This issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access highlights and celebrates samples of the many small milestones illustrating the slow and steady increase in open access (dramatic does not necessarily mean fast!).
There are now more than 2,000 journals actively participating in PubMedCentral. Over the past year, this number grew by 178 – that’s close to one more new entire journal actively contributing content to PMC every business day.
PMC now has over 3.5 million items. This means that about 15% of all the 24 million items cited in PMC (regardless of date of publication) have free fulltext available linked from PubMed.
In the last 7 years, the number of NIH funded articles indexed in PubMed (again regardless of date of publication) available for free grew from 86 thousand to over 600 thousand or from 34% to 71%.
Other small milestones: there are now over 100 publishers of open access scholarly books listed in the Directory of Open Access Books; the Social Sciences Research Network now includes over half a million full text papers; the Registry of Open Access Repositories now lists over 4,000 repositories; and the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine now has more than 75 million documents. Congratulations and thanks to everyone who is doing all the behind-the-scenes work that results in this dramatic increase in access to our knowledge (whether your initiative is highlighted this particular issue or not). To download the data go to the DGOA dataverse.
Selected data
Directory of Open Access Journals is going through a clean-up project; the number of journals listed decreased by 45 this semester (over the past year growth of 471 titles). Journals and articles searchable by article both grew this quarter.
This quarter PubMedCentral added the following (journal rather than article data). A key point is that increases are happening consistently in every category.
33 journals actively participating in PMC (total over 2,000)
23 journals with immediate free access (total 1,468)
24 journals with all articles open access (total 1,260)
46 journals that deposit ALL content in PMC (total 1,683)
9 more journals that deposit NIH-funded content only (total 310)
268 journals that deposit selected content in PMC (total 3,246)
arXiv added over 25,000 publications and now has more than a million. RePEC added over 64 thousand downloadable items for a total of over 1.6 million. The Logec service has lots of great stats (downloads, content by type and by date); highly recommended for anyone looking for more detail in this area. Social Sciences Research Network added close to 13 thousand fulltextpapers for a total of more than half a million. Internet Archive added:
100,000 movies for a total of over 2 million
4,000 concerts for a total of 153 thousand
100,000 audio recordings for a total of over 2.5 million
300,000 texts for a total of over 8 millio
This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series. Note that the dataverse has been cleaned up a little to make it easier to find the current file.
?2015 by Heather Morrison. Copying is an act of love. Please copy. (from Copyheart).
This issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access highlights and celebrates samples of the many small milestones illustrating the slow and steady increase in open access (dramatic does not necessarily mean fast!).
There are now more than 2,000 journals actively participating in PubMedCentral. Over the past year, this number grew by 178 – that’s close to one more new entire journal actively contributing content to PMC every business day.
PMC now has over 3.5 million items. This means that about 15% of all the 24 million items cited in PMC (regardless of date of publication) have free fulltext available linked from PubMed.
In the last 7 years, the number of NIH funded articles indexed in PubMed (again regardless of date of publication) available for free grew from 86 thousand to over 600 thousand or from 34% to 71%.
Other small milestones: there are now over 100 publishers of open access scholarly books listed in the Directory of Open Access Books; the Social Sciences Research Network now includes over half a million full text papers; the Registry of Open Access Repositories now lists over 4,000 repositories; and the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine now has more than 75 million documents. Congratulations and thanks to everyone who is doing all the behind-the-scenes work that results in this dramatic increase in access to our knowledge (whether your initiative is highlighted this particular issue or not). To download the data go to the DGOA dataverse.
Selected data
Directory of Open Access Journals is going through a clean-up project; the number of journals listed decreased by 45 this semester (over the past year growth of 471 titles). Journals and articles searchable by article both grew this quarter.
This quarter PubMedCentral added the following (journal rather than article data). A key point is that increases are happening consistently in every category.
33 journals actively participating in PMC (total over 2,000)
23 journals with immediate free access (total 1,468)
24 journals with all articles open access (total 1,260)
46 journals that deposit ALL content in PMC (total 1,683)
9 more journals that deposit NIH-funded content only (total 310)
268 journals that deposit selected content in PMC (total 3,246)
arXiv added over 25,000 publications and now has more than a million. RePEC added over 64 thousand downloadable items for a total of over 1.6 million. The Logec service has lots of great stats (downloads, content by type and by date); highly recommended for anyone looking for more detail in this area. Social Sciences Research Network added close to 13 thousand fulltextpapers for a total of more than half a million. Internet Archive added:
100,000 movies for a total of over 2 million
4,000 concerts for a total of 153 thousand
100,000 audio recordings for a total of over 2.5 million
300,000 texts for a total of over 8 millio
This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series. Note that the dataverse has been cleaned up a little to make it easier to find the current file.
?2015 by Heather Morrison. Copying is an act of love. Please copy. (from Copyheart).
“Libraries are a pretty big part of the publishing market, and they can try to use their position to influence some of these practices. Librarians can also work with scholars and writers to raise awareness around open access models….”
On June 13 2015, all around the world ? in Paris, Brussels, London, Berlin, Istanbul, Delhi, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal ? people gathered to March for the Closing of the Slaughterhouses.
But the slaughterhouses will not close of their own accord.
To close the slaughterhouses people?s eyes and hearts have to be opened. Opening people?s hearts is the only hope for the countless victims ? innocent, helpless, without voices, without rights ? who are suffering, horribly and needlessly, every moment of every day, everywhere in the world, for our palates.
The vegans from all over the world who marched on June 13 were the living proof of this first fundamental fact (Nearly 1% of the world population of 7.5 billion is vegan today.)
II. The second fundamental fact is that in order to provide this meat that is not necessary for the survival or health of the 7.5 billion humans on the planet, an unimaginable amount of suffering is necessary for over 150 billion innocent, voiceless, defenceless victims every year.
Slaughter for meat is not euthanasia. It is not the merciful, pain-free, terror-free ending of a long, happy life in order to spare the victim from suffering a terrible incurable disease or unbearable pain.
Slaughter is the terrifying and horribly painful ending of a short, anguished life full of disease and fear and pain, for innocent, defenceless victims deliberately bred and reared for that purpose. And it is all carefully concealed from the public eye.
And it is completely unnecessary for our survival or health. We inflict all this pain on the victims only for taste pleasure, and out of habit.
Demonstrations like the June 13 march are very important, but they are not enough to open people?s hearts and close the slaughterhouses.
For that, we first have to open access to the slaughterhouses, with audio-visual surveillance Webcams placed at all the sites of the abominations (breeding, rearing, transport, slaughter) — cameras that will film the horrors and stream them all immediately, continuously and permanently on the Web so that all people on the planet can witness the terrible cost in agony that our taste-preferences are inflicting, every moment of every day, everywhere, on our victims: sentient beings, innocent, defenseless, without rights, without voice, without respite, without hope.
Not everyone will look at the videos streamed on the web.
But the number of witnesses who will look and see will grow and grow. And with them will grow the knowledge of the heartbreaking truth, the reality that has till now been hermetically hidden from our eyes and our hearts.
And those of us who come to know the awful truth can provide the eyes and the voice for the victims.
The existing regulations for minimizing suffering in slaughterhouses are shamefully inadequate — how can one needlessly end an innocent life humanely? But even these existing, inadequate regulations are not being enforced or monitored or obeyed today.
As its first consequence, the crowd-sourced monitoring of slaughterhouses, based on the evidence streamed and stored publicly on the web, witnessed and reported by a growing number of informed and concerned citizens, will help to ensure that today?s existing (though inadequate) regulations ? and prosecution for their violation ? are enforced more and more reliably and rigorously.
In Quebec — the province that has until now been the worst in Canada for animal welfare — we have just acquired a legal basis for requiring rigorous monitoring of slaughterhouses: the National Assembly has heeded the many Quebec voices raised on behalf of protecting animals from suffering. The Quebec Civil Code has been amended to give animals the status of sentient beings instead of the status of inert property – or movable goods – as formerly. (Other countries are doing likewise: New Zealand is the latest.)
But this new status, like this public demonstration, are not enough.
Sensitizing Sentients to Sentience
In Quebec, on this new legal basis, and with the help of the new audio-visual evidence, as witnessed by the Quebec public, not only would we be able to prosecute those who do not comply with the existing (inadequate) regulations but we could also press for the passage of stronger and stronger legislation to protect sentient beings.
And the evidence provided by these surveillance Webcams would have a still further effect, apart from the enforcement and strengthening of today?s animal welfare regulations: It would also awaken and sensitize witnesses to the actual horrors made necessary by a non-vegan diet: It would sensitize us all to the sentience of sentient beings.
In place of the shamelessly false advertising images of “happy cows” and “contented chickens” we would all have the inescapable, undeniable, graphic evidence of the unspeakable suffering of these innocent, sentient victims – and the utter needlessness of their suffering.
Might this not at last inspire us all not to remain non-vegan, just for the pleasure of the taste, at this terrible cost in pain to other innocent feeling beings? Might it inspire us to abolish their needless suffering, instead of just diminish it?
Let me close with a little optimistic numerology and the world?s most benign pyramid scheme for every sentient being on the planet, with no losers other than industries that build profit on suffering:
If each vegan today inspires just 6 more non-vegans (1) to become vegan AND (2) to each inspire 6 more non-vegans to become vegan, then in just 9 steps all of the population of Quebec will be vegan, in 10 steps all of Canada, in 11 Canada and the United States, and in 12-13 the whole world.
It is also entirely fair that it should be ourselves, the most prosperous and well-fed populace in the world, who start. By the time we have closed all of our industrial slaughterhouses and converted the land to producing food to feed people instead of using it to breed, feed and butcher innocent victims, needlessly, the planet will be producing 40% more human food, 60% less pollution and 90% less suffering ? with enough left to sustain natural wildlife and their habitat too.
That will also be enough food to feed the world?s current malnourished as well as to allow the last subsistence hunters on the planet to make the transition to a truly fair, sustainable, scalable and merciful means of sustenance.
“We are delighted today to unveil the One Repo Advisory Board! Although I (Mike) and my Index Data colleagues are plenty involved with the world of open access, we’re well aware that others have far more experience and insight. So we’re working with four of the very best….Martin Eve (top left) is the driving force behind the Open Library of Humanities. Jan Velterop (top right) brings vast experience from decades working with every publisher you can think of. Cameron Neylon (bottom left) contributes a unique vision of the ways open data can be used to enhance research. And Peter Suber (bottom right) needs no introduction (but here is one in case you’ve been asleep for the last 20 years)….”
“To advance the University of Iowa’s longstanding commitments to open inquiry, the free exchange of ideas, and public access to scholarly works, the staff of the University of Iowa Libraries have adopted an open access policy that will make their publications freely available and ensure their long-term preservation and findability. This policy complements the Libraries’ support of open access to freely accessible scholarship, advances the diverse roles staff play as producers and preservers of scholarly and professional literature, and reflects the values of the University of Iowa Libraries’ mission statement. All University of Iowa Libraries staff members grant the University of Iowa the right to archive and make publicly accessible the full texts of their professional publications. These include traditional productions such as journal articles and book chapters and extends to documents in other formats, such as conference presentation slides and audio and video recordings of public talks. This agreement provides the University of Iowa the non-exclusive, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free license to preserve and redistribute the work. Staff members will submit electronic versions of their works to the University of Iowa’s institutional repository, Iowa Research Online (IRO), within thirty days of each work’s publication, presentation, or transmission, respecting publishers’ requests for embargoes. Ideally the submitted version will be the publisher’s final version or the author’s final accepted manuscript. On a case-by-case basis, including cases in which a publisher refuses to accommodate the terms of this policy, staff members may opt-out of this agreement by sending a message to the Chair of the Scholarly Publishing Team (see membership at https://sharepoint.uiowa.edu/sites/libraries/sc/scc/default.aspx). The Scholarly Publishing Team will be responsible for interpreting the policy, resolving related problems, and revising it as necessary. The Scholarly Publishing Team will review this policy one year after its adoption and report its findings to the University Librarian.”
“The reproducibility problem in science is a familiar issue, not only within the scientific community, but with the general public as well. Recent developments in social psychology (such as fraudulent research by D. Stapel) and cell biology (the Amgen Inc. and Bayer AG reports on how rarely they could reproduce published results) have become widely known. Nearly every field is affected, from clinical trials and neuroimaging, to economics and computer science. Obvious solutions include more research on statistical and behavioral fixes for irreproducibility, activism for policy changes, and demanding more pre-registration and data sharing from grantees. Two Perspectives in this issue (pp. 1420and 1422) describe how journals and academic institutions can foster a culture of reproducibility. Transparency is central to improving reproducibility, but it is expensive and time-consuming. What can be done to alleviate those obstacles? Most scientists aspire to greater transparency, but if being transparent taps into scarce grant money and requires extra work, it is unlikely that scientists will be able to live up to their own cherished values. Thus, one of the most effective ways to promote high-quality science is to create free open-source tools that give scientists easier and cheaper ways to incorporate transparency into their daily workflow: from open lab notebooks, to software that tracks every version of a data set, to dynamic document generation. Moreover, scientists who use open-source software are not locked into proprietary software platforms with unclear monetization plans. If philanthropy or government funds new tools that the open-source community can iterate and improve on, the per-dollar return on investment can far exceed the costs. Infrastructural tools are now available, or in development, that should help to catalyze a change in scientific transparency. One example is the Open Science Framework (OSF), a free and open-source software platform for managing scientific workflow (supported by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation in partnership with the Center for Open Science). Among its many features, this platform can enable scientists to easily track the history of all versions of every document or data set and the exact contributions made by each team member. All project materials can be given persistent identifiers, and the tracking of provenance allows any subsequent research project to give proper credit to the original. Projects using this platform include the Shared Access Research Ecosystem project of the Association of Research Libraries and its partners …”
Abstract: With the rise of Wikipedia as a first-stop source for scientific knowledge, it is important to compare its representation of that knowledge to that of the academic literature. This article approaches such a comparison through academic references made within the worlds 50 largest Wikipedias. Previous studies have raised concerns that Wikipedia editors may simply use the most easily accessible academic sources rather than sources of the highest academic status. We test this claim by identifying the 250 most heavily used journals in each of 26 research fields (4,721 journals, 19.4M articles in total) indexed by the Scopus database, and modeling whether topic, academic status, and accessibility make articles from these journals more or less likely to be referenced on Wikipedia. We find that, controlling for field and impact factor, the odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to closed access journals. Moreover, in most of the worlds Wikipedias a journals high status (impact factor) and accessibility (open access policy) both greatly increase the probability of referencing. Among the implications of this study is that the chief effect of open access policies may be to significantly amplify the diffusion of science, through an intermediary like Wikipedia, to a broad public audience.
“Are you searching for library jobs specialising in repositories access and management? A London University is currently recruiting for a Institutional Research Repository Assistant. Initially a 3 month temporary contract, with the possibility of an extension into a 12 month fixed term contract….”
“You want to publish your recently written article in an Open Access journal and you found out that the journal charges you Article Processing Charges, also well known as APC. What possibilities you have to pay for your APC since publishers do NOT want you to pay the APC out of your own pocket. There are sources of funding available that authors can use to cover APC….”
“We are looking to recruit an Open Science Developer to work on the THOR project. You will join the Literature Services team at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) located on the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus near Cambridge in the UK….”
“The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) are scholarly organizations that have seen an increase in the number, and broad range in the quality, of membership applications. Our organizations have collaborated in an effort to identify principles of transparency and best practice for scholarly publications and to clarify that these principles form part of the criteria on which membership applications will be evaluated.
These criteria are largely derived from those developed by the Directory of Open Access Journals. Note that additional membership criteria may also be used by each of the scholarly organizations. The organizations will not share information about applications received. We do not intend to develop or publish a list of publishers or journals that failed to demonstrate they met the criteria for transparency and best practice.
This is the second version of a work in progress (published June 2015); the first version was made available by OASPA in December 2013. We encourage its wide dissemination and continue to welcome feedback on the general principles and the specific criteria. Background on the organizations is below …”
Have you ever wondered what factors may shape the interactions we have in online chatrooms? With the advent of the Internet 20+ years ago, the ways in which we communicate have drastically changed, allowing us to easily interact nonverbally or … Continue reading »
“UC Berkeley Library is looking for a service-oriented Scholarly Communication Officer whose principal role will be to educate the university community about scholarly publication modes, intellectual property/copyright, and open access issues and services. S/he will be a campus resource on local, national and international scholarly communication developments and activities and their impact on scholarly inquiry and instruction….”
