A house is not a home without a dog, and a dog isn’t a “D-O-double-G” without its microbial “crew.” Human microbiome research is progressing rapidly, and we are always learning how the bacteria living on and inside of us contribute … Continue reading
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“Visitors to the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s website can now explore more than 51,000 objects from the Museum’s permanent collection in a revamped online database optimized for speed, user experience and mobile use.
The new online collection offers a visually rich platform with over 33,000 high-quality images available for viewing and high-res zooming capabilities to provide detailed views of assorted works. A hallmark of the new website is the 21,000 images now available for high-res download, providing open access to imagery for any personal, scholarly or commercial use. Multiple views of many three-dimensional works are also available to provide a unique online viewing experience for the site user … The new platform replaces the previous collections database created in 2010. The revamped online collection was created by the IMA Lab, the award-winning technology consulting arm of the Museum …”
” The government, in line with a commitment to transparency and open data, is
committed to ensuring that published research findings are freely accessible.
Increasing numbers of funding bodies require outputs arising from public funded
research to be as widely accessible as possible, so that potentially anyone can read
them.
2 A HEFCE policy for open access in the post-2014 Research Excellence Framework
(REF) was published in March 2014 that sets out the requirements for certain outputs
to be made open access in order to be eligible for submission in the next REF.
3 The purpose of this policy is to outline Buckinghamshire New University’s approach to
open access publishing …”
“The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the University of Cambridge’s Research for Equitable Access and Learning (REAL) Centre are joining forces to run a major new four year initiative that will seek to maximise the impact of research funded by the ESRC DFID Strategic Partnership….For ESRC-DFID [Economic and Social Research Council, Department for International Developmen] grants that have already ended, the EPD [Evidence and Policy Directorate] will place the greatest emphasis on migrating their research and data onto knowledge hubs using open knowledge approaches….”
The HEFCE/REF exception is not to the deposit requirement but to the OA requirement, and that makes all the difference in the world.
No publisher can block deposit; all they can do is embargo the date on which access to the deposit is set as Open Access (OA).
All REF submissions must be deposited immediately upon acceptance for publication — embargo or no embargo. The length of the allowable OA embargo, and exemptions from it, are an entirely separate matter.
Immediate-deposit allows a uniform mandate to be adopted by all institutions and funders, regardless of publisher OA embargo policy.
Once deposited, even if embargoed, access to an individual copy for research purposes can nevertheless be requested and provided on a one-to-one basis by one click each from the requestor to request and one click from the author to comply, thanks to the institutional repositories’ copy-request Button.
But only if — and when — the papers are deposited.
Sale, Arthur; Couture, Marc; Rodrigues, Eloy; Carr, Les and Harnad, Stevan (2014) Open Access Mandates and the “Fair Dealing” Button. In: Dynamic Fair Dealing: Creating Canadian Culture Online (Rosemary J. Coombe & Darren Wershler, Eds.). University of Toronto Press.
The scaleable, sustainable solution for global OA is for each author’s own mandated institutional repository to be the designated locus of deposit for all published articles. These can of course also be exported to any other locus desired (actually only the link need be exported, once metadata interoperability is ensured).
Arxiv depositors will of course be able to keep on depositing directly in Arxiv as long as they wish. Why not? They were, after all, among the first wave of OA providers, and have been faithfully doing it for decades, unmandated. Their Arxiv deposits can instead be harvested back to their institutions instead of trying to make these heroic depositors change their long-standing and progressive habits because other disciplines didn’t have the sense to do it unmandated,
But it remains true that today most papers (across all disciplines) are not being deposited in Arxiv, nor in institutional repositories, nor deposited anywhere within the first year of publication. Mandates from institutions and funders will remedy that.
But for mandates to be effective, they must demand minimal effort from authors and institutions, and it must be possible to monitor and ensure compliance.
The simplest and surest way to monitor and ensure compliance is for both institutions and funders to require convergent deposit in the author’s institutional repository. That covers all papers, funded and and unfunded (except the tiny minority by institutionally unaffiliated authors, who can deposit directly in institution-external repositories),
On the web, distributed locus of deposit does not “fragment the literature.” No one deposits directly in google; google harvests. Google currently inverts all data and still has the best search functionality.
Once enough of the OA corpus is deposited in institutional repositories (IRs) to make it worthwhile bothering, it will be a piece of cake for an enterprising grad student to write the harvest and search code across the global network of OA IRs, and generations of grad students will continue optimizing these tools beyond even the imagination of today’s sluggish, non-depositing scholarly and scientific researcher community…
Abstract: Today, almost every document we create and the output from almost every research-related project, is a digital object. Not everything has to be kept forever, but materials with scholarly or historical value should be retained for future generations. Preserving digital objects is more challenging than preserving items on paper. Hardware becomes obsolete, new software replaces old, storage media degrades. In recent years, there has been significant progress made to develop tools and standards to preserve digital media, particularly in the context of institutional repositories. The most widely accepted standard thus far is the Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification: Criteria and Checklist (TRAC), which evolved into ISO 16363-2012. Deakin University Library undertook a self-assessment against the ISO 16363 criteria. This experience culminated in the current report, which provides an appraisal of ISO 16363, the assessment process, and advice for others considering embarking on a similar venture.
“The University of Kansas Libraries seeks a dynamic, innovative and collaborative individual to join the Office of Scholarly Communication and Copyright. This individual will work with faculty, staff, and students to convey an understanding of the changing modes of scholarly communication, open access and copyright issues, and scholarly publishing.”
“ATLAS has fully supported the principle of open access in its publication policy. This
“Reviewers can also contribute substantially to these efforts in encouraging open practices (e.g. Agenda for Open Research)….”
“The Digital Scholarship Librarian provides expertise, information management, technical and organizational skills to the realization of the Library’s Scholarly Communication Program’s strategic goals and initiatives in a highly collaborative environment. Coordinates and implements those aspects of the Program that provide faculty, students, and staff with current information, education, tools, and resources. Helps support new models for the dissemination of the results of research, scholarship, teaching, and learning. Participates in the planning, development, and management of a Digital Scholarship Center and of the institutional digital repository of Dartmouth research….”
“The Harvard Library is joining with the California Digital Library, the University of California system, Ohio State University and the University of British Columbia in a study funded by the Mellon Foundation to help define the future of open access to scholarship. Pay It Forward: Investigating a Sustainable Model of Open Access Article Processing Charges for Large North American Research Institutions (PDF, 30 pages) is a year-long effort to study the implications of new funding models for scholarly communications, particularly the use of article processing charges, and determine their sustainability for research universities in the US and Canada. The project will create a detailed, flexible, and publicly available financial model to help university administrators and librarians develop open access policies and strategies. Harvard Library participation will be led by Peter Suber, Scott Wicks, and Elke Piontek.”
“Would you like to be part of the community compiling the Open Access Tagging Project (OATP) alerting service? We are looking for volunteer taggers to tag items about OA relevant to their own countries. The SPARC Europe Open Access Diary is one service built upon the OATP and there could be many more such services developed if the OATP were more comprehensive. So, we need your help, and it won’t take you long – just a few minutes now and then. If you’d like to find out more about what’s involved, Nancy Pontika, the SPARC Europe officer responsible for our Diary, would be pleased to explain and to set you up as a volunteer tagger. Please contact Nancy by email at pontika.nancy@gmail.com and she will tell you all about it.“