Tuesday, June 2, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Will Rewarding Peer Reviewers Help Scientific Publishing?

Posted: 02 Jun 2015 12:59 AM PDT

"While the pace of new scientific discoveries might lead you to believe that the industry is moving at a mind-boggling pace, the speed of academic research and publishing is actually surprisingly slow. Apparently, it can take an average of 150 days to get a scientific paper published and much of this problem stems from the peer review process – specifically, the lack of incentives for peers to actually contribute a review. Daniel Johnston and Andrew Preston, founders of scientific publishing platform, Publons, are hoping to change this. First launched in 2013, the New Zealand-based Publons is an online platform for researchers and academics to publish, review and discuss scholarly work. Unlike other platforms, Publons hopes to motivate reviews with the introduction of a peer rewards programme, giving them recognition for their contributions ..."

Tearing down barriers to global research data sharing - University World News

Posted: 02 Jun 2015 12:37 AM PDT

"One of the science world's fastest-growing movements is the Research Data Alliance, which was launched just two years ago to reduce barriers to data sharing and accelerate development of a coordinated global data infrastructure ... There have been five plenaries so far, and their locations have been as international as the Research Data Alliance's members – the first was in Gothenburg, Sweden, in March 2013, the second in Washington DC, the third in Dublin in March 2014, the fourth in Amsterdam, and in March this year the fifth was in San Diego. These are organisations and individuals involved from all around the world, and groups are often based around networks that exist already. So for instance there are links with Elixir, which is building an infrastructure for biological information supporting life science research. Their data sets will be similar in size to those of the huge Square Kilometre Array radio telescope, or SKA, a massive global research project being based in South Africa and Australia. Alliance members are making data sets more operable, and also operable with other data sets in other disciplines ... urrently the Research Data Alliance is talking about certification of data stewardship plans, and is looking for organisations to do that. In the United Kingdom, for example, there is an open data institute that is starting to certify public data sets. It is currently in consultation about data stewardship with the European Commission and several countries, which are starting to think about mandating ..."

COAR: Promoting Open Knowledge and Open Science Report of the Current State of Repositories

Posted: 02 Jun 2015 12:31 AM PDT

"This briefing paper presents an overview of the international repository landscape. The paper has been produced by COAR on behalf of the Aligning Repository Networks Committee, a group of senior representatives from repository networks around the world. While principally intended for the Global Research Council (GRC), the paper has also been written with a broader audience in mind. Over the last 20 years, open access repositories have been implemented around the world and are now fairly widespread across all regions. Repositories provide open access (OA) to research publications and other materials and enable the local management and preservation of research outputs. They are a key infrastructure component supporting the growing number of open access policies and laws, the majority of which recommend or require deposit of articles into an OA repository. OA repositories are increasingly connected through thematic, national and regional networks. In turn, these regional and national networks are further aligning their practices globally through the COAR Aligning Repository Networks Initiative, making their collections more valuable as it enables new services to be built on top of their aggregated contents. These services include tracking of research outputs for funders and research administrators, monitoring usage of publications, facilitating text and data mining, as well as peer review overlay services. Crucially, repositories represent a distributed and participatory model in which institutions manage content locally, but contribute to the global knowledgebase through adoption of common, open standards. Distributed systems, such as a global network of repositories, have an inherent sustainability. They increase the resilience of infrastructure and foster social and institutional flexibility and innovation. They also enable the research community to regain some influence over the scholarly communication system."

Massive Open Online Courses offer a brain boost of free education | Irish Examiner

Posted: 02 Jun 2015 12:27 AM PDT

"HAVE YOU thought about further study, but are unsure about whether you can commit to a course? Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are an exciting development that could be exactly what you are looking for. These are online, generally free, open access courses. Potential students can access them to learn about a huge variety of topics. MOOCs are normally much shorter than Open University or traditional distance learning courses, and don't require as much of a time commitment per week. Students do not usually receive certification for completion, although some providers offer that option for a fee. I first heard of MOOCs when I took redundancy from AIB 18 months ago. I was keen to retrain for a different career, but after eight years in the bank, I was nervous about signing up for a course. It felt like a long time since I had left college and I worried about getting back into the habit of study ..."

[CfA:] Digital Heraldry: Digitisation and Dissemination of the European Heraldic Heritage | Heraldica Nova

Posted: 02 Jun 2015 12:22 AM PDT

"Heraldry is a historical phenomenon that is unique to Europe, and therefore heraldry constitutes a crucial part of a mutual European cultural identity. From Scandinavia to Cyprus, from Portugal to Romania, throughout France, Germany, Poland, Italy—after its emergence in the twelfth century, heraldry had soon spread across almost the entire continent. Coats of arms were to be found in manuscripts, on walls and ceilings, in stained glass and panel paintings, on seals and coins as well as on objects of all kind. More than any other cultural achievement, coats of arms have the capacity to link objects, places and families into a network connecting the various parts of Europe, and to provide at the same time revealing perspectives in medieval and early modern culture, mentalities, and uses of communication that have been hitherto largely overlooked. Coats of arms thus have an enormous potential for understanding European history and the formation of our European culture. Heraldry is a crucial part of the daily work of libraries, archives, and museums, in fact everyone involved in the preservation of cultural heritage. At the same time, it is a subject with an intrinsic potential for interdisciplinary research, including history, art history, archaeology, philology and linguistics, numismatics, sphragistics etc. However, the complexity of heraldry and its language, the sheer amount of evidences as well as the largely outdated tools make it difficult to access so far. Because of the geographical fragmentation of sources across various regional and national institutions, it is next to impossible to reveal the 'bigger picture' of a single coat of arms' material context. Our cross-disciplinary project, so far consisting of historians from the University of Münster and computer scientists from the University of Leipzig, sets out to change this. We are convinced that the Digital Humanities will enable us to overcome those obstacles and give us the means for a rapprochement of heraldry on a totally new level. Relying on Ontology Engineering and Linked Open Data technology, our project aims to enable anyone to conveniently identify and study coats of arms without the previous heraldic knowledge. By incorporating already available online data from cultural heritage institutions all over Europe, our project will furthermore offer the possibility to locate any coat of arms in its material contexts and to reveal hitherto unknown links between different cultural objects and areas, opening up the subject for new tracks for research. In this effort, the project aims to tackle these specific tasks ..."

Quality Open Access market and other initiatives: a comparative analysis | van Gerestein | LIBER Quarterly

Posted: 02 Jun 2015 12:17 AM PDT

[Abstract] Recently academic publishing has entered in a new era, namely that of open access publishing. This has resulted in the appearance of numerous new open access journals. Scholars who want to publish their work today have endless publishing possibilities to choose from, but who is able to tell them which journal is reliable? This used to be the job of librarians, but with approximately 17000 journals they are no longer able to keep up. For this reason several websites and services have started to gather information about open access journals in order to make an overview of reliable and unreliable journals. One of these services is called Quality Open Access Market (QOAM). In this article six other services (Directory of Open Access Journals, JournalReviewer, SciRev, Journalysis, Journalguide, PRE-val and Eigenfactor) will be compared to QOAM in order to find out which service offers the best results. QOAM is taken as a starting point here because the research presented in this article was commissioned by them (namely: Saskia de Vries and Leo Waaijers) in order to find out what value they can actually add.

Academic Libraries offer Open Textbooks « CMLE

Posted: 02 Jun 2015 12:14 AM PDT

"Campus bookstores beware, there's a new textbook provider in town: Academic Libraries! But instead of long lines, high costs, and lousy buy-back prices, campus libraries are providing open textbooks. One example is at Portland State University (PSU). Recently 'Portland State University Library announced the publication of five open textbooks authored by PSU faculty for PSU students. In their first term of use, these textbooks saved students more than $23,800.' Rather than being a barrier to education, these open textbooks are a prime example of the possibilities of synergy between faculty, staff, and the library on a campus. Another example is at Louisiana State University (LSU). 'The LSU Library is promoting a new program that enables students in more than 100 courses to access electronic textbooks, rather than having to purchase costly printed ones. The change represents significant savings for students, who typically shell out several hundred dollars each semester on textbooks. E-textbooks are free.' Is there a future for campus bookstores? What do you think?"

Good news for open science in EFSI negotiations - but much work ahead | EU-LIFE

Posted: 02 Jun 2015 12:09 AM PDT

"EU-LIFE partners welcome the announcement that funds from ERC, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions and spreading excellence /widening participation actions were safeguarded from deviation to EFSI.  This outcome is particularly welcomed for revealing a common acknowledgement that open science is crucial for the future of Europe. We deeply thank all those involved in the trilogue negotiations that allowed for this outcome, in particular Vice-President Katainen, Vice-President Georgieva, Commissioner Moedas and the European Parliament (EP) advocating the case. More work is ahead now.  H2020 budget has still been unduly deviated and open science still suffers from under investment. In addition, EFSI has still to prove focus on frontier R&I and clear democratic governance. We look forward to contributing to the common endeavor of overcoming these crucial challenges."

Tanker Operator MarineTraffic presses for open data

Posted: 01 Jun 2015 11:51 PM PDT

"Speaking at'Towards a Roadmap for Blue Investment and Jobs in the Mediterranean' held in Athens, Marine Traffic managing director Demitris Memos explained: 'Activities taking place on the high seas have in the past been almost impossible to monitor. Consequently, it has been difficult for governments and businesses to work out what goes on. 'The world's oceans have been and to an extent still are fairly ungovernable places. Companies in the maritime big data area are starting to make sense of seaborne activity, increasing available knowledge and creating transparency on a global scale. Most stakeholders recognise that it is a good thing and will enable better regulation of our oceans and contribute significantly to the shipping industry's competitiveness. 'In terms of overall knowledge gaps, a key weakness is the sheer amount of data being generated. This is an issue for the big data industry in general, not just maritime. We need to make better sense of the immense amount of data we have and improve at extracting meaningful knowledge from it. However to do this, more data is needed! To understand causes and effects, data from multiple sources is needed and for this reason, we would encourage open data sharing.' MarineTraffic believed that open data and transparency could positively contribute to the overall competitiveness of the shipping industry, significantly improving efficiency in a number of areas, the company said."

Research: Open data means business | Open Data Institute

Posted: 01 Jun 2015 11:47 PM PDT

"Pioneering, diverse companies are using open data to create innovative products and services that fill gaps in markets, generate income and bring wide social, environmental and economic benefits. We have identified and analysed 270 companies that use, produce or invest in open data as part of their business, through desk research, surveys and interviews about their experiences. The open data companies we studied have an annual turnover of over £92bn, and over 500k employees between them. This shows the scale of open data's potential value in business. You can explore the different sections in full with the links to the right of this summary ..."

The Project Data Sphere® Initiative Marks Initial Research Outcomes | Business Wire

Posted: 01 Jun 2015 11:42 PM PDT

"Three peer-reviewed papers referencing The Project Data Sphere initiative appear in the May 2015; Vol. 20, No. 5; issue of The Oncologist. This follows a series of research abstracts which were published in conjunction with ASCO, the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. Two of The Oncologist research papers focus on prostate cancer research, including the collaboration with Sage BioNetworks and the Prostate Cancer Foundation which led to the launch of The Prostate Cancer DREAM Challenge. This effort marries crowdsourcing with data sharing, offering an innovative approach to tackle key research questions about metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC), an advanced form of the disease with poor outcomes. There are currently nearly 450 solvers comprising 25 teams participating in The Prostate Cancer DREAM Challenge. The first round of the Challenge closed this week and a leaderboard will soon be posted, allowing teams to compare their performances ... There are currently more than 900 authorized users on the platform with access to 49 data sets representing 27,000 patient lives across a broad array of cancer tumor areas. The site activity has increased significantly since its launch in April, 2014; more than 2,000 data downloads for research purposes have occurred since that time ..."  

The use of open resources among highly cited young Ukrainian scientists - E-LIS repository

Posted: 01 Jun 2015 11:36 PM PDT

"There are scientific and educational institutions in Ukraine which actively introduce and fill up open sources in web to make integration of Ukrainian scientists into worldwide communication more effective. Ukrainian scientists' citation boost with their complete works available at open sources must indicate the success of such integration. This article, grounding in Scopus and Google Scholar data, investigates the types of scientific web-sources used by Ukrainian scientists for promotion of their works."
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