Sunday, October 18, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

How do you access data on poverty? | Open Data

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 02:36 AM PDT

"End Poverty Day tomorrow comes among heightened discussion about poverty's causes, its measurement and what we can do to end it.    The international extreme poverty line has been updated to $1.90/day, the recent Global Monitoring Report projects that the number of people living below this line will fall below 10% this year, and the Bank has just announced it's stepping up efforts to boost data collection in the poorest countries, many of which suffer from 'data deprivation' ..."

Testing the boundaries of Open Access | City University London

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 02:33 AM PDT

"Professor Cameron Neylon will deliver the 2015 #citylis International Open Access Week Lecture, at 5:30pm on 22nd October. He is Professor of Research Communication at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University and an advocate of open research practice who has always worked in interdisciplinary areas of research. The lecture, which will be held in the Birley Lecture Theatre, R101 (Franklin Building) is organised by the Centre for Information Science and will be chaired by Lecturer in Library Science, Dr Ernesto Priego. It is a strongly held view that efforts to adopt and require Open Access and Open Data in 21st Century research enterprise, mark a return to the 17th Century values lying at the root of the development of modern scholarship. If this is indeed the case, why has the acceptance of Open Access and Open Data been so difficult? Have these 17th Century values been lost or sacrificed in order to make a limited case for the importance of academic scholarship? Or is there something more fundamentally wrong with the academic community? ..."

Open Access Week mixer on 10/20: What can open access do for you? | OSU Libraries | Oregon State University

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 02:30 AM PDT

"Open Access Week is an annual celebration of open access publishing and the drive to make knowledge freely available. The OSU Libraries and Press is hosting an event on Tuesday, October 20, 5-6:30 p.m. in the Forum space on the second floor of the Learning Innovation Center. If you're considering an academic or research career, come and hear what you should know about open access. OSU faculty and a graduate student will discuss why they choose to make their research available open access and how open access contributes to their success as researchers. The panel will be followed by a Q and A and hors d'oeuvres ..."

Open Access: The good, the bad and the unknown | Queen's Gazette | Queen's University

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 02:29 AM PDT

"To mark Open Access Week (Oct. 19-15) University Research Services and the Queen's University Library are hosting a special panel discussion entitled 'Open Access: What it is, what it means for you and why you should care' ..."

Open Access @ SDSU | SDSU Library and Information Access

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 02:28 AM PDT

"In recognition of this weeklong event, the library is launching our Open Access Research Guide, and has scheduled two workshops within its Digital Scholarship Series focusing on two different open movements. Click here to register – or just show up with your RedID!  And in the meantime, watch a 'Open Access Explained!' video on YouTube (8 min 23 sec)."

Open Access Publishing Services | Linguistics in Open Access

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 02:26 AM PDT

"Open access publishing is often said to be the future of academic journals, but the actual move from a subscription model to an open access model is not easily achieved. An important step towards fair open access has recently been taken by a number of editors, along with the Radboud University, resulting in the Linguistics in Open Access foundation (LingOA). The aim of this foundation is to provide a platform for linguistic journals to make the move from the traditional subscription model to an open access one. Several international linguistics journals, including Laboratory Phonology and the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics, are currently moving from their traditional publisher to a new open access publisher, along with their entire editorial staff, authors, and peer reviewers. LingOA facilitates this radical move by paying for the Article Processing Charges (APCs) of the articles published in these journals during the next five years. The journals will be published by Ubiquity Press, with the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) as a long-term sustainability partner ..."

Are learned societies an endangered species? | Research Consulting : Research Consultancy UK, Rob Johnson, Consultancy Services, Research Systems Strategy, Business Process Analysis and Redesign, Research Information Management, Research Performance Reporting, Supporting the transition to Open Access Publishing, Support for the sectors of Higher Education, Healthcare, Academic Publishing

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 02:22 AM PDT

"Earlier this year, Research Consulting carried out an analysis on the financial health of UK learned societies, and of their reliance on publishing revenues. The analysis was part of a broader study commissioned by Universities UK's Open Access Co-ordination Group that collected data and generated indicators to better understand how the transition to open access (OA) in the UK is impacting on the publishing and research environments. The main contribution of our work has thus been in developing a baseline position against which future changes to the financial health of learned societies can be monitored ..."

Monitoring the Transition to Open Access: A report for the Universities UK Open Access Co-ordination Group

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 02:21 AM PDT

"This study was commissioned in response to a recommendation of the Finch Group in its second report in 2013 that reliable indicators should be gathered on key features of the transition to open access (OA) in the UK. The findings presented here are thus a first attempt at generating such indicators covering five sets of issues: � OA options available to authors: the numbers of fully-OA and hybrid journals, along with issues such as the level of article processing charges (APCs), the availability of CC-BY and other licences, and the length of embargo periods � Accessibility: authors' take-up of OA options: the numbers - and the proportions of the overall population – of articles accessible on OA terms via different routes � Usage: the levels of usage of OA articles as compared to those that are not accessible on OA terms � Financial sustainability for universities: the amounts paid by UK universities in subscriptions and in APCs; and � Financial sustainability for learned societies: the overall income and expenditure – as well as the volumes of journal-related income and expenditure – of UK learned societies which have some publishing income. There are of course other issues highly relevant to the monitoring of progress towards OA, including such matters as the quality of services provided by publishers to authors and readers; and we hope that these will be addressed in subsequent studies. We are aware that the data we have been able to gather presents a number of challenges to which we draw attention in the body of this report. We make some recommendations that could lead to improvements in the quality of the data; and we are also aware that in subsequent exercises, improvements could be made in the methodologies we have adopted. Hence we have tried to be both clear and cautious in presenting our findings, which we summarise below."

Conference “Open Science – Benefits for Researchers in the 21th Century” - University of Latvia

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 02:15 AM PDT

"The conference invites the staff of scientific institutions, research project managers and coordinators, PhD students, science policy makers, librarians and other interested parties. The aim of this conference is to promote comprehension of the concept of Open Science and related challenges and advantages; as well as promoting comprehension of the recommendations of the European Commission regarding the management of scientific data un digitalization. The plenary session of the conference includes topics about open and joint research as a driver of more rapid and wider innovation; topics about the policy and practice of open access; topics on the essential question for Latvian scientific society – the possibilities and solutions of open access in Latvia and, more broadly, in Europe. The second half of conference will include three concurrent work seminars disscussing the exchange of expierence and  best practice. Conference is organized by the UL, the Riga Technical University and the National Libarary of Latvia. The sizable event will take place at the National Library of Latvia. Additional information and full program of the conference is available at the National open access service website ..."

The Missing Link to Open Educational Resources: A Search Engine | EdSurge News

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 02:13 AM PDT

"Andrew Carnegie believed 'There is not such a cradle of democracy upon the earth as a free public library, this republic of letters, where neither rank, office nor wealth receives the slightest consideration.' To actualize this belief, he donated over $60 million to build 1,689 public libraries in the U.S. in the beginning of the 20th century. His money built the structures while the communities furnished the books and committed money to maintain the facilities. The coupling of public libraries with public education provided robust opportunities and access to an organized collection of free resources. The 21st century equivalent of libraries is the Internet – a huge, free digital repository of knowledge. But the same connection to public education has not been developed. A teacher could spend hours fruitlessly searching the internet trying to find useable videos, lessons, or resources because content on the internet isn't labeled using a common educational nomenclature. My school district, Mineola UFSD, on Long Island, is in its fifth year of an 1:1 iPad initiative. As our use of instructional technology has increased, so has our awareness of the need for engaging digital content tied to the Common Core standards. We quickly realized that, while the materials we wanted may exist, we couldn't find them – so we decided to create our own. Last year Mineola UFSD hired professional videographers to create high-quality educational videos. The goal was for our teachers to create a warehouse of lessons that could be shared among and between buildings and grades. All of these videos can be found on Mineola's website; I created a video on longitude and latitude ..."

Research in Centre for Studies in Science Policy: Angus Deaton: "High quality and transparent data needed for informed debates"

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 02:02 AM PDT

"I am thrilled to have been awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2015. I am even more thrilled that the Nobel committee highlighted the work that my collaborators and I have done on India. My work shows how important it is that independent researchers have access to data, so that government statistics can be checked, and so that the democratic debate within India can be informed by the different interpretations of different scholars. High quality, open, transparent and uncensored data are needed to support democracy. I have used data from India's famous National Sample Surveys to measure poverty. Perhaps the biggest threat to these measures is that there is an enormous discrepancy between the National Accounts Statistics (NAS) and the surveys. The surveys "find" less consumption than do the national accounts, whose measures also grow more rapidly. While I am sure that part of the problem lies with the surveys — as more people spend more on a wider variety of things, the total is harder to capture — there are weaknesses on the NAS side too, and I have been distressed over the years that critics of the surveys have got a lot more attention than critics of the growth measures. Perhaps no one wants to risk a change that will diminish India's spectacular (at least as measured) rate of growth? We need better work resolving this issue. Without it, we cannot be sure what is happening to either poverty or inequality in India today. Measures that should be known and indisputable become instead the subject of bitter partisan debates. Poverty is more than the lack of money and my work with Jean Dreze has documented the improving, but still dreadful, state of nutrition in India ..."

Google’s Digital Library Wins Court of Appeals Ruling - The New York Times

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 01:53 AM PDT

"A United States appeals court ruled on Friday that Google's effort to build a digital library of millions of books was 'fair use' and did not infringe on the copyrights of authors. 'The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals,' Judge Pierre N. Leval of the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote, explaining the court's decision. The ruling affirmed a decision that was reached two years ago in a lower court. In that case, the court rejected the claims by the Authors Guild, a writers' organization, that Google's book scanning project is a commercial venture that violates authors' copyrights and drives down sales by making portions of their work available online free ..."

The anatomy of ‘predatory’ journals revealed

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 01:51 AM PDT

"A study into the rise of so-called predatory journals has revealed a lot more about the phenomenon than was previously understood, reports the Times Higher Education. Predatory journals represent the darker side of academic publishing. These are publications that will charge authors large sums of money in exchange for quick publication and little (or no) peer review. The research has confirmed the extent to which these journals have grown in use. The number of articles published in predatory scholarly journal publishing has risen almost eight-fold in the past four years. According to 'Predatory' Open Access: A Longitudinal Study of Article Volumes and Market Characteristics, more than 420,000 articles were hurled into the public domain by these journals last year, compared to 53,000 in 2010. This is mirrored in the increase in the number of journals themselves – 1,800 in 2010 and 8,000 by 2014. More than a third (34.7%) of authors using this fast-track route to publication are Indian academics, claims the report, and a quarter come from other areas in Asia. 16.4% were from Africa, 9.2% from North America and 8.8% in Europe. Another characteristic of predatory journals is that the most popular topic is engineering, followed by biomedicine, social science, business and economics. The report also illustrated that the process from submission to publication in predatory journals takes an average of 2.7 months, substantially faster than the nine to 18 months in normal academic journals. This shady practice has sprung up alongside the open access movement and at times the lines have been blurred between the two. Some open access journals are described as 'predatory' in nature due to inadequate checks and speedy publishing ..."

Wikipedians Reach Out to Academics | biotechin.asia

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 01:49 AM PDT

"Wikipedia is one of the most widely accessed online data resources, popular for its open access and openly editable content. And yet for this same reason, its adoption by scholars and scientists has been limited. In a community where peer-review forms an invaluable part of the scientific publication process, Wikipedia's collaborative editing policy has less reach. However, harnessing the expertise of scientists would undeniably benefit the website's scientific content, as evidenced by bio-wiki databases such as the Sanger Institute's Pfam and Rfam , or the now offline PDBWiki, all of which are biological data repositories that can be user-annotated through Wikipedia. In an attempt to bridge the gap between Wikipedia and the scientific community, volunteer editors of the website hosted the Wikipedia Science Conference at London last month, to reach out to academics and 'open-up' the scientific process ..."

KU Libraries announce recipient of 2nd annual open access award | Libraries

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 01:48 AM PDT

"KU Libraries are pleased to announce Dr. John Symons as the 2015 recipient of the Shulenburger Award for Innovation & Advocacy in Scholarly Communication. Granted annually, the Shulenburger award recognizes KU staff, faculty, students and academic departments that demonstrate outstanding efforts to facilitate open access by creating channels for public communication between scholars and community members across the globe. Former KU Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor David Shulenburger, a longtime advocate for open access, established the award with a private gift in 2014 to recognize exceptional advocacy and innovation in the scholarly communication system. Multiple strong nominations were received; however, the committee noted Symons' commitment to both international and local open access efforts as evidence that Symons is a worthy recipient of this year's honor. The current chair of the Department of Philosophy, Symons' work demonstrates remarkable commitment, fostering a culture of openness by pioneering open access opportunities into the humanities ..."

Open Access Publishing, academic research and scholarly communication: Online Information Review: Vol 39, No 5

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 01:47 AM PDT

[Abstract] Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the difference between Open Access and accessibility, to argue that accessibility is the most crucial feature, and to suggest some ways in which Open Access militates against accessibility. Design/methodology/approach – Analysis of best practice by journals and monograph publishers is used to highlight the degree to which accessibility is enhanced by input from readers and editors. The expense of this, both real and hidden, is shown to be compatible only with difficulty with publishing methods where keeping costs low is essential, and Open Access alternatives that make available manuscripts "as submitted" are shown to make available less accessible scholarship. Findings – Scholarship is markedly improved by referees and editors; the emphasis needs to be put on making available the most accessible scholarship, not on making more scholarship available. Practical implications – Journals and publishers should concentrate on, and research councils and similar bodies insist upon, ensuring high quality critical review and editing, not cost-free access. Originality/value – The debate on Open Access has put its emphasis in the wrong place. Rather than easier access to more scholarship, increased resource devoted to pre-publication review, revision and editing is the most important development to ensure the greatest advances in research and scholarship.

Minneapolis, Catholics and the Openness Revolution – M. Fioretti

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 01:28 AM PDT

"I have participated at the 2013 UST Law Journal Symposium in Minneapolis, with a paper on the relationships between p2p/Open{standards, software, education, manufacturing…} and Catholic Social Doctrine. The paper has been published in the 2013 issue of the Journal and from May 2014 is available online on the School website, titled Catholic Social Doctrine And the Openness Revolution: Natural Travel Companions? These are the slides of my talk at the Symposium, which anticipated and summarized the paper ..."

Our Response To The White House's Request For Comments On Its Intellectual Property Enforcement Strategy | Techdirt

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 01:26 AM PDT

"Last month, we noted that the new IP Enforcement Coordinator, Danny Marti, is now accepting comments for the administration's next 'Joint Strategic Plan on Intellectual Property Enforcement' plan. While I know it's easy to roll your eyes at participating in these things, in years past we sent in comments and were pleasantly surprised to see the resulting plan actually take many of those comments into account, and turn out to be something that was mostly reasonable. We do have some concerns about Marti, given that the comments he's made to date seem to reflect a very... one-sided view of copyright enforcement. However, we're hopeful that he's open to evidence and reason. Below are the comments that we're submitting, much of which was based on the Carrot & Stick research report we released last week. If you'd like to submit your own comments, all the details are here. The deadline is today, October 16th ..."

Open Access, The Next Wave | CCC's Beyond the Book

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 01:23 AM PDT

"The Next Wave of Open Access is coming on fast. Scholarly publishing must move beyond a single-issue focus on Article Processing Charges to address end-to-end solutions that engage authors throughout the workflow. At a Frankfurt Book Fair panel discussion organized earlier today by Copyright Clearance Center, authors, publishers, funders, and institutional representatives and publishers gathered  for a hard look at the important — and often unexpected — challenges of riding the OA wave. A particular focus examined how the shift toward authors is giving rise to new concerns for publishers who must provide value-added services that attract and retain the highest quality contributors ..."

Open Access Special: Making An Asset of Compliance and Reporting | CCC's Beyond the Book

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 01:21 AM PDT

"The Next Wave of Open Access is coming on fast. Scholarly publishing must move beyond a single-issue focus on Article Processing Charges to address end-to-end solutions that engage authors throughout the workflow. To maintain a robust and transparent Open Access publishing program, publishers juggle many compliance and reporting responsibilities. VAT compliance, funder compliance, and institutional reporting are the source of many sleepless nights for publishers. But does it have to be this way? At a Frankfurt Book Fair panel discussion organized by Copyright Clearance Center, participants noted that effective, efficient compliance and reporting can be important drivers in establishing strong institutional and funder relationships ..."

Google's massive book-scanning project legal

Posted: 18 Oct 2015 01:18 AM PDT

"It's legal under copyright law for Google to scan millions of books and make snippets of them searchable online, a U.S. appeals court ruled Friday. The ruling is part of a  decade-long, bitter battle between authors and publishers on one side and researchers and Google on the other. Google, whose parent company is  known as Alphabet, began its book-scanning project in 2004. The scanned volumes are searchable online but only in snippets. Google's argument has been those snippets are legal under the 'fair use' provisions of U.S. copyright law, which allows limited use of copyrighted material without the permission of the rights' holders. It's the same legal use that allows reviewers to quote from books without paying for the privilege. The Authors Guild and several individual writers sued Google in 2005, arguing Google's scans illegally deprived them of revenue from their writings. Google responded to author complaints by saying the ability to search books would not harm authors but help them by aiding readers in finding and choosing to buy volumes they might not have otherwise. Friday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York unanimously agreed with Google ..."
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