Showing posts with label SHERPA/REF Support Staff Consultation - 0% Index of News Article – Macmillan Humanities Open Book: Unlocking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label SHERPA/REF Support Staff Consultation - 0% Index of News Article – Macmillan Humanities Open Book: Unlocking. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

SHERPA/REF Support Staff Consultation - 0% Index of News Article – Macmillan Humanities Open Book: Unlocking Great Books | National Endowment for the Humanities arXiv Update - January 2015 - CUL Public Wiki - Confluence


 

Posted: 17 Jan 2015 09:27 AM PST
Excerpts from the open-data policy of the International Monetary Fund: "The IMF freely authorizes downloading and/or reprinting files from its website for personal (noncommercial) use....The policy of free access and free reuse does not imply a right to obtain confidential or any unpublished underlying data over which the IMF reserves all rights. Notwithstanding the general prohibition on the commercial use of IMF content, Users may download, extract, copy, create derivative works, publish, distribute and sell Data obtained from IMF Sites, subject to the following conditions...."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 08:03 AM PST
"A new European-based project seeks to facilitate open access to research infrastructures across borders. On January 15, the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI) announced that the EGI-Engage project (full name: Engaging the Research Community towards an Open Science Commons) underwent a successful review by the European Commission with a score of 15/15, giving the project the green light to begin in March 2015 with the public launch to take place at the EGI Conference 2015 in Lisbon, May 18-22, 2015. The 43 EGI-Engage project partners from Europe, the US and six countries in the Asia-Pacific region will collaborate on a framework for the Open Science Commons to provide researchers from across many disciplines with convenient access to digital services, data, knowledge and expertise in support of their research goals ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 07:48 AM PST
"The House Jan. 14 approved a bill that includes a provision exempting some companies using an open data format  to report their financial statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission. The measure called 'The Promoting Job Creation and Reducing Small Business Burdens Act' (H.R. 37) passed 271-154 and now goes to the Senate for its consideration. The bill mainly deals with changes to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Last week, the House tried to fast track the bill, but was defeated when it failed to get the two-thirds majority needed. (The House also passed the bill last September in the last Congress.) ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 07:43 AM PST
"As is the case with most things in politics, the Democratic and Republican Parties became the gatekeepers to meaningful political engagement, often by restricting access to campaign, fundraising, and other organizing tools to only their authorized party members. But now that's changing, and surprisingly enough it's being driven by the 'open' market's invisible hand. A McKinsey & Company report estimated open data's potential annual economic value to be $3 trillion worldwide. Likewise, the number of organizations embracing the 'open' model has grown significantly over the last decade. Chief among them is NationBuilder, a nonpartisan community organizing platform founded in 2009 by entrepreneur Jim Gilliam. The platform (and voter data to use on it) is available to any cause or candidate, regardless of party affiliation. In an interview for IVN, NationBuilder's vice president of business development, Adriel Hampton, pointed out how the nonpartisan 'open' philosophy is not only a core company tenet, but it works as a business model as well. In 2014 alone, campaigns using NationBuilder raised over $240 million ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 07:40 AM PST
"In recent years, advocates for consumers and transparency have been pushing regulatory agencies, journals, and clinical study sponsors to make human experimental data more accessible to independent scrutiny. In an attempt to balance the opposing forces of transparency and intellectual property, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) yesterday (January 14) laid out its guidance for when drug developers should share certain elements of clinical trials, including the protocol, summary results, and full dataset ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 07:38 AM PST
"Two small but significant steps forward were taken yesterday in the direction of open access to clinical trial data. A committee of the Institute of Medicine (IOM) yesterday called for the sharing of supporting data for clinical trials results within six months after publication, with a full analyzable data set shared no later than 18 months after study completion or 30 days after regulatory approval. Also yesterday, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) joined the Yale Open Data Access (YODA) Project in agreeing to share data from clinical trials for medical devices and diagnostics. The YODA Project said in a statement that the agreement 'establishes a fully independent intermediary to manage requests and promote data use,' as J&J has done with pharmaceutical clinical trial data since last year. Under the agreement, the YODA Project will approve or deny requests from investigators for de-identified patient data associated with the pharmaceutical, medical device, and diagnostic clinical trials conducted by J&J companies ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 07:33 AM PST
"The Humanities Open Book Program is designed to make outstanding out-of-print humanities books available to a wide audience. By taking advantage of low-cost "ebook" technology, the program will allow teachers, students, scholars, and the public to read humanities books that have long been out of print. Humanities Open Book is jointly sponsored by NEH and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Traditionally, printed books have been the primary medium for expressing, communicating, and debating humanistic ideas. However, the vast majority of humanities books sell a small number of copies and then quickly go out of print. Most scholarly books printed since 1923 are not in the public domain and are not easily available to the general public. As a result, there is a huge, mostly untapped resource of remarkable scholarship going back decades that is largely unused by today's scholars, teachers, students, and members of the public, many of whom turn first to the Internet when looking for information. Modern ebook technology can make these books far more accessible than they are today. NEH and Mellon are soliciting proposals from academic presses, scholarly societies, museums, and other institutions that publish books in the humanities to participate in the Humanities Open Book Program. Applicants will provide a list of previously published humanities books along with brief descriptions of the books and their intellectual significance. Depending on the length and topics of the books, the number to be digitized may vary. However, NEH and Mellon anticipate that applicants may propose to digitize a total that ranges from less than fifty to more than one hundred books. Awards will be given to digitize these books and make them available as Creative Commons-licensed "ebooks" that can be read by the public at no charge on computers, mobile devices, and ebook readers. The final ebook files must be in EPUB version 3.0.1 (or later) format, to ensure that the text is fully searchable and reflowable and that fonts are resizable on any e-reading device ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 07:28 AM PST
"Over the last few years I’ve published quite a few papers in PLoS journals. In almost all cases I have been lucky enough to receive a complete or partial fee waiver because I’ve had almost no grant support for the last ten years. I have been very grateful for this support. Unfortunately times have changed. Previously you simply had to assert that you did not have the funds to pay the publication charge and you were granted waiver. Now you to prove that you don’t have the funds and this includes proving that you cannot personally pay the publication fee â€" this requires you to submit back statements and explain where your money is being spent. I was quite shocked when I found this out recently (and if you don’t believe me, see the attached email exchange below). Besides the obvious invasion of privacy, I have to ask myself whether the paper, which I want to publish, is worth the £650 ($1000) that I would need to get it into print (assuming of course that it gets accepted)? Why am I publishing it anyway? Is it to advance science or simply the careers of me and my co-authors? If it is the latter then it seems reasonable for me to pay, but if it is an attempt to advance science and knowledge then I’m not so sure I should be paying. And yes, I could pay for this paper to be published, but I couldn’t pay for every paper I write; this would amount to several thousand pounds/dollars a year, which would comprise a serious chunk of my salary. This policy, of expecting an author to pay, seems contrary to the original PLoS One policy of publishing all science and could distort the science that is being published ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 07:27 AM PST
"How can open data promote trust in government without creating a transparent citizenry? Governments at all levels are releasing large datasets for analysis by anyone for any purpose—"Open Data." Using Open Data, entrepreneurs may create new products and services, and citizens may use it to gain insight into the government. A plethora of time saving and other useful applications have emerged from Open Data feeds, including more accurate traffic information, real-time arrival of public transportation, and information about crimes in neighborhoods.  Data held by the government is often implicitly or explicitly about individuals. While open government is often presented as an unqualified good, sometimes Open Data can identify individuals or groups, leading to a more transparent citizenry. The Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT) and Microsoft released a call for proposals on Open Data in Summer 2014. Six projects were selected for funding. At the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (BTLJ) Spring Symposium, these works will be presented and discussed by outside experts in the field of open government data."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 07:25 AM PST
"Many scientists struggle to understand why some grant applications succeed and others fail, perhaps explaining the online popularity of two articles calling for increased transparency in the grant peer-review process. Researchers are also talking about changing peer review at the other end of the research spectrum: after the results are published. Writing in PLoS Biology1, Daniel Mietchen, an evolutionary biologist at Berlin's Museum of Natural History, argues that, among other things, all successful proposals and their reviews should be released to the public ... Mietchen makes the case that lifting the curtain on the research-funding system could transform science as a whole. Publishing proposals as soon as they are submitted and seeing which ones were rejected could help scientists to see how their work stacks up against that of their colleagues. It could also open up new avenues for collaboration and allow others to build on failed proposals, he wrote. Even small steps — such as publication of all successful proposals years after the projects have ended — could be an important move towards that goal, he says ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 07:15 AM PST
"Oklahoma State University Library is the newest member of HathiTrust, a partnership of major academic and research libraries collaborating in an extraordinary digital library initiative to preserve and provide access to the published record in digital form. Launched in 2008, HathiTrust has a growing membership currently comprising more than 80 partners. The partners have contributed nearly 11 million volumes digitized from their library collections. More than 3.4 million of the contributed volumes are in the public domain and freely available online. According to Sheila Johnson, Dean of OSU Libraries, there are many benefits to OSU's faculty, students and on-campus visitors ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 07:02 AM PST
"A new report from the US's Institute of Medicine says sharing of data from clinical trials is in the public interest and should be an integral part of carrying out a clinical trial. The report calls on clinical trial funders, pharmaceutical companies, patient groups, ethics committees, journals and professional bodies to make this happen. The report concludes that challenges to sharing data – privacy concerns and risks of inappropriate analyses – do not outweigh the benefits and are not barriers to sharing, but practical considerations that can be dealt with. Specific recommendations in the report include that: [1] Data sharing plans are registered with the trial registration before the trial begins [2] Summary results are published within a year of a trial's end [3] Full data sets from a clinical trial should be shared within 18 months of the trial's end [4] Data sharing initiatives should be overseen by independent panels of experts and the public, and should be as transparent as possible. Deborah Zarin, Director of ClinicalTrials.gov, the world's largest clinical trial register, said: 'We were ready for a tipping point event.  This is a statement that the expectations have changed: if you're a researcher or a research sponsor, there's going to be an expectation that you're going to make data available at the end of your study,' reports Vox.com. The AllTrials campaign welcomes this report and thinks its recommendations could have been stronger if they included clear pathways to implementation and calls for audits of compliance. In a few points the report unfortunately repeats some of the hyperbolic, vague statements about potential harms 'to society' from data sharing that have come from those who are opposed to sharing the results of their trials. Those who have raised genuine concerns have been much more specific and it quickly becomes clear in the recommendations that such risks can be addressed ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 06:57 AM PST
"As per a Reuters report yesterday, the publisher of Nature and Scientific American, Germany's Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, is merging with Springer Science+Business Media, 'creating a group with 1.5 billion euros ($1.75 billion) in annual sales.' As well as showcasing the value locked up in scientific publishing, this merger also raises questions about the development of the field and the prospects for wider adoption of scholarly open access. Also included in the deal is educational and and social sciences publisher Palgrave Macmillan ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 06:54 AM PST
"A Note on the Removal of Individual Notices in the Chilling Effects Database from General Search Engine Search Results Recently, some people (including writers for Torrent Freak and Tech Dirt) noticed that the Chilling Effects website had disappeared from Google search results. This was entirely unintentional and was attributable to a mistake that occurred while we implemented a more limited removal of individual notice pages from search engine search results. Our intent was for the Chilling Effects home page, Search page, About page, and other informational pages to remain in search engine results. But, individual pages for takedown notices archived in the Chilling Effects database would not – for the time being, at least – show up in general search engine searches for terms that appear on those pages. Searches conducted via some search engines – e.g., Bing, DuckDuckgo, and Ixquick – now simply omit individual notice pages from results, as intended. We are working to fix the issue with Google search results as quickly as possible. The decision to de-index even the site's notice pages is not a decision that the Chilling Effects team made lightly. We want to take this opportunity to explain the decision, clarify the record, and welcome further input from the broader research community as we think through the project's next steps. As frequent visitors to the Chilling Effects website are aware, the project serves as a searchable archive of requests for removal of various categories of information from online platforms, including search engines, media hosts, and social networking sites. Although copyright takedown notices (sent pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, as embodied in Section 512 of the United States Copyright Act) form a large part of our corpus, the Chilling Effects database also incorporates a wide range of other types of removal requests. These include claims of trademark infringement, requests to remove links to allegedly defamatory content, notices seeking the removal of private or sensitive personal information, court orders, and notices originating from outside of the legal jurisdiction of the United States. We also see a number of requests that do not lend themselves to any easy categorization. Many of these non-DMCA notices are far more likely to have been sent by individuals than by corporate entities. The sheer volume of notices received and archived by Chilling Effects has increased significantly over time. We now typically receive between two and three thousand notices per day ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 06:51 AM PST
"I'm pleased to ­share that all the museum partners in the Getty Foundation's Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) have now published their catalogues — available to all, at no charge. The initiative recently reached this major milestone with the release of a free digital publication from Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler Galleries. Going digital with collections catalogues required us at the Getty Foundation and our partners to completely rethink the ways museums create and share content about their collections. As a group, we tackled the challenges of online publishing by creating new models for scholarly catalogues in the online environment that we anticipate will be widely adopted. The digital world was very different when the initiative first began in 2009—before the iPad was even released! Five years later, audiences have come to expect that all organizations, including museums, will provide accessible, dynamic digital content, and this is what these catalogues deliver ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 06:48 AM PST
"Publishing scholarly collection catalogues is a critical part of a museum's mission. Based on meticulous research, these catalogues make available detailed information about the individual works in a museum's collection, ensuring the contents a place in art history. Yet printed volumes are costly to produce and difficult to update regularly; their potential content often exceeds allotted space. One could say they are like thoroughbred horses confined to stock pens. Digital publishing presents an alternative, and the Getty Foundation's Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative (OSCI) is helping museums make the transition from printed volumes to multimedia, web-based publications freely available to anyone with a computer, tablet, or smartphone. The Foundation launched OSCI in 2009 in partnership with the J. Paul Getty Museum and eight other institutions: the Art Institute of Chicago; the Arthur M. Sackler and Freer Gallery of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Seattle Art Museum; Tate; and the Walker Art Center. The consortium's goals are to create models for online catalogues that will dramatically increase access to museum collections; make available new, interdisciplinary, up-to-date research; and revolutionize how this research is conducted, presented, and utilized ... From the beginning, the OSCI partners have worked together to address these and other challenges. The initiative began with research and planning grants, before moving into implementation to build their catalogues. Nearly all of the OSCI publications have been completed. In addition, the Indianapolis Museum of Art is collaborating with the consortium to offer an online publishing "toolkit" with open-source software that can be used free of charge by other museums. Learn more about the IMA Lab's OSCI Toolkit ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 06:41 AM PST
"All articles of Dutch scientists must be free of charge, the Association sets of Dutch Universities (VSNU). They are currently negotiating with several large publishing concerns about the embrace of Open Access (OA), as the system is called. But not everyone is enthusiastic about the course taken. Marcel Dicke, Professor of Entomology, is a critical follower of Open Access. 'I think that science should be emphasized. And then I see the added value and less risk more and more' ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 06:37 AM PST
[From Google's English] "In 2024, all articles of Dutch scientists need to be read for free. That wrote Sander Dekker, Secretary of Education, in 2013 to the House. Currently, most scientific journals behind the tollgates of digital publishing. Universities annually pay subscription fees to be allowed to inspect it. The minister sees many advantages in embracing openness. This keeps citizens, students and cash-strapped researchers informed of the latest science. several major publishers to make Dekkers vision reality. Universities are taking ambitious: they want all articles are open access, without cost more than the subscriptions now. Because costs are of course still in a system of open publications. Someone must still pay for making magazines. Publishing indeed ensure quality, formatting and archiving. All are not free. Only now pays the author and not the reader. In the Netherlands the subscription fees common set of big deals for magazine bundles, with a total value of 34 million euros. VSNU want to convert these deals in - equally expensive - contracts also entitle to publish open access. The first small success is already there. With Springer, one of the three largest scientific publishers in the world, there is an agreement in principal. At a minimal cost 'may publish all corresponding authors at Dutch universities open in' almost all 'fifteen hundred sheets of Springer. The details are still being negotiated. That precisely Springer first toehapte, is not surprising. The publisher took an OA publisher over and put himself firmly in the 'open' ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 01:08 AM PST
"PLOS would like to clarify the policy by which authors can apply for fee assistance in the form of a partial or full fee waiver. Authors who are unable to obtain financial support from institutional, library, government agencies or research funders to pay for publication are not expected to self-fund these costs. In short, PLOS does not expect authors to fund publication fees through their personal funds. Based on a misinterpretation of the organization's Publication Fee Assistance (PFA) policy, requests were made or implied for individual financial information from certain PFA applicants. This was done in error. We regret any confusion it may have caused for applicants and any other members of the community. The process for communicating with PFA applicants and the language used on relevant PLOS application forms have now been corrected. PLOS is committed to ensuring that the availability of research funding is not a barrier to publishing scientific research. Our Global Participation Initiative covers the full cost of publishing for authors from low-income countries, and covers most of the cost for authors from middle-income countries. Our PFA program has always and continues to support those with demonstrated need who are unable to pay all or part of their publication fees."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 01:07 AM PST
"Publishing policies of scientific journals - especially, the closed-access journals - often leave me scratching my head. Seriously. I am a member of ResearchGate; it is supposed to be a scientist-only social network, perhaps a 'Facebook for Science' (as Eli Kintisch wrote in 2014 in Science's Career Magazine), in which scientists can upload and share their research papers, track citations, follow the work of - and even request papers from - colleagues and fellow scientists across the world. Every once in a while I receive requests for some of my papers, usually from institutions in South America, India, and so on. ResearchGate allows me to upload my papers to their system for easy sharing with researchers who ask for them. It's a formalized and organized way of sharing research articles evocative of the #IcanHazPDF hashtag on Twitter. Except that I can't. That is, unless my research is published in an Open Access journal (such as the PLOS journals), or via the Open Access systems of various Closed Access journals (which requires the payment of a hefty fee), my ability to upload my research papers to ResearchGate is mostly restricted by the Closed Access publishers' interpretation of the copyright law - because they hold the copyright to the published work. I say, 'mostly', because there are some workarounds. Allow me to explain ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 01:04 AM PST
"First and third parts of a lecture delivered to 2009/10 Library post graduates at Loughborough University (March 25th 2010). Covers general open access and the response from the University of … Institutional RepositoriesWhat the Open Access agenda means for a modern institution Gareth J Johnson ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 01:03 AM PST
Use the link to access the video.
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 01:01 AM PST
Use the link to access the full text article from D-Lib Magazine.  "Information and communication technology (ICT) advances in research infrastructures are continuously changing the way research and scientific communication are performed. Scientists, funders, and organizations are moving the paradigm of 'research publishing' well beyond traditional articles. The aim is to pursue an holistic approach where publishing includes any product (e.g. publications, datasets, experiments, software, web sites, blogs) resulting from a research activity and relevant to the interpretation, evaluation, and reuse of the activity or part of it. The implementation of this vision is today mainly inspired by literature scientific communication workflows, which separate the 'where' research is conducted from the 'where' research is published and shared. In this paper we claim that this model cannot fit well with scientific communication practice envisaged in Science 2.0 settings. We present the idea of Science 2.0 Repositories (SciRepos), which meet publishing requirements arising in Science 2.0 by blurring the distinction between research life-cycle and research publishing. SciRepos interface with the ICT services of research infrastructures to intercept and publish research products while providing researchers with social networking tools for discovery, notification, sharing, discussion, and assessment of research products."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 12:58 AM PST
Use the link to access the full text article from D-Lib Magazine.  "In this paper we discuss the problem of data citation with a specific focus on Linked Open Data. We outline the main requirements a data citation methodology must fulfill: (i) uniquely identify the cited objects; (ii) provide descriptive metadata; (iii) enable variable granularity citations; and (iv) produce both human- and machine-readable references. We propose a methodology based on named graphs and RDF quad semantics that allows us to create citation meta-graphs respecting the outlined requirements. We also present a compelling use case based on search engines experimental evaluation data and possible applications of the citation methodology."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 12:56 AM PST
"The Libraries have embarked on an ambitious program to digitize all university theses and dissertations and make them available online to the public, according to librarian Jessica Adamick, assistant to the associate director for library services. The research works have been available in electronic format since 1997 for dissertations and 2007 for theses, but public online access has not been available. Other dissertations and theses spanning more than 100 years have long been available only in print. Beginning with the oldest dissertations and theses, which are rarest and most at risk of physical damage, the Libraries have begun digitizing the works and making them available online in ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. ScholarWorks will provide high visibility to the works, making them easily searchable via Google and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD), an international digital library that supports open access to theses and dissertations, said Adamick. The digitized dissertations are also fully accessible to persons with disabilities, which was not the case in their print forms. The Libraries are taking this opportunity to contact alumni, to let them know about the process and give them a chance to weigh in on the public accessibility of their works. Alumni can request that the Libraries send them a link to their digitized and open access thesis or dissertation, or they can opt-out of having their work available open access.  After digitizing the oldest works in 2013-14, the Libraries have begun digitizing works on a departmental basis. The first departments to be digitized include Afro-American studies, followed by astronomy, Chinese, history, psychology and polymer science."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 12:55 AM PST
Use the link to access the full text article from the Journal of Political Science & Politics.  "The digital revolution has made it easier for political scientists to share and access high-quality research online. However, many articles are stored in proprietary databases that some institutions cannot afford. High-quality, peer-reviewed, top-tier journal articles that have been made open access (OA) (i.e., freely available online) theoretically should be accessed and cited more easily than articles of similar quality that are available only to paying customers. Research into the efficacy of OA publishing thus far has focused mainly on the natural sciences, and the results have been mixed. Because OA has not been as widely adopted in the social sciences, disciplines such as political science have received little attention in the OA research. In this article, we seek to determine the efficacy of OA in political science. Our primary hypothesis is that OA articles will be cited at higher rates than articles that are toll access (TA), which means available only to paying customers. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the mean citation rates of OA and TA articles from eight top-ranked political science journals. We find that OA publication results in a clear citation advantage in political science publishing."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 12:52 AM PST
"Since more than a year Open Access has been in the news regularly. After Secretary of State Sander Dekker presented the goal of 100% Open Access in 2024, the Association of universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) started negotiations with Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. By the end of 2014 it came to an agreement with Springer about open access publishing without article processing costs whereas the talks with the other publishers are still going on. Scientists were informed by different media about these developments and were called on to publish their articles Open Access as much as possible. However, the ambition of 100% Open Access deserves a debate among scientists about promises and pitfalls. Therefore Library & Archive and Strategy and Policy organize an Open Access discussion meeting on Wednesday February 18, 12:00-14:00 (lunch included). You are invited to join this meeting where Prof. Dr. Jos Engelen, chair of the Governing Board of NWO, will share his opinion about Open Access. Prof. Dr. Detlef Lohse, professor of Physics of Fluids, will act as co-referent and discussion leader. Further details about the programme and venue will follow soon ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 12:48 AM PST
"HEFCE has established that, in order to be eligible for a future Research Excellence Framework, journal articles and conference proceedings accepted for publication after 1 April 2016 will have to be made openly accessible from repositories, with deposit into the repository being made at the time of acceptance for publication. This means that both authors and institutions have new responsibilities and tasks to ensure material will be eligible for a future REF. HEFCE has commissioned the Centre for Research Communications (CRC) at the University of Nottingham to develop a new service to support authors and institutions in meeting the new requirements, building on the current portfolio of SHERPA services (RoMEO, JULIET and FACT) . The CRC would like to hear your views and opinions on how this service should be structured. The results of this survey will be used to inform the service specification in order to ensure it meets user requirements as effectively as possible.  The survey consists of 20 questions and should take no more than 12 minutes to complete. It will close at midnight on the 28th of January 2015 ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 12:46 AM PST
"HEFCE has established that, in order to be eligible for a future Research Excellence Framework, journal articles and conference proceedings accepted for publication after 1 April 2016 will have to be made openly accessible from repositories, with deposit into the repository being made at the time of acceptance for publication. This means that both authors and institutions have new responsibilities and tasks to ensure material will be eligible for a future REF. HEFCE has commissioned the Centre for Research Communications (CRC) at the University of Nottingham to develop a new service to support authors and institutions in meeting the new requirements , building on the current portfolio of SHERPA services (RoMEO, JULIET and FACT) . The CRC would like to hear your views and opinions on how this service should be structured. The results of this survey, which is being undertaken by Research Consulting on behalf of CRC, will be used to inform the final service specification. The survey consists of 18 questions and should take no more than 15 minutes to complete. It will close at midnight on the 28th of January 2015 ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 12:44 AM PST
"Holtzbrinck Publishing Group (Holtzbrinck) and BC Partners (BCP) announced today that they have reached an agreement to merge Springer Science+Business Media (owned by funds advised by BCP) in its entirety with the majority of Holtzbrinck-owned Macmillan Science and Education (MSE), namely Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan and the global businesses of Macmillan Education.  This is a strategic transaction by Holtzbrinck and BCP aimed at securing the long-term growth of both businesses. It will create a leading global science and education publishing house with the opportunity to better serve its authors, the research community, academic institutions, learned societies and corporate research departments, as well as to extend its reach within the education and learning markets. Both companies have a highly complementary portfolio in terms of products (journals, books, databases and workflow tools) and end-markets (academic institutions, corporate research departments and individuals). The merged businesses will continue to offer the leading brands on which researchers, teachers and information professionals rely. Upon completion of the transaction, the new group will be under joint control of Holtzbrinck and funds advised by BCP with Holtzbrinck retaining a 53% share ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 12:40 AM PST
A new joint grant program by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation seeks to give a second life to outstanding out-of-print books in the humanities by turning them into freely accessible e-books. Over the past 100 years, tens of thousands of academic books have been published in the humanities, including many remarkable works on history, literature, philosophy, art, music, law, and the history and philosophy of science. But the majority of these books are currently out of print and largely out of reach for teachers, students, and the public. The Humanities Open Book pilot grant program aims to "unlock" these books by republishing them as high-quality electronic books that anyone in the world can download and read on computers, tablets, or mobile phones at no charge. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are the two largest funders of humanities research in the United States. Working together, NEH and Mellon will give grants to publishers to identify great humanities books, secure all appropriate rights, and make them available for free, forever, under a Creative Commons license. The new Humanities Open Book grant program is part of the National Endowment for the Humanities' agency-wide initiative The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square, which seeks to demonstrate and enhance the role and significance of the humanities and humanities scholarship in public life ... The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation will jointly provide $1 million to convert out-of-print books into EPUB e-books with a Creative Commons (CC) license, ensuring that the books are freely downloadable with searchable texts and in formats that are compatible with any e-reading device. Books proposed under the Humanities Open Book program must be of demonstrable intellectual significance and broad interest to current readers.   Application guidelines and a list of F.A.Q's for the Humanities Open Book program are available online at www.NEH.gov. The application deadline for the first cycle of Humanities Open Book grants is June 10, 2015 ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 12:36 AM PST
"arXiv has started 2015 with an important milestone as we added the one-millionth paper at the end of December'14 (press release &  video). Since its inception in 1991 with a focus on the high energy physics community, arXiv has significantly expanded both its subject coverage and user base. During 2014, the repository saw 90,000 new submissions and close to 81 million downloads from all over the world. arXiv has international scope, with submissions and readership from around the world, and collaborations with U.S. and foreign professional societies and other international organizations. arXiv's funding and governance is based on a membership program that engages libraries and research laboratories worldwide that represent the repository's heaviest institutional users. We are pleased to report that we currently have 183 members representing 24 countries . arXiv's sustainability plan is founded on and presents a business model for generating revenues. Cornell University Library (CUL), the Simons Foundation, and a global collective of institutional members support arXiv financially. The financial model for 2013-2017 entails three sources of revenues: CUL provides a cash subsidy of $75,000 per year in support of arXiv's operational costs. In addition, CUL makes an in-kind contribution of all indirect costs, which currently represents 37% of total operating expenses. The Simons Foundation contributes $50,000 per year in recognition of CUL's stewardship of arXiv. In addition, the Foundation matches $300,000 per year of the funds generated through arXiv membership fees. Each member institution pledges a five-year funding commitment to support arXiv. Based on institutional usage ranking, the annual fees are set in four tiers from $1,500-$3,000. In 2014, Cornell raised approximately $341,000 through membership fees from 183 institutions and the total revenue (including CUL and Simons Foundation direct contributions) is around $766,000. We are grateful for Simons Foundation's support. The gift has encouraged long-term community support by lowering arXiv membership fees, making participation affordable to a broader range of institutions. This model aims to ensure that the ultimate responsibility for sustaining arXiv remains with the research communities and institutions that benefit from the service most directly. Since we have started the arXiv sustainability initiative in 2010, an integral part of our work has been assessing the services, technologies, standards, and policies that constitute arXiv. Here are some of our key accomplishments from 2014 to illustrate the range of issues we have been trying to tackle.  Please see the 2014 Roadmap for a fuller account of our work ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 12:32 AM PST
"Reflections on arXiv passing the 1 million paper milestone from Subir Sachdev (Harvard University), Paul Ginsparg (Cornell University), Oya Rieger (Cornell University), Michelle Johannes (Naval Research Laboratory), Chris Myers (Cornell University), Andy Millis (Simons Foundation), and Jim Mullins (Purdue University & CIC) ..."
Posted: 17 Jan 2015 12:29 AM PST
"The proposed merger between Springer and Macmillan came as a surprise to me. They are two big brands that come together. However if you look purely at figures in number of journals Macmillan is a midget compared to Springer and combined they are probably slightly bigger than Elsevier. It is the brand of Nature and Nature Publishing group that might shine on Springer and its journals if this merger is managed well. Imagine a cascading peer review system for turned down articles from Nature to the complete Springer portfolio rather than the NPG journals only. That would give those Springer journals an enormous boost. In number of journals this merger will probably not be stopped by the anti-cartel watchdogs. What has not been mentioned in most press releases is the fact that this deal will for sure create the most profitable Open Access publisher in the world. Springer already acquired BioMed Central some years ago, and is expanding ferociously its own Springer Open brand and platform. Macmillan's Nature Publishing Group acquired the Swiss Frontiers early 2013 http://www.nature.com/press_releases/npgfrontiers.html Frontiers showed a healthy growth from 2,500 article in 2006 to 11,000 in 2014. The combined numbers of Open Access articles published by Springer Open, BioMed Central, Frontiers and the Nature Open Access journals (Nature Communications, Nature Reports) is still not topping that of Public Library of Science (PLoS) ..."
Posted: 16 Jan 2015 11:55 PM PST
"Consolidation is afoot in scientific publishing. Macmillan Science and Education, the London-based publisher of Nature and Scientific American, will merge with Berlin-based Springer Science+Business Media, one of the world's largest science publishers, their parent companies announced today. The joint venture, which combines the publishing portfolio of Macmillan Science and Education with Springer, would create a firm with some 13,000 employees and a turnover of around €1.5 billion, the companies said.  The deal was agreed by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group (the private firm that owns Macmillan, including Nature) and the private equity firm BC Partners, which in 2013 bought out Springer in a deal worth around €3.1 billion. Holtzbrinck will own 53% of the combined venture, and anticipates that the deal will be approved by competition authorities in the first half of 2015.  'The deal makes a lot of sense for both sides,' says Claudio Aspesi, a media analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in London. 'From BC Partners' perspective, there were a lot of questions about what they could do with Springer when they bought it, since much cost-cutting had already been done. Now we know how you can add value to that deal — add the most prestigious journals in the world. For Holtzbrinck, the idea is presumably that they get additional scale for Macmillan, which will give additional funds for any new plans.'  The scientific publishing market is dominated by the so-called 'big four' companies: Springer (which reports hosting 2,987 journals), Elsevier (3,057), Wiley (2,339) and Taylor & Francis (2,105). Together, they comprise around 30% of the world's total scholarly peer-reviewed journals, which number 34,585 (28,134 English language), according to Ulrichsweb, an online directory of scholarly journals. There follows an enormous number of smaller publishers: Macmillan publishes only 160 journals, but many of them bear the well-known Nature brand. 'Combined, these two companies, both deeply rooted in a strong publishing tradition, offer breadth, volume and reach,' said Derk Haank, CEO of Springer, which is also the world's largest publisher of open-access journals ..."
Posted: 16 Jan 2015 11:48 PM PST
"Today, Wikipedia turns fourteen years old. On this day in 2001, a simple idea changed the world: the idea that anyone, no matter who they are or where they lived, had something to contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. It was a simple idea, but intensely powerful, and it resonated with hundreds of thousands of people. Together, your contributions have made Wikipedia the most comprehensive repository of free information in the history of humanity.  I'm proud today to be able to share a remarkable recognition of your work. The Praemium Erasmianum Foundation (Dutch,English) in the Netherlands has announced that it will award the Erasmus Prize 2015 to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia community. The Erasmus Prize is one of Europe's most distinguished recognitions, awarded annually to 'a person or institution that has made an exceptional contribution to culture, society or social science.'  On behalf of the Wikimedia community, I thank the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation for this recognition.  This is the first time that this prestigious honor has been awarded to a group of individuals for their collective achievement. In the words of the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation: 'Wikipedia receives the prize because it has promoted the dissemination of knowledge through a comprehensive and universally accessible encyclopaedia. To achieve that, the initiators of Wikipedia have designed a new and effective democratic platform. The prize specifically recognises Wikipedia as a community — a shared project that involves tens of thousands of volunteers around the world.'  This honor is accompanied by an award of €150,000. In keeping with the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation's intent to recognize the contributions of the Wikimedia community, we are redirecting these funds towards the community in the form of individual grants and other support for editors and contributors ..."
Posted: 16 Jan 2015 11:41 PM PST
figshare is delighted to be supporting Brill publishers as they continue to develop out their digital offerings. figshare is providing Brill with a portal to enhance discoverability and usability of their digital research.  Founded in 1683, Brill is a publishing house with a rich history and a strong international focus, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Brill have previously illustrated their forward thinking approaches to new models of publishing with the IFLA/Brill Open Access Award, which was created in 2013 for initiatives in the area of open access monograph publishing.
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