Thursday, October 1, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Open - World's first short film on Open Government, Open Data, and Open Source - YouTube

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 04:18 AM PDT

Go to the link to watch: Open - World's first short film on Open Government, Open Data, and Open Source

A short film by: Written and Directed by Richard Pietro https://twitter.com/richardpietro Screenplay by Richard Pietro & Rick Weiss https://twitter.com/RickWeiss Produced by Richard Pietro & Rick Weiss Cinematographers Gord Poon & Mike Donis https://twitter.com/MikeDonis Technical Lead Brian Wong In association with http://clearmedia.ca/ and StoriesWorthSharing https://twitter.com/sws_films

 

Science in the Open » Blog Archive » PolEcon of OA Publishing I: What is it publishers do anyway?

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 04:13 AM PDT

"There is no statement more calculated to make a publisher's blood boil than "Publishers? They just organise peer review" or perhaps "…there's nothing publishers do that couldn't be done cheaper and easier by academics". By the same token there is little that annoys publishing reform activists, or even most academics, more than seeing a huge list of the supposed "services" offered by publishers, most of which seem unfamiliar at best and totally unnecessary, or even counter productive at worst. Much of the disagreement over what scholarly publishing should cost therefore turns on a lack of understanding on both sides. Authors are unaware of much of what publishing actually involves in practice, and in particular how the need for safeguards is changing. Publishers, steeped in the world of how things have been done tend to be unaware of just how ridiculous the process looks from the outside and in defending the whole process are slow, or in some cases actively antagonistic, to opening up a conversation with authors about which steps are really necessary or wanted, and whether or not anything can be easily taken away (or equally added to the mix). And both sides fail to really understand the risks and costs that the other sees in change."

Read the full article for a discussion by Cameron Neylon on publishers and OA advocates, peer review and the OA publishing process.

Open for Collaboration: an introduction to open scholarly comms practices Tickets | Eventbrite

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 04:10 AM PDT

"By: Brunel University London Library Event Description Speakers: Dr Christopher Daley / David Walters (Research Support team, Brunel University London) Carolyn Kirby / Danny Lovatt (Taylor & Francis) Would you like to know more about scholarly publishing and Open Access models? Tune in to this webinar for an overview of the essentials and learn about how publishers, universities and funding bodies are collaborating in this space to help ensure a swift and smooth transition.

To register for this free webinar please click here. When Wednesday, 21 October 2015 from 10:30 to 11:30 (BST)"

Accessible journal publishing, Part 1: HTML | The Lib Pub

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 04:07 AM PDT

"Now that we have our high-level musings on accessible publishing in libraries out of the way (check out the 'accessibility' category to see the previous posts on the topic), I think it's time to start talking about the nitty-gritty. Sure, we all agree that providing accessible digital content is good, but how do we do it? It should be pretty obvious by now that I'm not an expert on the subject, but I've learned a few things that I'd like to share. I'm starting off with what I know best – publishing in HTML – but I'm hoping to also write about accessible publishing in PDF form, as well as accessibility in retrospective journal digitization projects."

Read the full article about using HTML for coding to create the most accessible, readable, reader-friendly versions of information on the web (versus PDFs).

Paperity and Open Library of Humanities Partner to Enhance Discoverability | Paperity Blog

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 02:53 AM PDT

"We're very pleased to announce a partnership between Paperity, the open-access aggregator, and the Open Library of Humanities. This is part of the ongoing commitment to solid discoverability principles for open-access articles at the OLH. Paperity is the first multi-disciplinary aggregator of Open Access journals and papers. It aims to give readers easy and unconstrained access to thousands of journals from hundreds of disciplines, in one central location; to help authors reach their target audience, disseminate discoveries more effectively and maximize research impact; and to raise the exposure of journals, helping editors and publishers boost readership and encourage new submissions. OLH-logoBlue-largeThe Open Library of Humanities is an academic-led, gold open-access publisher with no author-facing charges. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the platform covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium, rather than any kind of author fee."

Read the full article about the new collaboration between OLH and Paperity to increase discoverability of OA.

 

Texbook act aims to relieve debt — Sonoma State Star - The university's student-run newspaper

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 02:42 AM PDT

"The Textbook Affordability Act, or Assembly Bill 798, was passed in the state Senate and Assembly on Sept. 11 and is intended to relieve students of the financial burden of expensive textbooks. The bill is now awaiting to be passed into law with the signature of Gov. Jerry Brown. The bill encourages faculty within the CSU and California community colleges to adopt low-cost textbooks that are available through open educational resources. The Open Educational Resources Adoption Incentive Fund is organized to make textbooks and other necessary materials more affordable for students. This will require faculty and staff to use other resources as well as alternative ways for the instructor to design specific material for each course."

Read the full text of the article to learn more on the progress of this new bill in Congress geared towards lowering the cost of text books for students.

Janssen Signs with Yale Open Data Access | Janssen

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 02:33 AM PDT

"Janssen Research & Development (R&D) signed a first-of-its-kind agreement with Yale School of Medicine's Open Data Access (YODA) Project to facilitate the sharing of clinical trials data aiming to enhance public health and advance science and medicine. The project represents a new standard for responsible, independent clinical data sharing. YODA independently reviews and makes final decisions regarding all requests from investigators and physicians looking to access Janssen's anonymized clinical trials data and clinical study reports. The agreement marked the first time any company has collaborated with a completely independent third party to review and make final decisions regarding every request for clinical data."

Read the full article for further information on this first time agreement working to standardize and faciliate the sharing of clinical trials data for public health.

First Draft of Guidelines for Linguistic Linked Data Generation: WordNets published by Best Practices for Multilingual Linked Open Data Community Group | Best Practices for Multilingual Linked Open Data Community Group

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 02:28 AM PDT

"First Draft of Guidelines for Linguistic Linked Data Generation: WordNets published by Best Practices for Multilingual Linked Open Data Community Group W3C Team |

Posted on: September 29, 2015

On 2015-09-29 the Best Practices for Multilingual Linked Open Data Community Group published the first draft of the following specification: Guidelines for Linguistic Linked Data Generation: WordNets. Participants contribute material to this specification under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA). If you have any questions, please contact the group on their public list: public-bpmlod@w3.org.

Learn more about the Best Practices for Multilingual Linked Open Data Community Group."

An Interview with Peter Suber on Open Access | Not Dead Yet

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 01:03 AM PDT

"Peter Suber is the Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC), Director of the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP), a Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and a J.D., both from Northwestern University, sits on the boards of many groups devoted to open access (OA) and scholarly communication, and has been active in promoting open access for more than a decade through his research, speaking, and writing. His most recent book is Open Access (MIT Press 2012), which Choice named an Outstanding Academic Title for 2013. I had the chance to hear Suber speak about open access here in the library not long ago, and I came away wanting to hear him say more about it. So I asked if I could interview him for this column, and he said yes, and I set up an appointment for the interview and then did a little research about him. By the time I arrived in his office for the interview I was practically tongue-tied, having read the Wikipedia article linked above; his home page; Richard Poynder's 'Open and Shut? 2007 Basement Interviews: Peter Suber' and his 'Open and Shut?' 2013 interview, 'Peter Suber on the State of Open Access: Where are We, What Still Needs to Be Done?;' a brief summary of his book, The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Logic, Law, Omnipotence, and Change (Peter Lang, 1990); and having scanned through the first three pages of his Northwestern University doctoral dissertation, Kierkegaard's Concept of Irony Especially in Relation to Freedom, Personality, and Dialectic (yes, I had access to the entire dissertation through our wonderful e-resources, but a quick scan of those three pages brought me once again the knowledge that, as Lord Peter Wimsey told the Warden of Harriet Vane's Oxford college, 'I have not the philosophic mind,' and I fled fearfully away from further philosophical full-text). I was pretty much terrified of the man's intellect. So I did the only sensible thing: I confessed my trepidation immediately. Peter smiled and put me at my ease quietly. Here are paraphrased summaries of his answers my questions ..."

Impact of Social Sciences – Exploring the publishing model of the Open Library of Humanities: A view from Latin America

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 12:45 AM PDT

"This week marks the launch of the greatly anticipated open access mega-journal, the Open Library of Humanities. Francisco Osorio provides a brief overview of what sets this journal project apart from the rest and how the new funding model offers an economic, social and technological platform for the humanities and social sciences to transition to open access. At the heart of the matter is the forms of communication in humanities and social sciences as distinctive from the natural sciences."

Punching down; In defense of PubPeer | PSBLAB

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 12:42 AM PDT

"Today marked a new low in the depths to which publishing industry will sink to maintain their outdated business model.  I'm talking about a piece of literary detritus entitled 'Vigilante Science' published in Plant Physiology and penned by its editor in chief Michael Blatt. It's a classic punch-down piece from a journal editor having a hard time coming to terms with the death of the publishing industry as we know it. Readers of this op-ed masquerading as serious discourse will rapidly learn that the popular post-publication peer review portal PubPeer (8 Ps – count em!) is a mere "by-product of the social media age". Straight away, he starts out dissing it as side-issue, as opposed to what it really is – a potential solution to a rampant problem foisted on academia by multi-billion dollar publishing corporations (one of which he happens to work for). Readers are then treated to (wait for it…) the two-fold problems with PubPeer…"

Libraries and Consortia in the Context of a Publisher’s Strategy | The Scholarly Kitchen

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 12:39 AM PDT

"I wish to describe a situation that I often come across and then try to explain how it came about. What are its implications for scholarly communications and library consortia in particular, and can we project into the future to think about how this situation could evolve? So here is the situation. Please note that throughout this discussion, I am presenting the case as professional societies see it. I frequently am contacted by these societies to help them with their publishing programs. Most of these societies are in the STM area, but humanists occasionally make that phone call, too. Virtually all of these conversations are about journals, not books or databases. I should add that I am not the only person who gets these calls. There is a whole little industry of consultants who work with professional societies. This is because not-for-profit professional societies often lack experienced business people, so the leadership looks outside when problems arise. The typical phone call goes like this: We are a scientific society that has been around for many years. We are the leading society in our area, though most of our members belong to other societies as well. We publish 3 journals, which are among the best in the field (as measured by Impact Factor). These journals used to throw off a healthy profit, but over the past several years the number of subscribers, both individual and institutional, has been dropping. This is problematic for us because we historically used the journals surplus to fund other activities. For example, we use the surplus to provide subsidies to graduate students to attend our annual conference. The journals are still modestly profitable, but when we look at the trends, we can see that in time they will be losing money. We don't have the resources to subsidize the journals. What should we do? ..."

Publishing PhD papers ‘improves a university’s profile’ | Times Higher Education

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 12:35 AM PDT

"Publishing PhD dissertations on a university's website can help to improve its global reputation for research excellence, an international conference has heard. About half of the 1.36 million downloads of research papers from Dublin City University's (DCU) open-access research portal so far are doctoral theses, explained Lisa Looney, its dean of graduate studies. Speaking at a European University Association event at Imperial College London to mark the launch of FRINDOC, a European Commission-backed project to internationalise doctoral education, Professor Looney said that eight of the 10 most downloaded items were doctoral theses ..."

unglue.it — Guide to Open Access Monograph Publishing is a Free eBook

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 12:34 AM PDT

"This guide has been produced to assist arts, humanities and social sciences researchers in understanding the state of play with regards to open access in the UK and what it means to them as current and future authors of scholarly monographs."

Open peer review could result in better quality of peer review | EurekAlert! Science News

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 12:33 AM PDT

"Whether or not a research article has been peer reviewed openly can seemingly make a difference to the quality of the peer review, according to research carried out by BioMed Central's Research Integrity Group and Frank Dudbridge from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. When two similar journals were compared, articles that underwent an open peer review showed a 5% improvement in the quality of the peer review reports compared to those that underwent a single blind peer review. The study, published in the open access journal BMJ Open, also found that reviewers suggested by authors were more likely to recommend acceptance than those who were chosen through other means. A judgment on the scientific validity of a research paper is usually based on the recommendations of two or more experts in the field who independently assess the scientific claims being made. To investigate the quality of peer review reports under different models, two journals from BioMed Central's BMC series were compared - BMC Infectious Diseases, which operates under the open peer review model and BMC Microbiology, which operates under the single-blind model ..."

Scientist says researchers in immigrant-friendly nations can't use his software | Science/AAAS | News

Posted: 01 Oct 2015 12:26 AM PDT

"A German scientist is revoking the license to his bioinformatics software for researchers working in eight European countries because those countries allow too many immigrants to cross their borders. From 1 October, scientists in Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Denmark—'the countries that together host most of the non-European immigrants'—won't be allowed to use a program called Treefinder, informatician Gangolf Jobb wrote in a statement he posted on his website. Treefinder has been used in hundreds of scientific papers to build phylogenetic trees, diagrams showing the most likely evolutionary relationship of various species, from sequence data. Although the change in the license may be a nuisance for some researchers, the program is far from irreplaceable, several scientists tell ScienceInsider. Treefinder had not been updated for several years and it was mostly used by researchers who had grown used to it, they say. Some pointed to a list of possible alternatives online ..."
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)