Program Officer in Scholarly Communications: Job Description | The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

“The Program Officer in Scholarly Communications reports to and takes direction from the Senior Program Officer, and cultivates, mentors, and supervises program staff.  The Program Officer meets regularly with leaders in the field, invites and evaluates proposals, prepares grant recommendations, manages budgets, and participates in policy discussions….” [The job description is silent on open access.]

Creating A Public Space: Open Access, Book Theft, and the Epigraphy of Ancient Libraries – SARAH E. BOND

” … As Erik Kwakkel has already talked about, medieval libraries used curses, but also  book chains in order to stop book thieves. Library materials were often expensive, rare, and labor intensive to produce, so it makes sense that libraries wished to protect them …  I have worked for both public and private institutions with adjoining libraries, and I must say that entering a public library is an altogether different spatial experience from entering a private one–which can often feel like entering a prison … “

Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Science | whitehouse.gov

“Today marks the third anniversary of the memorandum from Dr. John Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, directing Federal agencies with more than $100 million in annual research and development (R&D) expenditures to develop plans for increasing public access to the results of the research they support, specifically scholarly publications and digital data. The memo recognized that making research results accessible to the largest possible audience – other researchers, business innovators, entrepreneurs, teachers, students, and the general public – can boost the returns from Federal investments in R&D. Increased access expands opportunities for new scientific knowledge to be applied to areas as diverse as health, energy, environmental protection, agriculture, and national security and to catalyze innovative breakthroughs that drive economic growth and prosperity. Over the last three years, Federal agencies have made substantial progress toward increasing access to the results of funded research. As of today, 16 Federal departments and agencies have issued public access plans covering publications and digital data, and one additional agency has completed a plan for publications. The remaining agencies are nearing completion. Agencies with completed plans account for 98 percent of annual Federal R&D spending and include the Federal government’s largest R&D funders: Department of Defense (DOD), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Department of Energy (DOE), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). Some agencies with less than $100 million per year of R&D are complying voluntarily …”

Misconceptions about academic data sharing #datasharing #openscience

Gert Wagner and Benedikt Fecher reply to an editorial about data sharing in medicine.

Longo and Drazen miss the very point of scientific research when they write, that the researchers may «even use the data to try to disprove what the original investigators had posited«. It is at the core of the scientific paradigm that researchers take nothing as final truth. This is what Popper proposed in his critical rationalism and Merton in his conceptualization of skepticism.

THE TRANSFERABILITY OF TRUSTED DIGITAL REPOSITORY STANDARDS TO AN EAST AFRICAN CONTEXT

[From the ABSTRACT] Digital preservation is a topic that has been extensively explored over the last thirty years in the fields of archival and information studies. However, relatively little literature has touched on the topic of Trusted Digital Repositories (TDRs). A TDR is ‘[A]n archive, consisting of an organization of people and systems that has accepted the responsibility to preserve information and make it available for a Designated Community.’1 Standards governing TDRs, namely the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) and Repository Audit and Certification (RAC), have been designed and tested by developed nations with minimal reference to the developing world. Little attempt has been made to question whether these standards, entirely developed in one context, are actually transferable or applicable to another. There is an assumption, however, that because these standards have been generalised, they are ubiquitous and robust, transferable to any locale. This thesis seeks to question the basic assumptions that are made when standards or best practice created in the developed world are applied to different contexts outside of the original milieu of elaboration. Further, this thesis considers the applicability of TDRs to the Eastern African archival context …”

IFLA: Volume 42, Number 1, March 2016.

All the articles in this issue are in one large PDF. Here’s the table of contents:

Access to knowledge at the heart of the profession and a key to sustainable development 3 Steven W. Witt

Sharing the data: The information policies of NOAA and EUMETSAT 5 Freya R. Yost

Open access repositories in India: Characteristics and future potential 16 Prerna Singh

Open access and the Caribbean academic: An exploratory investigation of the adoption of this medium for publishing among science faculty of The University of the West Indies 25 Ingrid Iton and Ardon Iton

Faculty members’ perceptions and use of open access journals: Bangladesh perspective 36 Nafiz Zaman Shuva and Radia Taisir

Effective information service delivery to rural dwellers in Sub-Saharan Africa: Whose job? 49 Chimezie P. Uzuegbu

Kuwait’s higher education libraries: A descriptive analysis 59 Asma J. AlKanan

Scholarly Communications and Science Librarian (Sonoma State University)

“The Scholarly Communications and Science Librarian provides leadership in the development of a scholarly communications program in the University Library. This new position offers an opportunity to shape the University’s approach to scholarly communications and open access. S/he will be an advocate for open access scholarship on campus, building awareness of emerging publication trends and working with faculty to make their research open. The person in this position will be responsible for promoting and developing our institutional repository and e-thesis program, and be a campus resource for questions about research data, copyright, and publication issues….”

Scholarly Communications and Science Librarian (Sonoma State University)

“The Scholarly Communications and Science Librarian provides leadership in the development of a scholarly communications program in the University Library. This new position offers an opportunity to shape the University’s approach to scholarly communications and open access. S/he will be an advocate for open access scholarship on campus, building awareness of emerging publication trends and working with faculty to make their research open. The person in this position will be responsible for promoting and developing our institutional repository and e-thesis program, and be a campus resource for questions about research data, copyright, and publication issues….”