OATP primary |
- Issue 3: Open Data and Data Re-use - Europeana Professional
- Raising the bar for national language open access journals
- Shifting the Scientific Culture toward Transparency: ARL Signs onto Guidelines to Improve Research and Publishing Practices | Association of Research Libraries® | ARL®
- Why are librarians hesitant to CANCEL ALL THE JOURNALS? – Confessions of a Science Librarian
- Determining our Tech | Library Babel Fish | InsideHigherEd
- Understanding librarianship, serials, and open access | Gavia Libraria
- Guidelines Promote Transparency, Honesty in Science | InsideHigherEd
- More open access to AJP articles
- Whatever You Call It -- Open Journalism, Social Media Journalism, Open-Source Intelligence -- It's Going Mainstream | Techdirt
- “When Publishers Aren’t Getting It Done” (or, an exercise in masochism) — Medium
- Are Startups the Future of Scholarly Publishing? (Part 2) | RedLink
- Making science accessible – moving beyond open-access [FoAM]
| Issue 3: Open Data and Data Re-use - Europeana Professional Posted: 28 Jun 2015 01:28 AM PDT "Open data and data re-use are nothing new to the EuropeanaTech community. Opening up data and building platforms that allow for interoperability, research, annotation, community engagement and creative re-use are cornerstones for Europeana and the EuropeanaTech community. With this issue of EuropeanaTech Insight, we're happy to highlight several different examples of the extremely positive things that can happen when data and content are opened up. From IIIF and its numerous add-ons making the sharing of images, metadata and annotations easier than ever for research and memory institutions, to the future of watching and interacting with broadcast television, open data provides seemingly endless opportunities to enrich daily life. These examples are a call to arms for all data providers out there. Rich and open data is the lifeblood for projects like these. We hope the following articles inspire you and serve as examples of what is being done in the EuropeanaTech Community. Feel free to leave examples of your own projects below or get in touch with us to share your work ..." |
| Raising the bar for national language open access journals Posted: 28 Jun 2015 01:25 AM PDT "Open access is the dominant publishing model of scientific journals edited in Latin America (LA). Most of them typically publish national authors. As a result, the region has become the most dynamic region for open access journals publishing. In fact, while the United States and Eastern Europe publish less than 15% of their research via open access journals. By contrast, in Latin America, this figure is greater than 25%, as per data indexed by the Web of Sciences or Scopus bibliometric databases. The success of open access in the region is due to the support provided by the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) scholarly communication programme, in operation for the past 17 years. During that time, SciELO has progressively networked journal collections—typically operated at national level—from 11 LA countrie together with journal collections from Portugal, Spain (limited to health sciences journals) and South Africa. Altogether, the network represents about 1,000 journals and over 500 thousand articles. It is therefore one of the most important and comprehensive international cooperation initiative in open access. Considering that each participating country contributes with financial and infrastructure resources so all the research contents are freely available, SciELO contributes to a regional boon and the global common good. To achieve this, it relies on a methodology, combined with technology , which enables the online indexing, preservation, publishing and interoperation of peer-reviewed journals. It follows basic and common principles such as open access, decentralised operation and funding, common standards to maximise interoperability, quality control, performance evaluation and the strengthening of the editorial independence and transparency. The selection of journals to be indexed in each collection is carried out under the supervision of a national advisory committee, following pre-established criteria. The adoption of a SciELO-like integrated and networked approach to run not-for-profit and independent quality journals by other regions and countries—particularly in the developed ones—faces barriers mainly at the political level. Indeed, it requires research agencies' commitment and leadership to build authoritative, sustainable and transparent managerial and funding models ..." |
| Posted: 28 Jun 2015 01:15 AM PDT "Transparency and reproducibility are cornerstones of how science creates knowledge. Evidence for scientific claims should be shared openly so others can evaluate, question, replicate, or extend scientific studies. When evidence cannot be reproduced independently, then it should not be accepted as credible evidence. Despite their importance, transparency and reproducibility are not often rewarded. Lack of transparency reduces the credibility of published results, which in turn undercuts the efficient and effective use of funding to support scientific advancement. To improve research transparency, the scientific community is undertaking a series of reforms. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is expressing its commitment to the principles of transparency in scientific research and is joining this effort to reform research and publishing practices. Today in Science Magazine, the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) Committee has published the TOP Guidelines, a set of author guidelines that journals can adopt to enhance the transparency of the research they publish. These guidelines represent a concrete and actionable strategy toward improving research and publishing practices. Already, 111 journals and 34 organizations, including ARL, have expressed support for the principles of transparency and openness and have pledged to consider adopting them within the next year. ARL joins a broad coalition across scientific disciplines including societies such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Geophysical Union, and the Association for Psychological Science ..." |
| Why are librarians hesitant to CANCEL ALL THE JOURNALS? – Confessions of a Science Librarian Posted: 28 Jun 2015 01:03 AM PDT "There's lots of discussion out there right now in the twitter and blog world concerning Bjorn Brembs' call to librarians to jumpstart the mass migration to Open Access by essentially unilaterally cancelling all the journals they subscribe to. This act would force the hands of all the various players in the ecosystem to immediately figure out how to make Open Access work. Which is a great idea. I actually kind of mused about this sort of scenario a while back in a post called An Open Access thought experiment. Except what I wasn't smart enough or brave enough to do was imagine a scenario where it was librarians themselves who up and cancelled all the journals rather than it just happening. Why would that be? Well, I think it's safe to say that librarians don't feel they have the power to unilaterally cancel all their institution's subscriptions without some fearsome retribution either from within the institution itself or from elements of the publishing world. Recently the University of Montreal's library cancelled a big deal and seem to have gotten good support internally. So that's hopeful. By the same token, the SUNY Potsdam library's cancellation of the American Chemical Society a few years back seems to have had strong support internally. It was externally that the blowback happened. So that's both good news and bad news. Most recently the situation at Brock University in Ontario is an interesting example of what librarians fear will be the outcome of any large-scale cancellation exercise. The Brock library cancelled the Wiley big deal package, with what they thought was internal support. But a firestorm ensued with ultimately the Brock Faculty Association filing an internal grievance to force the administration to fund the library at the level necessary to subscribe to the journals. The grievance has since been dropped, leaving it to the Senate to pick up the pieces, but the implication is clear. Librarians: Act boldly at your own risk. Of course, it's not that simple ..." |
| Determining our Tech | Library Babel Fish | InsideHigherEd Posted: 28 Jun 2015 12:59 AM PDT "I'm a sucker for optimism. That's one of the reasons I liked David Weinberger's recent essay in The Atlantic in which he first describes how the internet has been "paved over" by data-sucking giant corporate interests and then explores how we can still have an internet that reflects and embodies its original ideals – a place where people can share ideas, build their own stuff, and participate in open culture. You can use the paved-over internet or you can "feel the loam between your toes." A lot of people who didn't know where to start got online only when a paved road was presented to them along with a click-through agreement to surrender their content and privacy. But there are parts of the internet that aren't commercialized, that do allow people to tend their own gardens still. The giants have the benefit of network effects – Google and Facebook are so big their very size exerts a kind of gravitational pull, and where pull isn't enough they can simply buy their potential competitors to absorb or kill them. But our confidence in them has been shaken by the reverberations of the Snowden revelations. People who have felt helpless about their identities being exploited whenever they use a popular service are now feeling angry as well. That irritation can be fanned into fury as terms of service change with little warning and the platforms that have become our surrogate memories and social gathering places become high-handed about what we can see and whether we can have the stuff we contribute. Of course, this metaphor of paving and gardening reminds me of libraries and how (with the collusion of the scholars we serve) we have entrusted our scholarly record to giant corporations which lobby for stricter rules about sharing and are busy buying up the smaller fry and now even trying to invade our institutional repositories. In 2013, more than half of scholarly papers published were the intellectual property of five corporations. In the social sciences, that number is a whopping 70 percent. These companies make tidy profit margins – between 30 and 40 percent, largely riding on the demands made on libraries to provide All the Things and the desperation of academics to exchange their research findings for reputational crumbs. We have choices, but they are not simple ones. Nobody forces you to be on Facebook. I'm not, but I have the luxury of connecting with my family by alternate means and enough money and a smidgen of tech skills to run my own website – and no great need to attract attention to it because I have a job. Still, I miss seeing a lot of family news and family members have to go through extra steps to share news and pictures with a grumpy Facebook refusenik. Nobody forces you to publish with journals owned by the big five, unless you're seeking grants or a steady job and can't afford to go against the grain. Again, I have a job and nothing much to prove - so it's up to me to make it possible for those with less security to make their work accessible and open. Recently Björn Brems suggested that librarians should simply cancel all subscriptions to fix this problem. On Twitter Mike Taylor predicted that things would sort themselves out within three months of the mass die-off of subscription journals. Of course, that ignores the likely fallout: librarians would be fired and possibly arraigned on charges of collusion, the budgets they had devoted to subscriptions would not be reallocated to supporting institutional repositories or any other way of sharing information, and the many scholars who email colleagues for the PDFs they no longer could access would find out their colleagues couldn't access them, either. Three months for the establishment of a new and better system seems a bit optimistic and based on some serious misconceptions, such as that the scholarly record Is safely preserved in LOCKSS and that somehow the copyrights publishers hold to that material will suddenly be irrelevant as publishers implode. Remember that the majority of books published in the 20th century live in copyright limbo? Yeah. Canceling subscriptions en masse won't fix that problem ..." |
| Understanding librarianship, serials, and open access | Gavia Libraria Posted: 28 Jun 2015 12:53 AM PDT "Kent Anderson works for a scholarly publisher. So does Peter Binfield. Phil Davis is a researcher. So is Martin Eve. Why is it so hard for certain portions of the open-access movement to assimilate that libraries and librarians are not monolithic with respect to open access (or, indeed, much of anything else) either? To be sure, some of the answer to that question is 'unconsidered privilege.' Librarianship is a feminized profession; that has profound social consequences vis-à-vis voice and silencing as well as political capital and lack of same. It is hardly coincidence that the loudest voices either spouting absolute nonsense about libraries and scholarly communication or erasing libraries' contributions to open access altogether have been—universally, as best the Loon can tell—white men. The Loon can name names if need be. Per her usual practice, she would vastly prefer not to. Anyone can learn, however. To that end, some suggestions for places to learn about the complex world of libraries, electronic-resource management (as libraries term it), and open access ..." |
| Guidelines Promote Transparency, Honesty in Science | InsideHigherEd Posted: 28 Jun 2015 12:47 AM PDT "Scholars affiliated with the Center for Open Science, a nonprofit, have published in Science a set of guidelines designed to encourage transparency, accuracy and honesty in journal publications. The guidelines, already attracting support from many journals, feature eight standards and then three levels of commitment for each one, with the goal being that journals that may not be able to adopt all standards at the top level can still do more to promote transparency, which in turn encourages further studies that either reproduce or challenge findings." |
| More open access to AJP articles Posted: 28 Jun 2015 12:44 AM PDT "If you are a meticulous reader of the online version of AJP, you might have noticed some subtle changes during the past few months. The online version is accessed through the Scitation web site,1 where each article is marked using a small icon with the abbreviation F, OA, S, or T. These symbols are defined in the right-hand column and designate the content as either Free, Open Access, Subscribed, or free Trial. Until the end of last year, all content in AJP was labeled S, meaning that non-subscribers could access it only by paying a $30-per-article fee. Most colleges and universities are subscribers to AJP—or at least they should be2—and these subscriptions are typically verified via IP addresses so that access is automatically available on any computer at the institution. Alternatively, nearly all members of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) receive personal online subscriptions to AJP as part of their membership and can therefore log in to view AJP articles. However, in January of this year AJP published its very first open-access article. This article, which discusses an alternative approach to Kirchoff's laws for circuits,3 is published under a Creative Commons (CC-BY) license4 and is freely available via Scitation to anyone on the internet. We are now offering this open-access option to all authors of full-length papers at a per-article cost to the authors (or to their institutions or funding agencies) of $2200, which offsets a portion of our expenses. More recently, two additional sets of authors have taken advantage of this new option, providing open access to last month's cover article on the physics behind the wormhole visualization in the movie Interstellar,5 and a forthcoming article on biomedical imaging and optical microscopy.6 Like most physics journals, AJP already had a so-called green open-access policy, in that we allow authors to post their articles on their own web sites and on e-print servers such as arXiv.7 More precisely, our standard copyright agreement8 allows authors to post copies of their author-prepared manuscripts on e-print servers and to post either author-prepared or final, published versions of their papers on their own (or their institutions') web sites. Based on a quick, informal sample, however, it appears that most AJP authors do not take advantage of this opportunity. Fewer than half of the articles in last month's issue are available on arXiv, and fewer still are posted on the authors' web sites ..." |
| Posted: 28 Jun 2015 12:40 AM PDT "We've written a couple of times about the use of publicly-available information, typically posted on social networks, to verify developing stories where traditional sources are scarce or unreliable. This new field doesn't seem to have a fixed name yet -- open journalism, social media journalism, open-source intelligence are all used -- but whatever it is, it's clearly going mainstream, as this announcement on the YouTube blog of The First Draft Coalition makes clear: 'You could say that user-generated news video is today's 'first draft' of capturing an event that took place. But when it comes to incorporating this content into the reporting of a news event, verification is a critical step for any newsroom -- and not every journalist knows where to start. So we're bringing together a group of thought leaders and pioneers in social media journalism to create educational resources on how to verify eyewitness media, and how to consider the ethics of using it in news reporting. This new group, called The First Draft Coalition, will consist of experts from Eyewitness Media Hub, Storyful, Bellingcat, First Look Media's Reported.ly, Meedan, Emergent, SAM Desk, and Verification Junkie. The Coalition will develop and program a new site for verification and ethics training, tools, research, and, most importantly, case studies around the biggest news stories of the moment.' As the post explains, The First Draft Coalition will be launching its own site later this year, but you can get a taste of the kind of thing it will be doing from examples on Medium. There's an article there by Eliot Higgins from Bellingcat, whom we wrote about last year, and who is widely regarded as one of the leading exponents of the art. His post is well-worth reading ..." |
| “When Publishers Aren’t Getting It Done” (or, an exercise in masochism) — Medium Posted: 28 Jun 2015 12:33 AM PDT "What do scholarly communication initiatives such as protocols.io, The Winnower, Altmetric, and Open Library of Humanities have in common? And how about ventures such as Ubiquity Press, Open Access Key (OAK), Hypothes.is, Science Exchange, Dryad, PubPeer, Authorea, Center for Open Science (COS), Scalar, and Publons? Not sure? Well, not only do they represent new innovations in scholarly communication, but they also share the distinction of being launched independently of existing publishers. In fact, research by Kramer and Bosman clearly shows that driving forces in publishing innovation are not publisher led — at least not by existing publishers. (To chart this changing landscape in scholarly communication, Kramer and Bosman are currently running a survey to learn more, which I highly recommend you take part in.) Which brings me to the crux of this post: To share the dynamic, sometimes humorous, definitely charged and energizing discussion that took place around this topic at the recent annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) in Denver. Kevin Hawkins and I framed a panel session titled 'When Publishers Aren't Getting it Done' (no doubt a title worthy of a masochism award at a publishers meeting!), and I then invited a lively group of scholar-led innovators to be a part of our panel ..." |
| Are Startups the Future of Scholarly Publishing? (Part 2) | RedLink Posted: 28 Jun 2015 12:27 AM PDT "In our previous blog, we explained how startups are changing the dynamics of scholarly publishing. In the second part of this post, we explain how academic publishing is further advancing through startups. Funding We are usually exposed to the methods and procedures of research, however, we often forget that funding is also a component in which many face challenges. However, impressive startups have solutions to these obstacles. Startups such as PetriDish.org and Experiment, using the concept of crowdfunding, bring in funds for research by networking with graduate students and other scholars. Accommodating Open Access Open access has been gaining acceptance among many publishers and institutions. In order to supplement the rise of open access, startups have been pivotal to the process. However, while having many benefits, open access has its own set of challenges as well. For example, many publishers cite the lack of control over online work. To provide a solution, Scholastica integrates the entire publishing process online and even provides incentives to help open access scholars. Knowledge Unlatched, PeerJ, PubMed, Open Book Publishers, Uniquity Press, Public Library of Sciences, and the OAPEN discovery programmes are some impressive startups that are actively accommodating the specific needs as well as challenges of open access publishers. Becoming Social In our previous blog, we have emphasized about scholarly publishing becoming more social. As the need for social media becomes more commonplace, it is also interesting to realize that startups emphasizing in social networking are rapidly rising in the scholarly publishing industry. Startups such as Learning Catalytics, Mendeley, and Amplify have been acquired by major publishers. As new publishing models and digital distribution gain further acceptance, the need for scholarly collaboration through social platforms is inevitable. Overall, startups are playing a vital role for scholarly publishers. Regardless of the publishing model and organization, challenges are always part of the process. The rise of startups in providing solutions for these challenges prove that they are necessary for the future of academic publishing. We are excited to see the role of startups in the industry by providing new solutions, increasing opportunities, and advancing academic publishing." |
| Making science accessible – moving beyond open-access [FoAM] Posted: 28 Jun 2015 12:23 AM PDT " ... We're witnessing a rise of open-access science publishing, where tax-funded research is gradually becoming more available to the people who paid for it – and it is probable that one day all public-funded research will be made open access. While this is fantastic progress, there will undoubtedly still be real problems with the accessibility of scientific research articles – many people don't even know these articles exist, and even if they do know the articles exist they may not know where to find them. Once someone does know where to find the research articles, there is still the challenge of knowing how to judge the reliability of the source, and how to interpret the work when it is usually written in a painfully unreadable jargon-filled style. Popular media often adds to the confusion by presenting science research in sensationalised forms, making it even harder to judge what is reliable information. Mistrust of scientists due to real or perceived biases and ethical issues (like the source of their funding, scientific fraud, and events like Climategate) also contribute to the difficulty in working out what to believe ..." |
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