“Presentation made during the AAUP (Association of American University Presses) annual meeting in New Orleans, proposing an overview of European policies in term of open access to academic publications.”
Monthly Archives: August 2014
Developing Institutional Repositories: Considering Copyright Issues
Abstract: The development of Institutional Repositories (IRs) was the outcome of several Open Access Initiatives and Movements made to salvage the dwindling scholarly communication. The development is more than a decade now and has been embraced by many universities and academic institutions. This paper discusses the nexus of copyright laws and the institutional repositories and reveals the fact that open access institutional repository is built on the principle of no restriction of access. Therefore, the paper opines that copyright issues must be treated in form of licenses which creators must give to allow contents to be included in the repositories. The paper recommends the teaching of copyright laws to authors (faculty members and students) and library staff who deposit and manage the repositories respectively and also that protocols for managing creators/publishers copyright licenses are employed.
Climate-smart agriculture: scientists show agricultural progress in responding to climate change – BioMed Central blog
“The article in Agriculture and Food Security indicates that momentum that has already built among the science community for CSA [climate-smart agriculture], forming a solid foundation for greater engagement by more researchers in fundamental and applied studies. Open access publishing plays a crucial role in this momentum, bringing research and information to policy discussions, and to the farmers who will to implement CSA-based methods….”
Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture turns 10
“African universities should work towards establishing open access policies, to enable their research to be more accessible to the wider scientific community….”
NEOMED Receives $12 Million from Federal Government
“NEOMED, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to create a bridge between academic research and the pharmaceutical industry, will receive $12 million in funding from the Government of Canada to help academic researchers turn their early discoveries into future medicines….NEOMED is situated within the premises of the NEOMED Institute, a research and development centre at the cutting edge of technology, in Technoparc Montreal’s Saint-Laurent Campus. The NEOMED Institute acts as an open-access drug discovery hub hosting commercial enterprises, providing a unique environment to foster innovation, collaboration, and creativity….”
Blair Horner: Colleges Open And Students Experience Textbook Sticker Shock | WAMC
“Open textbooks are faculty-written and peer-reviewed like traditional textbooks, but they are published under an open license, meaning they are free online, free to download, and affordable in print. 80% of students surveyed said they would do significantly better in a course if the textbook were free online and a hard copy was optional, which is exactly how open textbooks work. Open textbooks save students $100 per student, per course on average.
And there is movement in the direction of such open textbooks.
More than 2,500 faculty members from 750 U.S. colleges have signed the Faculty Statement on Open Textbooks, which expresses their intent to consider using high-quality open textbooks whenever appropriate.
The government can help by investing funds and programmatic support to create more open textbooks. Investment from the government would fast-track the production of vital high-quality classroom ready texts, as well as providing colleges and faculty the resources they need to use available open textbooks in their classroom immediately.
The Washington Open Course Library has developed open course materials – including open textbooks – for the 81 highest enrolled courses in Washington’s community and technical colleges. The program, funded by an initial investment of $1.8 million, has so far saved students $5.5 million since its inception, including $2.8 million in student savings so far this semester….”
Lehetséges öszintén és nyiltan megemlékezni a történelem sötét és tragikus korszakaira
A Kanadai Magyar Demokratikus Charta üdvözli Kanada kormányának a történelmi igazságtétel irányába tett lépéseit
Montreál, Kanada ? 2014. augusztus 25 — A Kanadai Magyar Demokratikus Charta üdvözli a kanadai kormány nyilatkozatát, melyet az 1914 és 1920 közötti internálások századik évfordulóján tett. Az I. Világháború alatt és az azt követő másfél évben, összesen 8.600 ártatlan nőt, gyereket és férfit internáltak mint “idegent és ellenséget” 24 lágerben, csupán azért, mert az Osztrák-Magyar Monarchia területeiről származtak.
A kanadai Miniszterelnöki Hivatal által kiadott közlemény szerint:
“a kormányok kötelessége, hogy védelmet nyújtsanak háborúk idején, ezért sajnálattal tekintünk vissza egy olyan kormányzati politikára, amely ahelyett, hogy védelmet nyújtott volna, a kollektív bűnösség elve alapján cselekedett, és nem vette figyelembe az ?ártalmatlanság vélelmét?. Ezzel a közleménnyel Kanada beismeri a múlt bűneit és deklarálja, hogy tanult a múlt hibáiból. Egyben kijelenti: ?kötelességünknek tartjuk, hogy megemlékezzünk az áldozatokról?.
Bár a legtöbb internált ukrán származású volt, magyar nemzetiségű áldozatai is voltak az internálásnak; így értelemszerűen magyarok is kerültek az elszigetelő lágerekbe. Ezen kívül a kanadai települések rendőrségei több magyar származású személyt is nyilvántartottak a többi 80 ezer szintén “idegennek és ellenségnek” titulált kelet-európaival együtt.
A Kanadai Magyar Demokratikus Charta elismeri a kanadai ukrán közösség erőfeszítését és munkáját, melyet annak érdekében végzett, hogy végre ismertté válhasson Kanada történelmének ez a szomorú fejezete. Többek között a Shevchenko (Sevcsenko) Alapítvány, a Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (Ukrán-Kanadai Polgári Jogok Egyesülete) és Ukrainian Canadian Congress (Ukrán Kanadai Kongresszus) dolgozott a történelmi igazságtétel érdekében hosszú éveken keresztül. Ennek a munkának köszönhetően született meg a C-311-es törvény, mely egy 10 millió dolláros alap létrehozását tette lehetővé. Az alap támogatásának és projektjeinek köszönhetően ismerhetik meg a kanadaiak ? származásuktól függetlenül ? ezt a sokáig elfeledett történelmi tragédiát.
A Kanadai Magyar Demokratikus Charta sajnálattal veszi tudomásul, hogy odahaza, a magyar politikai vezetés a mai napig sem tud hasonló példamutatással járni e téren. A KMDH sajnálatosnak tartja, hogy a jelenlegi kormány képtelen őszinte és félreérthetetlen irányt mutatni a huszadik század első felében elkövetett kormányzati igazságtalanságok feldolgozásának érdekében, és ma is inkább másokra keni a felelőséget szomorú múltunk több esetében. A kanadai aktivisták, tudósok, múzeumok és kormányzati tisztviselők együttműködése az ukrán diaszpórával annak ékes bizonyítéka, hogy lehetséges őszintén és nyiltan megemlékezni a történelem sötét és tragikus korszakaira.
A Kanadai Magyar Demokratikus Charta – egy, az akadémikusokat és aktivistákat összefogó országos szervezet ? fejet hajt az igazságtalanul meghurcolt embertársaink emléke előtt, tiszteleg az internálás magyar és más nemzetiségű áldozatai előtt. Továbbá, kötelességének tekinti, hogy felszólaljon minden olyan jelenlegi kormányzati lépéssel szemben, amely igazságtalanul érinti az embereket.
Dr. Göllner András, alapító és nemzetközi szóvívő
A Concordia University politológia tanszékének emeritus professzora. Montreál, Québec.
Dr. Ádám Christopher, társalapító és szóvívő
A Carleton University történelem tanszékének oktatója. Ottawa, Ontario.
Dr. Balogh Éva, társalapító és szóvívő
A Yale Egyetem korábbi történész professzora és a Morse College egykori dékánja. New Haven, Connecticut.
Dr. Hernád István, társalapító és szóvívő
A Magyar Tudományos Akadémia külső tagja / Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) Kanadai kiemelt kutatási katedra kognitív tudományokban. Montreál, Québec.
Dr. Szeman Imre, társalapító és szóvívő
A University of Alberta kiemelt professzora angol irodalomban, szociológiában és filmművészetben.
www.hungariancharter.com
A Positive Example for Hungarian Society
Canadian-Hungarian Democratic Charter Welcomes Canadian Government’s Decision to Acknowledge Historical Injustice
MONTREAL, CANADA – August 25th, 2014 — The Canadian Hungarian Democratic Charter welcomes the Government of Canada’s statement on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the country’s first national internment operations between 1914 and 1920, in which more than 8,600 innocent men, women and children from the lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and elsewhere in Eastern Europe were unjustly interned as “enemy aliens” in 24 internment camps across Canada.
A statement from the Prime Minister’s office notes that:
“governments have a solemn duty to defend against legitimate threats in wartime, but we look back with deep regret on an unjust policy that was implemented indiscriminately as a form of collective punishment and in violation of fundamental principles of natural justice, including the presumption of innocence. In Canada we acknowledge the mistakes of the past, and we learn from them. We are also steadfast in our commitment to remembering those who suffered.”
While most of those interned were Ukrainians, Hungarian immigrants to Canada were also considered to be enemy aliens, and they were not only among those deported to remote camps, but were also among more than 80,000 residents required to register with local authorities, simply as a result of their ethnic background.
The Canadian Hungarian Democratic Charter also acknowledges the Ukrainian community groups and activists that for decades fought for this sad chapter in Canada’s wartime history to be recognized. We think especially of the Shevchenko Foundation, the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress–all of which persevered in their calls for justice, even as they faced widespread denial and indifference on the part of Canadian authorities. Their persistence is what led to Bill C-331, which opened the way for the creation of the $10 million Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund, thus allowing for Canadians of all backgrounds and generations to explore this previously neglected chapter in our country’s history.
The cooperation amongst community activists, the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora, historians and other academics, artists, local museum curators and government officials demonstrates that it is possible to reflect openly on the most painful chapters of a nation’s history. This can serve as a positive example for Hungarian society as well.
The Canadian Hungarian Democratic Charter — a national organization of academics and community activists — remembers the Hungarians and other Europeans who fell victim to wartime xenophobia and prejudice in Canada, and will continue to raise its voice against injustice and oppression in our contemporary world.
Dr. András B. Göllner. Founder and International Spokesperson
Emeritus Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Concordia University, Montreal, Que.
Dr. Christopher Adam. Co-Founder and Spokesperson
Sessional Lecturer, Department of History, Carleton University, Ottawa, Ont.
Dr. Éva Balogh. Co-Founder and Spokesperson
Former Professor of History and Dean of Morse College at Yale University (Retired) New Haven, Conn.
Dr. Stevan Harnad. Co-fondateur et porte-parole, langue française
Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science, Université du Québec à Montréal and External Member, Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Imre Szeman. Co-Founder and Spokesperson
Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies and Professor of English, Film Studies, and Sociology, University of Alberta.
www.hungariancharter.com
Open Access Movement Pioneer Robin Peek Retires from Simmons GSLIS : News & Events Blog
“After teaching at GSLIS for more than 20 years, Associate Professor Robin Peek has retired this summer. As a pioneer of the Open Access (OA) Movement, which began in the mid-1990s, Peek championed open access of scholarly research. Her studies focused on the OA movement history and evolution, as well as the development of OA mandates, journals, and institutional change….”
Openaccess week 2014.
Together, let’s promote Openaccess.
Open Research Intern (Paid Internship) – 6 months : London
“We have an exciting opportunity for an internship in the newly-formed open research team at Nature Publishing Group / Palgrave Macmillan. This role would suit a graduate with an interest in open access publishing who is looking to gain experience in this rapidly developing area of scholarly communications….”
Wellcome’s recommendations on Data Access and Sharing
The Wellcome Trust and other funders have commisioned a study on
ESTABLISHING INCENTIVES AND CHANGING CULTURES TO SUPPORT DATA ACCESS
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@msh_peda/documents/web_document/wtp056495.pdf
(This is a report of the Expert Advisory Group on Data Access (EAGDA). EAGDA was established by the MRC, ESRC, Cancer Research UK and the Wellcome Trust in 2012 to provide strategic advice on emerging scientific, ethical and legal issues in relation to data access for cohort and longitudinal studies.)
This is very welcome – data is a poor relation of the holy – and in many subjects often largely useless – PDF full text. Here the report states why, and how we need to care for data.
Our findings were that
– making data accessible to others can carry a significant cost to researchers (both in terms of financial resource and the time it requires) and there are constraints in terms of protecting the privacy and confidentiality of research participants;
– while funders have done much valuable work to encourage data access and have made significant investments to support key data resources (such as the UK Data Service for the social sciences), the data management and sharing plans they request of researchers are often not reviewed nor resourced adequately, and the delivery of these plans neither routinely monitored nor enforced;
– there is typically very little, if any, formal recognition for data outputs in key assessment processes – including in funding decisions, academic promotion, and in the UK Research Excellence Framework;
– data managers have an increasingly vital role as members of research teams, but are often afforded a low status and few career progression opportunities;
– working in data intensive research areas can create potential challenges for early career researchers in developing careers in these fields;
– the infrastructures needed to support researchers in data management and sharing, and to ensure the long-term preservation and curation of data, are often lacking (both at an institutional and a community level).
TL;DR It needs commitment in money, policies and management and it’s a large task
So …
RECOMMENDATIONS
We recommend that research funders should:
1. Strengthen approaches for scrutinising data management and sharing plans associated with their funded research – ensuring that these are resourced appropriately and implemented in a manner that maximises the long-term value of key data outputs.
2. Urge the UK Higher Education funding councils to adopt a clear policy at the earliest possible stage for high quality datasets that are shared with others to be explicitly recognised and assessed as valued research outputs in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework
3. Take a proactive lead in recognising the contribution of those who generate and share high quality datasets, including as a formal criterion for assessing the track record and achievements of researchers during funding decisions.
4. Work in partnership with research institutions and other stakeholders to establish career paths for data managers.
5. Ensure key data repositories serving the data community have adequate funding to meet the long-term costs of data preservation, and develop user-friendly services that reduce the burden on researchers as far as possible.
PMR: This is the FUNDERS urging various bodies to act. Some items are conceivably possible. (4) is highly desirable but very challenging and universities have consistently failed to value support roles and honour ”research outputs” instead. (5) is possible but must be done by people and organizations who undersdtand repositories, not university libraries whose repositories are effectively unused.
And we MUSTN”T hand this over to commercial companies.
We recommend that research leaders should:
6. Adopt robust approaches for planning and costing data management and sharing plans when submitting funding applications.
7. Ensure that the contributions of both early-career researchers and data managers are recognised and valued appropriately, and that the career development of individuals in both roles is nurtured.
8. Develop and adopt approaches that accelerate timely and appropriate access to key research datasets.
9. Champion greater recognition of data outputs in the assessment processes to which they contribute.
PMR: (6) will have lipservice unless the process is changed (7) means changing culture and diverting money (8) is possible (9) requires a stick from funders
We also emphasise that research institutions and journals have critical roles in supporting the cultural change required.
Specifically, we call for research institutions to develop clear policies on data sharing and preservation; to provide training and support for researchers to manage data effectively; to strengthen career pathways for data managers; and to recognise data outputs in performance reviews.
We call on journals to establish clear policies on data sharing and processes to enable the contribution of individual authors on the publication to be assessed, and to require the appropriate citation and acknowledgement of datasets used in the course of a piece of published research. In addition, journals should require that datasets underlying published papers are accessible, including through direct links in papers wherever possible.
PMR: Journals have failed us catastrophically both technically (they are among the worst technical printed output in the world – broken bizarre HTML and not even using Unicode) and politically (where their main product is glory, not technical). The only way to change this is to create different organisations.
This will be very difficult.
The funders are to be commended on these goals – it will be an awful lot of money and time and effort and politics.
Crowd-Sourced Peer Review: Substitute or Supplement?
Harnad, S. (2014) Crowd-Sourced Peer Review: Substitute or supplement for the current outdated system? LSE Impact Blog 8/21
If, as rumoured, google builds a platform for depositing unrefereed research papers for ?peer-reviewing? via crowd-sourcing, can this create a substitute for classical peer-review or will it merely supplement classical peer review with crowd-sourcing?
In classical peer review, an expert (presumably qualified, and definitely answerable), an “action editor,” chooses experts (presumably qualified, and definitely answerable), “referees,” to evaluate a submitted research paper in terms of correctness, quality, reliability, validity, originality, importance and relevance in order to determine whether it meets the standards of a journal with an established track-record for correctness, reliability, originality, quality, novelty, importance and relevance in a certain field.
In each field there is usually a well-known hierarchy of journals, hence a hierarchy of peer-review standards, from the most rigorous and selective journals at the top all the way down to what is sometimes close to a vanity press at the bottom. Researchers use the journals’ public track-records for quality standards as a hierarchical filter for deciding in what papers to invest their limited reading time to read, and in what findings to risk investing their even more limited and precious research time to try to use and build upon.
Authors’ papers are (privately) answerable to the peer-reviewers, the peer-reviewers are (privately) answerable to the editor, and the editor is publicly answerable to users and authors via the journal’s name and track-record.
Both private and public answerability are fundamental to classical peer review. So is their timing. For the sake of their reputations, many (though not all) authors don’t want to make their papers public before they have been vetted and certified for quality by qualified experts. And many (though not all) users do not have the time to read unvetted, uncertified papers, let alone to risk trying to build on unvalidated findings. Nor are researchers eager to self-appoint themselves to peer-review arbitrary papers in their fields, especially when the author is not answerable to anyone for following the freely given crowd-sourced advice (and there is no more assurance that the advice is expert advice rather than idle or ignorant advice than there is any assurance that a paper is worth taking the time to read and review).
The problem with classical peer review today is that there is so much research being produced that there are not enough experts with enough time to peer-review it all. So there are huge publication lags (because of delays in finding qualified, willing referees, and getting them to submit their reviews in time) and the quality of peer-review is uneven at the top of the journal hierarchy and minimal lower down, because referees do not take the time to review rigorously.
The solution would be obvious if each unrefereed, submitted paper had a reliable tag marking its quality level: Then the scarce expertise and time for rigorous peer review could be reserved for, say, the top 10% or 30% and the rest of the vetting could be left to crowd-sourcing. But the trouble is that papers do not come with a-priori quality tags: Peer review determines the tag.
The benchmark today is hence the quality hierarchy of the current, classically peer-reviewed research literature. And the question is whether crowd-sourced peer review could match, exceed, or even come close enough to this benchmark to continue to guide researchers on what is worth reading and safe to trust and use at least as well as they are being guided by classical peer review today.
And of course no one knows whether crowd-sourced peer-review, even if it could work, would be scaleable or sustainable.
The key questions are hence:
1. Would all (most? many?) authors be willing to post their unrefereed papers publicly (and in place of submitting them to journals!)?
2. Would all (most? many?) of the posted papers attract referees? competent experts?
3. Who/what decides whether the refereeing is competent, and whether the author has adequately complied? (Relying on a Wikipedia-style cadre of 2nd-order crowd-sourcers who gain authority recursively in proportion to how much 1st-order crowd-sourcing they have done ? rather than on the basis of expertise ? sounds like a way to generate Wikipedia quality, but not peer-reviewed quality?)
4. If any of this actually happens on any scale, will it be sustainable?
5. Would this make the landscape (unrefereed preprints, referee comments, revised postprints) as navigable and useful as classical peer review, or not?
My own prediction (based on nearly a quarter century of umpiring both classical peer review and open peer commentary) is that crowdsourcing will provide an excellent supplement to classical peer review but not a substitute for it. Radical implementations will simply end up re-inventing classical peer review, but on a much faster and more efficient PostGutenberg platform. We will not realize this, however, until all of the peer-reviewed literature has first been made open access. And for that it is not sufficient for Google merely to provide a platform for authors to post their unrefereed papers, because most authors don?t even post their refereed papers in their institutional repositories until it is mandated by their institutions and funders.
Harnad, S. (1998/2000/2004) The invisible hand of peer review. Nature [online] (1998), Exploit Interactive 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B. (2004) (ed.) Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp. 235-242.
Harnad, S., Carr, L., Brody, T. & Oppenheim, C. (2003) Mandated online RAE CVs Linked to University Eprint Archives: Improving the UK Research Assessment Exercise whilst making it cheaper and easier. Ariadne 35.
Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8).
Harnad, S. (2011) Open Access to Research: Changing Researcher Behavior Through University and Funder Mandates. JEDEM Journal of Democracy and Open Government 3 (1): 33-41.
Harnad, Stevan (2013) The Postgutenberg Open Access Journal. In, Cope, B and Phillips, A (eds.) The Future of the Academic Journal (2nd edition). Chandos.
VSNU wants help with Open Access
In preparation to the negotiation with scientific publishers, VSNU chairman Karl Dittrich has sent a letter to all scientists in the Netherlands. He hopes that researchers themselves will also insist on the transition to an Open Access model.
You can read the letter which has been sent on behalf of the Board of Governors of all Dutch universities.
A modest proposal
Dear Professor X,
Thank you for the invitation to review for the Journal of X. I appreciate the work you do and have done for the X community.
That said, I have decided not to review for Elsevier journals unless the journal making the request is willing to convert one mutually agreed-upon article in the same journal to Gold Open Access status. If that condition can be met, I would be happy to review this paper, but if not, I’m afraid I must decline.
With best regards,
–Dan Gezelter