Friday, October 2, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Two jobs building OLH technology | Open Library of Humanities

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 08:11 AM PDT

"We're very pleased to be able to announce that Birkbeck, University of London is hiring two development staff members to build technology for the Open Library of Humanities. These two posts can be viewed on the Birkbeck website: a Senior Software Developer and a Software Developer/Digital Humanities Specialist...."

Utah Workshop on Open Educational Resources and Open Textbooks | Summary | powered by RegOnline

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 01:34 AM PDT

Use the link to access more information about the recent event.  

NSU professor to serve on Education Advisory Committee - Muskogee Phoenix: News

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 01:33 AM PDT

"For Northeastern State University associate professor of English, Dr. Melissa Strong, continual and educational growth has always been valuable. Living her life both professionally and personally by this idea, Strong also tries to impart this mindset to her students, a media release states. Recently, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) formed the Education Advisory Committee (EAC) with the goal of better informing schools across the nation of the millions of digital resources available to them. Out of a pool of more than 300 candidates, Strong was selected to serve as a committee member.  The DPLA is an organization that offers free digital access to millions of items from America's libraries, museums and archives ..."

New Labor app, API open massive data library on child labor

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 01:32 AM PDT

"The Labor Department released two new ways for the public to use open data in the fight against child and forced labor Tuesday. The Sweat & Toil app, released by the department's Bureau of International Labor Affairs, takes thousands of pages of data from three reports — 'Findings on the Worst Forms of Child Labor;' 'List of Goods Produced by Child Labor or Forced Labor' and 'List of Products Produced by Forced or Indentured Child Labor' — and reduces it to a database that can be searched on a mobile device. App users can review international laws or efforts to eliminate child labor, browse what goods have been produced with child or forced labor, and comb through other assorted child labor data. The Labor Department also released an API which taps into the bureau's data library on child and forced labor, giving developers and data scientists the chance to integrate the data into their own research ..."

Can Open Data Make Better Cities?

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 01:14 AM PDT

"The potential for big data to have a positive impact on the way in which cities function and the quality of life of their citizens is beginning to transform from feeling intuitive, to being backed up by practical evidence. However, there are a number of debates still raging over how powerful software and coding technology ought to be best leveraged, and the associated risks, perhaps the most common of which is the issue of privacy and security. A recent report released by McKinsey & Co estimated that open data represents a $3 trillion per year opportunity for cities and businesses. Meanwhile, concurrent to the concerns over privacy, and somewhat separate from the business opportunity, the open data movement has been gaining momentum as a way to create better services ..."

Open Data Gaining Momentum in Africa

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 01:12 AM PDT

"Some 450 policy makers, government officials, academics, development practitioners, and representatives from civil society and the private sector from 39 countries gathered in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania for the first-ever Africa Open Data Conference.  During the event, earlier this month, participants discussed and shared their experiences on Open Data in Africa, how it can be best put into use, how to build the necessary technical skills, and how successes can be translated across sectors and countries ..."

Open Access Policy Guidelines and Template for Funders

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 01:09 AM PDT

"The present guidelines aim to assist in the development of efficient Open Access policies among Funders. They have been prepared by the National Documentation Centre and SPARC Europe as part of the work of the PASTEUR4OA project. They provide the context, the process and a model policy that will enable Funders to develop and implement their own Open Access policy. The proposed policy draws heavily on the UNESCO Open Access policy development guidelines, the MedOANet guidelines for Open Access, PASTEUR4OA work on the effectiveness of existing Open Access policies, and the RECODE project policy recommendations for Open Access policies to research data. It follows current good practices in institutional and funder policies, as they emerged from PASTEUR4OA research on policy effectiveness, suggesting an obligatory and non-waivable deposit in repositories as the most successful way leading to the growth of Open Access to scientific information. Finally, the proposed policy aims at helping align institutional policies with the 2012 Recommendation of the European Commission and the Horizon 2020 requirements."

Open peer review could result in better quality of peer review

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 01:07 AM PDT

Whether or not a research article has been peer reviewed openly can seemingly make a difference to the quality of the peer review, according to research carried out by BioMed Central's Research Integrity Group and Frank Dudbridge from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. When two similar journals were compared, articles that underwent an open peer review showed a 5% improvement in the quality of the peer review reports compared to those that underwent a single blind peer review ... The study, published in the open access journal BMJ Open, also found that reviewers suggested by authors were more likely to recommend acceptance than those who were chosen through other means.

"A judgment on the scientific validity of a research paper is usually based on the recommendations of two or more experts in the field who independently assess the scientific claims being made. To investigate the quality of peer review reports under different models, two journals from BioMed Central's BMC series were compared - BMC Infectious Diseases, which operates under the open peer review model and BMC Microbiology, which operates under the single-blind model ..."

OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repositories — OpenAIRE Guidelines 3.0 documentation

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:57 AM PDT

Use the link to access the guide.

BMC Medicine | Full text | ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:56 AM PDT

[Abstract] Background A negative consequence of the rapid growth of scholarly open access publishing funded by article processing charges is the emergence of publishers and journals with highly questionable marketing and peer review practices. These so-called predatory publishers are causing unfounded negative publicity for open access publishing in general. Reports about this branch of e-business have so far mainly concentrated on exposing lacking peer review and scandals involving publishers and journals. There is a lack of comprehensive studies about several aspects of this phenomenon, including extent and regional distribution. Methods After an initial scan of all predatory publishers and journals included in the so-called Beall's list, a sample of 613 journals was constructed using a stratified sampling method from the total of over 11,000 journals identified. Information about the subject field, country of publisher, article processing charge and article volumes published between 2010 and 2014 were manually collected from the journal websites. For a subset of journals, individual articles were sampled in order to study the country affiliation of authors and the publication delays. Results Over the studied period, predatory journals have rapidly increased their publication volumes from 53,000 in 2010 to an estimated 420,000 articles in 2014, published by around 8,000 active journals. Early on, publishers with more than 100 journals dominated the market, but since 2012 publishers in the 10–99 journal size category have captured the largest market share. The regional distribution of both the publisher's country and authorship is highly skewed, in particular Asia and Africa contributed three quarters of authors. Authors paid an average article processing charge of 178 USD per article for articles typically published within 2 to 3 months of submission. Conclusions Despite a total number of journals and publishing volumes comparable to respectable (indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals) open access journals, the problem of predatory open access seems highly contained to just a few countries, where the academic evaluation practices strongly favor international publication, but without further quality checks.

Study finds eightfold rise in ‘predatory’ journal papers | Times Higher Education

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:53 AM PDT

"The number of articles in so-called predatory journals has risen almost eightfold in the past four years, according to an in-depth study of murky publishers that wave through scientific papers with little or no checks on their credibility. Indian academics accounted for more than a third of authors, while another quarter came from elsewhere in Asia, suggesting that the issue of predatory journals is limited in Europe and North America. Predatory journals have sprung up alongside the move to open access, whereby publishing is funded by academics paying an article processing fee, rather than by charging readers subscription fees. Yet some of these open access journals are considered 'predatory' because they lack proper checks on quality and publish articles rapidly. To demonstrate this lack of rigour one scholar managed to get a nonsensical paper accepted at a predatory journal – which then asked for an $800 (£525) article processing fee.  In a paper published in the journal BMC Medicine, two academics based at the Hanken School of Economics in Finland have mapped the dramatic rise of papers in predatory journals. In 2010, there were about 1,800 active predatory journals; by 2014, this had grown to 8,000, ''Predatory' open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics' found. There was an even more dramatic rise in the number of papers published by these journals, rising nearly eightfold from 53,000 in 2010 to 420,000 in 2014. More than 60 per cent of the corresponding authors were from Asia, of which 34.7 per cent were from India, while a further 16.4 per cent were from Africa. Only 9.2 per cent were based in North America, and another 8.8 per cent in Europe ..."

Open Access Week: Humanities Research, Publics and Access Talk Tickets, Uxbridge | Eventbrite

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:49 AM PDT

"This is an event held by Brunel University London Library to mark Open Access Week. The way in which researchers publish their work is undergoing a profound transformation. The introduction of digital technologies that shift the cost of publishing to the labour to first copy, rather than in the actual dissemination, changes the research-publication landscape. Where previously scholars committed their work to journals that were printed and sold (to small audiences), with the advent of the internet and the world wide web comes the possibility of giving free access to anybody who is interested, not just to those who can pay. In this talk, Dr. Martin Paul Eve will explore the contexts and controversies that sit behind so-called 'open-access' publishing and present alternative models for the future of research ..."

Open access symposium 'Research without paywalls' | University of Groningen Library | Top 100 University | University of Groningen

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:46 AM PDT

"The University of Groningen Library hosts the symposium Research without paywalls - Chances and challenges of open access for the humanities and social sciences on 22 October 2015 to discuss open access publishing in the humanities and social sciences. This half-day conference brings together open access experts, scholars, librarians and everyone interested in open access to discuss the opportunities it provides for academic publishing."

Why we should all be interested in international research programmes | Jisc

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:43 AM PDT

"We're a sector hungry for international collaboration, according to a survey of researchers working in social sciences and humanities across 31European countries – but often lack the skills and infrastructure to take advantage ... The reason for the blockade in cross-border research projects is understandable, if regrettable: researchers don't always know the routes to publishing their work internationally or how to find overseas colleagues in their area. They may not be aware of shared resources that they could use and, when they do happen upon relevant resources, they may not have access to them ... But the benefits are clear. By working collaboratively, organisations and their staff can access internationally-held data and resources. They gather skills and knowledge from people working in similar areas EU-wide, can build internationally competitive teams and research groups, and also gain a greater audience for their research ..."

 

The new norm: thoughts on the world, post-OA - Research Information

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:33 AM PDT

"The UK catalysed developments with the commissioning and publication of the so-called 'Finch' report on publication and accessibility of research.   It has now arguably passed the baton on to the Netherlands, the first nation to clearly articulate its vision, by 2024, of publishing *all* of its research outputs on a Gold OA basis. Although government policy direction in the US is around 'public access', the Gates Foundation is the first major research funder to mandate that all its funded research outputs be published  open access, accessible immediately (gold OA). The rest of the world is engaging with OA in some form or other, though policies predominantly focus on Green OA (archiving articles in repositories following their publication in subscription journals). Nonetheless there is a clear direction of travel, and the future looks set to be Open.   What next then, for scholarly communication? There has been much discussion around how best to communicate research and findings in our increasingly networked digital age. If we assume that all research outputs will be made available to all, how might scholarly communication change? One area that springs to mind is accessibility. Those of us who don't have a PHD in high energy physics struggle to understand the terms and concepts outlined in a typical research article in this field.   How then do we bridge this gap in understanding? ..."

Does Alliant Press suggest a self-published future for university presses? | Publishing Technology

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:25 AM PDT

"Last week, Alliant International University (AIU), a private US college announced an intriguing scholarly publishing partnership with Author Solutions, the self-publishing arm of Penguin Random House. Together the two organisations said they were creating Alliant Press, a university press that would be built using Author Solutions infrastructure and be dedicated to publishing "academic works of AIU students, scholars, alumni, staff and other select authors". Author Solutions' official announcement presents this partnership as a "new model of academic publishing", and it's certainly innovative from several different points of view. Yet whether it truly does present a model that could be applied more widely across the scholarly publishing sector is open to debate. AIU has been open in saying that it signed a partnership with Author Solutions instead of investing in the considerable infrastructure required to set up a university press from scratch. The deal will allow AIU to leverage the systems and workflow of a publishing services company to produce and distribute content for publication. By making use of on-demand resource, Alliant Press will therefore hope to keep its start-up costs under control. What's more surprising, however, is that AIU chose as its partner a company that specialises in providing services in the trade publishing sector rather than a scholarly publisher. Perhaps the explanation for this lies in AIU itself. It is a private university mostly run as a for-profit institution, meaning that it will always be looking for new and innovative ways to monetise its activities. This partnership suggests that it sees its university press as being in the business of producing books, probably as short print runs of content authored by its student and faculty body where publication is supported or funded by the author. At a very superficial level this bears some small similarities to open access monograph publishers already active in the market, in that here authors and/or their funders pay a publication fee to publish their work. Yet an open access monograph publisher, such as Palgrave Open, and Alliant Press actually have very different in aims and objectives, even if they're both trying to solve the same problem: that of providing researchers with a path to publish their content in a challenging scholarly book market ..."

Predatory publishers earned $75 million last year, study finds | Science/AAAS | News

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:21 AM PDT

"Need to get your research published? Don't want to be hassled by peer review or editorial quality control? You are in luck: There are thousands of scientific journals waiting to publish it right away, for a fee. A new study finds that the fake journal business is booming—and puts some hard numbers on this murky academic underworld. Last year alone, so-called predatory publishers took in about $75 million and published nearly half a million articles, researchers report today online in BMC Medicine. 'It took more than half a year to finish the data collection,' says Cenyu Shen of the Hanken School of Economics in Helsinki, who conducted the survey with fellow information systems scientist Bo-Christer Björk. With some help from undergrad students, the team combed through hundreds of discredited academic journal websites to gather basic data. Where did they get their list of predatory publishers? From Jeffrey Beall, the librarian at the University of Colorado, Denver, who both coined the phrase and for years has curated an online black list of publishing bad guys ... Beall's list has come a long way from its origins on a personal blog in 2010. Not only does he now provide a long list of the criteria that land a publisher on the list, there is now a formal process for getting off it. The appeals are handled by an external board of advisers ... Controversial or not, Shen and Björk wanted some basic data about this predatory population. They started by simply counting the number of journal titles published by the 1030 publishers on Beall's list as of September 2014, which includes 416 single-journal publishers. They identified 11,873 journal titles.  A full probe of all of those journals would have been a herculean task, so they devised a sampling method to estimate the features of the whole. First they divided the publishers into groups based on how many journals they published (more than 100, 10–99, 2–9, or 1). They then took a random sample of the publishers within each group, a random sample of each publisher's journals, and finally, they chose five random articles from those journals to gather data about the studies and authors.  The results show that the fake journal business is very robust. The team estimates that 420,000 articles were published in these journals in 2014 at an average price of $178. Mirroring the results of a 2013 sting operation by this author, the team found that most of the publishers are based in developing countries in Asia, with India leading the pack with 27%. What's new is their finding that the authors who publish in these journals by and large come from the same regions: India leads with 35% of authors, and more than 75% hail from Asia or Africa ..."

News from the MLA MLA Receives Grant for Expansion of MLA Commons

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:16 AM PDT

"The MLA has received a generous $225,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand the association's scholarly communication platform, MLA Commons. With support from the Mellon Foundation, the MLA will create Humanities Commons, a federated open-source network of sites that will link the MLA to other humanities societies to further interdisciplinary collaboration. During this pilot phase of the project, the MLA will establish and connect Commons networks for the College Art Association; the Association for Jewish Studies; and the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies and head the development of a shared identity-management system that will facilitate collaboration among society members. The project will be led by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, the MLA's director of scholarly communication, and the grant period will run until 31 December 2016."

The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014: malware and some side notes « Walt at Random

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:13 AM PDT

"First, a very brief status report. As of this morning, the book has sold five copies (four paperback, one ebook)–exactly the same numbers as a week ago, September 24, 2015. This is, how you say, not especially rapid progress toward the twin goals of making the data available and carrying forward the research into 2016. (Meanwhile, the October 2015 Cites & Insights has been downloaded at least 1,300 times so far–about 85% of those downloads being the more-readable single-column version of this excerpted version of The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014. (If one out of every 20 downloads yielded a sale of the book, that would meet the data-availability goal and probably the next-year's-research goal…) Second, a sad note. An article–which I'd seen from two sources before publication–that starts by apparently assuming Beall's lists are something other than junk, then bases an investigation on sampling from the lists, has appeared in a reputable OA journal and, of course, is being picked up all over the place…with Beall being quoted, naturally, thus making the situation worse. I was asked for comments by another reporter (haven't seen whether the piece has appeared and whether I'm quoted), and the core of my comments was that it's hard to build good research based on junk, and I regard Beall's lists as junk, especially given his repeated condemnation of all OA–and, curiously, his apparent continuing belief that author-side charges, which in the Bealliverse automatically corrupt scholarship, only happen in OA (page charges are apparently mythical creatures in the Bealliverse). So, Beall gains even more credibility; challenging him becomes even more hopeless. Third, a somewhat better note: Cheryl LaGuardia has published 'An Interview with Peter Suber' in her 'Not Dead Yet' column at Library Journal. If you haven't already read it, you should. A couple of key quotes (in my opinion) ..."

Joint response on the draft UK Concordat on Open Research Data | Unlocking Research

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:08 AM PDT

"During August the Research Councils UK on behalf of the UK Open Research Data Forum released a draft Concordat on Open Research Data for which they have sought feedback. The Universities of Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford prepared a joint response which was sent to the RCUK on 28 September 2015. The response is reproduced below in full ..."

Forum: An open forum to discuss the future of peer review |

Posted: 02 Oct 2015 12:07 AM PDT

Use the link to access the complete discussion thread.  "This forum contains 8 topics and 13 replies ..."
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