The Georgia Tech Library has consistently supported open access to scholarly literature. Dr. Nielsen, and other supporters, are trying to extend the concept, beyond just finished products, to the actual process of creating new scientific knowledge. We hope this presentation will help spark further campus-wide conversations on both open science and open access issues.
– Lori Critz, Georgia Tech Subject Librarian and Faculty Engagement Department Head
Dear OA Workers and friends
Some good news:
1. UWC Library will be recruiting nationally for a new position: Head: Repository and Digital Scholarship Services. Really looking forward to opening a new chapter for Openness at UWC with a dedicated staff member. The ad should appear in Sunday Times before end of October – maybe coincide with OA Week!
2. This year, we’re putting our money where our mouth is with an opportunity for UWC researchers. See the attached file (hope it loads). Opportunity.pdf. We’re diverting funds normally set aside for copyright costs (feeds paid to corporate publishers for course reader duplication costs) to pay article processing charges for publication in accredited OA journals. Hopefully, we’ll be able to draw on these researchers’ OA endorsements in months to come.
Thanks to Elsabe and UP for the master list of accredited OA journals at http://www.library.up.ac.za/aoajsa.htm – this was very helpful in preparing our own subject based lists.
3. Otherwise, we’ll be pushing hard with Repository promotion. Our faculty librarians will be trained again tomorrow so they’re well set to campaign for the Repository in their departments.
Best wishes to all for their OA Week activities – one month to go!
Allison
Next month during Open Access Week (October 24-30), students are poised to make breakthroughs on campuses across the world – starting conversations, educating peers, lobbying administrations, and making real change. Students are the driving force pushing Open Access forward, but to help we’re rolling out a couple of important new resources: an Open Access Week student action guide and two flagship student webcasts during the week.
The action guide will serve as a launching point for planning the week, with tons of examples for how to get involved. From ambitious projects to something as simple as writing an article or raising awareness of Open Access through Facebook and Twitter, the guide has all kinds of ideas, and there’s something for everyone. Whatever it is, pick a way to participate in Open Access Week and join the other students around the world engaging thousands (tens of thousands? millions?) on their campuses and in their organizations!
Read the Open Access Week student action guide now
Our two flagship student webcasts will feature leading figures from the Open Access movement talking directly to students about the impact of Open Access to research and the crucial role of students in making Open Access a reality on their campuses, in their fields of study, and as the new default mode of communication. It will also be a two-way conversation – each webcast will have a live Q&A session for students to ask questions, delve deeper into topics, and get advice.
SAVE THE DATES: The first webcast will be broadcast on Monday, October 24th at 8:00pm EDT (12:00am GMT). The second will be broadcast on Wednesday, October 26th at 12:00pm EDT (4:00pm GMT). No matter where you are in the world, plan to tune in for at least one of the webcasts!
[NOTE: The time of the second webcast has been corrected and was previously listed without a date]
Our featured webcast speakers will include:
John Wilbanks is the Vice President for Science at Creative Commons and was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. He is a frequent speaker on the topics of open access, open data, open innovation systems, and their impact on science. He was named by Seed Magazine among their Revolutionary Minds of 2008 as a “Game Changer” and serves on the Board of Directors for DuraSpace and AcaWiki.
Heather Joseph serves as the Executive Director of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an international coalition of over 800 libraries working to enable a more open system of scholarly communication. As SPARC’s Director, she has focused on supporting the development of new publishing strategies and business models, and advocating for national and international policies that encourage the adoption of Open Access as a central principle of research and scholarship. Prior to joining SPARC, she spent 15 years as a publishing executive in both commercial and not-for-profit publishing organizations. She is an active participant on the Board of Directors of numerous not-for-profit organizations, and is a frequent speaker and writer on scholarly communications in general, and on Open Access in particular.
Goldis Chami is a medical student at the University of British Columbia and a member of the Right to Research Coalition Steering Committee. She has led the charge for her institution to adopt an openaccess policy and serves on its Scholarly Communications Steering Committee. She is also actively working to get more Canadian students involved in promoting Open Access and to support local advocacy efforts through her work on a forthcoming on-campus advocacy guide. She writes regularly for The Global and Mail about medical training and healthcare.
Stay tuned for more additions, and we’ll post the final webcast programs and details on how to register for each shortly. To make sure you’re updated on our Open Access Week announcements as they happen, fill in the form below with your email address.
Start planning now, and we hope you’ll share our new resources with friends, colleagues, and through your other channels!
Northwestern University will host four Open Access Week 2011 events including a guest lecture by Ed Valauskas (First Monday), panels featuring faculty and student journal editors, and the opening of the Northwestern University Library’s Center for Scholarly Communication and Digital Curation. For more information, please visit our events page and/or contact me via email.
International Open Access Week, from October 24th through the 31st, is an important week of action for students around the world to come together and push to create real change – by starting conversations, educating peers, lobbying administrators, and more. Students have become a leading force in advancing Open Access, and Open Access Week is a important opportunity to showcase that work and continue pressing forward.
We’re going to make this year bigger than ever, and we need your help. So, what can you do? The most important thing is simply to participate, whether it’s by hosting a viewing party for one of our webcasts, writing an opinion piece for your campus newspaper, or sharing our Facebook and Twitter pages with your friends so they can get involved and stay up to date.
To help you get started, we’ve created this guide with ideas for how you can get involved and make a difference during the week. Take a look, and plan to join the other students around the world engaging thousands (tens of thousands? millions?) on their campuses and in their organizations. Together, we’ll make this the biggest Open Access Week yet!
Go to openaccessweek.org, set up a profile, and join the Student Open Access Week Organizers group. The site will connect you with hundreds of others who are planning events for the week, and the student organizers’ group will be a discussion forum where you can get help, ask questions, and post the details of what you’re planning for the week.
Be sure to let us know what you do during the week by posting on the Open Access Week website or sending an email with details to contact [at] righttoresearch [dot] org. In November, we’ll post a summary of students’ impact during the week, and we don’t want to leave anyone out – even if it’s just sending us a link to an opinion article you wrote.
• Like the Right to Research Coalition on Facebook and follow us on Twitter (@R2RC), then urge your friends to get connected with us by posting a link to our website and why Open Access matters to you. If you tweet, be sure to use the hashtag #OAWeek.
• Contact your local or campus newspaper to pitch a story on Open Access or offer to write an opinion piece to run during the week. A guide to writing an Open Access opinion article is coming soon!
• If you’re in a student organization or on your student government, include information on Open Access in your newsletters around Open Access Week.
• Translate! Our resources are created in English, but we’re working with students to translate them into a number of different languages. If you’re interested in helping to translate our resources, email nick [at] arl [dot] org to get connected with our translation effort.
One of the highest impact ways students participate in Open Access Week is by organizing an event on campus to educate students (and faculty) about Open Access and why it’s important. Last year, students put together panels on a number of different campuses that included local experts from the faculty and library. Many students are already planning panels for this year, and to make holding an event easier, we’re hosting 2 live webcasts that you can feature in your program instead of putting together a whole panel.
The first webcast will be broadcast at 8:00pm EDT (12:00am GMT) on October 24th, and the second webcast will be broadcast at 12:00pm EDT (4:00pm GMT) on October 26th. More details on the webcasts will be announced shortly, including information on how to register.
Even if you can’t organize an event, plan to join us for one or both of the webcasts. We’ll have leading figures from the Open Access movement talking directly to students about the impact of Open Access to research and the crucial role of students in making Open Access a reality on their campuses, in their fields of study, and as the new default mode of communication.
If you do plan an event, make sure you reach out to your campus librarians as quickly as possible. They’ll be a great resource to help you plan, to get you connected with Open Access champions on your campus, and may be able to help cover potential costs of an event.
• Post Open Access flyers and posters in high-traffic areas of your campus.
• Dress up prominent statues on campus in Open Access swag, like George Mason University did last year. You can order Open Access swag in the SPARC store.
• Overprice tags: Pull print copies of some of the most expensive journals in your library and label each with its own price tag, then display the journals in highly trafficked areas of your library. You can find more information on how to create overprice tags here.
• Set up a projector in a high traffic area of campus and play short videos about Open Access, such as the intro animation of our website which can find on Vimeo here. Other options would be Open Access 101 or one of the many videos from the SPARC Voice of Open Access series. Or you could even project one of our Open Access Week webcasts live for students to watch as they walk by.
• Work with your librarians to put up a message about Open Access Week on the computers and information screens around your library.
• Post a large piece of paper and invite students to write down their frustrations in accessing research.
• Set up a table with a laptop and ask students to endorse our Individual Statement on the Right to Research.
• Use sidewalk chalk to write messages about Open Access or your institutional repository like the students at Oregon State University.
• Use Open Access Week to kick off a campaign for your university to adopt an openaccess policy requiring research on your campus to be made openly available. Use the work being done by students at the University of British Columbia as a model. Also, be on the look out this Winter for many more resources from the Right to Research Coalition to help you promote an openaccess policy on your campus.
• Use Open Access Week to bring the issue of Open Access and the Right to Research Coalition to the attention of your local, national, or international student organization, then encourage them to join the coalition and become active in educating members about Open Access and advocating for policies that open up access to research.
Whatever it is, plan to participate in Open Access Week in some way. To make this year the biggest yet, each person’s participation is important, so start planning now to join the thousands of others making a difference during the week. Get connected through the Open Access Week student organizers’ page, and make sure you let us know what you’re doing so we can share it with everyone else (especially if you have pictures!).
Stay tuned for more additions, and we’ll post the final webcast programs and details on how to register for each shortly. To make sure you’re updated on our Open Access Week announcements as they happen, fill in the form below with your email address.
Authors James H. Fowler and Nicholas A. Christakis have received an award from the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) for their much talked about paper, “Social Network Sensors for Early Detection of Contagious Outbreaks“, published in PLoS ONE in September 2010 (read our interview with the authors here.) The Society named the article the “Best Environmental Epidemiology Paper” of 2010.
On behalf of PLoS ONE, we extend our congratulations to Fowler and Christakis!
To some extent the benefits follow the funding, institutions and their staff members being the primary beneficiaries from institutional repositories, while national research funding agencies may be the primary beneficiaries from the publication in open access of the research they fund. However, in addition all open access business models also allow benefits to flow to communities which have not been part of the funding infrastructure.
The briefing paper ‘Open Access Business Models for research funders and universities’ was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange and was written by Fred Friend.
The briefing paper is available for download here.
To some extent the benefits follow the funding, institutions and their staff members being the primary beneficiaries from institutional repositories, while national research funding agencies may be the primary beneficiaries from the publication in open access of the research they fund. However, in addition all open access business models also allow benefits to flow to communities which have not been part of the funding infrastructure.
The briefing paper ‘Open Access Business Models for research funders and universities’ was commissioned by Knowledge Exchange and was written by Fred Friend.
The briefing paper is available for download here.
If you’re a student or interested in working with students during this year’s Open Access Week, be sure to join our Student OA Week Organizers group! There you can post your plans for the week to inspire others, ask questions, and get help to make your Open Access Week plans as successful as possible. This year, students will be a bigger part of OA Week than ever, and the Student OA Week Organizers group is the place to be if you’re a student or want to work with students during the week.
Stay tuned for some exciting new resources for Open Access Week from the Right to Research Coalition!
(Yes, we are a little bit late announcing this, but…) The winner of the PLoS ONE Blog Pick of the Month for August is Connor Bamford from the Rule of 6ix for his post on recent advancements made in sequencing pox genomes.
By comparing the entire genetic sequence of pathogens like cowpox, smallpox, and monkeypox, researchers were not only to see how similar these able to virus were to each other, but they also started to uncover how these strains evolved in space and time:
Cowpox viruses were found to cluster in two major groups – cowpox like and vaccinia virus like suggesting that our smallpox ‘vaccinia’ vaccine potentially originated as a cowpox virus (as we thought) yet it was endemic to mainland Europe, something that goes against the tale of Jenner’s isolation of cowpox from the UK.
Connor, along with all of the authors of the paper, will receive a complimentary t-shirt from us.
Photo via Flickr / Agriculturasp
Thanks to openmedia.ca for alerting us to the problems with lawful access, anticipated to be part of an omnibus crime bill introduced by Harper’s conservatives this coming Monday.
One aspect of lawful access expected to be included is a requirement for Internet Service Providers to retain personal data for delivery on request to law enforcement officials, with no requirement of a warrant.
There are many troubling aspects of this approach. One very troubling aspect of lawful access that I would like to highlight today is whether it is wise to assume that retaining large databases of personal information would ONLY be accessible by law enforcement officials. Wouldn’t a database like this be handy for identity thieves? What about stalkers, spammers, hackers, con artists, or corporate espionage? If we build it – a large database storage everything we do over the internet, designed for retrieval at an individual level – will they come?
No doubt efforts would be made to protect these databases – but if the information is designed to be retained to hand over for security reasons, then it seems reasonable to think that others will be able to figure out how to get at this information, too. It seems almost incomprehensibly foolish to even contemplate suggesting the creation of such databases late in the summer of the phone hacking scandal. Surely this has alerted enough of us to the dangers of not attending to our privacy in the electronic age that proceeding with such a plan would be political suicide?
The Dramatic Growth of Open Access continues to amaze! Open access service provides, note that the next data capture day is September 30.
As an OA activist, my aim is more than just tracking this phenomenon, of course – the goal is to do everything possible to encourage more and faster growth! So here is my OA Week challenge: why not post your perspective on what we need to do to further speed OA growth? Send me the link, and I’ll create a special issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access for OA Week gathering all the suggestions.
Note that Open Access Week is coming up October 24-30, 2011.
Dear Colleague,
BioMed Central will be holding the Open Access Africa 2011 free two-day conference at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Ghana, 25 – 26 October 2011, and we would like to personally invite you to attend the event.
Now in its second year, the conference will discuss the benefits of open access publishing in an African context, from the perspective of both readers seeking access to information, and researchers seeking to globally communicate the results of their work. Open Access Africa 2011 aims to bring together researchers, librarians, university administrators and funders, featuring speakers from a number of disciplines including representatives from ComputerAid, Thoughtworks and the Pan African Medical Journal.
Open Access Africa 2011 is free to attend without any registration fees. To register your interest, please contact Helena Asamoah-Hassan (maadwoa2000@yahoo.com ). Spaces are extremely limited, so please register your interest soon, and BioMed Central will contact you to confirm your place at a later date. Please note that due to space constraints, BioMed Central cannot guarantee a place to everyone who has registered their details.
BioMed Central is a publisher of over 200 peer-reviewed scientific and medical open access journals. To support researchers in developing countries, BioMed Central operates a waiver scheme that enables authors to publish their research in a BioMed Central journal without incurring the usual article-processing charge.
Should you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to contact BioMed Central by emailing oaafrica@biomedcentral.com.
We hope to see you at Open Access Africa 2011 in October.
Kind regards,
