Wednesday, April 8, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Overview of OSTP Responses

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 09:54 AM PDT

"This chart is based on a crowd-sourced open Google Spreadsheet that consolidates guidlines from federal agencies as a result of the Whitehouse's Office of Science and Technology Policy's (OSTP) 2013 statement. The chart is an overview of each agency's compliance with policies that are intended to '[open] goverment data resources' by working towards public access for all research outputs supported by federal funding (Process Toward Opening Data Government Resources. The White House, 16 Aug. 2013. Web.). The chart was built using the DCC model for providing an overview of funders' data policies. More information can be found in the links below. This document will continue to evolve and version as contributors complete the Google Spreadsheet 'OSTP Responses'."

OpenCon 2015 Details Announced! | OpenCon

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 03:26 AM PDT

"Today 11 organizations representing the next generation of scholars, researchers, and academic professionals announced OpenCon 2015: Empowering the Next Generation to Advance Open Access, Open Education and Open Data. Slated for November 14-16 in Brussels, Belgium, the event will bring together students and early career academic professionals from across the world to learn about the issues, develop critical skills, and return home ready to catalyze action toward a more open system for sharing the world's information — from scholarly and scientific research, to educational materials, to digital data. Hosted by the Right to Research Coalition and SPARC, OpenCon 2015 builds on the success of the first-ever OpenCon meeting last year which convened 115 students and early career academic professionals from 39 countries in Washington, DC.  More than 80% of these participants received full travel scholarships, provided by sponsorships from leading organizations, including the Max Planck Society, eLife, PLOS, and more than 20 universities ..."

Rutgers-Camden students laud open source textbook recommendation | NJ.com

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 03:21 AM PDT

A group of Rutgers-Camden students are celebrating what they see as a huge step toward the university offering an alternative to traditional -- and traditionally expensive -- textbooks. The University Senate Student Affairs Committee has issued a recommendation to Rutgers President Robert Barchi to promote the use of open source textbooks -- which would be free for online use, or in print at a reduced cost. The university senate report proposes creating a competitive grant program awarding faculty members who convert their assigned readings to open source books. The report, approved by the committee on March 27, comes amid a campaign led by members of the Rutgers-Camden chapter of the New Jersey Public Interest Research Group, trying to raise awareness of open source libraries at other colleges across the U.S. 

All that glitters : Nature News & Comment

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 03:18 AM PDT

"In 2012, the United Kingdom took a bold leap on open-access publishing, announcing that all research articles produced by its publicly funded scientists should be made free to read. A fine pledge, but three years on, it has experienced some practical difficulties. It is instructive to examine them ... Many nations have not set open-access policies. Others, including the United States, are loitering with little intent, and mandating only delayed access to an author's version of a peer-reviewed manuscript — a 'green' form of open access that ultimately benefits science less (see Nature 494, 401; 2013). RCUK favours a mixed model, but one that gradually migrates towards gold. A review of its progress, published in March, serves as a useful guide and should be examined by funders, publishers and institutions (see go.nature.com/tz2orl).  One problem is that it is hard to track progress, good or bad. RCUK and many British institutions cannot systematically count RCUK-funded papers, let alone those published as open access. As a result, RCUK, although strongly confident, cannot be entirely sure whether the £17-million (US$25-million) open-access fund it gave to universities in 2013–14 has produced the desired result of at least 45% of its funded papers being either green or gold open access.  This underlines the need for researchers to use the ORCID system, a single digital identifier for individuals that links their published papers and grant applications. Use of FundRef, a service from non-profit publisher alliance CrossRef for reporting funding sources, is also essential ... Open-access licences are another major source of confusion. The London-based biomedical charity the Wellcome Trust, which has long mandated gold open access and provides the funds to cover it, reported last month that it now sees 87% compliance with its policy — but that only 66% of papers are accompanied by a liberal publishing licence that allows extensive reuse of text. Licence information, it says, is often ambiguous or contradictory, and records for open-access payments can be lost between authors and publishers.  RCUK says that the licence problem is compounded by researchers not understanding which licence they need to use to comply with the open-access policy, and by publishers offering a range of 'open' licences. (Since January, all 18 open-access journals owned by Nature Publishing Group have switched to using the fully liberal CC-BY 4.0 licence as a default, and to charging a flat fee.) And then there are costs. All experiments should be encouraged in the evolving gold open-access market, but academics should know that fees for papers published in fully open-access journals are lower than those of 'hybrid' subscription journals that allow an open-access option. The Wellcome Trust says that the average fee levied by hybrid journals is 64% higher than that charged by fully open-access titles. British funders are now pondering steering the market by dissuading researchers from publishing in hybrid journals, as other countries have done ..."

Using Wikipedia: a scholar redraws academic lines by including it in his syllabus

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 03:13 AM PDT

" ... Most professors mention the website as "that place that you are not allowed to cite in your research papers". This mini-lesson is hammered into the head of every freshman, sophomore, junior and senior. Yet, Wikipedia remains a popular resource for both students and professors when they need immediate access to specific bits of information that fall outside of their areas of knowledge. Wikipedia is the #6 most accessed website in the world, and the only nonprofit site in the bunch. In essence, we have a love-hate relationship with Wikipedia in higher education. In my classes, however, I've been experimenting for the past six years with how we might move beyond this narrow, schizophrenic approach to one of the most popular educational resources online. And what I've found is that my students are excited by the idea of engaging with this part of the internet that is otherwise deemed 'off-limits' in their courses ... I teach our required course in sociological theory - something, admittedly, most students dread ... First the students individually draw a card from a 'deck of social theorists' I've constructed to reveal the name and photograph of the sociologist they'll be researching for the project. While they're welcome to exchange their card with someone else, or even draw again, I find that most stick with the one they've drawn originally.  Students then review their adopted theorist's page and begin the process of upgrading the information in a way that reflects research practices that meet the standards of what we might consider acceptable in academia ..."

5 Million Public Domain Ebooks in HathiTrust: What Does This Mean? | The Scholarly Kitchen

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 03:09 AM PDT

"A week or so ago, a monumental thing happened: the number of public-domain books in the HathiTrust digital repository topped 5 million. And since no one (including HathiTrust, so far) seems to be making a very big deal about this, it seems like a good moment both to recap the achievements of HathiTrust and to consider a few of its implications for the future of reading and scholarship. For those unfamiliar with the outlines of its history, HathiTrust emerged in the wake of the Google Books Library Project, a massive and still ongoing program of book digitization that Google undertook in 2004 in cooperation with some of the most comprehensive research libraries in North America and the UK. The basic outlines of the agreement between Google and each library were simple: in return for allowing Google's employees to come in and (non-destructively) scan most or all of the books in the library's collection, the library would receive a digital copy of the resulting set of text images. This meant that when Google had finished its scanning project in a library and departed, the library was left with a full digital copy of its collection (or of the subset scanned by Google, anyway)—a copy which had cost the library nothing except the inconvenience of having Google underfoot for a year or so. Copyright law being what it is—for better or for worse—this was a project that brought a few legal issues to the surface, among them the question of what the library could do with the digital copies that resulted from this project. These various legal questions have been (and to some degree continue to be) addressed in the course of several lawsuits, and some of those have been discussed in the Scholarly Kitchen already and in many other places as well. I'm not going to replow that ground here. But one issue does seem now to be settled: one thing the Google partner libraries could do was get together and use the images resulting from that project to create an enormous, centrally managed, and robustly archived library of digitized books. That library now numbers over 13 million titles, most of which are in copyright and therefore not freely available for online reading. Instead, these can be used for research: if you need to figure out what terms appear in which books (and how often), you can use HathiTrust to do so; having identified the books that are of interest to you, you can then pursue full access to them by some other means. Other kinds of research are possible as well, within constraints designed to maximize access without crossing legal lines. Whether those lines are placed where they should be is an important and vexed question, which I won't pursue here. Instead, I want to address some of the implications of Google's project for access to an incredibly rich and varied treasure trove of books and other documents that are in the public domain. Until quite recently, these books were largely hidden from the public by their imprisonment in physical objects ..."

NIST Releases Public Access Plan: Agency will Partner with NIH to use PMC Platform | SPARC

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 03:05 AM PDT

"NIST Releases Public Access Plan: Agency will Partner with NIH to use PMC Platform Heather Joseph, Executive Director, SPARC The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released its plan for policies ensuring public access to articles and data resulting from its funded research, as required by the February 2013 White House directive, laying out a strong framework for a comprehensive approach to ensure access and productive reuse of NIST-funded research outputs ..."

NASA drives future discoveries with new ISS information system

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 03:01 AM PDT

"A new NASA-designed information system will drive discoveries as scientists and researchers devise future investigations to be conducted aboard the International Space Station. Specialists at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, gathered critical information on the agency's physical science research to create Physical Science Informatics, a knowledge base that will give investigators access to information on previous space station research to boost future research. The space station is an orbiting laboratory providing an ideal facility to conduct long-duration investigations in a microgravity environment. The platform allows continuous and interactive research similar to Earth-based laboratories, including key hardware for conducting investigations ... Funded by the International Space Station Program, the Physical Science Informatics puts information on past, current and future space station physical science investigations in one digital repository making it easy for investigators to find out what's been done so far in research areas and devise where to go next ..."

Using data visualization to make open data work

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 02:58 AM PDT

"The DATA Act legislation means that federal agencies need to make their data open to the public: government leaders, watchdog groups, journalists, and citizen activists are demanding accountability and transparency. Everyone wants accountability into budget expenditures and mission success, and no one has a tolerance for fraud or inefficiency. This presents challenges for agencies that struggle to keep up with their data, much less share it publicly in a way that's timely and easy-to-use. Thanks to data visualization software, such goals are easily in reach. While cumbersome spreadsheet tools tax the patience and eyesight of virtually everyone, data analysis software is designed with people in mind. The strengths and weaknesses of our visual processing systems inform every aspect of the software—using color, font size, page architecture, etc.—to make the viewing experience intuitive and pleasant, not painful. Here are some specific ways data visualization can help share federal data in a transparent and accountable way ..."

Open data group steps up from Health Datapalooza

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 02:48 AM PDT

" ... In his first few months since starting as executive director of the Health Data Consortium, Chris Boone has taken the group known mainly for staging the Health Datapalooza happenings into the realm of serious Capitol Hill lobbying. But Boone, 35 -- a former health IT consultant and executive with a specialty in informatics and a former member of the federal Health IT Policy Committee -- doesn't want to call it lobbying, even though the consortium hired a registered lobbyist in 2014, Lauren Ellis. 'We want to educate folks,' Boone, who joined the consortium in October, told SearchHealthIT. "We represent the intersection of health data and policy, the policy that drives innovation ..."

China must restructure its academic incentives to curb research fraud | South China Morning Post

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 02:42 AM PDT

" ... While many countries have tried to broaden their assessment system to assess a researcher's impact in a more balanced way, in China, the only method of judging researchers is by the number of publications they have in ranked journals. Unfortunately, that means money is changing hands in huge amounts, with hundreds of thousands of yuan spent to get a single publication in the top journals. This focus on one metric above all others has led to large-scale gaming of the system and a black market of plagiarism, not to mention invented research and fake journals. On the heels of previous exposés of an "academic bazaar" system where authorship can be bought, Scientific American uncovered in December a wider and more systematic network of Chinese "paper mills" that produce ghostwritten papers and grant applications to order. The article linked the problem to a hacking of the peer-review system, which is supposed to protect the quality and integrity of the research. The major first fallout took place last week, with the publisher BioMed Central retracting 43 papers for peer-review fraud, the biggest mass retraction carried out for this reason to date. The number of papers retracted for this reason increased by nearly 50 per cent. Many other major publishers have been implicated, with the publisher of the world's largest journal, Public Library of Science (PLOS), also issuing a statement that it is investigating linked submissions ..."

Accelerating materials discovery with world's largest database of elastic properties | (e) Science News

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 01:59 AM PDT

"Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have published the world's largest set of data on the complete elastic properties of inorganic compounds, increasing by an order of magnitude the number of compounds for which such data exists. This new data set is expected to be a boon to materials scientists working on developing new materials where mechanical properties are important, such as for hard coatings, or stiff materials for cars and airplanes. While there is previously published experimental data for approximately a few hundred inorganic compounds, Berkeley Lab scientists, using the infrastructure of the Materials Project, have calculated the complete elastic properties for 1,181 inorganic compounds, with dozens more being added every week. Their research was recently published in the open-access Nature Publishing Group journal Scientific Data, in a paper titled, 'Charting the complete elastic properties of inorganic crystalline compounds.' The two lead authors are Berkeley Lab scientists Maarten de Jong and Wei Chen. Co-authors include Kristin Persson, Mark Asta, Thomas Angsten, and Anubhav Jain of Berkeley Lab as well as collaborators from UC San Diego, Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology, Duke University, and MIT ..."

about | semazon

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 01:54 AM PDT

"Semazon is an International Web Portal created by LISaV-ISLaV (International Semiotics Laboratory Venice) and by IAVS-AISV for sharing, spreading, reviewing and discussing semiotic publications and similia. An updated research observatory on semiotics, as a joint action platform designed to promote documentation and deepening of the publishing industry in this area. Semazon offers the state of the art of theoretical and analytical studies in semiotics. On Semazon you can personally upload extracts from books and journal issues; you can broadcast audio and/or video on presentations or lectures referred to; you can flag up and find the best retailers, libraries and online catalogues. The aim, within a fervent and fruitful dialogue between research groups, is a renewed interest in relevant readings, solicited through exchanges and critical reflections on the documents uploaded. With a suspense that makes you want the hard copy output. The scientific nature of the project is provided by a network of Universities and Publishers, by a prestigious Board, which includes the directors of the best journals and book series in semiotics all over the world, and by a Steering Committee composed of young community leaders and formed to build a Portal that addresses the most important, current or critical topics and matters."

Dismantling the Stumbling Blocks that Impede Researchers’ Access to E-Resources | The Scholarly Kitchen

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 01:50 AM PDT

" ... One important dynamic, which is all too frequently ignored, is that content providers operate in the systems ecosystem of the licensing academic library. This ecosystem incorporates a number of services and intermediaries, and, for all the creativity that has gone into it, it nevertheless has real weaknesses. Content providers have been challenged to integrate their offerings as seamlessly into this ecosystem as would benefit researchers. In a recent Ithaka S+R issue brief, I wrote about some of the various stumbling blocks that off-campus users, especially, experience in using licensed e-resources. Even for common research workflows, when off campus, researchers can be required to click through seven or more webpages in order to gain access to an article or book that they have already discovered. Similarly, mobile devices all too often are poorly served by site design and the web apps that have been created for them, surprising given that libraries want to invest in mobile solutions and the strategic opportunities they face to incorporate the sensors and services that these devices offer. These challenges can be found across the range of content providers, libraries, and various intermediary services, and collectively I believe they are driving users away from licensed e-resources and towards open access materials ..."

NeuroDojo: How much harm is done by predatory journals?

Posted: 08 Apr 2015 01:28 AM PDT

" ... To listen to some of these, you could be forgiven for thinking that publishing a paper in one of these journals is practically academic miscondusct: a career-ending, unrecoverable event. I talk to a lot of working scientists, both online and in person. And in all of that time, how many scientists have I heard of who have reported someone who submitted to one of these journals, who were not satisfied with their experience? Three. One experience is described in two posts (here and here), and a couple of others were tweeted at me when I asked for examples. And two were "my friend" stories, not personal accounts. For the amount of handwringing over predatory publishers, this is a vanishingly small number. Of course, these numbers are probably underreported, because nobody wants to admit that they published in a junk journal. It's like admitting you got taken in by an email from someone claiming to be a Nigerian prince. It's embarrassing to admit when you should have known better ... Assuming that the author has not gone into great financial hardship, let's say the paper is published online, but without proper peer review. What are the possible outcomes, and what harms might arise?  If the paper is competent, the author could harmed because people will not read the paper because of the journal. But the paper is available for other researchers can use it and cite it if they so choose. People cite non-reviewed stuff all the time (conference abstracts, non journal articles) ... Another argument is that the harm of publishing in predatory journals is that the public or the unwary will be confused, because the findings could be untrue. Let's examine a few scenarios of how findings could be false. The research was not done well. This is no different from research published in other journals ... The researchers are malicious. It is possible that someone with an agenda might try to give dubious information some sort of veneer of respectability by publishing it in a predatory journal. But... why? There are many easier ways for people with an agenda to spread lies than publishing in a crummy journal ..."
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