Monthly Archives: October 2013
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The Grey Literature Library: Over 22,000 Open Access Archaeological Reports available at the ADS
The aim of the Archaeology Data Service’s (ADS) Grey Literature Library is to make unpublished archaeological fieldwork reports, that are often difficult to discover via conventional channels because they are not published commercially, freely available to the public in an easily retrievable fashion. These unpublished reports cover archaeological interventions such as: watching briefs, excavation reports and building surveys. Desk-based assessments and specialist analysis are also included.
Through the Grey Literature Library it is possible to search for archaeological reports by contractor, using the browse by contractor option, or carry out more advanced searches, filtering the reports by period, monument type, artefact type and location using the search option.
The Grey Literature Library has been growing steadily over the past decade as a result of the OASIS project in England and Scotland. The OASIS project allows archaeologists to upload reports and associated metadata about archaeological activities via an online data capture form. The OASIS project then manages the flow of information from the archaeological data producers, such as the contracting units and community groups, through to the local Historic Environment Records and the National Monuments Record for validation, before it is passed on to the ADS for public dissemination via the Grey Literature Library.
To coincide with Open Access Week ADS has released 1678 new grey literature reports bring the total of currently available reports to 22,128.
Here are just a few examples of important reports made available by the Grey Literature Library:
The Over Narrows (Cambridge Archaeology Unit)
The Over Narrows (Pt. V; 2010)
Two reports on Mesolithic and Neolithic lithic scatters, Beaker and Grooved Ware pottery spreads, roundhouses and a “strip-compound” enclosure of Bronze Age date. Notable for rare evidence of spade-cultivation (probably Beaker-associated).
Four reports revealing an area of intense past activity from the Neolithic through the Bronze Age, Iron Age and Romano-British periods.
Multiple reports on multi-stage offshore investigations including test-pits, geophysics, cores and investigations of a previously undiscovered wreck site.
Report on geophysical survey that revealed structural remains possibly associated with the priory, as well as other phases of activity and possible industrial features.
Do you have 30 minutes spare to discuss your use of UKOER?
Do you have 30 minutes spare to discuss your use of UKOER?
Do you want to share your experiences of using resources in Jorum?
If so, we would like to hear from you.
How?
We are working with Evidence Base at Birmingham City University to create a series of case studies about Jorum. So, if you have used Jorum and would be willing to share your experiences of using and sharing Open Educational Resources (OERs), we want to hear from you.
The information will be collected via a short interview, which will be written up as a case study for the Jorum website. The interviews should take approximately 30 minutes via telephone or Skype.
If you are willing to be interviewed, please leave your details in our very short survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/jorumcasestudies
Please do share this request amongst your networks/colleagues – we need your stories!
IDS publishes 47 years of key titles into its digital repository
During Open Access Week 2013, the Institute of Development Studies is pleased to announce that we are in the process of digitising and publishing onto OpenDocs, our open access repository, our entire back catalogue of around 3000 research reports, working papers, practice papers, IDS Bulletin articles and other Series Titles. A key aspect of our approach to supporting open access to research is building on the existing open access availability of our research knowledge through the continued expansion and improvement of OpenDocs. Our research and policy outputs including reports, papers, briefings, journal articles and book chapters are now all routinely published onto the repository.
Open Access literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. OpenDocs significantly extends the reach of our and our partners’ research and evidence. It hosts collections from our key research centres and research consortia as well as the BLDS Digital Library containing over 2000 full-text publications from research organisations in Africa and Asia.
Lawrence Haddad, IDS Director said: ‘OpenDocs is set to become one of the go to resources for development research and knowledge. Free access to knowledge and learning sits at the very core of our values and approach. The repository will help maintain IDS’ position as a global knowledge hub ensuring that the evidence and perspectives of our members and our partners continues to influence and improve global policies and programmes that accelerate global development.’
Last year IDS launched our new Strengthening Evidence Based Policy Programme funded by DFID. This cross institutional programme focuses on seven themes spanning energy, gender, impact evaluation, innovation, nutrition, rising powers, sexuality and rights and mitigating violence. Over the next three years the programme will provide policy solutions to emerging areas of development and almost 400 reports, policy briefings and other publications.
OpenDocs provides an ideal repository for these outputs as not only does it profile them in a series of thematic collections that are easily navigated but it ensures that the full text of each of the documents is indexed by search engines and securely stored for the future. In practice, this means that far more policy actors, for whom this programme was designed, will find and use this evidence. Already documents from the programmes’ rapidly growing collections have been downloaded over 3000 times by users all over the world.
Other collections available through OpenDocs include the BLDS Digital Library, the Robert Chambers Archive, the International Centre for Tax and Development and the ESRC STEPS Centre.
OPEN ACCESS WEEK – The MedOANet project releases Guidelines for implementing open access policies for research performing and research funding organizations
Press release:
Athens, 21 October 2013
Open access week
The MedOANet project releases Guidelines for implementing open access policies for research performing and research funding organizations
The MedOANet project (Mediterranean Open Access Network – www.medoanet.eu) releases the Guidelines for implementing open access policies for research performing and research funding organizations. Aim of the Guidelines is the coordination of policy-development in the six Mediterranean countries that participate in the project (France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Turkey). They provide concise and targeted guidance for a harmonized approach towards policy development.
The MedOANet Guidelines present the main concepts and issues with respect to open access, discuss the major steps that are necessary in the process of policy development and present the important components of an institutional and funder policy. The also provide model policies for research performing and research funding organizations and present best practices in policy development for research performing and research funding organizations.
The Guidelines recommend:
ü Immediate self-archiving in repositories to be required upon acceptance for publication (author final version or publisher version)
ü Immediate open access to metadata and to full-text research outputs if possible (for universities, research centres, etc.)
ü Immediate open access to full-text research outputs with up to 6 months embargo periods (12 for SSH) for research funders
ü Peer-reviewed research covered by the policy, especially journal articles, conference proceedings books/monographs
ü Mandatory character of the policy, with compliance checked. Authoritative publication lists for institutions derived only from repositories
ü Minimally recommend that researchers deposit research data that underpin publications in repositories and formulate separate policies
The purpose of the Guidelines is to provide guidance in defining and implementing open access policies at national and institutional level and their coordination at regional level, based on existing best practices and in line with the European Commission’s Recommendation and Communication on access to and preservation of and dissemination of scientific information (2012) and the planning for Horizon 2020.
The MedOANet Guidelines for implementing open access policies for research performing and research funding organizations will soon become available in all the languages of the six Mediterranean countries-partners of the project. The Guidelines were first presented during the MedOAnet project’s European conference and are released on occasion of Open Access Week 2013.
Link to the English version of the MedOANet Guidelines: http://medoanet.eu/sites/www.medoanet.eu/files/documents/MED2013_GUIDELine_dp_EN_ws.pdf
The British Ecological Society Celebrates Open Access Week
This post has been reposted from the Methods in Ecology and Evolution Blog
This week is international Open Access Week, which aims to raise the awareness of open access publishing within the scientific and academic community, and provides an opportunity to hear about its potential benefits and the latest policies and opinions. Institutions and universities from all over the world are involved and there’s an extensive calendar of events that you can have a look at to see what’s happening in your area.
What open access options do Methods and the other BES Journals offer?
- We offer authors of primary research papers the choice to pay for our open access option, OnlineOpen (members of the BES receive a 25% discount on publication fees). Here are some of Methods most recent open access articles:
- Rapid Bayesian inference of heritability in animal models without convergence problems
- Using time-to-event analysis to complement hierarchical methods when assessing determinants of photographic detectability during camera trapping
- Oligotyping: Differentiating between closely related microbial taxa using 16S rRNA gene data
- Spatial models for distance sampling data: recent developments and future directions
- Inclusion of a near-complete fossil record reveals speciation-related molecular evolution
- We’re partnered with the open access journal, Ecology and Evolution (E&E); We offer the authors of good quality research that we’re unable to publish in Methods, the option to transfer their article, along with the reviewer comments, to E&E, with a 20% discount on publication fees. Here are some of the E&E articles published online last month that were transferred from Methods:
- Inferring parturition and neonate survival from movement patterns of female ungulates: a case study using woodland caribou
- Individual heterogeneity in black brant survival and recruitment with implications for harvest dynamics
- A bioturbation classification of European marine infaunal invertebrates
- Best Practicable Aggregation of Species: a step forward for species surrogacy in environmental assessment and monitoring
- Long-term metapopulation study of the Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia): survey methods, data management, and long-term population trends
In addition to the above open access options, all of our content is made freely available 2 years after publication. We’re also pleased to be able to offer readers free access to all Application papers, which are citable descriptions of new methods and techniques in ecology and evolution.
Open Access week event at SAUT and CUHAS Tanzania
The Consortium of Tanzania University and Research Libraries (COTUL) is planning to host a national OA week events in Mwanza on 30th October (a bit delayed due to unavoidable circumstances). The event will involve two parallel public lectures one at Saint Augustine University of Tanzania (SAUT) and the other at the Catholic University of health and allied sciences (CUHAS). At SAUT we expect to have Lecturers, Librarians and researchers from different part of Tanzania are expected to attend while at CUHAS, Lecturers, Doctors and Medical students from CUHAS are expected to attend. The CUHAS event has been organized by Medical Student association of Tanzania (TAMSA). See the event poster
In total we anticipate to sensitize over 200 academic staff and students.
We have actually started promoting the event using different materials including posters, brochures etc. We thank EIFL for their support and encouragement for making this happen. We’ll post more information as we go on.
Open Access Week 2013 @ Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore, Karnataka, India
To support the ‘International Open Access Week’ event observed all over the world, IIA library has designed a poster. This poster is available for viewing in the following URL,
http://prints.iiap.res.in/handle/2248/6423
The previous year’s OA week celebration at IIA also can be viewed from the following URL,
http://prints.iiap.res.in/handle/2248/5286
With Regards,
Christina Birdie
Librarian, IIA,Bangalore
Open access legislation in the US and Canada looks to prioritize post-publication archiving, not publishers’ profits
My open access policy post has just been published in the London School of Economics Impact Blog.
The text follows. Note that this was written before the Canadian tri-agency draft open access policy was released on October 15, but correctly predicts expansion of the CIHR policy basics across the funding agencies. My comments on the tri-agency policy are posted here. The ACOA / APLAC response draft is posted here.
Providing further context on open access policy, Heather Morrison presents cases from the U.S. and Canada, where each are also grappling with how to provide wider access to publicly funded research. If passed, the U.S.’s FASTR Act would require ‘green’ archiving and a focus on interoperability of local repositories. Across North America, faculty-led institutional policy has also been instrumental in administering access whilst preserving university autonomy.
What do UK academics and policy-makers need to know about open access policy across the pond? This is a call for UK academics to join us in calling for public policies that prioritize the needs of scholars and the public interest, not the profits of a handful of publishers. U.S. leaders have developed approaches to policy that are good models for any country! The U.S. Free Access to Research Act (FASTR), if passed, would require the archiving of peer-reviewed results of research funded by federal agencies for public access with a maximum six month embargo. A White House directive in response to a public call for open access is calling for much the same approach, with implementation details anticipated at any moment.
Image credit: Berkeley Lab (CC-BY-NC-SA)
A six month embargo is more than generous considering that scholarly publishers have had over a decade to transition to open access. There are more than ten thousand fully open access peer reviewed journals successfully employing a variety of business models listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. By insisting on deposit in repositories for public access with long-term preservation addressed, FASTR ensures ongoing access to these works for the U.S. public. FASTR addresses the technical requirements for re-use much more directly than the RCUK’s indirect and insufficient preference for a particular license. Research funders in the U.S. and Canada fund research rather than targeting funding to open access article processing fees. The faculty permissions approach, developed by academics for academics, pioneered by Harvard and perfected by MIT is the optimal model for institutional open access policy from the scholar’s point of view. Perhaps a topic for another day: throughout the U.S. and Canada, university libraries provide hosting and support services for faculty-led publishing.
The Free Access to Research Act (FASTR) in the U.S., if passed, would require free public access to federally funded research for departments with research budgets of $100 million or more. Unlike the UK, FASTR does not ask authors to publish in open access journals, nor does it provide funding for open access article processing fees. FASTR’s call for examination of open licensing is very similar to the recent advice from the UK’s Business, Innovation and Skills Committee for further research on this point.
FASTR is a superior policy to the UK’s RCUK policy from a number of perspectives. First, demanding deposit in repositories designed for long-term preservation for free public access assures that U.S. citizens will have access to these works in perpetuity. The UK’s push for gold open access policy leaves works funded by the UK at the mercy of publishers and journals that could fold, be owned or controlled by organizations outside the political influence of the UK, or that could change their business model in future.
The US focus on interoperability and local repositories meeting technical requirements directly addresses requirements for data and text-mining. This is likely to be far more effective than the UK’s attempt to achieve this indirectly through CC-BY (attribution only) licensing. CC-BY is not necessary for data and text mining of freely available works as these are essentially automated forms of reading materials. CC-BY is not sufficient for data and text mining because a CC-BY license can be placed on works that are not technically suited for these tasks, such as a locked-down PDF.
Both the UK and the FASTR approaches are designed to accommodate publishers in the transition process. The FASTR maximum six-month embargo on green open access archiving is appropriate given that scholarly publishing has now had more than a decade of experience with open access. The Directory of Open Access Journals now lists close to ten thousand fully open access, peer reviewed scholarly journals which use a variety of business models. This is a strong indicator of the ability of scholarly publishers to transition to open access, given good public policy which prioritizes scholarship and the public interest while giving scholarly publishers a lengthy period of time to adjust. The goal for open access policy should be to gradually decrease embargo periods to zero, reflecting that the public interest is and should be the priority of government, not protecting outmoded business models.
Other North American funding agencies are largely following this U.S. model. For example, Canada’s first federal funding agency to adopt an open access policy, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), adopted a policy fairly similar to the public access policy of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Canada’s tricouncil funding agencies are currently undergoing discussions with a view to standardizing open access policies across the agencies, with CIHR’s policy most likely to serve as the model. It should be acknowledged that the UK’s early lead in green open access policy and repository development was a major influence in the direction of U.S. and Canadian policy.
While U.S. and Canadian research funders allow for researchers to apply for open access article processing fees in research grant applications, it is unlikely that either the U.S. or Canada would follow the lead of providing targeted funding for this purpose, particularly in the current lean economic environment. Even in better economic times, in North America there is far more university autonomy and less central direction than is the case in the UK.
A great model for institutional policy from the scholar’s point of view is the faculty-led open access permissions policy pioneered by Harvard and perfected by MIT. Shieber and Suber have developed a webpage dedicated to what they call “good practices” for this kind of policy. The basic idea is that faculty give their university permission to post their peer-reviewed articles for open access in their local repository, with a waiver option available to authors on request. This approach gives a university all the permissions needed to make the work of its faculty open access, while at the same time asserting the rights of faculty to their own work.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Open Peer Review of Web Writing Book (675+ comments) during Open Access Week
Join readers in posting comments (over 675 to date) during the open peer review phase of Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning, an open access book-in-progress under contract with Michigan Publishing. This freely-accessible volume explores why online writing matters for liberal arts education and illustrates how faculty and students are engaged in this work. Based on essays from twenty-five contributors, this volume responds to current debates over massive online courses by arguing for the thoughtful integration of web-based authoring, annotating, editing, and publishing tools into what the liberal arts do best: teaching writing and clearer thinking across the curriculum.
During the open peer review (through October 30th, 2013), four commissioned experts and general audiences are publicly posting online comments on web essays to offer developmental feedback to authors and assist the editorial team in making selections for the final manuscript. The completed work will be published in 2014 under the University of Michigan’s new Maize Books imprint, both in paper (for sale) and online (for free). Financial support for this project has been provided by the Center for Teaching and Learning at Trinity College, and also by the Trinity Institute for Interdisciplinary Studies. Learn more at http://WebWriting.trincoll.edu
SPARC and World Bank OA Week Kickoff Now Online
It’s day 2 of Open Access Week 2013 and we hope your events are well underway. Please feel free to utilize the kickoff video for your events.
On Monday October 21st, 2013 SPARC and the World Bank hosted the Open Access Week Kickoff event at the World Bank. The event begin with a 60-minute panel discussion, entitled, “Open Access: Redefining Impact,” hosted by Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. Among the topics discussed were Article Level Metrics (ALM’s) and changing the way scholarly communication is measured.
- Dr. Stefano Bertuzzi, Executive Director of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB)
- Brett Bobley, Chief Information Officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association
- Dr. Cameron Neylon, Advocacy Director for Public Library of Science
- Dr. Michael Stebbins, Assistant Director for Biotechnology in the Science Division of the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy
Following the panel discussion, winning nominations of the new Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP) were announced. Elizabeth Marincola, Chief Executive Officer of PLOS, Robert Kiley, Head of Digital Services, Wellcome Library at the Wellcome Trust, and Alex Kozak Policy Analyst, Public Policy and Government Relations at Google will each announced a winning ASAP nomination. The ASAP Program, sponsored by 27 global organizations including Google, PLOS, and the Wellcome Trust, recognizes those who have built upon Open Access scientific research for new innovations shaping our society. For more information on the ASAP Program, visit asap.plos.org.
OpenEI.org is an Open Energy Data Platform for sharing and accessing world wide energy data!
OpenEI is making a profound impact on the world’s energy transformation by providing data access, generative data use, key knowledge derivation tools, and synthetic datasets that will help inform policy, purchase, build, and business decisions. Our community-based platform is a core competency for the world, the U.S. Department of Energy and its laboratories, providing a high-degree of value for building knowledge and datasets, connecting and structuring data via linked open data standards, and serving as the place for the world to contribute and utilize energy data, APIs and web-services.
Try it out and share your data today!
http://en.openei.org/wiki/Main_Page
Supporting Open Access week – discovering content and its use
It’s that week in the year- Open Access week, where we all come together internationally to support in the sharing of open content across the globe.
Now, here at Jorum we support that ethos all year round, but it is always wonderful to see just how this global event; now in it’s 6th year, brings the importance of sharing content to the fore.
The Jorum team have been working on a number of projects over the last year, to promote and share OER, which has included a number of new initiatives and service updates.
A New Beginning For Jorum
On 5th September, we released a new, updated and refreshed Jorum website. Easy to use search functionality makes discovering content better than ever. Jorum can also provide a new way to view detailed Stats on a resource or set of resources providing a much more tailored view on your/our content. The move to DSpace 1.8, allowed us to provide this greater functionality, and was something that was often requested by our community.
Full details on the updates can be read in our last blog post: A new beginning for Jorum.
LOVE OER
Open access week is all about the surfacing of content, in tandem with sharing resources widely. So, the deliverance of new ways to obtain stats is one way to do this, but we are also working on a couple of projects to help us to understand how OERs are used and shared.
Our recently launched ‘LoveOER’ campaign is seeking individuals who have used, or have simply been inspired by resources from Jorum in their teaching or learning, to share 5 resources that have made a difference to them. We can see how resources are shared, but it is often not always that easy to collect evidence on how OERs are making a difference to teaching within the UK. This new initiative will provide clear exemplars of how to make best use of Jorum’s wealth of content in each subject area and also facilitate and improve discovery of our expanding collections.
Our first curated collection can be seen under Subjects Allied to Medicine.
Further details on this campaign, and how you can earn £75 Amazon vouchers in the process can be found in our blog post:Love OERs? Earn a Reward!
Collecting Further Evidence
Our latest project has been working with Evidence Base to try and find users of OER content, to compile a number of case studies for Jorum. If you would like to be involved, simply complete the following survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/jorumcasestudies. They will be conducting interviews that should take approximately 30 minutes via telephone or Skype. Please do get involved!
Surfacing Content
Alongside collecting evidence of the use of OER, we continue our work on Jorum Powered – a collection of new ways to help increase the visibility and discoverability of OER and open content, this includes a Jorum Window, Jorum Sub-Site and a Jorum API.
So, go on keep sharing and please do continue to support and share your content via Jorum – the UK’s national repository for finding and sharing open educational resources, created and shared by those who teach in the UK.
We will keep you posted on further developments for 2013/14 via this blog, Twitter, Facebook and though the Jorum update discussion list.
Open Access Week event at SAUT and CUHAS Tanzania
The Consortium of Tanzania University and Research Libraries (COTUL) is planning to host a national OA week events in Mwanza on 30th October (a bit delayed due to unavoidable circumstances). The event will involve two parallel public lectures one at Saint Augustine University of Tanzania (SAUT) and the other at the Catholic University of health and allied sciences (CUHAS). At SAUT we expect to have Lecturers, Librarians and researchers from different part of Tanzania are expected to attend while at CUHAS, Lecturers, Doctors and Medical students from CUHAS are expected to attend. The CUHAS event has been organized by Medical Student association of Tanzania (TAMSA). See the event poster
In total we anticipate to sensitize over 200 academic staff and students.
We have actually started promoting the event using different materials including posters, brochures etc. We thank EIFL for their support and encouragement for making this happen. We’ll post more information as we go on.