Showing posts with label MPAA Wants to Censor OpenCulture's Public Domain Movies | TorrentFreak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label MPAA Wants to Censor OpenCulture's Public Domain Movies | TorrentFreak. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

MPAA Wants to Censor OpenCulture's Public Domain Movies | TorrentFreak


OATP primary

Posted: 18 Jan 2015 07:33 AM PST
"The rapid rise of predatory journals—publications taking large fees without providing robust editorial or publishing services—has created what some have called an age of academic racketeering.1 Predatory journals recruit articles through aggressive marketing and spam emails, promising quick review and open access publication for a price. There is little if any quality control and virtually no transparency about processes and fees. Their motive is financial gain, and they are corrupting the communication of science. Their main victims are institutions and researchers in low and middle income countries, and the time has come to act rather than simply to decry them.
Unfortunately, predatory publishing is often confused with open access publishing, whereby studies are free to all and can be reused for many purposes. Legitimate open access publishing—which has widely benefited scientific communication—uses all the professional and ethical practices associated with the best science publishing. Predatory publishing upholds few if any of the best practices yet demands payment for publishing...."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 04:17 AM PST
This is an editorial in the International Journal of Nursing Knowledge warning about the problems created by predatory publishers.
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 04:12 AM PST
"Lastly, the number of large data sets that opened in health care and the tools to analyze them came of age in 2014. For example, the FDA launched openFDA in June 2014, which made it easier to analyze data about adverse events, drug and medical device recalls, prescription and over the counter product labeling, and to access open source code for analyzing this data."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 04:10 AM PST
"Open access publishing is an area of strategic importance for the scholarly communications process in Durham University, and a requirement of a number of funding bodies including RCUK and the Welcome Trust. Durham University is seeking to appoint a Publications Officer to manage the University's open access publication fund, particularly the open access block grant received from Research Councils UK (RCUK) (£325,000 in 2014-15). The post holder will also be expected to take a leading role in the University's digital humanities strategy and develop innovative ways of promoting and disseminating the University's research outputs.
Reporting to the Academic Liaison Librarian (Research Support), you will be responsible for devising, managing, monitoring, and reviewing all aspects of processes relating to the payment systems for Article Processing Charges (APCs) for Gold Open Access. You will prepare regular analysis and reports on expenditure and make recommendations and decisions on achieving best value for money. You will play a key role in direct communication with individual researchers/authors and publishers to ensure compliance with funding body requirements and relevant University policies. You will work collaboratively with the Library Repository Manager and University Research Office to ensure that research outputs are correctly and efficiently deposited in the University's open access repository, Durham Research Online (DRO) in a way which is compliant with funding body requirements, HEFCE's REF requirements and Durham University's Open Access Policy (http://dro.dur.ac.uk/du_oa_policy_summary.pdf). A key element of this role is direct communication with publishers both in the UK and overseas to ensure maximum exposure to Durham University research."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 03:22 AM PST
"In order to make a start at providing accessibility, here is my humble advice to publishers:
* Publish your XML – the whole point of XML is to allow creation of new formats easily. So if I pay for an article, give me not only the HTML and the PDF, but the XML too.
* Ensure your XML is correct. Mandate automated XML-first pagination from your suppliers to avoid embarrassing errors like that pointed out above.
* Make sure that your licenses allow third parties to use the XML to create new formats, and even encourage them to do so.
* If you are an OA publisher, please don't use the ND versions of CC licenses."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:53 AM PST
Use the link to access the resource list from Arizona State University Libraries.  
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:51 AM PST
"Interest in open access is increasing steadily, and news media are paying more and more attention to the subject. Development of open science in the Netherlands is being followed both nationally and internationally. Open access, research data management and open science are much debated topics among politicians, research funders as well as publishers. What does all this mean for researchers? What should I know when I want to request a research grant? Should I in future make all my data freely available, and how should I do that? Can I go on publishing in my trusted quality journals? What about the cost of open access publishing and data storage? What are the risks and opportunities to my scientific career if I do opt for open access publishing? Would you like an answer to these questions, or do you have questions of your own concerning open access or open science? We sincerely invite you to participate in this symposium."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:48 AM PST
" ... As we enter this brave new world of free and open publishing we will of course encounter unforeseen roadblocks to make this process a bit less smooth than it could otherwise be. The first one of these that I wish to discuss is that of indexing. There is little point in putting a copy of your thesis or a preprint of your paper into an institutional repository if that research cannot be found. At the current time there is no consistent way in which Australian universities warehouse, index and abstract such works. In my own field of organic chemistry the most important information conveyed is the new chemical structures and their transformations. In the current paradigm the main chemical indexing of published papers is a paid service performed by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS). Chemical structures and their reactions are painstakingly extracted and put into a searchable database, including the Registry File which currently contains details of some 91 million chemical substances ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:46 AM PST
"Oncology researcher Dr. Vinay Prasad says he often feels frustrated conducting studies comparing the optimal use of marginally beneficial but expensive cancer drugs. Prasad, based in Washington, D.C., often runs into roadblocks when he makes information requests to drug manufacturers about studies they have conducted or funded. 'Medical science has been hijacked by commercial interests and proponents of new things,' said Prasad, who was so passionate during an interview about the issue that he was nearly yelling into the telephone. 'You consistently get either no answer or an excuse.'Prasad is not alone in his frustration. Data from many clinical trials remain unpublished and unreported long after the investigations are completed. Drug companies often cite the need to protect confidential business information. Of 182,330 clinical trials and observational studies listed on the website maintained by the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health, ClinicalTrials.gov, only 15,899 have posted results. When researchers from the Cochrane Collaboration, which provides systematic research reviews, looked for data on the safety and effectiveness of various treatments for flu symptoms, they said it took 4½ years to obtain the complete list of trials conducted by manufacturers. Last week, the Institute of Medicine urged major changes in data-sharing practices to make it easier for independent researchers to compare therapies. Some experts have hailed the report—Sharing Clinical Trial Data: Maximizing Benefits, Minimizing Risk—as a big step toward greater research transparency ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:39 AM PST
"The international workshop "Creating Impact with Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition", to be held in Wageningen, the Netherlands, on 19 and 20 January 2015, explores the different types of impact of open data and the pathways towards these impacts. The workshop is hosted by the Government of the Netherlands and organised by the Open Data Institute in the United Kingdom in collaboration with Alterra, a part of Wageningen University and Research Centre ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:31 AM PST
[From Google's English] "Leibniz Information Centre for Life Sciences with a bang: On January 15, 2015, the Information Centre presented with his new website. New is not only the design of the page. ZB MED is now offering new services such as a comprehensive publication Consulting Open Access ... As a result, scholars, opinion leaders and students have been identified as the main target groups of ZB MED. In addition, strategic action areas for the provision of services have been defined: Search & Find, publish and distribute, organizing and processing. Furthermore, research in information science will continue to play a bigger role in ZB MED. 'This new objective is now available in our outward appearance visible,' says Korwitz. The new design of the website of ZB MED emphasizes the scientific standards of the institution, which has the largest library of the range of subjects medicine, health, nutritional, environmental and agricultural sciences worldwide. The menu structure reflects the increasing importance of the research. In addition, the page 'responsive' and adapts to the screen size of the terminal, the user calling ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:28 AM PST
"Are you an instructor concerned about the impact of high textbook costs on your students? Do you want to be able to customize learning material for your courses? Explore possible open textbook solutions by attending a two-hour workshop and writing a short textbook review following the workshop. Participants will receive a $200 stipend for their time and efforts ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:25 AM PST
"The District is changing rapidly. It has gained 74,000 new residents since 2000; 800 more arrive each month. While many municipal leaders need to spur growth, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser's (D) greatest challenge will be shaping it equitably. Despite the District's budget deficit, it approaches its challenges — affordable housing, educational disparities and equitable economic development, among others — from a position of strength: The District has economic growth, diversity and a talented and technologically sophisticated workforce. If it can master the challenge of inclusion, ours can truly be a world-class city. Solutions to many of the problems facing the new mayor depend on getting up-to-date information into the right hands and using it well. To make good on Bowser's promise to expand opportunity to all eight wards — for example, to improve housing affordability in one of the tightest real estate markets in the country and create schools that work for all students — the District will need to embrace wonkiness and strive to become a data-driven city ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:22 AM PST
" ... But here's a key question: does 'open' actually transform the way in which we do 'school,' the way in which we teach and learn? Does changing the licensing of materials necessarily alter how we think about 'content' and curriculum? As my article on 'Who Owns School Work' suggests, open licenses are important in pushing back on assumptions of 'ownership' around educational content and data — that is, thinking about copyright and Creative Commons can prompt an important discussion about what happens to the content and data created by teachers and students alike. (And this is certainly related to questions of privacy as well.) 'Openness,' even if we're talking simply about openly licensed materials, can help crack open – there's that word again; it's hard to avoid – some of traditional forces of control in the classroom, be those textbook publishers, textbooks, or even teachers themselves. Openness can imply participation, and as such, it can mean that students see themselves as actively building their learning not simply being recipients of someone else's version of it ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:18 AM PST
Use the link to access the full text article from PLoS Medicine.  "Twenty years ago an editorial by Doug Altman in the BMJ [1], 'The Scandal of Poor Medical Researc'", decried the poor design and reporting of research, stating that 'huge sums of money are spent annually on research that is seriously flawed through the use of inappropriate designs, unrepresentative samples, small samples, incorrect methods of analysis, and faulty interpretation'. Since then, change has been gradual, while the list of problems has lengthened, and documentation of their magnitude has accumulated. Recent years, however, have seen a crescendo of concern. Public awareness has been accelerated with the publication of Ben Goldacre's Bad Pharma [2], which clearly articulated the problems posed by biased non-publication and reporting of pharmaceutical research. Wider awareness of these issues helped spark the AllTrials campaign (http://www.alltrials.net/), which asks for 'all trials registered; all results reported'. Of course, the problems of poor design and reporting, as well as selective non-publication, extend well beyond drug trials to most areas of research: drug and non-drug, basic and applied, interventional and observational, animal and human. A 2009 paper in The Lancet [3] estimated that three problems—flawed design, non-publication, and poor reporting—together meant over 85% of research funds were wasted, implying a global total loss of over US$100 billion per year. This year, a follow-up series [4] more extensively documented this wastage, confirming the earlier estimate, but adding details and a series of more explicit recommendations for action. The waste sounds bad, but the reality is worse. The estimate that 85% of research is wasted referred only to activities prior to the point of publication. Much waste clearly occurs after publication: from poor access, poor dissemination, and poor uptake of the findings of research. The development of open access to research [5] is important to reduce this post-publication waste. Poor access—including paywalls, restrictions on re-publication and re-use, etc.—limits both researcher-to-researcher and researcher-to-clinician communications. As PLOS Medicine editorial leaders pointed out in a PubMed Commons response to the Lancet series [6], open access is more than free access and includes 'free, immediate access online; unrestricted distribution and re-use rights in perpetuity for humans and technological applications; author(s) retains rights to attribution; papers are immediately deposited in a public online archive, such as PubMed Central' [7]. Globally, the most important access problem is arguably due to language barriers, and with the growth of research in non-English-speaking countries, particularly China, this problem is likely to grow. Language barriers make even free-access research unusable, but by eliminating restrictions on re-publication and re-use, open access can at least reduce barriers to translation ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:15 AM PST
Use the link to access the video.  
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:10 AM PST
Use the link to access the full text article from the New England Journal of Medicine.  "Two years ago, you finished a trial that took 5 years of your life. You'd had an idea for a new indication for a marketed drug. After cajoling the drug maker and pleading with your colleagues around the world, you put together, on a shoestring budget, an active-comparator–controlled trial with more than 1000 patients, with each followed for more than 2 years. The results were positive but not stunning: people with the condition under study now had another option for treatment that was equally effective but a little less toxic than existing therapies. You were able to get the work published in a major medical journal. With the primary work published, you had hoped to analyze the data further and prepare additional reports. But another year has gone by with no more publications. Your data lie dormant, providing no benefit for anyone. You are not the only one in this position; there are many data sets from clinical trials that are either never published or from which only a single report is ever produced. Can these data provide value to others? In October 2013, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) convened a committee to examine the current and future practice of sharing individual patient data gathered in the performance of controlled clinical trials. An interim assessment was issued for public comment in January 2014,1 and the full report and an executive summary are now available. I served as a member of that committee. Here, I will summarize the report's major findings, but this article is not a policy statement from the Journal. We will articulate our policy after we have had a chance to share the report with our readers, editors, and editorial board; we anticipate that the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors will also formulate policy on this matter. We urge you to contact us with your thoughts and concerns by commenting on this Perspective article at NEJM.org ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:06 AM PST
"Two important developments may mean that many more researchers will soon be able to access and analyze data from many more clinical trials. In the first, a preliminary report from the Institute of Medicine lends strong support to the open data movement. Among the IOM's recommendations: investigators should be required to establish a data-sharing plan at the time the trial is registered, and data underlying a trial analysis should be made available within 6 months after journal publication. In the second development, the Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project announced that Johnson & Johnson plans to share data from its device and diagnostic trials — a first in the field. (J&J previously announced plans to share data from its drug portfolio.)"
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 01:01 AM PST
"We recently spoke to Susan Spilka, Marketing and Communications Director for CHORUS, to learn more about how it works and why it's worthwhile for publishers and societies to join.  You can follow Susan on Twitter @sspilka or @CHORUSaccess ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 12:58 AM PST
"Data sharing can accelerate new discoveries by avoiding duplicative trials, stimulating new ideas for research, and enabling the maximal scientific knowledge and benefits to be gained from the efforts of clinical trial participants and investigators. At the same time, sharing clinical trial data presents risks, burdens, and challenges. These include the need to protect the privacy and honor the consent of clinical trial participants; safeguard the legitimate economic interests of sponsors; and guard against invalid secondary analyses, which could undermine trust in clinical trials or otherwise harm public health ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 12:54 AM PST
"The US National Academies Press has published a 280pp report on Sharing Clinical Trial Data: Maximizing Benefits, Minimizing Risk. The report is of particular interest to privacy specialists, research managers, and people such as myself who've been involved in the NHMRC clinical trials framework and TGA confidentiality consultations. The Committee on Strategies for Responsible Sharing of Clinical Trial Data states ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 12:49 AM PST
"The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has published a new Recommended Practice on Access License and Indicators (NISO RP-22-2015) that defines metadata to be used to indicate free-to-read content and a link to license terms for the use/re-use of that content. Developed by the NISO Working Group on Access License and Indicators (formerly Open Access Metadata and Indicators), the recommended practice proposes the adoption of two core pieces of metadata and associated tags: and . The first tag would indicate that the work is freely accessible during the specified timeframe (if applicable). The second tag would contain a reference to a URI that carries the license terms specifying how a work may be used ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 12:43 AM PST
"Negotiations: new phase with Elsevier, agreement made with Springer Koen Becking (Tilburg University) and Gerard Meijer
(Radboud University Nijmegen) are currently negotiating subscription fees for scientific journals with the Elsevier, Springer (Science and Business Media), Wiley and Oxford University Press publishing houses. The universities are only prepared to renew current subscription agreements if the publishers take steps towards open access. Several publishers are not very
keen to do so, given the drastic changes in their revenue model this transition would cause. An overview of the latest negotiation developments per publisher ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 12:40 AM PST
"The last few months have brought exciting developments at PLOS, and we'll be doing more in 2015 to make the publishing experience with PLOS even better. Today's post will talk about just some of what is new now and due in the near term.  We will have much more coming as the year progresses. We are implementing a number of exciting publishing-related changes aimed at improving the author and community experience. Specifically, these projects aim to reduce time to publication, reduce post-publication correction rates, and above all, provide our community greater access to scientific research – the reason PLOS exists.  Many of these projects will occur behind the scenes and will serve as the pillars of future initiatives, while others will be more visible to the community ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 12:38 AM PST
"At the end of 2013 and 2014 I wrote blog posts on Occam's Corner (over at the Guardian) to list and briefly review the books I read in each of those years. I am trying to develop this practice into a good habit because it spurs me to read; and I hope it might also serve to flag up titles of interest to others. I am planning to do the same thing again once 2015 draws to a close but this time I have decided to ease the task by writing short reviews as I go along. So here goes with the first one because I have just finished Martin Paul Eve's Open Access and the Humanities (subtitled Context, Controversies and the Future) ..."
Posted: 18 Jan 2015 12:35 AM PST
"Despite the growing availability of legal services in many countries, movie studios face a constant stream of pirated films. In an attempt to deter these infringements, the MPAA and individual movie studios send thousands of takedown notices to Internet services every month. Most of these requests are directed at Google. When it comes to takedown notices the MPAA has a dubious track record. The movie industry group has got into the habit of asking Google to remove the homepages of allegedly infringing sites instead of individual pages where the infringing movies are listed. A few days ago, for example, the MPAA asked Google to remove the homepage of the most popular torrent site Kickass.so, alongside several other torrent and streaming sites. As with previous requests Google declined to do so as the request was too broad.The same takedown notice includes another unusual and perhaps more worrying request. Between all the 'pirate sites' the MPAA also targeted Open Culture's list of public domain movies.  For those unfamiliar with the project, Open Culture offers an archive of high-quality cultural & educational media. With Stanford University's Dan Colman as founder and lead editor, the content listed on the site is selected with great care ..."
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