Category Archives: oa.partial

Wikipedia Is Finally Asking Big Tech to Pay Up | WIRED

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“FROM THE START, Google and Wikipedia have been in a kind of unspoken partnership: Wikipedia produces the information Google serves up in response to user queries, and Google builds up Wikipedia’s reputation as a source of trustworthy information….

The two have grown in tandem over the past 20 years, each becoming its own household word. But whereas one mushroomed into a trillion-dollar company, the other has remained a midsize nonprofit, depending on the generosity of individual users, grant-giving foundations, and the Silicon Valley giants themselves to stay afloat. Now Wikipedia is seeking to rebalance its relationships with Google and other big tech firms like Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, whose platforms and virtual assistants lean on Wikipedia as a cost-free virtual crib sheet….

Today, the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates the Wikipedia project in more than 300 languages as well as other wiki-projects, is announcing the launch of a commercial product, Wikimedia Enterprise. The new service is designed for the sale and efficient delivery of Wikipedia’s content directly to these online behemoths (and eventually, to smaller companies too)….

The free, albeit clunky option will still be available to all users, including commercial ones. This means that Wikimedia Enterprise’s principal competition, in the words of Lisa Seitz-Gruwell, the foundation’s chief revenue officer, is Wikipedia itself….

But the formatting problems with the free version offer an obvious opportunity to create a product worth paying for, one tailored to the requirements of each company. For example, Enterprise will deliver the real-time changes and comprehensive data dumps in a compatible format. There will also be a level of customer service typical of business arrangements but unprecedented for the volunteer-directed project….

By offering more useful data, Enterprise will help ensure that commercial operators display the latest, most accurate version of articles and crack down on vandalism quicker. A contractual relationship will also more formally recognize that these companies are extracting value from a volunteer project, and therefore must “contribute back to the commons,” Seitz-Gruwell says. …”

Guest Post – Trends, Challenges, and Needs of Research in the Global South: Learnings as Research4Life Turns 20 – The Scholarly Kitchen

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“Access to research knowledge is essential for developing new research and for informed policy decisions. But access to knowledge is not equal around the world; researchers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are significantly disadvantaged by access challenges.

This was the burning problem that Research4Life was set up to address, 20 years ago this year as the print to electronic migration was just gaining speed. Launched as Hinari by the World Health Organization (WHO) with 1500 journals from six major publishers, it now offers users up to 132,000 resources from 180 international partners. But partnering with publishers to facilitate access is not enough in itself; the resources have to be used effectively in a way that is relevant to users’ research, implementation and beyond.

This is why, every five years Research4Life commissions in-depth reviews of its work to understand how the work of the partnership is experienced from the users’ as well as the partners’ perspectives – looking at its infrastructure, external context or landscape, and user experience. Together, the reviews serve as a solid evidence base for future evolution as Research4Life plans its strategy for the next five years. Our most recent set of evaluations were conducted in 2020-2021….”

Wary EU vows to keep its research open to ‘most’ of the world | Science|Business

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“Brussels presented a new global research agenda on Tuesday, committing to a more cautious approach to cooperation with foreign science powers, while at the same time pledging to reinvigorate ties with an EU-friendly US administration.

The blueprint, which has been in the works for months,  sets out “nuanced and modulated” rules of engagement with foreign countries based on “levels of reciprocity, a level playing field, and the respect for fundamental rights and shared values,” while protecting EU-funded research from those seeking to abuse the system.

Among other measures, the blue print promises:

A shift to cooperation around new strategic goals, such as the dual green and digital transition. The EU will adapt cooperation with particular countries and regions in light of this approach, giving priority to cooperation with countries in the wider European neighbourhood, to Africa, and to “like-minded” industrialised and emerging economies.
To weigh openness against the EU’s evolving pursuit of strategic autonomy, which could mean revising and limiting cooperation with certain foreign actors.
To boost the involvement of member states in setting the EU’s global science path…. 

Notably, the old ethos of “open to the world” espoused by former research commissioner Carlos Moedas is gone, to be replaced by “open to most of the world”….

DeepDyve Launches New Digital Library Platform, Bringing World Class Enterprise Literature Management Technology to Research Organizations

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“DeepDyve, the leading enterprise literature management company, today announces the availability of the DeepDyve Digital Library, the industry’s first fully integrated platform aimed at helping research organizations discover, access, and manage research papers. The Digital Library is a one-stop platform designed for small to medium-sized teams and organizations needing easy and affordable solutions for reading and organizing scientific papers. This new offering provides access to more than 100 million journal articles and research papers – without the need for information professionals and IT staff….

The platform allows teams to search, organize and access the full text of five million open access articles and 20 million premium rentable papers from over 20,000 journals. In addition, researchers are able to purchase and download any paper from its comprehensive collection of 100 million citations available in the reference database. The Digital Library supports automatic de-duplication of purchases, so if one team member has already bought a paper, it will be available to all plan members, avoiding repeat charges and reducing waste….”

The Pierre Auger Observatory shares 10% of data | symmetry magazine

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“Pierre Auger scientists have released data before, both in their open-access scientific publications and for the purposes of education and outreach on their website. But this is the first time they’ve released such detailed information about each cosmic-ray event. The release includes 10% of their dataset through 2018—a collection of every 10th recorded event….”

OpenNotes – Patients and clinicians on the same page

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“OpenNotes is the international movement promoting and studying transparent communication in healthcare. We help patients and clinicians share meaningful notes in medical records. We call these open notes….

OpenNotes is not software or a product. It’s a call to action.”

 

Federal Rules Mandating Open Notes

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“Taking effect in April, 2021, rules implementing the bipartisan federal Cures Act specify that clinical notes are among electronic information that must not be blocked and must be made available free of charge to patients. To meet the interests of some patients, the rules allow specified exceptions….”

Maximizing Benefit, Minimizing Harm – The Geyser — Hot Takes & Deep Thinking on the Info Economy

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“Editors ran with scissors many times during the early days of Covid-19, with some infamously wounded when they stumbled. But preprints have been a wholly different category of problem. As you know, I think making preprints openly available to the lay public and journalists perpetuates unnecessary downsides and mismanages our interface with society. But is there a better way? Criticism is one thing, but what about a positive proposal for fixing the issues? I’ve proposed numerous design improvements before, and here’s a bit more refinement — if preprint servers required a simple email login, and required these emails to be associated with institutions of higher education and research companies, we’d have a much better system for sharing preliminary reports….”

Remote access to Taylor & Francis Online made easier with SeamlessAccess – Taylor & Francis Newsroom

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“Accessing research through an institutional subscription using SAML authentication (Shibboleth and OpenAthens) is now more straightforward with the introduction of SeamlessAccess on Taylor & Francis Online.

SeamlessAccess automatically recognizes if you have previously logged into Taylor & Francis Online using Shibboleth or OpenAthens and presents your previously used institution as the first option, removing the need to manually search each and every time you want to access journal research articles.

The feature not only works on Taylor & Francis Online but follows you across all participating publisher platforms. So, if you have logged into your institution on another participating publishing platform and then switch to another also using SeamlessAccess, your institutional choice will be carried with you. This works even if you’re visiting a publisher platform for the first time….”

Amazon Publishing in Talks to Offer E-books to Public Libraries

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“The potential deal would be a breakthrough moment in the library e-book market as Amazon currently does not make its digital content available to libraries. It would also be a major coup for the Digital Public Library of America’s upstart e-book platform and its SimplyE library reading app….”

 

 

Amazon under pressure to lift ban on e-book library sales | TheHill

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“Amazon’s refusal to sell e-books published in-house to libraries is sparking backlash as demand for digital content spikes during the coronavirus pandemic.

Librarians and advocacy groups are pushing for the tech giant to license its published e-books to libraries for distribution, arguing the company’s self-imposed ban significantly decreases public access to information.

“You shouldn’t have to have a credit card in order to be an informed citizen,” Michael Blackwell, director of St. Mary’s County Library in Maryland, told The Hill. “It’s vital that books continue to be a source of information and that those books should be democratically discovered through libraries.”

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A petition launched last week by Fight for the Future, a tech advocacy group, calls for Congress to pursue an antitrust investigation and legislative action against Amazon for its ban on selling e-books to libraries. As of Tuesday afternoon, it had nearly 13,000 signatures….

Amazon has indicated it is in discussions to allow its e-books to be licensed by libraries, but so far the public institutions are unable to access Amazon’s digital titles.

Issues surrounding library e-books go beyond Amazon. Traditional publishers have become increasingly restrictive regarding e-books, Blackwell said, but they at least offer options for libraries to license and distribute those books.

The crux of the issue is how e-books are sold. Whereas libraries can lend out physical copies of purchased books for as long as they hold up, libraries must adhere to licensing agreements that constrain how long they can keep e-books in circulation.

The top publishing firms typically have two-year licensing contacts for library e-books, with options to extend for another two years, said Alan S. Inouye, senior director of public policy and government relations at the American Library Association.

But unlike their traditional publishing peers, Amazon does not allow libraries to purchase the e-books it publishes, leaving no option for libraries to access what Amazon says is “over 1 million digital titles” that consumers “won’t find anywhere else.”…”

Elsevier Chairman Y.S. Chi’s letter to President-elect Joe Biden

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“Congratulations on your election as the 46th President of the United States. We also extend our enthusiastic congratulations to Senator Kamala Harris on her historic election as our next Vice President.

My congratulatory letter is also a letter of our commitment to act with open and transparent evidence-based solutions to help your administration to meet the challenges and opportunities of our time….

For example, in January 2020, Elsevier launched a Coronavirus Info Center that made all relevant journal articles, clinical insights and data analytics freely available; and shortly afterwards, added a series of freely accessible resource hubs for healthcare workers and researchers, including a global Healthcare Hub; a Research Hub; and a Mental Health Hub. We are also partnering with OSTP, NIH, and the WHO to support COVID-19 research solutions. And lastly, we launched Elsevier’s The Lancet COVID-19 Commission—an interdisciplinary initiative led by Jeff Sachs, alongside leaders in health sciences, business, finance, and policy—focused on helping to speed up equitable and lasting solutions to the pandemic….”

Open Science Saves Lives: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic | bioRxiv

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Abstract:  In the last decade Open Science principles have been successfully advocated for and are being slowly adopted in different research communities. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many publishers and researchers have sped up their adoption of Open Science practices, sometimes embracing them fully and sometimes partially or in a sub-optimal manner. In this article, we express concerns about the violation of some of the Open Science principles and its potential impact on the quality of research output. We provide evidence of the misuses of these principles at different stages of the scientific process. We call for a wider adoption of Open Science practices in the hope that this work will encourage a broader endorsement of Open Science principles and serve as a reminder that science should always be a rigorous process, reliable and transparent, especially in the context of a pandemic where research findings are being translated into practice even more rapidly. We provide all data and scripts at https://osf.io/renxy/.

 

Policy Commons

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“Policy Commons is a one-stop community platform for objective, fact-based research from the world’s leading policy experts, nonpartisan think tanks, IGOs and NGOs

We treat think-tank publications as a formal body of literature in its own right, with tools to systematically search it, cite it, understand its impact, catalog it, and preserve it for the long term….”