Friday, October 23, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Everywhere and Anytime, Here and Now: Digital and Residential Education at Harvard

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 06:34 AM PDT

"Since the founding of edX and HarvardX in 2012, Harvard has made substantial investments in online learning in order to advance three goals: [1] Expanding access to knowledge, [2] Improving teaching and learning on campus, [3] Advancing our understanding of how people learn. These goals reflect our mission as a research university: to create and disseminate knowledge and to educate talented students from around the world...."

Small steps-big-opportunities-brussels-open-access-week-2015-kramer-b…

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:29 AM PDT

"Presentation on 'Innovations in scholarly communication' for Open Access 2015 meeting, Brussels, October 21, 2015. Slides in pdf format."

U of M’s Open Textbook Network reports student savings of $1.5 million from open textbooks | Discover | University of Minnesota

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:28 AM PDT

"Faculty from nine colleges and universities across the United States have saved their students an estimated $1.5 million in textbook costs to date by adopting open textbooks, the University of Minnesota's Open Textbook Network (OTN) reported this week.  The OTN, created and run by leaders at the U of M's College of Education and Human Development, is an alliance of schools committed to improving access, affordability and academic success through use of the open textbooks.  Open textbooks are funded, published and licensed to be free for students or available in print for a low cost. The U's Open Textbook Library lists nearly 200 open textbooks in a number of subject areas.  The average U.S. college student will be asked to spend more than $1,200 on books and supplies this year, according to the College Board. Research has shown that the cost of textbooks has increased over 1,000 percent since 1977, and this high cost can have a significant negative impact on student learning.  The $1.5 million in student savings was reported by nine early OTN members, including California Polytechnic State University–San Luis Obispo, Cleveland State University, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities, Ohio State University, Purdue University, University of Arizona, University of Minnesota, University of Northwestern St. Paul, and University of Oklahoma. Most of these savings were realized within the last year.  Over the past year, the Open Textbook Network has grown from seven to more than 25 members. In sum, these members represent 84 institutions nationwide ..."

US Senate proposes bill to make college textbooks more affordable | The Daily Orange – The Independent Student Newspaper of Syracuse, New York

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:26 AM PDT

"A new bill proposed in the U.S. Senate aims to make college textbooks more affordable. The Affordable College Textbook Act, which has been proposed by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Al Franken (D-MN), would allow all universities, ranging from community colleges to private institutions, to provide students with textbook content online and free of charge. It is estimated that in the last decade, the cost of college textbooks has risen about 82 percent, and there is no stabilization in sight, according to an Inquisitr article. The cost of textbooks constantly fluctuates because textbooks cannot be used over several years, since the information they contain needs to be updated, and there is a cost attached to each updated edition of a textbook, according to Inquisitr ..."

Innovation in science, technology to solve global challenges: Daejeon Declaration

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:26 AM PDT

"The Daejeon Declaration was adopted at the OECD Ministerial Meeting Daejeon 2015 on Oct. 21. The declaration presents a future policy direction for the development of science and technology around the globe over the next 10 years ..."

After Schock scandal, House curtails wasteful spending with disclosure and open data - Sunlight Foundation Blog

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:24 AM PDT

"This morning, the House Committee on Administration moved forward with new rules on how members of Congress spend taxpayer dollars on auto mileage, air travel, office decoration and more. The resolution requires more detailed disclosure on travel spending and makes it more difficult for members to spend lavishly on office decor or chartered travel. The changes emerged from a task force led by Rep. Rodney Davis, R-Ill., and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., set up by the committee in response to excesses by former Rep. Aaron Schock. Perhaps most importantly, the committee has committed to releasing house expenditure reports as open data. This represents a huge leap forward from the current system of difficult to parse PDF documents that should make it easier for journalists, watchdogs and lawmakers themselves to identify potentially inappropriate spending patterns ..."

California Building Open Data Portal for Green Government

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:23 AM PDT

"California's growing collection of open data websites has another addition: a portal focused on all things about green government. A beta of the GreenGov open data portal was launched ahead of the Innovation Code-a-Thon this weekend on Oct. 24-25. The $25,000 contest at the Ziggurat building in West Sacramento is sponsored by the Department of General Services, GovOps and several other departments and companies. A prize pool of $25,000 is up for grabs, funded through 2014 legislation from Assemblymember Mike Gatto, D-Glendale, creating a total of three innovation contests. This weekend's hackathon will challenge participants to develop apps and tools that improve government sustainability, via the 'Green Gov Challenge.' So far, the GreenGov transparency portal offers data sets on topics such as the location of alternative fuel stations, source-level greenhouse gas emissions, state building sustainability metrics, California water district and special district boundaries, purchase order extract data, and more. The California Department of Technology said it provided project management, infrastructure and geospatial services on development of the GreenGov portal. The California Health and Human Services Agency, Board of Equalization and Franchise Tax Board are among the state entities now offering data their own open websites. The Center for Digital Government, operated by TechWire's parent company e.Republic, is one of the sponsors for this weekend's code-a-thon contest."

Papers in economics ‘not reproducible’ | Times Higher Education

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:21 AM PDT

"At least half of papers in economics are not reproducible, a new analysis has found, suggesting that the 'reproducibility crisis' in academia is not confined to lab sciences. Researchers from the United States Federal Reserve and the Department of the Treasury tried to replicate the results from 67 papers across 13 prestigious journals, but even after contacting authors when necessary, they were successful in only 49 per cent of cases where the data were not confidential and the researchers had the right software to analyse it. 'We assert that economics research is usually not replicable,' the paper concludes. The findings feed into broader concerns that academics are engaging in statistical sleights of hand, not being open with data and failing to control their own biases in order to get career-boosting positive results in top journals. Last week, two studies reported that scientists doing experiments with animals were often failing to use well-known techniques – for example blinding themselves to which animals were receiving what drug – to mitigate their biases, and therefore potentially exaggerating the impact of new treatments. But this new study highlights that the problem of reproducibility might not be confined to the lab. According to the paper, the main reason for being unable to replicate findings was an inability to find the right data or the computer code that produced the original results, even after contacting the authors. Code was missing crucial functions, or certain variables were absent from the data, the paper says ..."

Catalpa International - software and design for the developing world

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:20 AM PDT

"On 26 September, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop announced a new Australian Aid Program initiative in Timor-Leste aimed at tackling chronic undernutrition and anaemia in women and children. Catalpa International is proud to be one of the implementing partners. The initiative is supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's (DFAT) innovationXchange, created in March 2015 to support innovation across the Australian aid program. In Timor-Leste 50 per cent of children under five years are stunted, an indicator of long term nutritional deprivation. Children who are stunted have a greater risk of illness, impaired cognitive development and lower educational attainment. Sixty two percent of children under 5 years are anaemic; classified as a 'severe public health problem' by the World Health Organisation. Catalpa is excited to be working with DFAT to address this challenge by focusing on the application of new technologies to better coordinate implementing partners. Catalpa will focus on making the monitoring and evaluation processes more efficient while helping partners to better target their development resources and activities. A core component of the intervention is the development and implementation of a shared online monitoring platform using Catalpa's Openly open data platform. The technology will allow development partners to better measure the impact of their work as well as measure change in the nutritional status of women and children ..."

UNISA Open data and information: opportunities and challenges for records profession - Open Access Week

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:18 AM PDT

"Open data and information: opportunities and challenges for records profession."

Give public access to Congressional research reports | TheHill

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:17 AM PDT

"American taxpayers spend more than $100 million a year supporting the work of the Congressional Research Service.  Their findings, reports and analysis should be public information.  It is good public policy to allow educators, students, members of the news media and everyday citizens access to CRS' non-partisan taxpayer-funded reports.  This issue is bipartisan and we hope will attract the interest of the new Speaker of the House and the new Librarian of Congress.  By providing public access to CRS reports, we can elevate our national discourse and make it easier for citizens to cut through the misinformation that too often pollutes the national debate.  The American taxpayer deserves access to the same objective and nonpartisan CRS analyses on which we rely as Members of Congress.  What is good for Congress should be good for the general public ..."

What impact does open access have on healthcare? - On Health

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:16 AM PDT

"Access to research evidence is essential for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) health staff to be able to make the best-informed decisions in field programmes. MSF has a central library service, but emailing requests for articles across timezones does not provide quick answers when these are needed. Open access publishing is the best solution to this predicament. Likewise, the research that MSF conducts should be accessible by the populations where MSF works – the vast majority of which are in low or middle income countries affected by conflict, natural disaster or lack of access to health care ... MSF recognises this need and an analysis of MSF research publications showed that open access journals are the most popular choice for our organisation. In addition, we have an open repositorythat contains over 1800 MSF-authored studies, protocols and research resources ... To help keep MSF field staff (and anyone interested in global health research) up to date, we produce a weekly roundup of relevant global health articles by MSF and non-MSF authors. We also highlight these on our Twitter account @MSFsci.  We use the global reach of Twitter to help engage our field teams in other ways, most notably by our monthly Twitter journal clubs ..."

Managing Open Access Journals using OJS - Open Access Week

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:13 AM PDT

"As indicated before, ASSAf is in the process of rolling out Open Journal Systems (OJS) for the hosting of SciELO SA journals In need of a web site and online journal management system. These journals will be digitally preserved via Portico. The following two journals are part of the pilot, and a third one will be following soon:  South African Crime Quarterly Potchefstroom Electronic Law Journal  We are currently in the process of training journal editors and other role players. The main page for ASSA journals is http://journals.assaf.org.za/  ..."

Archivalia: ++ GW has a repository ++ ++ #icanhazpdf New to Open Access

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 03:12 AM PDT

[From Google's English]  "As yesterday http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/1022483474/ I take today along news about the Open Access Week in brief ..."

MLA : Publications : Call for Proposals: Scholarly Communications

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:45 AM PDT

"The MLA Books Panel seeks to publish a comprehensive overview of scholarly communications in the life and health sciences for librarians and biomedical professionals. The publication will define scholarly communications in the twenty-first century through discussion of current concepts and state of the art. It will also review the history of the field and examine the forces that have caused it to radically change in the last two decades, and explore future developments and emerging technologies and practices. Areas of focus for chapters include ..."

Open Access Week: Overcoming Obstacles: Associations Now

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:44 AM PDT

"To mark Open Access Week, here's a look at how some associations are embracing the movement and pushing it forward, while some are a little more hesitant about the shift toward open content. The open-access movement is getting some special attention this week during International Open Access Week ..."

Open Access Is a Human Rights Issue | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:42 AM PDT

"A BBC article has been making the rounds this week about #icanhazpdf, a 'secret codeword' that people use to access research papers from limited-access journals. The idea is simple: when researchers—or, for that matter, curious readers—find a reference to an article that they can't access, they post a request on Twitter. After someone with access sees the request and sends the paper over, the asker deletes the tweet so that it doesn't arouse any future suspicion. The hashtag might be new, but it's hardly a new practice. Indeed, a lot of people take for granted that when they need a paper, there's someone in their network with access to the right online database to retrieve it. The BBC suggests that the hashtag encourages copyright infringement. Biologist and open science advocate Michael Eisen noted that one could just as easily say the opposite: it's the researchers who publish in paywalled journals that encourage infringement. Let's not portray casual sharing as more heroic than it is, though. A network of friends with institutional connections is not a luxury that everyone has. Emailing papers doesn't fix a system in which the most cutting-edge knowledge is only available to a few people. If anything, casual sharing of limited-access papers only underscores the problem: limiting access to research keeps knowledge away from people without the same connections and privileges.  Malaria researcher Bart Knols wrote in 2012 about a startling reality in sub-Saharan Africa: while modern treatments for malaria had become very successful in the Western world, those treatments were extremely slow to move to the communities that needed it most. Without access to those medicines, communities were relying too heavily on DDT, which was causing insects' tolerance to the insecticide to skyrocket ... Even among advocates for open access, it's sometimes easy to forget what's really at stake. At its heart, open access isn't an abstract, academic debate. It's a human rights issue. In Knols' words, Can we justify withholding information from those who need it most?' Last week, the trial resumed for Diego Gomez, a student being prosecuted for sharing another researcher's Master's thesis over the Internet (as he put it, 'for ignoring the rigidity of copyright law'), something that thousands of researchers do every day ... There are a lot of complicated questions about the future of academic publishing and how publishers can transform and sustain themselves. But let's always remember the underlying issue: when only people with large budgets or institutional connections can access and use research, it puts many others at a severe disadvantage.  No hashtag can change that ..."

 

10 steps to open access success | Chris Sampson

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:37 AM PDT

"It's Open Access Week! For a lot of people, 'open access' (OA) is a synonym for 'more work'. Advocates often don't appreciate that this is a genuine concern. There's also a lack of appreciation for the perceived risks of sticking your neck out with an OOIDH (open or it didn't happen) position. So here is some advice – based on my own experience – on what you as an individual should do to become an open access author and advocate. No grand commitments, boycotts, costly APCs or threats to your career progression – I promise. Take the following 10 steps in turn and then climb upon your open access advocate high horse. If you do, we'll be 10 steps closer to a genuinely open access world of scholarly publishing ..."

The scientists encouraging online piracy with a secret codeword - BBC News

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:36 AM PDT

"What if you're a scientist looking for the latest published research on a particular subject, but you can't afford to pay for it? In many countries, it's against the law to download copyrighted material without paying for it - whether it's a music track, a movie, or an academic paper. Published research is protected by the same laws, and access is generally restricted to scientists - or institutions - who subscribe to journals. But some scientists argue that their need to access the latest knowledge justifies flouting the law, and they're using a Twitter hashtag to help pirate scientific papers. Andrea Kuszewski, a cognitive scientist and science writer, invented the tag, which uses a code phrase: 'I can haz PDF' - a play on words combining a popular geeky phrase used widely online in a meme involving cat pictures, and a common online file format ..."

Most science research findings are false. Here’s how we can change that - Quartz

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:35 AM PDT

"In the year of its 10th anniversary, the author of the analysis, John Ioannidis, professor of medicine and health research and policy at Stanford University, and his colleague Bob Kaplan, emeritus professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, took questions from the public on Reddit on what can still be done to fix scientific research. Quartz has condensed and edited the highlights of the discussion ..."

Open Access « Network Institute

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:33 AM PDT

"The Network Institute endorses Open Access. To facilitate and stimulate the use of Open Access the institute has its very own open access endorsement program!"

Grant to Develop the Next Generation Wayback Machine | Internet Archive Blogs

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:20 AM PDT

"The Wayback Machine, a service used by millions to access 19 years of the Web's history, is about get an update.  When completed in 2017, the next generation Wayback Machine will have more and better webpages that are easier to find. The Internet Archive, with generous support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF), is re-building the Wayback Machine which currently offers access to 439+ billion Web captures including Web pages, video and images. Today, people's work, and to some extent their lives, are conducted and shared largely online. That means a portion of the world's cultural heritage now resides only on the Web. And we estimate the average life of a Web page is only one hundred days before it is either altered or deleted ..."

Showcasing Europe’s Open Access champions « SPARC Europe

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:18 AM PDT

"SPARC Europe and some of its members would like to announce that it will be showcasing some of Europe's Open Access champions in the coming months. In addition to more Open Access policy implementation in Europe, we believe that continuing to change hearts and minds in our academic communities is important. For this reason, we will be sharing some of the stories of Europe's Open Access champions to stimulate more advocacy in our academic communities: What motivates them? How are they spreading the OA word? What are their challenges? What's their advice to other champions? How do we involve them and keep them engaged, and what makes a good champion? You can expect stories from a range of different types of OA leaders, from Deans to Heads of Dept or Research to administrators from 8 countries ..."

US Senator Brian Schatz on Open Access and Turning Breakthroughs into Businesses - YouTube

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:17 AM PDT

"US Senator Brian Schatz describes why he supports public access to taxpayer-funded research and the importance of Open Access in spurring innovation."

Impact of Social Sciences – What does Academia_edu’s success mean for Open Access? The data-driven world of search engines and social networking

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:15 AM PDT

"With over 36 million visitors each month, the massive popularity of Academia.edu is uncontested. But posting on Academia.edu is far from being ethically and politically equivalent to using an institutional open access repository, argues Gary Hall. Academia.edu's financial rationale rests on exploiting the data flows generated by the academics who use the platform. The open access movement is in danger of being outflanked, if not rendered irrelevant by centralised entities like Academia.edu who can capture, analyse and exploit extremely large amounts of data ..."

All New PLOS Collections! | Research Analysis & Science Policy

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:11 AM PDT

"Today sees the launch of a new platform for PLOS Collections – so what's new and what can it do? The most obvious change is a complete design refresh for both the PLOS Collections homepage and Collection pages themselves. As well as being far more attractive, Collections are now organised primarily by subject area rather than by journal. The reasons for this are twofold: first, feedback from users told us that finding collections by journal was not intuitive and meant scouring lists in the hope of locating a particular collection, so we hope that organising the content by subject will aid discoverability for readers. Second, PLOS Collections are now less frequently focussed on one particular journal; rather we look to use the vast body of research and commentary published across the seven journals and PLOS Currents to provide breadth and depth of content.  Collections can still be found by journal – by visiting the journal homepages and looking under Browse.  Within collections, articles can now be arranged and put into sections in ways to suit that the topic, no longer simply by article type. This means that curators can subsection subjects to assist discoverability, to tell a story or create a timeline by suggesting the order in which the content should be consumed ..."

GSS Open Access Award (GSSOAA) |

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:06 AM PDT

"The Graduate Student Society Open Access Award acknowledges graduate students who have published work in gold open access journals. Our aim is to increase the visibility and prestige of such publications and support the open access movement's ability to effectively disseminate research findings. GSSOAA is jointly administered by the GSS and the SFU Library and will consist of up to six monetary awards of $125.00. Applications will be accepted from October 19th, 2015 to November 6th, 2015 and the award will be announced on November 21st, 2015 in conjunction with OpenCon 2015 Vancouver. For more information about open access publishing, assistance in finding suitable open access publishing venues for your work, and accessing the SFU Library Open Access Fund, please see the Scholarly Publishing and Open Access Guide ..."

EHSLibrary: Creating open access materials is easy!

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:05 AM PDT

"Open access and Open Educational Resources (OER) are hot topics in academia, and have been for several years. Earlier this week, we talked about what these concepts are and an example of how the Library is collaborating with Neuro-ophthalmology experts to create open access content. This post will focus on tools the Eccles Library has used to develop OER (and some that you can use, too)! We all know WordPress as a free, open source blogging platform that is actually used for about 25% of websites! Its open source nature makes WordPress very easy to use and customize! As such, librarians suggested this platform to a Nursing faculty member who wanted to have her students create the textbook for a distance PhD class on conducting research with diverse populations. The result is an OER that can be added to in future semesters, and accessed by students and researchers in the field. It also provides an opportunity for students to publish their work, rather than just writing a paper that will never been seen again once the class is over ..."

Advancing Open Access through Collaboration

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:03 AM PDT

Use the link to access the presentation.

Falvey Memorial Library: Villanova University :: How does Falvey do Open Access? |

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:01 AM PDT

"It's Open Access Week, a time set aside to advocate for access to scholarly research free of price barriers and most copyright and licensing restrictions. In recognition of open access initiatives, Falvey Memorial Library created the SOAR (Scholarship Open Access Reserve) fund. To date, one application to cover an article processing charge (APC) has been granted to a faculty member. A second is pending. The Library has also received inquiries about how we will vet open access journals eligible for APC reimbursement and, more generally, for advice on how to identify high quality open access journals. We'd like to share the answers to these questions more broadly ..."

Towards a transparent and open global scholarly communication system,…

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 02:00 AM PDT

Use a link to access the presentation.

Will Pharma Overreach in the TPPA Create A Movement for Access to Medicines? | Health and Human Rights Journal

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 01:57 AM PDT

" ... Simply put, the TPPA is designed to block the sick and the poor from accessing affordable generic and biosimilar medicines. If the TPPA is ultimately approved by its member nations, it will enshrine a billions-over-millions trade-off: billions of dollars in profits will be made by patent-holding pharmaceutical corporations, and millions of people will needlessly suffer and die. But the legislative bodies of those member nations, including the US Congress, have not yet signed off on the deal. And many are facing significant pressure not to. That pressure provides an historic opportunity for advocates to not just scuttle a bad trade deal, but to elevate the human right to health. As it stands, the TPPA is a weapon of mass destruction. The final terms include multiple provisions that extend both the scope and length of patent protections. For example, the agreement guarantees market exclusivity for patented biologic drugs for at least five years in all TPPA countries, and likely eight years of de facto exclusion of more affordable versions of needed medicine.2 ..."

What Google's Victory Against the Authors Guild Means for Readers and Libraries - The Atlantic

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 01:55 AM PDT

" ... So much has changed on the Internet, in libraries, and with books in the decade since the Authors Guild first filed suit. In 2005, Google was a relatively young search engine—it had only gone public the previous year—looking to expand its horizon beyond the web. Now Google is part of a conglomerate named Alphabet, and Google Books seems very much like an early, vestigial effort among Alphabet's larger body of projects, which includes higher-profile ventures like self-driving cars  ... Ten years ago there were no Kindles, iPads, or postcard-sized smartphones to read on. Now the growth of e-reading is unmistakable. In 2011, 11 percent of Americans read an ebook; in 2014, 27 percent did ... It's now a good time to think about more heterogeneous models and markets for ebooks, including in the discussion not only the Googles and Amazons of the world, but also libraries, which find existing channels and platforms for ebooksless than ideal.  This matches larger trends in digital librarianship ... For those organizations to provide greater access to digitized print books, the United States will have to solve thorny issues about the status of much of what is held in its cultural-heritage institutions. Works from before 1923 are in the public domain, and recent volumes are clearly under copyright. But a large percentage of books between the distant and recent past are in a grey territory where their status is foggy. Their copyright may not have been renewed, and their publishers and authors are long gone. With imperfect records we can't be sure what we can do with these millions of books.  Fortunately, in the U.S., we can also appeal to fair use, an important principle that makes the American system of copyright different from most other countries ..."

"Every week is open access week" - Stuart Lewis, University of Edinburgh | Jisc

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 01:50 AM PDT

"21 October 2015 The University of Edinburgh publishes thousands of articles by thousands of authors every year. So how is it coping with the changing tide towards open access? Stuart Lewis, the university's head of research and learning services and deputy director of library and university collections, describes the ups and downs of open access life at a research-intensive institution ..."

Quiz: Test your open access knowledge - BioMed Central blog

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 01:43 AM PDT

To celebrate Open Access Week 2015, we've put together a quiz for you to find out how much you really know about this form of publishing. Why not see how well you do?

Finding open-access journals on Scopus keeps getting easier

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 01:29 AM PDT

"Over the past five years, the number of open access journals has increased steadily. More than 4,000 of the 22,000+ journals indexed in Scopus are fully open access. But in order for that research to be useful, it needs to be easy to identify. That's why we have created the Open Access Journal Indicator in as part of our efforts to make OA content even more visible. Scopus (@Scopus) is the world's largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature, including scientific journals, books and conference proceedings. It's used for a wide variety of purposes by individual researchers as well as academic institutions and government agencies. Alicia Wise, PhDThis OA Journal Indicator helps researchers who want to search freely accessible text, it shows authors where they might want to publish their work open access, it helps funders track compliance, and it helps librarians who are interested in undertaking a specific analysis of open access journals ..."

The high-stakes online future of open-access science

Posted: 23 Oct 2015 01:27 AM PDT

"The Internet turned academic publishing on its head. With it researchers and journals began opting to publish open access to improve visibility—paywalls be damned. But science can be strangely steadfast in its habits and most research articles are still not free and open to all.  Some argue that may be a good thing while others—such as PLOS One and BioMed Central—think open access is the way of the future. To that end it's the eighth-annual Open Access Week—one to celebrate all thingsopen access in the world of academia. Open access is a new trend in academic publishing where more journals and scientists are opting to make their data free and available to all. Some journals, like PLOS One, are entirely open access, whereas others publish open access on an article-by-article basis.  Generally speaking, publishing open access is meant for the benefit of science overall. It means that researchers looking to deepen their understanding of a particular subject can easily read the literature without having to go through obscenely expensive subscriptions to certain journals. Because open-access articles are published under creative commons licenses, it also means that researchers can create tools to aggregate articles under common themes.  For the layperson, open access also means the average non-scientists can directly interact with the scientific literature—something the U.S. taxpayer may want to do since many studies are government funded. Open access also allows researchers to better their knowledge and understanding: It means doctors have more access to new research ..."
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