The MBLWHOI Library held our 8th year of open access events today, having invited all Woods Hole scientific community members to a networking open access coffee and cider break. Staff representing the Marine Biological Laboratory, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and the National Marine Fisheries Service in Woods Hole attended the brief event, where about 80 printouts of articles published by Woods Hole authors were on display and informal discussions about open access/repository/data issues took place. Further events will be held during the year. 
Monthly Archives: October 2013
University of Zimbabwe Library Open Access Reloaded: Creating a Better Understanding
2013 International Open Access Week Celebrations at University of Zimbabwe are geared towards demystifying myths/fears/concerns attached to Open Access, and increasing wider awareness, appreciation and use of OA Resources. The UZ Library has a Mobile OA Exhibition Tent circulating around the campus, in-order to avail an opportunity for the University Community, a platform to enlighten their understanding of OA. UZ Library is also exhibiting posters of academics with Top Ten Most Accessed Articles from the University of Zimbabwe Institutional Repository (UZIR) articles and Top Ten Most Contributors to the UZIR.
For the past two days, the Mobile OA Exhibition Tent has generated a lot of “OA” enthusiasm amongst students, lecturers and administrative. Exhibition of tangible benefits derived from archiving articles in the institutional repositories has intrigued most of the academic staff members. Lectures have already began queuing the Special Collections Department which manages the UZIR, armed with their publications, conference proceeding, reports, articles among others for archiving in the UZIR
The UZ Library is looking forward to a great ending tomorrow!
UZ OA Team
Open Access Week Kicks Off at the Harare Institute of Technology
The Open Access Mobile Vendor starts in earnest at HIT.
Activities commenced with the posting of OA posters throughout the campus and preparing the Mobile BikeDecorated%20Bike%203.jpg
Library Staff comprising Mr Nhakura and Mr Mambume take to the HIT streets to explain the OA as a pragmatic mode of publishing and scholarly communication
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Mr Nhakura also explains to students of Pharmaceuticall Engineering the benefits of OA to students and how they also should share their own knowledge and contribute to the global knolwedge base. Mr%20Nhakura%20discusses%20with%20Pharmaceutical%20ENgineering%20Students%20and%20distributes%20OA%20pamhlets%2C%20brochures%20and%20flyers.jpg
It has been a very exciting start and we look forward to continue with more engaging activities.
World Development Information Day: Making Development Information Available to All
In 1972 The United Nations General Assembly established October 24 as World Development Information Day “to draw the attention of world public opinion to development problems and the need to strengthen international cooperation to solve them”. Today, one could argue that Development Information is widespread; there is plenty of awareness about the plight of less developed countries, and a good deal of international cooperation to address them. Now the focus has shifted – quite rightly – to how best to collaboratively address these problems. For me, there’s another interpretation as well, which is that of making information for development more readily available, so that better, more effective and efficient decisions can be made to address the development “problems” on which this day was originally intended to shed light upon.
It is a truism that there is more information available today, to more people, in more places than has ever been available in the history of our planet. This information base grows daily. The challenge for many of us dedicated to addressing development challenges is less about the amount of information and more about getting the right information, and ensuring that such information is accessible to all. So for me it is about equal access to information. Which is why I find it pleasantly coincidental that this week is also Open Access Awareness Week (http://www.openaccessweek.org/.
Open Access is one of the core pillars of our work at the CGIAR Consortium, the group of 15 of the world’s leading agricultural research Centers conducting research to improve the lives, lands, and livelihoods of the world’s poorest people. The CGIAR Consortium Board recently approved the Consortium’s Open Access Policy, and a first round of draft Implementation Guidelines are under widespread review. Both documents can be found at www.cgiar.org/open.
So let’s celebrate the fact that Development Information is widespread, but let’s also not rest until we can assure that access to information to help address development challenges is openly accessible to all.
Adhesión de la Universidad de Oviedo al Tratado de Berlín y apoyo al Acceso Abierto
Mañana día 25 de octubre a las 9 de mañana, tendrá lugar un acto de adhesión de la Universidad de Oviedo a la Declaración de Berlín. La adhesión será firmada por el Rector de la Universidad, Sr. Don Vicente Gotor Santamaría y asistirá al acto de adhesión el Presidente de la Sociedad Max Planck, Mr. Peter Gruss, cuyo apoyo al Acceso Abierto queda de manifiesto en su reciente publicación Open Access ist nicht zu stoppen
Con este acto, la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Oviedo finaliza las actividades con las que se ha unido a la” International Open Access Week 2013″ . Además la Biblioteca está impartiendo unas sesiones informativas sobre el el “Open Access” en los diferentes centros universitarios. Se puede encontrar toda la información en este enlace
Además este cartel se ha difundido en todos los centros universitarios
#oaweek: The successes of #openaccess
My previous post outlined some of the differences between #openaccess and other Open initiatives and was, by implication, somewhat critical. In this post I’ll list some of the things that are successes or going well for #openaccess. In the next I’ll contrast this with things that are serious problems or failings. I welcome criticism and may amend my position – one tragedy of OA is that useful debate is stifled by factionalism (I’ll discuss this later).
So here’s my list of successes. (By implication important things that are not on the list (e.g. repositories) have serious problems).
1. Recognition: “OpenAccess” is now widely recognized as an issue within important parts of the community. It’s part of the political agenda and cannot be overlooked (it may be deliberately ignored). Open access has roughly the following actors, and I’ll expand below:
* publishers. All publishers are intensely aware of it.
* funders of research. Again almost all funders – both government and charity – are highly aware of OA.
* government. OA is frequently on parliamentary and legislative agendas
* university managements. All are highly aware of the issue. Many, but by no means all, academics are aware of OA.
2. OA publishers. The brilliance of Vitek Tracz’s BioMedCentral showed that OA could prosper in the marketplace. Not enough people recognize this and all OA advocates, whether favouring “green” or “gold” (terms I deprecate and will discuss later) should give unfettered praise. BMC started with an apparently mad idea – ask authors/universities to pay for publication rather than publishing for free in conventional journals. This paradoxical strategy is very hard to sell and it required Vitek’s brilliance (and personal capital). BMC got all the important things right and many have followed.
* quality. Any new journal struggles against established brands and there could have been a tendency to shade quality. However BMC journals stressed quality and I am proud to be on the Ed Board of one) have standards as least as good as their legacy equivalents.
* price. BMC prices are largely affordable. Yes, it’s real money and from a personal pocket it’s a lot, but many chemicals and reagents can cost as much as the APCs.
* brand. BMC has a coherent brand. (And #animalgarden have embraced @GulliverTurtle).
* outreach. BMC has actively promoted aspects of #openaccess = running meetings, organizing competitions, supporting projects, etc. so that the human and technical infrastructure of #openaccess has been enhanced.
* innovation. BMC was relatively conventional apart from the market model. Later OA publishers have innovated significantly, especially PLoS. PLoS introduced the mega-journal PLoSONE which deliberately accepts solid useful but not necessarily dramatic science. It’s probably the largest impact in publishing innovation so far. Journals such as BMC’s Gigascience are also succeeding in innovation (data journals).
* regulatory processes. Recently the OA publishers have set up OASPA, the OA publishers’ association, which monitors quality of parts of OA practice. It’s an effective protection against “predatory journals” which have low quality, and very dubious practices. I would hope and expect that OASPA will offer some form of certification.
3. Funders. Huge credit goes to the Wellcome Trust – Mark Walport, Robert terry and Robert Kiley. Because Wellcome is independent of government it can make its own policy and has done so. Wellcome proved that funders could have a coherent, workable policy for requiring that their funded work was published openly, and they have constantly pressed for BOIA-compliance. Wellcome effectively set the rules for other funders to emulate, so that RCUK, Europe and many others have seen that the process can work.
4. Governments and other policy makers. Open Access is now an important political issue. It’s argued to have considerable benefits – that funded work which is universally visible brings economic and moral/political rewards. Governments making all funded work public are providing important resources to the world. In the UK, for example, there have been commissions (Finch) and debates in the Houses and similar issues are debated in many other countries. The EU, under the inspired leadership of Neelie Kroes, has insisted on Open Research in Europe.
5. Public infrastructure. There’s a modest, but not sufficient amount of infrastructure to support Open Access. Funders include JISC in the UK, SURF in NL, and there are useful initiatives such as DOAJ (directory of Open Access journals). I applaud these but there’s nowhere near enough and University investment in repositories has been fragmented, wasteful and almost completely ineffective.
In the next post I will outline some of the failings of OA, and then in the final post list issues that need to be addressed.
BUSE Library open access week celebrations
Bindura University of Science Education Library – Open Access Week 2013
Las Bases de Datos manejadas por BIREME en el contexto del movimiento Open Access
La Biblioteca Virtual en Salud de Puerto Rico,
en acción concertada con BIREME,
la Escuela Graduada de Ciencias y Tecnologías de la Información,
de la Universidad de Puerto Rico,
se complacen en presentar:
Las Bases de Datos manejadas por BIREME
en el contexto del movimiento Open Access
Con la participacion de la Dra. Lilian Calò,
Coordinadora de Comunicación Científica en Salud,
BIREME/OPS/OMS
Introducción por la Prof. Carmen Santos-Corrada,
Coordinadora Biblioteca Virtual en Salud de Puerto Rico
FECHA: Jueves, 24 de octubre de 2013
HORA 9:30-10:30 a.m. (Puerto Rico)
LUGAR: Aula EGCTI-UPR 313
Transmisión en vivo a través de Blackboard Collaborate :
http://www.paho.org/virtual/LilianCalo
Les esperamos.
Open Access iBOOKS – Nearly 6000 pages of Historic Travel Journals
When the IK Foundation publishes PRINTED BOOKS they are produced to achieve the highest level of quality in terms of content as well as of design; we practice a classic craft in which great attention is paid to the choice of paper, typefaces, printing and binding to provide the reader with the very best experience. Our books are made to last for centuries, as they are often used as reference works – we are proud of this tradition and will continue to uphold it in the future.
iBOOKS have other advantages, including the fact that one can read them freely, they are available to all and one can “carry with one” thousands of pages as long as one has access to the Internet. Perhaps their greatest advantage is the combination of being able so easily to look for hundreds of thousands of search words via iIndex and to get straight to the relevant page. At the bottom of each iBook page the “Index Tag Cloud” also shows which indexed words there are on each page.
The possibilities are endless, and we ask You as a reader to browse around in order to see what The IK Workshop Society has to offer – Add Knowledge, iFacts, iMaps and iIndex, directly related to iBooks.
We see iBooks as inspiring sources of information and as research tools. Should You wish to experience the printed volumes, they can generally be purchased with an iFellow discount in The IK Shop or are available in major libraries around the world.
THE LINNAEUS APOSTLES GLOBAL SCIENCE & ADVENTURE
The publication of a major international series of eight volumes – in all 11 books and over 5,500 pages – which has been in preparation since the late 1990s under the overall title of The Linnaeus Apostles – Global Science & Adventure. All the accounts of the apostles’ journeys to every continent have been published for the first time in English; those of the apostles who left no travel journals are described through their correspondence or other sources. In the introductory and concluding volumes world experts in various subject fields will provide accounts of the 18th century, of Linnaeus, of travelling and the hardships of fieldwork, together with biographies and an index covering approximately 5,500 indexed printed pages, resulting in around 150,000 specific search terms and a considerable number of cross references or references to modern biological nomenclature.
WELCOME TO TAKING PART… www.iLinnaeus.org
Perceiving Is Believing
Do we really sing as well as we all think we do in the shower? Exactly how complex is Mel Taylor’s drumming in Wipeout? How we hear things is important not just for the field of music research, but also for the fields of psychology, neurology, and physics. There is a lot more to how we perceive sound than sound waves just hitting our ears. PLOS ONE recently published two research articles exploring music perception. One article focuses on how perceiving a sound as higher or lower in pitch—the frequency of a musical note relative to other notes—than another sound is influenced by different instruments and the listener’s musical training. The other explores rhythm, including musicians’ perception of rhythmic complexity.
Pitch is the frequency of a sound, commonly described using the words high or low. The quality of tone, or timbre, of an instrument, on the other hand, is less easy to define. Tone quality is often described using words like warm, bright, sharp, and rich, and can cover several frequencies. In the study presented in “The Effect of Instrumental Timbre on Interval Discrimination,” psychology researchers designed an experiment to determine if it is more difficult to perceive differences in musical pitch when played by different instruments. They also tested whether musicians are better at discriminating pitch than non-musicians (you can test yourself with this similar version) to see if musical training changes how people perceive pitch and tone.
The researchers compared the tones of different instruments, using flute, piano, and voice, along with pure tones, or independent frequencies not coming from any instrument. As you can see from the figure above, each instrument has a different frequency range, the pure tone being the most localized or uniformly “colored.” Study participants were given two choices, each choice with two pitches, and decided which set of pitches they thought were the most different from each other; sometimes they compared different instruments or tone qualities and sometimes, the same.
The researchers compared the participants’ answers and found that changes in tone quality influenced which set of pitches participants thought were the most different from each other. Evaluation of the different timbres showed that musicians were the most accurate at defining the pitch interval with pure tones, despite their training in generally instrumental tones. Non-musicians seemed to be the most accurate with both pure and piano tones, though the researchers noted this might be less reliable because non-musicians had a tendency to choose instrumental tones in general. Interestingly, both groups were faster at the pitch discrimination task when pure tones were used and musicians were better at the task than non-musicians. Everyone chose pitch intervals more accurately as the differences between the pitches became larger and more obvious.
Another group of researchers tested how we perceive syncopation, defined as rhythmic complexity, in their research presented in “Syncopation and the Score” by performing an experiment playing different rhythms to musicians. They asked musicians to rank the degree of complexity of each rhythm.
The study was limited, with only ten participants, but in general, the rhythm patterns thought to be the most complex on paper were also perceived as the most complex when the participants listened to them. However, playing the same patterns in a different order sometimes caused listeners to think they were hearing something more or less syncopated. The authors suggest that a rhythm pattern’s perceived complexity depends upon the rhythm patterns played before and after it.
Both research studies highlight the intersection of music and music perception. We don’t need to be musicians to know that music can play tricks on our ears. It may be that some of us are less susceptible than others to these tricks, but even trained musicians can be fooled. Look here for more research on music perception.
Citations:
Zarate JM, Ritson CR, Poeppel D (2013) The Effect of Instrumental Timbre on Interval Discrimination. PLoS ONE 8(9): e75410. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0075410
Song C, Simpson AJR, Harte CA, Pearce MT, Sandler MB (2013) Syncopation and the Score. PLoS ONE 8(9): e74692. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0074692
Image: Spectrograms of four tones – Figure 1A from Zarate JM, Ritson CR, Poeppel D (2013) The Effect of Instrumental Timbre on Interval Discrimination. PLoS ONE 8(9): e75410. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0075410
Events program dedicated to OA within academic institutions From Moldova (October 21 through 27, 2013)
Five Flavors of Open Access from DuraSpace: FLEXIBLE
Winchester, MA Delivering open access repository content to diverse and growing communities of information consumers around the world requires the use of flexible technologies that can be customized for use by local research, scientific, intellectual and cultural heritage institutions.
The Fedora open source repository framework is a robust, modular repository system for the management and dissemination of digital content. Fedora’s flexibility enables it to integrate with many types of enterprise and web-based systems, offering scalability–millions of objects, and durability–all of the information is maintained in files with no software dependency–from which the complete repository can be rebuilt at any time. Fedora also provides the ability to express rich sets of relationships among digital resources.
The following resources provide a look at Fedora through Hydra and Islandora. Hydra is a multi-purpose application framework featuring individual repository user interfaces and durable asset management features. Islandora is a Drupal-based digital asset management platform.
Get a head on your repository
Introduction to Hydra
RECORDING: http://www.slideshare.net/DuraSpace/92512-duraspace-hot-topics-recording-introduction-to-hydra
Tom Cramer, Chief Technology Strategist, Stanford University Libraries introduces the capabilities of the Hydra application framework–a multi-purpose solution with individual repository user interfaces and durable asset management features built on Fedora, and provides an overview of both the technical and community efforts underpinning the project.
Drupal on Fedora for research
Stewarding Research Data with Fedora and Islandora
RECORDING: http://www.slideshare.net/DuraSpace/duraspace-7-0
Mark Leggott, University Librarian, University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI), President of Discovery Garden Inc. and founder of the open source Islandora project explaining how an open standards-based system facilitates integration in the ecosystem of research in the data lifecycle.
Overview of Hydra solutions
A Case Study on General Repository Applications
RECORDING: http://www.slideshare.net/DuraSpace/101612-duraspace-hot-topics-recording-a-case-study
Rick Johnson, Co-Director, Digital Library Initiatives and Scholarship Program at the University of Notre Dame along with Richard Green, Consultant to Library and Learning Innovation at the University of Hull provide overviews and demonstrations of production IRs that showcase the wide range of Hydra’s utility–applications for IR, Digital Exhibits, audio and video management, ETD’s, datasets, image libraries, and workflow management.
Opening up our open access survey data
We’ve been really pleased with the response to our author survey on open access. Now, you can get your hands on some of the data with our interactive visualization tool, and find out how open access authors vary by research experience, region, and subject area. Later on this week we’ll be featuring some more results from the survey and showing how author and librarian experiences compare.
We also have a short poll on the Wiley Exchanges blog – we’d love to know if your experience matches the results of the survey.
In the meantime, we hope you enjoy our data!
Archaeology Data Service
What is the ADS?
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) supports research, learning and teaching with freely available, open access, high quality and dependable digital resources. It does this by preserving digital data in the long term, and by promoting and disseminating a broad range of data in archaeology. The ADS promotes good practice in the use of digital data in archaeology, and provides technical advice to the research community, and supports the deployment of digital technologies.
The Importance of the ADS to Archaeology
Archaeology is in a special position in that much of the creation of its data results from destruction of primary evidence, making access to data all the more critical in order to test, assess, and subsequently reanalyse and reinterpret both data and the hypotheses arising from them. Over the years, archaeologists have amassed a vast collection of fieldwork data archives, a significant proportion of which remain unpublished. Access to data, even those which are published, is often difficult or inconvenient at best.
The ADS provides an integrated open access on-line catalogue to its 500+ collections, 22,000+ grey literature reports and provides a gateway to other historic environment collections through our general Archsearch facility, our project Archives facility and our Grey Literature Library.
The ADS is works with national and local archaeological agencies and those research councils involved in the funding of archaeological research, to negotiate deposition of project data. This includes data derived from fieldwork as well as desk-based studies. The types of data involved include: text reports, databases (related to excavated contexts or artefacts, for example), images (including aerial photographs, remote sensing imagery, photographs of sites, features and artefacts), digitised maps and plans, numerical datasets related to topographical and sub-surface surveys and other locational data, as well as reconstruction drawings.
ADS Services
For users: archaeological researchers and teachers
Whether you are involved in archaeological research or teaching, the ADS makes data sets available to support your work. Our on-line catalogue Archsearch enables you to search for relevant archaeological data sets, or more widely across the Humanities as a whole, by headings such as author, title, subject, area or period. If you are interested in archiving information with the ADS, you may find our Guidelines for Depositors and Guidelines for Cataloging helpful. You may also be interested in the recommendations contained within our Guide to Good Practice series.
For data creators and depositors
If you or your organisation creates archaeological data in an electronic form then you should consider using the ADS to provide permanent cataloguing, storage, and curation of your data. Our collection policy is available and we will be happy to negotiate a deposit and access agreement with you. If you are interested in archiving information with the ADS, you may find our Guidelines for Depositors and Guidelines for Cataloguing helpful. You may also be interested in the recommendations contained within our Guide to Good Practice series.
For funding and other agencies
The ADS promotes standards and best practice in the creation, description, preservation, and use of electronic information. We were major contributors to the AHDS series of Guides to Good Practice. Titles include excavation and fieldwork archiving, geophysics, aerial and satellite imagery and GIS.