Funding Round for Open Access in Physics, Mathematics, and Computer Science underway – TIB-Blog

“From 1 June 2023 to 1 July 2023, a funding call for seven journals in quantum physics, mathematics, and computer science is underway. Libraries, research institutions, foundations, companies and individuals can make a financial contribution to ensure that these journals can exist sustainably as open access journals – without author-facing publishing fees….”

Open Call for Volunteers for Presidential Task Forces

“ACM President Yannis Ioannidis is planning to create 10 task forces as part of ACM 4.0, a long-term strategic plan for ACM, and is inviting volunteers to serve on these task forces

Below are brief descriptions of each of the task forces. Each will comprise a cross-section of individuals selected for their interest and relevant expertise. Although the length of service for the different task forces may vary, it is anticipated that each will produce an initial report in about six months….

The Open Science task force will establish services to help researchers operate according to the Open Science paradigm (which includes Open Access as an important component) and the demands it brings, for example, reproducibility of experiments, transparency throughout the research life cycle, and new forms of scholarly communication and reviewing….”

Tackling the Law of Text and Data Mining for Computational Research – Duke University Libraries Blogs

“Over the last several years, Duke, like many other institutions, has made a significant investment in computational research, recognizing that such research techniques can have wide-ranging benefits from translational research in the biomedical sciences to the digital humanities, this work can and has been transformative.  Much of this work is reliant on researchers being able to engage in text and data-mining (TDM) to produce the data-sets necessary for large-scale computational analysis. For the sciences, this can range from compiling research data across a whole series of research projects, to collecting large numbers of research articles for computer-aided systematic reviews. For the humanities, it may mean assembling a corpus of digitized books, DVDs, music, or images for analysis into how language, literary themes, or depictions have changed over time….

The techniques and tools for text and data-mining have advanced rapidly, but one constant for TDM researchers has been a fear of legal risk. For data-sets composed of copyrighted works, the risk of liability can seem staggering. With copyright’s statutory damages set as high as $150,000 per work infringed, a corpus of several hundred works can cause real concern. 

However, the risks of just avoiding copyrighted works are also high….”

Investigating the citation advantage of author-pays charges model in computer science research: a case study of Elsevier and Springer | Emerald Insight

Abstract:  Purpose

Citation is an important measure of quality, and it plays a vital role in evaluating scientific research. However, citation advantage varies from discipline to discipline, subject to subject and topic to topic. This study aims to compare the citation advantage of open access and toll access articles from four subfields of computer science.

Design/methodology/approach

This research studies the articles published by two prestigious publishers: Springer and Elsevier in the author-pays charges model from 2011 to 2015. For experimentation, four sub-domains of computer science are selected including (a) artificial intelligence, (b) human–computer interaction, (c) computer vision and graphics, and (d) software engineering. The open-access and toll-based citation advantage is studied and analyzed at the micro level within the computer science domain by performing independent sample t-tests.

Findings

The results of the study highlight that open access articles have a higher citation advantage as compared to toll access articles across years and sub-domains. Further, an increase in open access articles has been observed from 2011 to 2015. The findings of the study show that the citation advantage of open access articles varies among different sub-domains of a subject. The study contributed to the body of knowledge by validating the positive movement toward open access articles in the field of computer science and its sub-domains. Further, this work added the success of the author-pays charges model in terms of citation advantage to the literature of open access.

Originality/value

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to examine the citation advantage of the author-pays charges model at a subject level (computer science) along with four sub-domains of computer science.

Why Open Access To The ACM Digital Library Matters | Associations Now

“ACM, in the midst of both a landmark celebration and a broader open-access initiative, is putting its history online for anyone to access. The archives give computing enthusiasts something to celebrate—and interested parties a window into ACM’s evolution….

Once, this information—immensely valuable to historians and researchers alike—might have been locked behind a paywall. But as a part of its landmark campaign for its 75th anniversary celebrations, ACM is opening up a large portion of its archives, making the first 50 years of its published records—more than 117,500 documents dating from 1951 to 2000—accessible to the public without a login….”

Using current research information systems to investigate data acquisition and data sharing practices of computer scientists – Antti Mikael Rousi, 2022

Abstract:  Without sufficient information about research data practices occurring in a particular research organisation, there is a risk of mismatching research data service efforts with the needs of its researchers. This study describes how data acquiring and data sharing occurring within a particular research organisation can be investigated by using current research information system publication data. The case study organisation’s current research information system was used to identify the sample of investigated articles. A sample of 193 journal articles published by researchers in the computer science department of the case study’s university during 2019 were extracted for scrutiny from the current research information system. For these 193 articles, a classification of the main study types was developed to accommodate the multidisciplinary nature of the case department’s research agenda. Furthermore, a coding framework was developed to capture the key elements of data acquiring and data sharing. The articles representing life sciences and computational research relatively frequently reused open data, whereas data acquisition of experimental research, human interaction studies and human intervention studies often relied on collecting original data. Data sharing also differed between the computationally intensive study types of life sciences and computational research and the study types relying on collection of original data. Research data were not available for reuse in only a minority of life science (n?=?2; 7%) and computational research (n?=?15; 14%) studies. The study types of experimental research, human interaction studies and human intervention studies less frequently made their data available for reuse. The findings suggest that research organisations representing computer sciences may include different subfields that have their own cultures of data sharing. This study demonstrates that analyses of publications listed in current research information systems provide detailed descriptions how the affiliated researchers acquire and share research data.

ACM Opens First 50 Years Backfile

“ACM has opened the articles published during the first 50 years of its publishing program. These articles, published between 1951 and the end of 2000, are now open and freely available to view and download via the ACM Digital Library.

ACM’s first 50 years backfile contains more than 117,500 articles on a wide range of computing topics. In addition to articles published between 1951 and 2000, ACM has also opened related and supplemental materials including data sets, software, slides, audio recordings, and videos….”

Journal of Functional Programming moving to Open Access

As the year winds down, the Journal of Functional Programming gets ready to open a new chapter. From January, every article in JFP will be available under Gold Open Access.

The published ‘version of record’ will be made available to all upon publication, and will be found from the journal’s homepage. Papers will be free to read for anyone, anywhere.

Authors will continue to retain copyright of their work: content will be published under a Creative Commons license, which allows free access and redistribution and, in many cases, allows re-use in new or derivative works. Read our FAQ page to find out more about what the move to Open Access means for our authors.

Ground-breaking Computer Science Resource Wins 2021 UCT Open Textbook Award | Digital Open Textbooks for Development

“University of Cape Town Deputy Vice-Chancellor Lis Lange has announced that the 2021 UCT Open Textbook Award goes to Associate Professor Maria Keet for her groundbreaking resource, An Introduction to Ontology Engineering.

The award, which recognises outstanding open textbooks written by UCT staff and students, is an initiative of the DVC in collaboration with the DOT4D and carries a value of R30 000.

The UCT Open Textbook Award is a symbol of institutional commitment to supporting the production of open educational resources that promote social justice and innovation. In line with this approach, the award recognises open textbook development efforts that address any of the following areas: curriculum transformation, pedagogical innovation, inclusion of students and marginalised voices, disability access, relevance to local context, multilingualism and technical innovation….”

Ground-breaking Computer Science Resource Wins 2021 UCT Open Textbook Award | Digital Open Textbooks for Development

“University of Cape Town Deputy Vice-Chancellor Lis Lange has announced that the 2021 UCT Open Textbook Award goes to Associate Professor Maria Keet for her groundbreaking resource, An Introduction to Ontology Engineering.

The award, which recognises outstanding open textbooks written by UCT staff and students, is an initiative of the DVC in collaboration with the DOT4D and carries a value of R30 000.

The UCT Open Textbook Award is a symbol of institutional commitment to supporting the production of open educational resources that promote social justice and innovation. In line with this approach, the award recognises open textbook development efforts that address any of the following areas: curriculum transformation, pedagogical innovation, inclusion of students and marginalised voices, disability access, relevance to local context, multilingualism and technical innovation….”

Ground-breaking Computer Science Resource Wins 2021 UCT Open Textbook Award | Digital Open Textbooks for Development

“University of Cape Town Deputy Vice-Chancellor Lis Lange has announced that the 2021 UCT Open Textbook Award goes to Associate Professor Maria Keet for her groundbreaking resource, An Introduction to Ontology Engineering.

The award, which recognises outstanding open textbooks written by UCT staff and students, is an initiative of the DVC in collaboration with the DOT4D and carries a value of R30 000.

The UCT Open Textbook Award is a symbol of institutional commitment to supporting the production of open educational resources that promote social justice and innovation. In line with this approach, the award recognises open textbook development efforts that address any of the following areas: curriculum transformation, pedagogical innovation, inclusion of students and marginalised voices, disability access, relevance to local context, multilingualism and technical innovation….”

OpenStax and collaborators receive $1.13 million to develop free textbooks | Rice News | News and Media Relations | Rice University

“OpenStax and its 12 collaborators have received U.S. Department of Education funding to develop three new free, openly licensed textbooks for in-demand computer science courses. The books will be accompanied by comprehensive support, including educational technology and instructor training.

The textbooks, serving a sector of higher education that includes 2.5 million students, are expected to save students more than $110 million over five years….”

Brainiacs Journal of Brain Imaging And Computing Sciences

“Brain Health Alliance, a not-for-profit organization, manages and publishes the Brainiacs Journal of Brain Imaging And Computing Sciences, also called simply Brainiacs or the Brainiacs Journal as an online journal (LCCN 2021201717, ISSN 2766-6883) of scholarly research articles and electronic digital documents available via open access. All documents will be published fully open access and freely available without any page charges or publishing fees paid by authors and without any access fees paid by readers.”

Study Shows Ensuring Reproducibility in Research Is Needed – IEEE Spectrum

“About 60 percent of IEEE conferences, magazines, and journals have no practices in place to ensure reproducibility of the research they publish. That’s according to a study by an ad hoc committee formed by the IEEE Computer Society to investigate the matter and suggest remedies.

Reproducibility—the ability to repeat a line of research and obtain consistent results—can help confirm the validity of scientific discoveries, IEEE Fellow Manish Parashar points out. He is chair of the society’s Committee on Open Science and Reproducibility….

The goal of the ad hoc committee’s study was to ensure that research results IEEE publishes are reproducible and that readers can look at the results and “be confident that they understand the processes used to create those results and they can reproduce them in their labs,” Parashar says….

Here are three key recommendations from the report:

Researchers should include specific, detailed information about the products they used in their experiment. When naming the software program, for example, authors should include the version and all necessary computer codes that were written. In addition, journals should make submitting the information easier by adding a step in the submission process. The survey found that 22 percent of the society’s journals, magazines, and conferences already have infrastructure in place for submitting such information.
All researchers should include a clear, specific, and complete description of how the reported results were reached. That includes input data, computational steps, and the conditions under which experiments and analysis were performed.
Journals and magazines, as well as scientific societies requesting submissions for their conferences, should develop and disclose policies about achieving reproducibility. Guidelines should include such information as how the papers will be evaluated for reproducibility and criteria code and data must meet….”

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Open Access Agreement | Scholarly Publishing – MIT Libraries

“The MIT Libraries has negotiated an innovative open access agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) that allows MIT authors to make ACM articles freely available at no cost to them.

Under the agreement, MIT corresponding authors can make all articles and conference proceedings in the ACM Digital Library open access immediately at no cost to the author. Instead, MIT is paying ACM a single bulk fee to cover both article publication costs and subscription access. Authors who elect open access may select a Creative Commons license for article sharing and reuse.

The pilot agreement runs from January 2020 through December 31, 2022, and applies to manuscripts submitted and articles published during that period….”