Decoding the meaning of language | MIT News

“In addition to conducting his own research, von Fintel is also a founding co-editor of Semantics and Pragmatics, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal that is now one of the top four journals in the discipline. Last year, it officially became the second official publication of the Linguistics Society of America, which has published the journal Language since 1925. 

Interestingly, when von Fintel launched the publication in 2008 (with David Beaver of the University of Texas at Austin), the idea of open access was still novel. “Before the Web, people communicated in informal networks, so it was hard to find out what was going on,” von Fintel says. “I felt an obligation to help people get access to what was going on.”
An early and passionate advocate for open access, von Fintel helped launch the MIT linguistics department’s first website in the early 1990s, and soon thereafter started his academic blog, “semantics etc.,” to build connections among linguists and disseminate ideas throughout the field. He also served on the Institute’s Open Access Working Group, which proposed the open access policy adopted by MIT in 2009. 

“One point of the scientific method is quick and open communication,” von Fintel says. “You can build on results as soon as they happen. It accelerates the way science gets done. We’re changing the culture in our discipline in a big way.”…”

Fears about further research selectivity dampened by grant letter | News | Times Higher Education

“Hefce is also asked to “consider how to reward open data as part of future REF assessments”, and to work with Jisc to minimise the cost of the government’s commitment to open access. The government has been criticised by some in the sector for the potential cost of its preference for journal-based gold open access, which often involves the payment of a fee, to repository-based green open access. However, although papers submitted to the next REF must be open access, the funding councils have not expressed such a preference….”

Open Access Advocacy Librarian 14344

“The Information Services Directorate (ISD) wishes to appoint an Open Access Advocacy Librarian. It is intended that the Open Access Advocacy Librarian, assisted by an Open Access Senior Library Assistant, will engage in particular with RCUK-funded research-active academic staff in order to encourage them to reshape their publication habits, thus ensuring their compliance with the Gold/Author Pays Open Access objectives set by the Research Councils UK. The post holder will provide training, advice and support to units/departments based on a combination of practical and theoretical knowledge of the field of open access publishing and repository work. Thus, the role will involve financial responsibilities such as the management of RCUK and other Open Access funds but will also embrace responsibilities for managing and/or supporting staff within the relevant sections of the University Library, while working in liaison with the University’s Research and Knowledge Exchange Services to achieve full open access compliance.

The post holder will need to understand the full range of contemporary OA compliance environments, for example, being able to explain how RCUK and/or Wellcome Foundation compliance relates to other compliance regimes, including HEFCE’s separately articulated Open Access requirements. The Open Access Advocacy Librarian will take specific responsibility for training and supervising a Senior Library Assistant, while working closely with the Head of Acquisitions in the Library to ensure that Open Access procedures embed with existing Acquisitions workflows.”

Paperity

I would like to share a little bit about Paperity and what the website has been up to since its launch. Paperity is a multidisciplinary aggregator of Open Access Journals and Papers which was launched in October 2014 and since then it has aggregated more than 2,200 journals and 400,000 multidisciplinary articles. What makes it unique is that it is both an aggregator and multidisciplinary. Through its full-text feature it eases the research process researchers and early career researchers have to go through when investigating or doing assignments. Paperity also makes sure to index only true peer-reviewed scholarly literature, and keeps strong communication with the journals aggregated to assure quality and consistency for its users. 

Paperity has received a lot of support from the Open Access community and has appeared in blog posts in numerous sites such as Archimag, University World News, InfoToday, Open Science, and many more. 

Paperity has also partnered with EBSCO Information Services, open journals from Paperity are listed in EBSCO A-to-Z, a bibliographical catalog used by libraries and library users around the world to facilitate and manage their access to journals. Paperity also partnered with the European Union Contest for Young Scientist, the winning articles will be added to Paperity as soon as they get pubished in the Journal of Young Investigators.

Besides that, we are currently working on our website’s features to make it easier and more efficient to our readers. 

I invite you to check the website and learn more about the team at http://paperity.org/about/ . If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. 

Open Library of Humanities Update, Part 1: Now accepting submissions; Religious Studies and Theology editors in place | Omega Alpha | Open Access

“An idea whose time has come often takes time to develop. Two years have elapsed since Dr. Martin Paul Eve first issued a call on his blog for participants to help build a “PLOS-style model for the Humanities and Social Sciences.” (I covered and commented on Dr. Eve’s call here.) A broad and deep response to this call from the humanities community internationally set this timely idea in motion through scholar-led organization and governance, seed grant funding, and lots of hard work. On December 2, 2014, the Open Library of Humanities site announced that through its technology partnership with the open access publisher Ubiquity Press, the submissions platform for the multi/interdisciplinary humanities “megajournal” is now open and ready to accept submissions! The formal launch of OLH with the publication of an estimated 120 articles (based on scholar pledges) is slated for “between May and Summer 2015.” You can visit OLH’s submissions platform here to learn about publication guidelines, and to submit your article. See also this announcement on the Ubiquity Press blog….Speaking of section editors, a slate for Religious Studies and Theology editors have been selected and are now in place….”

Position Description: Policy Director, AccessNow.org

“Access is seeking a Policy Director to manage a broad portfolio with responsibility for Access’ policy initiatives and strategic partnerships. The position is a senior management position, with multiple staff across the world, reporting to the Executive Director. Access (AccessNow.org) is a growing organization dedicated to defending and extending the digital rights of users at risk around the world. Our policy work centers on five focus areas: privacy, digital security, freedom of expression, network interference, and business and human rights. Our policy, advocacy, and technology teams have staff presences in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East/North Africa, Central Africa, North America, and Southeast Asia, to provide global support to our mission….

Scholarly Publishing Data Analyst – California Digital Library, University of California: California Digital Library

“re you a data-driven information professional passionate about transforming scholarly communication?  Do you want to understand how academic research institutions can support the shift to open access?  So do we!

The California Digital Library (CDL) has an exciting and unique opportunity for a Scholarly Publishing Data Analyst to help us model the financial implications of a shift to open access for large research-intensive universities.  We are seeking an enthusiastic, motivated, and data-driven individual to coordinate data collection and analysis for a largescale collaborative study of new economic models of scholarly journal publishing.  Working with an outstanding cross-institutional project team  of librarians and academic researchers, the Scholarly Publishing Data Analyst will have primary responsibility for assembling expenditure and bibliometric data documenting the financial investment of large research universities in scholarly journals, to support models of how those investments might change under various open access scenarios….”

Executive Editor – Nature Communications : London, United Kingdom : Naturejobs

“Nature Communications is Nature Publishing Group’s flagship Open Access journal. Since its launch in 2011, the journal has grown very rapidly — it now attracts in excess of 18,500 submissions per year, and in 2014 will publish almost 3,000 papers. The journal covers a range of topics across the life sciences and physical sciences, and recently celebrated its highest impact factor to date – 10.742.

As the journal has grown so rapidly, and with the move to being fully Open Access, Nature Communications now faces different challenges as well as new opportunities. We are therefore creating an exciting new position — Executive Editor, Nature Communications — to meet the journal’s evolving needs.
The newly appointed Executive Editor will lead Nature Communications through the next phase of its development. He or she will work with the editorial teams across the biological and physical sciences to create an editorial strategy for the journal, and then support an implementation plan to achieve these strategic goals. They will be the ‘face’ of the journal, both within NPG and externally, where they will need to be able to speak knowledgeably about its aims, scope and policies….”

The Open Access Advantage in Legal Education’s Age of Assessment – Jotwell: Lex

“Open access (OA) scholarship is available online, without fees, and free of restrictive copyright and licensing provisions. As institutions of higher education implement a more metrics-driven paradigm, law schools are increasingly attentive to the quantification of both individual faculty and aggregate law school impact. Citation counts are one means of quantifying these impacts. Donovan, Watson, and Osborne build on their 2011 article, Citation Advantage of Open Access Legal Scholarship, which demonstrated that open access resources have a great impact on legal scholarship, (103 Law Lib. J. 553, 557). In this article, they work to develop a systematic and scientific explanation for why open access scholarship has a citation advantage in the legal education context.

The authors’ research shows that articles published simultaneously as print and open access law review articles provide at least a 50% citation advantage over their print-only law review counterparts. More specifically, they find that the aggregate cumulative OA advantage for new and retrospective works combined is about 53%; the OA advantage of newer works published during the years 2007-2012 is about 60%. Their research also indicates that OA articles are more heavily cited in the years immediately following an article’s publication and that OA articles tend to “command greater attention over the lifespan of the work” (Donovan et al, at 8).

The authors also explore the measurement of the OA advantage to a law review as it relates to the institution’s ranking in the U.S. News & World Report. They conclude that the greatest OA advantage is for a journal whose home institution is in tier 2, 3, or 4 of the U.S. News & World Report law school ranking. For those tiers, the aggregate cumulative OA advantage for new and retrospective works combined is about 51% compared to an OA advantage of new works published during the years 2007-2012 of about 89% for tiers 2 and 3, and 81% for tier 4. For journals at tier 1 schools, the OA impact decreases significantly because journals at higher ranked institutions have high levels of exposure even without OA. In this tier, the aggregate cumulative OA advantage for new and retrospective works combined is about 11% compared to an OA advantage of new works published during the years 2007-2012 of about 16%.

As the authors point out in their conclusion, this article is a sobering reminder that readily available information on the Internet will often be the first, and in some cases the only, source consulted. Consequently, OA publishing offers faculty the potential opportunity to increase their work’s exposure in the field by being readily available, and therefore, is fertile ground for the OA citation advantage. According to Donovan, Watson, and Osborne, the OA citation advantage for a law review article is threefold: an OA article gets attention sooner; about half of the citations to an OA article will be from the first six years of the publication’s existence; and OA articles receive attention for a sustained period of time that exceeds the length of attention received by its non-OA counterparts. Depositing faculty scholarship in an open access repository, whether in SSRN or in an educational institution’s repository, is a simple, tasteful way that faculty can promote their scholarship while supporting the open access movement.”

Fossilized Footprints Lead Scientists Down a Prehistoric Path

journal.pone.0103255.g008_rota

Whether tromping alone or running in a pack, all prehistoric creatures got around somehow. Paleontologists can use fossilized bones to learn more about what dinosaurs ate, what they looked like, and even how they might have moved, but bones are … Continue reading »

The post Fossilized Footprints Lead Scientists Down a Prehistoric Path appeared first on EveryONE.

Why principal investigators funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health publish in the Public Library of Science journals

Abstract: Introduction. The National Institutes of Health public access policy requires the principal investigators of any Institutes-funded research to submit their manuscript to PubMed Central, and the open access publisher Public Library of Science submits all articles to PubMed Central, irrespective of funder. Whether the investigators, who made the decision to publish in one of the seven Public Library of Science journals were motivated by the National Institutes’ public access policy or by the journals’ quality standards is unknown. 

Method. Forty-two Institutes-funded investigators who had published in one of the seven journals between 2005 and 2009 were interviewed, using a semi-structured, open-ended interview schedule. 
Analysis. Qualitative analysis was conducted, dividing the participants into those who published in the journals before the mandatory policy (pre-mandate) and those who published after the policy (post-mandate).
Results. The Institutes-funded investigators submitted to the Public Library of Science journals because they favour the high impact factor, fast publication speed, fair peer-review system and the articles/ immediate open access availability.
Conclusions. The requirements of the National Institutes’ public access policy do not influence the investigators’ decision to submit to one of the Public Library of Science journals and do not increase their familiarity with open access publishing options.

Digital Scholarship Librarian | The College of Wooster

“The College of Wooster Libraries seeks an innovative and service-oriented colleague to become our Digital Scholarship Librarian. This newly created faculty position reports to the Director of Libraries and provides leadership in creating, organizing, promoting, and curating digital materials. The librarian will play a key role in supporting our Open Access resolution, our institutional repository (Open Works), digital projects developed under our current grant, institutional research data, born digital scholarship, and digitized content….”

Open access must be open at both ends

Open access must be open at both ends

What do Early Career Researchers (ECRs) think of Open Access? Following on from Daniel Amund’s post on the topic for OA Week 2014, another Wiley Advisor Jonathan Foster, winner of last year’s essay competition, shares his perspective. “If I have seen further, it is because I am standing on the shoulders of giants”. This famous…

Call for Assistant Editors, Open Access Books in Food Science, Employment | IFT

“Are you an ambitious student or recent graduate who wants to build up your experience? Are you looking for a challenge in an international working environment? Are you passionate about the internet and all things on-line?
I would kindly like to invite you to consider the role of Assistant Editor in the pioneer Open Access academic book publishing program in Food Science (nutrition, food engineering, technology, safety, etc.), launched by De Gruyter Open (www.degruyteropen.com)….”