Clinical Case Reports Publishes issue 1.1

CCR coverWe are pleased to announce that Clinical Case Reports has now launched with the publication of its inaugural issue. Clinical Case Reports is a new open access peer reviewed journal publishing case reports and clinical images across all Health Science disciplines.

Editor-in-Chief, Debra Jackson has highlighted two case reports from the issue:

Multiple bone metastases detected 10 years after mastectomy with silicone reconstruction for DCIS and contralateral augmentation by Ryutaro Mori and Yasuko Nagao
Summary: Multiple bone metastases were detected after treatment for ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). Contralateral invasive breast cancer was considered to be the metastatic origin.

A perioperative uncontrollable bleeding in an elderly patient with acquired hemophilia A: a case report by Andrea Cortegiani, Vincenzo Russotto, Grazia Foresta, Francesca Montalto, Maria Teresa Strano, Santi Maurizio Raineri and Antonino Giarratano
Summary: A perioperative uncontrollable bleeding referable to an acquired hemophilia A, characterized by a high factor VIII inhibitors titer and a very poor response to bypassing agents and immunosuppressive therapy.

In addition to case reports, the journal also publishes clinical images that illustrate a key clinical finding that can be presented in the form of a question. Below is the highlighted image from the first issue:

CCR RashWhat is the diagnosis for this rash? by Namrata Singh and Shireesh Saurabh
Summary: A 46-year-old female with history of Churg-Strauss syndrome was seen for a flare-up.
The rash that she presented with was because of traditional practice called “coining” and this can be confused with physical abuse especially in children and a careful history is needed.

 

Our aim is to directly improve global health outcomes and share clinical knowledge using case reports to convey important best practice messages. The journal publishes common as well as uncommon clinical scenarios with a particular focus on those reports which illustrate the clinical use of important guidelines and systematic reviews.

We would like to invite you to publish your case report with us.

submit your case report

CCR etocs

Tshwane University of Technology launches its institutional repository

The Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) celebrated Open Access Week by launching its Institutional Repository. The name for the repository is Tshwane University of Technology Digital Open Repository (TUTDOR). The launch event kicked off with opening remarks from the TUT Vice Chancellor and Principal Professor Nthabiseng Ogude, followed by the keynote address by the DVC Research and Innovation, Prof Lulama Makhubela. Other speakers included Prof Pierre de Villiers, Managing Director: AOSIS , Mr Felix Ubogu, from WITS, Mr Pierre Malan from SABINET and Mr Lazarus Matizirofa from UJ.

TUTDOR was then launched by the VC who also signed the Open access mandate. The repository was showcased by the Project Leader Mr April Mahlangu and the event ended by the vote of thanks by the DVC Teaching and learning Dr Stanley Mukhola. It was an enormously successful event and Tshwane University of Technology Library and Information Services (TUTLIS) is proud to have been the host of the event and the custodian of the TUT institutional repository leading its university in into the journey to Open Access.

Ecology and Evolution Publishes Issue 3.12

ECE 3 12The latest issue of Ecology and Evolution is now live! Over 20 excellent articles free to read, download and share. The cover image has been taken from the article ‘Daphnia predation on the amphibian chytrid fungus and its impacts on disease risk in tadpoles’ by Catherine L. Searle, Joseph R. Mendelson III, Linda E. Green and Meghan A. Duffy. Below are some highlights from this issue:

purple_lock_open Functional similarity and molecular divergence of a novel reproductive transcriptome in two male-pregnant Syngnathus pipefish species by Clayton M. Small, April D. Harlin-Cognato, and Adam G. Jones
Summary: Evolutionary studies have revealed that reproductive proteins in animals and plants often evolve more rapidly than the genome-wide average. The causes of this pattern, which may include relaxed purifying selection, sexual selection, sexual conflict, pathogen resistance, reinforcement, or gene duplication, remain elusive. Investigative expansions to additional taxa and reproductive tissues have the potential to shed new light on this unresolved problem. Here, we embark on such an expansion, in a comparison of the brood-pouch transcriptome between two male-pregnant species of the pipefish genus Syngnathus.

purple_lock_open Drosophila rely on learning while foraging under semi-natural conditions by Vukašin Zrelec, et al.
Summary: Learning is predicted to affect manifold ecological and evolutionary processes, but the extent to which animals rely on learning in nature remains poorly known, especially for short-lived non-social invertebrates. This is in particular the case for Drosophila, a favourite laboratory system to study molecular mechanisms of learning. Here we tested whether Drosophila melanogaster use learned information to choose food while free-flying in a large greenhouse emulating the natural environment.

purple_lock_open Strong species-environment feedback shapes plant community assembly along environmental gradients by Jiang Jiang and Donald L. DeAngelis
Summary: An aim of community ecology is to understand the patterns of competing species assembly along environmental gradients. All species interact with their environments. However, theories of community assembly have seldom taken into account the effects of species that are able to engineer the environment. In this modeling study, we integrate the species’ engineering trait together with processes of immigration and local dispersal into a theory of community assembly.

Read other top articles in this issue >

Submit your paper to Ecology and Evolution here >

Sign up for e-toc alerts here >

OA Advocate Jack Andraka to appear on this Wednesday’s Colbert Report

Open Access advocate Jack Andraka will appear on the Colbert Report, this Wednesday October 30th at 11:30pm EDT.

The winner of the 2012 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, Jack Andraka has captivated the world with his novel diagnostic for pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancer that, according to Jack’s trials, has significantly improved upon tests currently available on the market.  

Jack Andraka is a perfect example of the power of Open Access, the free availability of all academic research articles online with full reuse rights. In his own words, Jack used free online academic journals “religiously” in his research, as well as the National Institute of Health’s online article database, called PubMed Central (PMC).

Jack has become an outspoken advocate for Open Access and a leader among a group of outstanding students who are advancing research, using articles they can find freely online. According to Jack, “there are millions people like [him]” who are trying to tap into the power of the Internet to advance research, but that “paywalls are stopping [them].”    

Earlier this year, the Right to Research Coalition spoke to some of Jack’s fellow Intel International Science and Engineering Fair participants about their difficulties in accessing research articles and the impact Open Access could have in allowing them to make discoveries similar to Jack’s. As Kelsey Barter, a Junior from University High School in Arizona said, “It’s really important to have access to the literature because it’s the foundation of anything that is going to happen in the sciences.”

Students interviewed in the video include:

  • Jack Andraka
    Sophomore, North County High School
    Glen Burnie, Maryland

  • Kelsey Barter
    Junior, University High School
    Tucson, Arizona

  • Thabit Pulak
    Junior, Richardson High School
    Richardson, Texas

  • Swetha Revanur
    Freshman, Evergreen Valley High School
    San Jose, California

  • Brittany Wenger
    Senior, The Out-of-Door Academy
    Sarasota, Florida

  • Catherine Wong
    Senior, Morristown High School
    Morristown, New Jersey

Open Access promises to benefit students of all disciplines by giving them access to the cutting edge research literature immediately, rather than making them wait until they graduate to an institution that can afford subscription bundles that often run into the millions of dollars. As Jack has proven so vividly, innovation can and often does come from unexpected places, and Open Access will help empower many students who are also making significant contributions to scientific and scholarly advancement at an early age.

You can see Jack in the guest sidebar on the Colbert Nation website at http://www.colbertnation.com.

This interview is presented by the Right to Research Coalition, with support from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Society for Science and the Public.

For press inquiries, contact Nick Shockey, Director of the Right to Research Coalition
Phone: 202-296-2296
Email: nick [at] arl [dot] org

Can You Image That? Imaging a Cell and Its Proteins Together

journal.pone.0077209.g005_cropped

Observing the world around us is a natural human instinct, and exploring the realm of the tiny and beautiful is especially captivating for scientists and the public alike. The business of building and testing new microscopes, and developing new methods of microscopy, is rapidly changing and evolving over time. As early as 1914, scientists started documenting the history of the microscope.

Thankfully, rather than drawing out what we see through the lens onto a piece of paper, there are now advanced forms of microscopy, like electron  microscopy, that allow scientists to scan a substance—with an electron beam—to sample its topography, or surface shape, and produce wonderfully detailed images that also contain tremendous amounts of data. In a separate form of microscopy called fluorescence microscopy, fluorescent proteins—proteins in the cell engineered to have a fluorescent tag—and intracellular proteins fused to a fluorescent protein can be imaged because they emit light in response to certain wavelengths of light coming from the microscope.

In a continuous effort to “see what’s going on a bit better,” Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers published an article in PLOS ONE today detailing improvements of their relatively new form of 3D super-resolution microscopy. It combines what they call PhotoActivated Localization Microscopy, or PALM (a type of fluorescence microscopy), with electron microscopy (EM), and lets us have a look at organelles, like mitochondria, and the location of nearby proteins, right in the same cell at roughly the same time.

For instance, if we know a specific protein attaches directly to DNA in a specific organelle, PALM allows us to see precisely the nanometer-scale location of this protein, when it is fused to a fluorescent protein. EM on the other hand, allows us to see the overall structure of the organelle, and so combining these to see both at the same time is extremely useful to cell biologists studying structure and function.

In their study design, PALM needs to be performed before EM (see image of sample preparation and setup below), and then the two images are overlaid by correlating the area of fluorescence, seen during fluorescence microscopy, to the area of the cell structure seen during electron microscopy. The overlaid image is the final result, and the goals of the researchers in this improvement study were to optimize the image resolution and the number of useable fluorescent dyes, speed up the protocol, and simplify the equipment involved by moving it from 3D (very difficult, less accessible) to 2D (easier, common in research institutions), in hopes of making this technique accessible to cell biologists.

journal.pone.0077209.g001

In this and the previous work, the researchers describe how they combined the two forms of microscopy to achieve the results they were looking for. All forms of microscopy have limitations, especially when it comes to the limits of the optics and sample preparation, and in this case, scientists overcame a barrier between optimizing the available fluorescence and also optimizing the quality of the EM images that were produced.

As you might imagine, the better the overall image quality is, the better biologists can use the image information to help understand the structure and function of biological components, such as organelles and proteins. Additionally, though the cells used in this study were frozen and prepared, there is a possibility that live cells could be directly imaged using this technique.

Though explaining and understanding the method are a little complicated, the pictures make it all worth it—and the scientists would agree. Below are example image sets. The first set is of an image containing mitochondria, or the powerhouse of the cell, and a protein that localizes in its DNA.

The first image in the set shows the result of PALM, the second contains the EM, and the third is the alignment of the two images (and M is for mitochondria).

journal.pone.0077209.g002

And here’s a second set, with imaging of a whole cell by traditional confocal microscopy (A), followed by a similar sequence as above (B-D) for a nucleus and the location of a fluorescent dye that adheres to actin (protein) filaments.

journal.pone.0077209.g006

The researchers also managed to perform imaging using two colors (title image), demonstrating the versatility of the technique. Check out the full details and image set here, as well as other recent studies involving new imaging techniques here, here, and here.

Citation: Kopek BG, Shtengel G, Grimm JB, Clayton DA, Hess HF (2013) Correlative Photoactivated Localization and Scanning Electron Microscopy. PLoS ONE 8(10): e77209. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0077209

Image Credits: All images from the article

Artexte launches Publisher’s Toolkit for Open Access Week 2013

Artexte is a non-profit arts organization. Our mandate is to document contemporary art from 1965 to the present with special emphasis on Canadian art. We also facilitate research in this area by offering reference services, by making our collection accessible to the public, and by developing rigorous information resources.

In February 2013 Artexte launched e-artexte, an Open Access repository for visual arts publications. Publishers and authors can now self-archive their documents in a thematic repository that contextualizes their work in a specialized collection that reflects the 30 years of research and documentation carried out by Artexte.

Open Access and self-archiving are new to most of our community of publishers who deposit their print publications with Artexte. Our aim is to promote the Open Access model as one that can improve the visibility and distribution of contemporary art writing from across the country.

We are doing outreach work currently related to the e-artexte repository. As part of our Publisher’s Toolkit project we are developing resources to build awareness and capacity regarding the use of e-artexte, as well as information about digital publishing standards and practices. We are launching the Toolkit during Open Access Week, and it will continue to develop in the coming months.

You can see the Publisher’s Toolkit online here: http://artexte.ca/toolkit/

Five Flavors of Open Access from DuraSpace: RICH MEDIA OPEN ACCESS

Winchester, MA  We live in a cyber landscape of moving digital images and sounds. Through the Internet discovery and access to almost anything we can imagine through multiple devices is instant. Favorite films and television shows, obscure recordings, field research materials, historic artifacts and more can be found in two clicks. While there is an abundance of rich media available–72 hours of video alone is uploaded per minute which is equal to 60 years worth of “big 3” network content per month–even more rich scholarly content is awaiting addition.

The following resources offer overviews, approaches, tools and strategies for curating, managing and preserving audio and video content in repositories.

Parts and pieces of the audio/visual puzzle
The Big Picture: Preserving Audio and Video Digital Media

RECORDING: http://www.slideshare.net/DuraSpace/5-1612-curated-series-2-webinar-1-recording

Karen Cariani, Director WGBH Media Library and Archives at WGBH Educational Foundation, and members of WGBH staff present an overview of digital audio and video preservation. They share workflows, challenges, best practices and specific issues and complexities around differing video formats.

Drilling down to awesome content
Creating Access to Audio and Video Digital Media: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Variations on Video Project

RECORDING: http://www.slideshare.net/DuraSpace/6612-recording-creating-access-to-audio-video-digital-media-the-variations-on-video-project-the-rock-and-roll-hall-of-fame

Join Adam Weed, Systems and Digital Collections Librarian at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, and Jon Dunn, Director of Library Technologies and Digital Libraries, IU Libraries, Variations on Video Project, to learn about new strategies, best practices and scholarly applications for audio and visual digital media in institutional repositories. They share their experiences with access, specific video issues and preservation storage. 

Tools you can use
AVAILABLE NOW: Manage Audio and Video Collections With Hydra-based Avalon Media System

BLOG POST: http://duraspace.org/available-now-manage-audio-and-video-collections-hydra-based-avalon-media-system

Need a complete, open source, scalable audio/video system? Take Avalon for a test drive and find out how to curate video and audio files and manage workflows for university library video and audio content. Indiana University and Northwestern University released 1.0 of the Avalon Media System for managing large collections of digital audio and video files earlier this year. You many download the software and sign up for the email list, avalon-discuss-l, to get technical support or provide feedback.

Practical Advice for Perplexed Elsevier Authors

For those Elsevier authors who wish to provide OA rather than continuing to agonize over what Elsevier might intend or mean:

Believe Elsevier when they state officially that “Elsevier believes that individual authors should be able to distribute their AAMs for their personal voluntary needs and interests, e.g. posting to their websites or their institution’s repository, e-mailing to colleagues.”

Go ahead and deposit your final draft immediately upon acceptance for publication, set access to the deposit as OA, and ignore all the accompanying Elsevier hedging completely. It means absolutely nothing.

And for those who nevertheless remain tormented by irrational doubts:

Don’t stress: Deposit immediately just the same, but set access to the deposit as restricted access (only you can access it) instead of OA, and rely on the repository’s copy-request Button to forward individual eprint requests to you from individual requestors: you can decide for each request, on a case by case basis, whether or not you wish to fulfill that request, with one click.

This will tide over potential user needs till either the Elsevier embargo elapses or your irrational doubts subside — whichever comes first.

(The battle-ground for OA has now become the 1-year embargo, which publishers try to impose in order to protect their current revenue streams come what may. Publishers — though so far not Elsevier — have tried to redefine Green OA as access after a 1-year embargo, leaving authors who want to provide immediate access with only one option: pay extra for Gold OA. The immediate-deposit mandate plus the eprint-request Button — not petitions, boycott threats or hand-wringing — are the way the research community can protect the interests of research from the self-interest of publishers.)

Problems in Open Access: we need regulation in the broken market

In the last post I highlighted success of the Open Access initative and culture over the 10 years since BOAI. This post highlights a fundamental problem of scholarly publishing and the “market”. Please criticize me – lack of criticism is one of my concerns. Unfortunately there is very little constructive discussion of OA – it’s limited to isolated blog posts like mine, and the factional GOAL list. However unless the OA movement(s) recognizes and addresses  serious shortcomings OA will remain marginal in many areas and of no benefit to the world outside academia and its markets.

I’ll use the term legacy publishers to represent the large established closed publishers (Nature, Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, T+F, etc.). OA publishers are those with effectively total OA content from inception(BMC, PLoS, eLife…) and legacy . Scholarly societies are caught in the middle. Many are struggling and some do deals with legacy. I’ll omit them – sadly – and fear that many will be crushed in the next few years or end up being appendages. Societies must re-examime their purpose and cannot assume thay have an income stream from publishing while retaining scholarly freedom.

As I write this post it becomes clear that we must look at the overall picture of the scholarly publishing market. Open access currently is about 5-10% (gigures are extremely difficult – counts by journal make it higher, counts by article or revenue lower. The global total market is about 10-15 Billion USD. That’s about the size of the rail network in UK. It’s a lot of money and most of it comes from research grants and student fees. OTOH apparently Harvard’s library bill is less than the maintenance of its campus so it’s not at the top of Vice-Chancellor’s concerns.

So who are the players in the market?

The legacy publishers. (I differentiate between OA publishers (BMC, PLoS, eLife…) and legacy (Nature, Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, T+F, etc.). Scholarly socities are caught in the middle, many consumed by or doing deals with legacy and I’ll omit them.  Large legacy publishers are now modern corporations, excutives can earn over a million dollars, and many middle managers have no grounding in academia or science or have lost it many years ago. Think of legacy publishers as you think of your bank, your energy supplier, the train operators – the corporate culture. Do you trust Elsevier more than you trust Barclays Bank? Do you trust the American Chemical Society more than you trust Amazon? For me it’s fairly even.

Legacy publishers have huge amounts of money to spend on lobbying – much of this is done in secret. Their argument to governments is “look what a lot of revenue we generate for you”. This is powerful – we still sell tobacco, though the helath costs exceed the revenue and few politicians can solve this problems except of decades. I suspect scholarly publishing has features in common.

The authors. Authors have little say in the market. Scholarly publishing has increasingly become a means of chasing glory defined by large brands and the academic system forces them to chase this – to conform. I have the luxury of not having to conform but I don’t expect aspiring young scientists to break ranks – I applaud them when they do and I will promise to man their barricades. But by and large they conform. And they are the producers of the goods, which they give freely and which are misappropriated downstream. In principle they have the power to change the system by mass action, and this has been tried (Tim Gower’s boycott of Elsevier briefly caused a dip in share price). I think this was the original idea of Stevan Harnad’s Subversive Proposal – authors should self-archive their manuscripts voluntary and expose them on the web. If this had been done 10 years ago it would have succeeded and the authors /academia would control the market. The #scholarlypoor would be able to read the output of scholarship in the rich North. But it hasn’t happened and it isn’t going to happen and no amount of exhortation to Green-archive will have now have any effect. Increasingly, therefore, authors do what they are told – by tenure committees, funders and by legacy publishers.

The universities. There are probably about 2000 research-publishing universities globally – it’s a long tail. They control the purchasing – the 15 Billion USD. In principle purchasers have enormous power in a market and in principle Universities could change the market dramatically. If 2000 Universities said “from next year we will [publish all our output as Green] [refuse to accept embargoes of > 6 months] [set a maximum APC of 1000 USD] etc ” the publishers would have a hard struggle not to accept. It might take a court case – and it’s symptomatic of OA that they have never tested the legal boundaries of what their actual rights are. (Is a copyright transfer actually legal – I suspect no in many domains and republishing papers open might infringe author rights but not publishers). But Universities have been universally supine. There have been a few mandates, generally of the form “you must [self-archive]- unless you don’t want to/ publisher won’t let you” and these have been worse that useless – they have demonstrated that universities have no teeth or are afraid to use them. The major reason is that universities, who are both consumers and producers are required to compete against each other and are a Holy Roman Empire of feudalism. Any other market would have seen rationalisation, but Universities (for good reasons) have been chartered to be individually independent and self-sufficient.

The readers. They have no purchasing power and are almost treated with contempt by legacy publishers and universities. Most #scholarlypoor don’t read the fruits of scholarship – teenagers like Jack Andraka are forced to beg their parents to funds to read medical papers.

Funders. Funders recognise the value of exposing their funded work and are requiring authors to make it open access – in some way. They have real power and are trying to use it. But they are constrained by having to change a 15 Billion market with very active opposition from legacy publishers. If attempts are too bold the government-based funders get shouted down on Capitol Hill or the House of Lords
Governments. Funders also face non-compliance from researchers – I think Wellcome’s mandate (which is absolute and sufficiently funded) is only 55-60% obeyed (and we must help to change this through monitoring). Funders are also very coherently aligned – the practice may differ (mainly due to national fighting from legacy publishers) but the overal goals are united.

OA advocates. A lot of effort has been put into OA by many organisations and individuals. And I applaud them for their energy and dedication. But they are not united, with little clear strategy and poor long-term goals. (Will #oaweek change the world?)  This has to change if they are to be taken seriously and I’ll address this in the next post.

My primary observation on the Scholarly publishing market is it’s unregulated. Banks, trains, energy all have some form of regulation in UK. There are formal constraints on what train operators can charge (though in UK they aren’t very effective). But in scholarly publishing publishers can do anything. They can charge what they like for Hybrid Gold APCs (an appalling system) and may do – 5000 USD. They can licence papers as they like. Nature have a differential charge for CC-NC vs CC-BY. They can appropriate content for their own reuse (Springer collects all the diagrams in its papers and resells them at 50 USD each). Several OA publications have ended up behind paywalls.

It’s appalling that no-one except a few activists challenge the current unregulated market practices. Universities are happy to hand over 15 Billion without anyone checking what they are getting. This has to change.

OSTP: On Not Putting the Fox in Charge of the Henhouse


Exchange in SIGMETRICS with David Wojick, a consultant to OSTI:

DW:the non-NIH US agencies are implementing the OSTP mandate for a 12 month delayed access program, just as NIH already does.”

That the OSTP mandate requires providing OA within a year (at most) is well-known.

But how each agency will formulate and implement its mandate is definitely not well-known, nor even fully decided as yet: it is still being worked on, agency by agency (and I’m sure Peter Suber, Heather Joseph, Alma Swan and others with expertise in OA and OA mandates are being consulted).

The most important practical implementation issues are:

#1 Who must make the paper OA? the fundee or the publisher? Obviously for a uniform, systematically verifiable mandate, it must be the fundee, the one bound by the mandate, and not the publisher, the one that is in conflict of interest with the mandate, and not bound to comply with it (except if paid extra money).

#2 Where must the paper be made OA? Here again, for a uniform, systematically verifiable mandate, it must be in one verifiable locus, and the only locus shared by all fundees, all funders and all institutions (and for both Green and Gold OA) is the fundee’s own institutional repository – from whence it can be exported or harvested to other sites, such as PubMed Central, if and when needed.

#3 When must the paper be made OA? (The mandate already stipulates this: within 12 months of publication at the latest.)

#4 When must the paper be deposited? This is the most important question of all, and carries with it the answer to the other questions: the fundee must deposit the final, refereed, accepted draft, immediately upon acceptance for publication — not 12 months after publication — irrespective of whether it is published in a subscription journal or a Gold OA journal, irrespective of whether the deposit is immediately made OA or embargoed, and irrespective of whether the journal endorses immediate OA or imposes an OA embargo.

It is #4 that holds the key to a successful and effective OA mandate, the Liège model “Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access” model (which Peter Suber calls the “Dual Deposit/Release” model). The model has been tried and tested, and has already proven to be more effective than any other mandate model, and is both compatible with and subsumes all the other mandate models.

The key to the Liège model’s success is that it is convergent and systematic rather than divergent and anarchic, mobilizing the universal source of all research, funded and unfunded, Green, Grey and Gold, across all disciplines — the fundee’s own institution — to monitor and ensure timely compliance as well as to tide over any embargo with the repository’s facilitated copy-request Button.

All of this depends on requiring deposit, by the fundee, in the institutional repository, immediately upon acceptance for publication, which is the only universal, objective, verifiable calendar date of reference for timely compliance. (Publication dates diverge wildly from both the acceptance date and the actual date of appearance of the journal. Whereas a 12 month embargo is the number to beat, publication date can lead to an uncertainty of as much as two years or more.)

Gargouri, Y., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L., & Harnad, S. (2012a). Testing the Finch Hypothesis on Green OA Mandate Ineffectiveness. arXiv preprint

Rentier, B., & Thirion, P. (2011). The Liège ORBi model: Mandatory policy without rights retention but linked to assessment processes.

DW:If you know of an agency that is doing something else I would like to hear about it. Note that NIH has half of the Federal basic research budget so this is merely rounding out the existing program.”

No U.S. funding agency has yet adopted the immediate-deposit clause, but it has been adopted by the FNRS in Belgium, and has been proposed by HEFCE in the UK. It is also implicit (though not yet implemented or enforced) in the Harvard mandate model.

DW:The only big issue at this point is whether the non-NIH agencies will collect and post accepted manuscripts, as NIH does, but perhaps via SHARE repositories, or use CHORUS and link to the publisher websites.”

You leave out the most important option of all, which is that all papers are deposited in the fundee’s own institutional repository (and exported if/when desired, to institution-external repositories).

And of course on no account should the depositor or the locus be the publisher (although of course the institutional repository can and will also link to the version on the publisher’s site, whether subscription or Gold, OA or embargoed).

I hope all the US funding agencies are likewise taking advice on implementation from those who represent the interests of the research community rather than the publishing community.

DW:Stevan, I am well aware of your vision. I have read your NRC submission. It just does not happen to be what the US Government is implementing.”

It may not be what is being implemented at OSTI, where you are advising, but have you read what each of the other agencies is doing?

DW:The Brits wanted the US to follow them, but that too is not happening.”

And a good thing too, since the Finch/RCUK Policy U-Turn was a disaster. But HEFCE and BIS now look to be fixing that…

DW:The situation is as I describe it.”

Perhaps at OSTI. The rest remains to be seen.

The OA movement has won some and lost some, across the years, but it’s not over till it’s over…

(1994) A Subversive Proposal

(2001) The Self-Archiving Initiative

(2002) The Budapest Open Access Initiative

Harnad, S. (2004a) Memorandum to UK To UK Government Science and Technology Select Committee Select Committee on Science and Technology Written Evidence

Harnad, S. (2004b) For Whom the Gate Tolls? Select Committee on Science and Technology Written Evidence

Harnad, S. (2007). No Need for Canadian PubMed Central: CIHR Should Mandate IR Deposit.

Harnad, S. (2011) What Is To Be Done About Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research? (Response to US OSTP RFI).

Harnad, S. (2011) Comments on Open Access FAQ of German Alliance of Scientific Organisations (Allianz der deutschen Wissenschaftsorganisationen).

Harnad, S (2012) Digital Research: How and Why the RCUK Open Access Policy Needs to Be Revised. Digital Research 2012.

Harnad, S. (2013). Harnad Response to HEFCE REF OA Policy Consultation. HEFCE.

Harnad, S. (2013). Harnad Comments on HEFCE/REF Open Access Mandate Proposal. Open access and submissions to the REF post-2014

Harnad, S. (2013) Harnad Evidence to House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee on Open Access. House of Lords Science and Technology Committee on Open Access, Winter Issue, 119-123.

Harnad, S. (2013) Harnad Evidence to BIS Select Committee Inquiry on Open Access. Written Evidence to BIS Select Committee Inquiry on Open Access, Winter Issue

Harnad, S. (2013). Follow-Up Comments for BIS Select Committee on Open Access. UK Parliament Publications and Records.

Harnad, Stevan (2013) Recommandation au ministre québécois de l’enseignement supérieur.

Multiple Comments on CIHR Open Access Policy

Multiple Comments on SSHRC Open Access Policy

Multiple Comments on OA Progress in Canada

Multiple Comments on NIH Public Access Policy

Multiple Comments on Harvard Open Access Policy

Multiple Comments on France/HAL Open Access Policy

Comments on H. Varmus’s 1999 E-biomed Proposal [1] [2]

Fool’s Gold: Publisher Ransom for Freedom from Publisher Embargo?

Bob Campbell wrote on the Wiley blog:

Stevan accuses me of much conflation yet he himself conflates APCs and subscriptions when commenting on double-dipping. APCs are not paying for the ?same articles? paid for by subscriptions. Publishers have always charged separately for different services/products. For example, a medical journal may charge a pharmaceutical company for reprints, advertising space and subscriptions. These are priced separately and charged separately, and accounted for separately in the publisher?s financial management of the title. The pharmaceutical company does not demand that the cost of buying advertising space is offset against any library subscriptions.

Bob Campbell defends double-dipping by citing journal charges for the purchase of reprints, advertising and subscriptions. That’s all fine.

But what we are discussing here is the cost of publication, not of extra products or services.

Worldwide institutional subscriptions pay the cost of publication (in full, and fulsomely). It is not at all clear what extra product or service is being paid for when an author pays for hybrid Gold OA (for the paper he has given the publisher for free, to sell).

Of course it’s an extra source of revenue to the hybrid Gold publisher to force the author to pay that extra money (for whatever it is that they are paying for). And let there be no doubt that the payment is indeed forced (if the hybrid Gold publisher embargoes Green). Is the extra “service,” then, exemption from the publisher-imposed Green OA embargo?

(Note: If the publisher is among the 60% who endorse immediate Green OA, then none of my objections matter in the least, and I couldn’t care less if the publisher earns the extra revenue from those authors who are silly enough to pay for hybrid Gold OA when they could have had the same, cost-free, by just providing Green OA.)

But the publisher who embargoes Green and then pockets the extra revenue derived from hybrid Gold, over and above subscriptions, without reducing subscription charges proportionately is indeed charging twice for publication, i.e., double-dipping (and offering absolutely nothing in return except freedom from the publisher’s own Green OA embargo).

Subscriptions pay the cost of publication. Print reprints are an extra product. And adverts are an extra service. But hybrid OA is merely fool’s gold, if paid unforced. And if forced by a publish embargo, there is a word to describe the practice, but I will not use it, as a publisher has already once threatened to sue me for libel if I do? So let’s just call it double-dipping, with no extra product or service…

Five Flavors of Open Access from DuraSpace: RESEARCH DATA

Winchester, MA  Advancing knowledge in all fields of research now requires curation, collection, management, access and long-term preservation of digital data sets. Providing permanent open access to the results of publicly funded research is a challenge for many institutions faced with with mandates for including data with published results.

These four web seminar recordings provide contrasting strategies along with practical solutions and tools about how several institutions are tackling the research data challenge and making their findings freely available.

Fundamental questions, assumptions and challenges
Research Data Curation at UC San Diego: An Overview

RECORDING: http://www.slideshare.net/DuraSpace/10113-research-data-curation-at-uc-san-diego-an-overview-webinar-recording

David Minor, Head of Research Data Curation Program and Declan Fleming, Chief Technology Strategist, at UC San Diego Library provide details about a new curation program at the University of California San Diego Library in this presentation. For more than two years, librarians and computing professionals worked with researchers from diverse disciplines to conduct a pilot program to pinpoint research data curation practices that could be used across campus.

Practical solutions
Metadata and Repository Services for Research Data Curation

RECORDING: http://www.slideshare.net/DuraSpace/101513-metadata-and-repository-services-for-research-data-curation-webinar-recording

Declan Fleming, Chief Technology Strategist, Arwen Hutt, Metadata Librarian and Matt Critchlow, Manager of Development and Web Services from UC, San Diego Library offer core curation services in this presentation. Beginning with a view of the wide variety of discussions held with researchers focused on commonalities and differences in needs and expectations, the resulting data model is presented along with information about how the Library’s linked data asset management system was updated to express complex research data objects.

And even more practical solutions
Research Data Management Support: DataONE-Tools and Approaches for Supporting the Data Life Cycle

RECORDING: http://www.slideshare.net/DuraSpace/esi-supplemental-webinar-2-dataone-recording 

William Michener, Professor and Director of e-Science Initiatives at the University of New Mexico presents tools and strategies to help researchers address the key data life cycle challenges. This webinar was also part of the DuraSpace/ARL/DLF E-Science Institute. Tools and collaborations are in process around the world for building data management plans to collect, preserve, analyze and document data. DataONE, a federated data network built to improve access to Earth science data is highlighted.

Reaping results of good planning
E-Research Support at Johns Hopkins University and Purdue University

RECORDING: http://www.slideshare.net/DuraSpace/esi-supplemental-webinar-recording

Sayeed Choudhury, Associate Dean for Research Data Management, Johns Hopkins University and James L. Mullins, dean of libraries and professor of library science, Purdue University  presented “E-Research Support at Johns Hopkins University and Purdue University” to participants in the DuraSpace/ARL/DLF E-Science Institute. In this web seminar presenters discuss progress towards developing a data management plan and service at their institutions.