sense of isolation and old maids cycling to communion through the morning mist, I feel aggrieved that the world class research carried out by the fine folk of Henbury, (in the north of Bristol) can be read by those as far afield as Stoke Bishop, Catbrain and even Brentry without any expectation of reciprocity. Such a licence would allow open access to all research carried out within Henbury, within Henbury. To the knee-jerk zealots that say that this is unworkable, I offer the following response ... Anyway, the important thing is coming to an agreement with publishers. I spoke to Evil Sir and they estimate 0.006 of the papers in their journals are from Henbury, and would allow access to Henburians at £30 per paper, plus a £8000000000 admin charge and some chips with garlic mayo and chilli sauce (is that not double-dipping?) ..."

Public Access for Federally Funded Research | DMPTool Blog

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 02:42 AM PDT

"On February 22, 2013, the White House's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued an executive directive that requires the results of taxpayer-funded research – both articles and data – be made freely available to the general public. The DMPTool team has been closely monitoring the responses by federal agencies, but we could use your help (see the links below under "How you Can Help"). Forty-three agencies were directed to come up with plans for increasing access to the results of federally funded research (see the OSTP memo links at the bottom of this blog). Since July 2014, twelve of these agencies (and their sub-agencies) have released their plans. The DMPTool team has been actively reviewing newly released funding agency announcements and plans specifically for how Data Management Plans are to be implemented. Once identified, the new plans, if the plans are different form what is already in the DMPTool, will be added to the DMPTool. With the help of Librarians from across the country, other information from the various plans' guidelines is being collected and consolidated (not just for data, but for published outputs as well). Columbia University and the University of Oregon are keeping up with the announcements via their Library websites ..."

Beyond Beall’s List

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 02:39 AM PDT

"If you have even a fleeting interest in the evolving landscape of scholarly communication, you've probably heard of predatory open access (OA) journals. These are OA journals that exist for the sole purpose of profit, not the dissemination of high-quality research findings and furtherance of knowledge. These predators generate profits by charging author fees, also known as article processing charges (APCs), that far exceed the cost of running their low-quality, fly-by-night operations. Charging a fee is not itself a marker of a predatory publisher: many reputable OA journals use APCs to cover costs, especially in fields where research is often funded by grants. (Many subscription-based journals also charge authors fees, sometimes per page or illustration.) However, predatory journals are primarily fee-collecting operations—they exist for that purpose and only incidentally publish articles, generally without rigorous peer review, despite claims to the contrary. Of course, low-quality publishing is not new. There have long been opportunistic publishers (e.g., vanity presses and sellers of public domain content) and deceptive publishing practices (e.g., yellow journalism and advertisements formatted to look like articles). It is also not unique to OA journals. There are many mediocre subscription-based journals, and even respected subscription-based journals have accepted deeply problematic submissions (e.g., Andrew Wakefield et al.'s article linking autism to vaccines in The Lancet1 and Alan Sokal's nonsense article in Social Text).2 ... The highest-profile watchdog of predatory publishers is Jeffrey Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado-Denver, who curates a blacklist of 'potential, possible, or probable' predatory OA publishers and journals.4 Beall's list has become a go-to tool and has even been featured in The New York Times,5 but it is not the final word on predatory publishing, partially because Beall himself has a complicated, and not entirely supportive, attitude toward OA in general ... However, in 2014, Walt Crawford took Beall to task in an article called 'Ethics and Access 1: The Sad Case of Jeffrey Beall.'6 ..."

Academic Journals In Glass Houses... - Neuroskeptic

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 02:33 AM PDT

"A psychiatry journal, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (JNMD), has just published a remarkable attack on another journal, Frontiers in Psychology. Here's the piece: it's by the JNMD's own Statistics Editor. In it, he writes that: To be perfectly candid, the reader needs to be informed that the journal that published the Lakens (2013) article, Frontiers in Psychology, is one of an increasing number of journals that charge exorbitant publication fees in exchange for free open access to published articles. Some of the author costs are used to pay reviewers, causing one to question whether the process is always unbiased, as is the desideratum. For further information, the reader is referred to the following Web site: http://www.frontiersin.org/Psychology/fees. The back-story here is that a group of researchers wrote a letter to JNMD alleging several errors in a 2014 paper about psychotherapy for psychosis. One of the authors of the letter was psychologist Daniël Lakens, and these authors cited one of Lakens' papers from 2013, which appeared in Frontiers in Psychology. Now the Statistics Editor of the JNMD seems to be implying that Lakens effectively bought off the peer reviewers, and that this is why his paper was accepted. In fact, he questions the peer review standards of not only Frontiers, but all Open Access journals ..."

These 6 Art Projects Make Urban Data More Accessible For The Rest Of Us | Co.Exist | ideas + impact

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 02:25 AM PDT

"As big data in cities gets bigger, with growing numbers of sensors tracking everything from air pollution to traffic jams, the resulting piles of information aren't necessarily easy for people living in those cities to access or use. In the Sense Your City Data Art Challenge, an organization called Data Canvas asked designers to find creative ways to share data collected from DIY sensors in seven cities around the world. 'The dialogue now is between cities and big technology companies—there's not really a voice for everyday citizens,' says Emina Reissinger from Swissnex, which partnered with Grey Area Foundation for the Arts and LIFT to put on the challenge. 'Even if you open data and put it all out there, you need to be kind of a data scientist to even work with these data sets—a normal person on the street doesn't understand what open data is about and how they can get engaged. This is about making data that's very abstract kind of tangible for the everyday person.' Here are the six winning ideas ..."

Research Data Management and Open Access by Dr Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre - YouTube

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 02:20 AM PDT

"Dr Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre talks about research data management at the University of Kent in October 2013."

Indian Journals -- A Bibliometric Study on Aquaculture and Fisheries Journals through Electronic Data Base in Directory of Open Access Journals

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 02:17 AM PDT

Abstract: This paper examines the open access journals which are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The objectives of this study are to analyse the open access journals on Fisheries and Aquaculture published in various years, disciplines, languages, countries and licence wise. The majority of journals are published by with United States, English being the most common communication language; the large number of journals are published in Aquaculture and fisheries disciplines, while very few journals are published in zoology, biology, ecology and environmental science disciplines respectively. It is found that the majority of journals were published during the year 2002–2011.

Sharing via scientific collaboration networks | American Institute of Physics

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 02:12 AM PDT

" ... With the widespread availability of photocopy machines, authors could replicate this process arbitrarily; readers could also make personal copies from the volume of the journals held by their institutional library. Such replication at modest levels is typically viewed by scholarly publishers as manifestations of the "fair use" provisions under US copyright law (Sect. 107) and similar international equivalents. Most scholarly publishers are comfortable with such sharing practices as long as they don't encroach upon the boundaries of fair use, such as repackaging articles for resale, or, in the case of some publishers, posting the publisher's final version on widely available institutional websites. The practice of article sharing became a much simpler task with online publishing—a simple keystroke can send copies to thousands of readers. A new tool that has appeared over the last decade has made the practice of article sharing even simpler and more useful for the researcher—the advent of article sharing networks. The best known of these networks are very successful start-ups in terms of the number of users, ResearchGate (6 million members) and Academia.edu (30 million monthly visitors). These networks solicit researchers to establish collaboration networks and give users capabilities to upload versions of their articles to be shared with user-defined collaboration groups and, in some cases, members of the public. These networks are becoming an increasingly popular means of article sharing and represent the latest incarnation of this important means of researcher collaboration. For this reason the scholarly publication community needs to support this new venture, but in a way that allows the practice to evolve as a useful tool without undue harm to the enterprise that published the article ..."

Berkeley Law - Clinic News--New Guide Helps Authors Get Book Rights Back from Publishers

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 02:08 AM PDT

"The iconic image of a writer pecking away at an old typewriter is as quaint as the rotary phone. The digital age enables writers to write when and where they choose, and it has also revolutionized publishing. There are more ways to publish a book than ever before: e-books with enhanced interactivity, print on demand, video adaptations, and so on. But many authors can't take advantage of these new technologies—their hands are tied because they've handed over their copyrights to publishers. Writers can feel trapped by contracts signed before electronic publishing was so ubiquitous. Take Nobel Laureate Dr. Harold Varmus, an author of over 300 scientific papers and five books. He wanted to offer a free electronic version of his memoir. It seemed easy; it was his book, after all. But he was blocked—he'd given his publisher exclusive rights. Even writers who don't want an electronic copy often regret giving up their rights once their books fall out of print or sales drop. Varmus renegotiated his contract terms with help from the Authors Alliance, a nonprofit formed just one year ago by four UC Berkeley scholars: Social Sciences Dean and History Professor Carla Hesse, University Librarian Thomas Leonard, and Law Professors Molly Van Houweling and Pamela Samuelson ... Writers with literary agents may find it less daunting to negotiate with publishers, but it can be intimidating to do alone. So the alliance is producing a new self-help guide to empower authors to do just that. 'Understanding Rights Reversion,' co-authored by students at Berkeley Law's Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, will be out this month. It's the first guide of its kind, according to Brianna Schofield '12, a research and policy fellow who supervised the project ..."

Preserving Our Intellectual Legacies in the Digital Age- Eventbrite

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 02:04 AM PDT

"Scholars are often so busy with current research projects and other matters that we don't think about how best to preserve our intellectual legacies. But it is worth asking: Will future generations of scholars appreciate our contributions after our books go out of print? Or when the physical bookshelves on which they are stored must compete with virtual bookshelves, full of new electronic resources that are more easily discovered and accessed online? How can authors avoid the prospect of intellectual oblivion in the digital age?   Authors concerned with these questions have formed the nonprofit Authors Alliance to help formulate answers. Join us for a conversation about overcoming legal, technical, and institutional obstacles to the preservation of our intellectual legacies. Topics will include the process of reclaiming copyrights from publishers, the role of fair use in preserving works, and the potential of open access publishing to make and keep works accessible to readers ..."

Humanities seminar to explore the production and politics of knowledge

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 01:54 AM PDT

"Coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web's public debut, Rice University's Humanities Research Center is hosting a 2015-16 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures. Titled "Platforms of Knowledge in a Wide Web of Worlds: Production, Participation and Politics," the seminar's organizers are bringing two speakers to campus this month to acquaint and engage the Rice community with the topic.  With its main activities — lectures and workshops — to take place during the upcoming academic year, the seminar will examine the proliferation of digital knowledge platforms such as Google, Wikipedia, edX and Coursera to understand their impact on culture and academia, said Farès el-Dahdah, center director and professor of humanities. He is leading the seminar together with Melissa Bailar, center associate director and professor in the practice of humanities, and Lisa Spiro, Fondren Library executive director of digital scholarship services. The seminar was made possible through a $175,000 award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation ... To kick off the exploration of these issues, the center is hosting talks by two internationally renowned scholars of media and information studies: Siegfried Zielinski, a German media theorist and the chair for Media Theory: Archaeology and Variantology of the Media at Berlin University of the Arts, and Christopher Kelty, an associate professor in the departments of Information Studies and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and a former member of Rice's Anthropology Department. Co-hosted by the English Department and the Center for Critical and Cultural Theory ... "

Open Access and Beyond Open Access at CERN Library

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 01:44 AM PDT

Use the link to access the presentation.

Walt at Random » Blog Archive » The Open Access Landscape: 6. Chemistry

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 01:33 AM PDT

"Chemistry as a subject doesn't seem to require much clarification (noting that most biochem ended up in Biology). This subject includes 136 OA journals that published 12,258 articles in 2013 and almost exactly the same number (12,429) in 2014 ..."

For Hardware Makers, Sharing Their Secrets Is Now Part of the Business Plan - NYTimes.com

Posted: 05 Apr 2015 01:29 AM PDT

"Facebook showed plans last week for drone aircraft that beam lasers conveying high-speed data to remote parts of the world. As powerful as that sounds, Facebook already has something that could be even more potent: a huge sharing of its once-proprietary information, the kind of thing that would bring a traditional Silicon Valley patent lawyer to tears. Facebook is not alone. Technology for big computers, electric cars and high-technology microcontrollers to operate things like power tools and engines is now given away. These ideas used to be valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. To the new generation of technologists, however, moving projects and data fast overrides the value of making everything in secret ... Facebook has already shared designs for data storage, computer servers and rack designs, among other hardware, Mr. Parikh said, and has seen rapid improvements as a result.  Rather than just building and testing a handful of designs, Facebook gets to see dozens of variations that individuals and companies manufacture inexpensively. They often contract with prototype makers over marketplaces like the Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, or they may even use three-dimensional printers ..."
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