The European Network of Open Education Librarians ((ENOEL) is helping implement the UNESCO Open Educational Resources (OER) Recommendation as ambassadors and facilitators of Open Education. How it plans to support it […]
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The STM Association released an Article Sharing Framework to facilitate use of scholarly collaboration networks in compliance with new EU Copyright Directive.
The post Article Sharing Framework: Facilitating Scholarly Sharing Through Metadata appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
A look at a session from last week’s CHORUS Forum that discussed new open access business models — what does it take to make them work?
The post New Open Access Business Models — What’s Needed to Make Them Work? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
How can not-for-profit organizations outcompete their commercial rivals? Revisiting Joe Esposito’s 2011 post that lays out a blueprint for success.
The post Revisiting: Governance and the Not-for-profit Publisher appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Thea Sherer discusses Springer Nature’s efforts to address climate impact and how collective action can help us all do our part.
The post Guest Post — Climate Action: Collaboration for Progress on Earth Day appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
At the end of 2020, the Chinese Academy of Sciences issued their first “Early Warning List of International Journals”. Christos Petrou takes a look at the early impacts this list has had on the journals and publishers named.
The post Guest Post – An Early Look at the Impact of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Journals Warning List appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Study of researchers indicates that a preprint or accepted manuscript can substitute for the version of record in some use cases but not all.
The post Publishers Care about the Version of Record, Do Researchers? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Study of researchers indicates that a preprint or accepted manuscript can substitute for the version of record in some use cases but not all.
The post Publishers Care about the Version of Record, Do Researchers? appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Yesterday marked the launch of the Authors Alliance, a nonprofit organization that supports authors who want “to harness the potential of digital networks to share their creations more broadly in order to serve the public good.”
In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Authors Alliance founder Pamela Samuelson explained that the Authors Alliance will have a few different roles. Inwardly, the group will “provide authors with information about copyrights, licensing agreements, alternative contract terms,” and other practical legal information so that they can make their works widely and openly available. And externally, the Alliance will “represent the interests of authors who want to make their works more widely available in public policy debates,” and advocate for these reforms alongside like-minded public interest organizations.
The Authors Alliance was developed by Samuelson and several of her colleagues at the University of California Berkeley including Molly Van Houweling, Carla Hesse, and Thomas Leonard. The Alliance also has an advisory board made up of pre-eminent scholars, writers, and public interest advocates, including several members of the Creative Commons board of directors. The Authors Alliance is now accepting new members.
The Alliance has already developed a set of copyright reform principles, outlining its vision for changes to copyright law to support authors who write to be read.
We have formed an Authors Alliance to represent authors who create to be read, to be seen, and to be heard. We believe that these authors have not been well served by misguided efforts to strengthen copyright. These efforts have failed to provide meaningful financial returns to most authors, while instead unacceptably compromising the preservation of our own intellectual legacies and our ability to tap our collective cultural heritage. We want to harness the potential of global digital networks to share knowledge and products of the imagination as broadly as possible. We aim to amplify the voices of authors and creators in all media who write and create not only for pay, but above all to make their discoveries, ideas, and creations accessible to the broadest possible audience.
The principles include:
At the core, the Authors Alliance and Creative Commons share a similar goal: to provide useful resources and tools for creators who aren’t being served well by the existing copyright system. We’re excited to work with the Alliance on issues that support authors who write to be read–and the public interest for whom these authors create.
Dan is giving a talk today at the 2014 NIAID bioinformatics festival. The meeting is being live streamed from the NIH campus. If you’d like a preview, the slides are now available on slideshare.
Access to research results, immediately and
without restriction, has always been at the heart of PLOS’ mission and the wider Open Access movement. However, without similar access to the data underlying the findings, the article can be of limited use. For this reason, PLOS has always required that authors make their data available to other academic researchers who wish to replicate, reanalyze, or build upon the findings published in our journals.
In an effort to increase access to this data, we are now revising our data-sharing policy for all PLOS journals: authors must make all data publicly available, without restriction, immediately upon publication of the article. Beginning March 3rd, 2014, all authors who submit to a PLOS journal will be asked to provide a Data Availability Statement, describing where and how others can access each dataset that underlies the findings. This Data Availability Statement will be published on the first page of each article.
What do we mean by data?
“Data are any and all of the digital materials that are collected and analyzed in the pursuit of scientific advances.” Examples could include spreadsheets of original measurements (of cells, of fluorescent intensity, of respiratory volume), large datasets such as
next-generation sequence reads, verbatim responses from qualitative studies, software code, or even image files used to create figures. Data should be in the form in which it was originally collected, before summarizing, analyzing or reporting.
What do we mean by publicly available?
All data must be in one of three places:
Do we allow any exceptions?
Yes, but only in specific cases. We are aware that it is not ethical to make all datasets fully public, including private patient data, or specific information relating to endangered species. Some authors also obtain data from third parties and therefore do not have the right to make that dataset publicly available. In such cases, authors must state that “Data is available upon request”, and identify the person, group or committee to whom requests should be submitted. The authors themselves should not be the only point of contact for requesting data.
Where can I go for more information?
The revised data sharing policy, along with more information about the issues associated with public availability of data, can be reviewed in full at:
http://www.plos.org/data-access-for-the-open-access-literature-ploss-data-policy/
http://www.plos.org/update-on-plos-data-policy/
Image: Open Data stickers by Jonathan Gray
The post PLOS’ New Data Policy: Public Access to Data appeared first on EveryONE.
After attending two recent scientific conferences, one which was gender balanced, and one which was so gender-imbalanced that it engendered snarky out-of-band twitter comments, it struck me that we might need a Bechdel Test for scientific workshops. The Bechdel test is a simple test for movies. To pass the test, a movie has to have:
Seems simple, right? You’d be amazed at just how few popular movies pass the test, including some set in universes that were originally designed for equality. (I’m talking about you, Star Trek reboot.)
Here’s an analogous test for scientific workshops or conference symposia. Does the workshop have:
Again, this seems simple, right? But you’d be shocked how few scientific conference symposia or workshops can live up to this standard. I suspect this depends strongly on specific research fields.
Rigoberto Hernandez has been talking about advancing science through diversity for quite a while. I finally got to hear him speak about the OXIDE project on this latest trip, and he’s got a lot of great things to say about how diversity can strengthen science. I think one great way to help is to point out the good conferences we attend which live up to this standard.
Rigoberto also happened to be one of the organizers of the gender-balanced conference, which was also one of the best meetings I’ve ever attended.
In 1998, Open Science seemed like a pretty obvious projection of basic scientific principles into the digital age. I didn’t think the ideas would meet much, if any, resistance from the scientific community. And in October 1999, Brookhaven National Lab sponsored a meeting called Open Source / Open Science that, in retrospect, was a pretty utopian gathering. There were a lot of the current OpenScience community members present at the meeting (notably Brian Glanz and Greg Wilson). It felt like everyone would be convinced to do Open Source & Open Data science in short order.
The past 14 years have been instructive in just how long it can take to make cultural changes in the scientific community.
So, it was an amazing experience to be present when the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced the Champions of Change for Open Science. These are 13 incredible individuals and organizations with great stories about sharing their science. It feels like we’ve made significant motion on implementing policies that are friendly to Open Science. I should note that we’re particularly happy to see OSTP use the phrase Open Science, and not the more narrow terms: Open Data or Open Access. I’m hopeful that Open Source will also be part of science policy going forward.
There was a second group who got the opportunity to present at this event at a poster session later that day. I haven’t seen the list publicized elsewhere, but these are some sharp folks who deserve recognition for their work. I’m going to highlight some of these in the coming week. Here’s the list of posters:
It was an intense day, and I’m delighted that Open Science has finally come of age.
I’m giving a poster in a few days about openscience.org, and it has been a very long time since I’ve had to make a poster. This one turned out quite text-heavy, but I wanted to make a few arguments that seemed difficult or impossible to translate into graphics. A PDF (9.3 MB) of the draft is available by clicking the image on the right…
Comments and suggestions, as always, are quite welcome.
Yesterday’s post on the reversible random number generators received some interesting reactions from my colleagues. They were uniformly impressed with the solution to what everyone thought was a hard problem, but surprisingly, most of the scientists I talked to were most excited about the fact that dangling a $500 reward for solving a hard problem generated nearly instantaneous results. Typical comments:
I wonder if I similarly spent my startup how much science I could get done…
Also, it is amazing what $500 buys these days!
Think how many problems we could solve if we dangled a few prizes for other knotty problems.
So what made this work?
I’m now wondering if all of the attempts to get a kickstarter or crowdsourced funding model for science (e.g. sciflies, petridish, scifundchallenge, fundageek) are just a bit misguided. Science is darned expensive, and for better or worse, we’re going to be wedded to federal and foundation funding for science for a long time. All funding models have an aspect of salesmanship to them – a scientist must convince the funder that the problem itself is interesting enough to need solving, and that their lab is the one to solve it. In the NSF-style funding model, scientific communities do have significant input into what the “good problems” are, but the necessary delays in funding and the scarcity of funds means that we’re not very agile.
Perhaps we need a clearinghouse where scientific communities can agree on a tough challenge, pool some minimal award money (like $500 or $1000) and let their young colleagues have a go at winning fame by solving them.
