Monthly Archives: June 2016

Dramatic Growth of Open Access June 30, 2016

Posted on by

Highlights this quarter include a new indicator illustrating that 42% of the cancer literature indexed by PubMed is available as free full-text within 3 years of publication; ongoing strong growth in open access archives and their content; milestone of over 10 million free texts for Internet Archive; a mix of negative growth reflecting clean-up at DOAJ and growth in articles searchable at the article level; over 50% annual growth at the Directory of Open Access Books; and concern noted about the apparent ongoing growth of Elsevier and what this might mean for open access.

Details

New indicator : a search of the PubMed index for “cancer” for all articles and with limits by date of publication demonstrates that 42% of the cancer literature indexed in PubMed published in the last 3 years is available as free fulltext.  17% is available as free fulltext within 30 days of publication, 31% within one year of publication. With no date limits the overall percentage is 26% of the 3.3 million articles on cancer indexed by Pubmed.

 

Results of PubMed search for “cancer”
with limits by date of publication and free fulltext
  # of articles free fulltext % free fulltext
30 days 19,050 3,206 17%
60 days 32,562 6,540 20%
90 days 46,057 10,382 23%
180 days 85,913 23,421 27%
last 1 year 162,335 50,499 31%
last 2 years 323,252 126,867 39%
last 3 years 475,973 198,505 42%
no date limit 3,318,957 861,168 26%

Kudos to Internet Archive for exceeding 10 million free texts!

Ongoing strong open access archives growth is illustrated by OpenDOAR adding close to 200 repositories over the past year, a 7% growth rate and a total of over 3,000 repositories. The Registry of Open Access Repositories added 269 repositories over the past year, also a 7% annual growth rate for a total of over 4,000 repositories. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine is now searching over 93 million documents from over 4,000 repositories. With growth of over 18 million documents over the past year (24% annual growth rate), it won’t be long before BASE passes the 100 million milestone. arXiv grew by over 10% over the past year, adding over 100,000 documents for a total of 1.6 million.

The Directory of Open Access Books grew by over 50% in the past year for a total of close to 5,000 books from more than 150 publishers. 

In spite of overall negative growth reflecting a major “get-tough” clean-up project, the Directory of Open Access Journals‘ number of articles searchable at the article level which grew by 16% over the past year, over 300,000 more articles for a total of over 2.1 million articles. On May 9, DOAJ removed over 3,000 journals that had not filled out the new application form. Since that date, DOAJ has added 234 titles for a DOAJ growth rate of 4.5 journals per day. Watch for continuing strong growth in the next few quarters as DOAJ has hired a team of international ambassadors. 

The ongoing dramatic growth of Elsevier 

The Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) is still included in the downloadable data.  I would like to note concern about its current and future open access status and commitment, particularly since it was recently bought by Elsevier, features the ad for “free subscriptions to more than 500 partner-sponsored abstracting e-journals [emphasis added]”, (copied below for purposes of academic critique – please contact SSRN for other uses), the SSRN website indicates partnerships with providers of pay-per-view, and the message from chairman Michael Jensen on the Elsevier sale indicates that part of what is behind this is Elsevier’s desire to expand into social sciences.

In addition to the SSRN buyout, as noted on my research blog Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, Elsevier is now the world’s largest open access publisher as measured by number of fully open access journals.

Open access may resolve the access problem, however OA per se does not address the increasing commercialization of scholarly journal publishing and increasing market concentration that has been happening since the end of the second world war. The growing presence of large traditional commercial scholarly publishers in open access is something to watch, in particular because ongoing open access is likely not compatible with maximal profit-making.

As usual the full data is available for download from the DGOA Dataverse:  http://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dvn/dv/dgoa

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access June 30, 2016

Posted on by

Highlights this quarter include a new indicator illustrating that 42% of the cancer literature indexed by PubMed is available as free full-text within 3 years of publication; ongoing strong growth in open access archives and their content; milestone of over 10 million free texts for Internet Archive; a mix of negative growth reflecting clean-up at DOAJ and growth in articles searchable at the article level; over 50% annual growth at the Directory of Open Access Books; and concern noted about the apparent ongoing growth of Elsevier and what this might mean for open access.

Details

New indicator : a search of the PubMed index for “cancer” for all articles and with limits by date of publication demonstrates that 42% of the cancer literature indexed in PubMed published in the last 3 years is available as free fulltext.  17% is available as free fulltext within 30 days of publication, 31% within one year of publication. With no date limits the overall percentage is 26% of the 3.3 million articles on cancer indexed by Pubmed.

 

Results of PubMed search for “cancer”
with limits by date of publication and free fulltext
  # of articles free fulltext % free fulltext
30 days 19,050 3,206 17%
60 days 32,562 6,540 20%
90 days 46,057 10,382 23%
180 days 85,913 23,421 27%
last 1 year 162,335 50,499 31%
last 2 years 323,252 126,867 39%
last 3 years 475,973 198,505 42%
no date limit 3,318,957 861,168 26%

Kudos to Internet Archive for exceeding 10 million free texts!

Ongoing strong open access archives growth is illustrated by OpenDOAR adding close to 200 repositories over the past year, a 7% growth rate and a total of over 3,000 repositories. The Registry of Open Access Repositories added 269 repositories over the past year, also a 7% annual growth rate for a total of over 4,000 repositories. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine is now searching over 93 million documents from over 4,000 repositories. With growth of over 18 million documents over the past year (24% annual growth rate), it won’t be long before BASE passes the 100 million milestone. arXiv grew by over 10% over the past year, adding over 100,000 documents for a total of 1.6 million.

The Directory of Open Access Books grew by over 50% in the past year for a total of close to 5,000 books from more than 150 publishers. 

In spite of overall negative growth reflecting a major “get-tough” clean-up project, the Directory of Open Access Journals‘ number of articles searchable at the article level which grew by 16% over the past year, over 300,000 more articles for a total of over 2.1 million articles. On May 9, DOAJ removed over 3,000 journals that had not filled out the new application form. Since that date, DOAJ has added 234 titles for a DOAJ growth rate of 4.5 journals per day. Watch for continuing strong growth in the next few quarters as DOAJ has hired a team of international ambassadors. 

The ongoing dramatic growth of Elsevier 

The Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) is still included in the downloadable data.  I would like to note concern about its current and future open access status and commitment, particularly since it was recently bought by Elsevier, features the ad for “free subscriptions to more than 500 partner-sponsored abstracting e-journals [emphasis added]”, (copied below for purposes of academic critique – please contact SSRN for other uses), the SSRN website indicates partnerships with providers of pay-per-view, and the message from chairman Michael Jensen on the Elsevier sale indicates that part of what is behind this is Elsevier’s desire to expand into social sciences.

In addition to the SSRN buyout, as noted on my research blog Sustaining the Knowledge Commons, Elsevier is now the world’s largest open access publisher as measured by number of fully open access journals.

Open access may resolve the access problem, however OA per se does not address the increasing commercialization of scholarly journal publishing and increasing market concentration that has been happening since the end of the second world war. The growing presence of large traditional commercial scholarly publishers in open access is something to watch, in particular because ongoing open access is likely not compatible with maximal profit-making.

As usual the full data is available for download from the DGOA Dataverse:  http://dataverse.scholarsportal.info/dvn/dv/dgoa

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

DuraSpace | Open technologies for durable digital content

Posted on by

“The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University were awarded an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership Grant for Libraries earlier this year. The aim of the funding is to to assist work on the API Extensions framework for Fedora 4 platform that will facilitate the exposure of repository contents as linked data web resources.”

Will Libraries become stewards of our Open Data Collections | Chris Moore | Pulse | LinkedIn

Posted on by

“What I have been thinking about lately is the role of our Public Libraries as stewards of Open Data.  As long as I can remember the Library and our Librarians are the stewards of information, those that guide us on our quests for knowledge.  What if our libraries had a person who had a responsibility for the communities Open Data collection.  This elevates data beyond just something a government “chooses” to release to a set of important current and historic information that needs to be curated.”

Virginia Tech researchers earn grant to study big data sharing and reuse | News | Virginia Tech

Posted on by

“Sharing, use, and reuse of data in a holistic manner across faculty, colleges, government, and industry is crucial for the community at large to be able to make sense of what is being gathered and to make good use of it as well,”

Barbara Fister, Babel Fish Bouillabaisse

Posted on by

An OA book on OA and other topics, by Barbara Fister. 

“As part of a sabbatical project, I have collected some things I’ve written into a lightly-edited, open access, Creative Commons-licensed volume. Some of this material comes from my personal blog, where I’ve been posting thoughts about [open access], books, publishing, and how online reading communities function (the actual subject of my sabbatical research). Much of this bouillabaisse comes  my writings at Inside Higher Ed, which is a born-digital news organization that combines sharp education journalism with a slate of bloggers, columnists, and guest commentaries….”

Paying for Compliance: A Potential Path Forward for Institutional Repositories | The Scholarly Kitchen

Posted on by

“Elsevier is making major moves away from relying on content sales and toward a future based on selling services to the research community and others. The glaring need this potential service meets is the generally unsatisfactory performance of institutional repositories. Despite years of effort, key problems continue to plague institutional and funding agency repositories — significant effort and overhead for universities/funders, and poor researcher compliance resulting in a mostly empty storehouse. The Elsevier/Florida project, while not a complete solution, suggests how these problems could be solved.”

Hillary Clinton’s Initiative on Technology & Innovation

Posted on by

“Hillary believes that the government has an obligation to protect the open internet….She will also promote open-licensing arrangements for copyrighted material and data supported by federal grant funding, including in education, science, and other fields. She will seek to develop technological infrastructure to supports digitization, search, and repositories of such content, to facilitate its discoverability and use….Hillary will make it easier for the federal government to find, try, and buy innovative technology—including open source software….Open up More Government Data for Public Uses: The Obama Administration broke new ground in making open and machine-readable the default for new government information, launching Data.gov and charging each agency with maintaining data as a valuable asset. With more accessible datasets, entrepreneurs can create new products and services, citizens can evaluate more effectively how the government does it job, researchers can look for new insights – and government can work better. Hillary will continue and accelerate the Administration’s open data initiatives, including in areas such as health care, education, and criminal justice. She would fully implement the DATA Act to make government spending more transparent and accountable to the American people, improving USASpending.gov so that Americans can more accurately see how and where their taxpayer dollars are spent. She would also bring an open data approach to regulation—making it easier for businesses to submit structured data instead of documents, and bringing greater transparency to financial and other markets so that regulators, watchdog groups, and the American people can more easily identify fraud and illegal behavior….”

Statement by Christophe Rossel, President of the EPS, after UK’s decision to leave the EU – European Physical Society (EPS)

Posted on by

“At a time when the EU Commission wants to develop and implement open science policy to improve the quality and impact of European science, in particular by better interconnecting research infrastructures, it would be unfortunate to see such efforts refrained by political decisions….”

DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATION BILL, 2017

Posted on by

“Brain Research through Application of Innovative Neuro-technologies [BRAIN] Initiative- The Committee continues to strongly support the BRAIN initiative. The bill provides $250,000,000, an increase of $100,000,000 above fiscal year 2016, to expand the initiative consistent with the BRAIN 2025 report issued in 2014. The Committee is encouraged by the rapid progress the initiative has made in dramatically changing the ways we gather data about the brain, generating advances in tools for measuring brain structure and activity that have the potential to produce massive amounts of new data. To prepare for the management of all this information, BRAIN has dedicated some of its existing budget to stimulate the development of centers for data warehousing, analysis and visualization for each of its defined research areas. However, the Committee believes the need for data integration and manipulation that would make full use of these large cross-disciplinary datasets not only entails a large investment in open data hosting, but also requires significant investments in interactive data management that combines neurophysiological, imaging, clinical, and molecular datasets in both human and model organisms. The Committee encourages NIH to work with its Federal, academic and private partners, as well as leaders in the technology sector, to jointly develop integrated, user friendly, scalable data analysis hubs for BRAIN data as well as methods for tool dissemination. The goal of such an effort would be a network that has at its core an interconnected open platform of imaging, neurophysiological, behavioral, clinical, and molecular data along with the metadata essential for its interpretation. This collaborative effort would guide development and sharing of best practices in data acquisition, analysis, and choices in computational pipelines. Open sharing on this scale would enable data analysis and visualization across institutional boundaries to accelerate understanding of brain function and dysfunction. The Committee directs NIH to provide a plan, developed in collaboration with its partners, to the Committee 6 months after enactment of this act to create such a network, including schedule and cost estimates….

Open Access to Federal Research- The Committee has received reports by the Office of Science and Technology Policy’s [OSTP] on the progress of all Federal agencies in developing and implementing policies to increase public access to Federally funded scientific research. The Committee is pleased by the progress, but previously instructed OSTP to have plans approved from all relevant Departments’ and Agencies’ plans in this act’s jurisdiction approved by the end of calendar year 2014 with implementation occurring by January 1, 2016. Agencies funded in this act are instructed to continue providing quarterly reports to the Committees on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and Senate to keep Congress apprised of the remaining progress needed to make federally funded research accessible to the public as expeditiously as possible….

Open Textbooks- The Committee directs the Department to provide a report to the Committee no later than 180 days after enactment of this act on steps it has taken or plans to take to help achieve the highest level of savings possible for students through the sustainable, expanded use of open textbooks at institutions of higher education and production of the highest quality open textbooks….”

PLOS ECR Community | Serving students and early career scientists

Posted on by

“PLOS ECR (Early Career Researcher) Community, formerly The PLOS Student Blog, is a forum for the next generation of scientists and science writers.

Starting in 2016, we’ve changed the name of this blog site on PLOS BLOGS Network from The Student Blog to The PLOS ECR Community. We’ve also refocused its purpose and scope into an outlet for promising writers who are currently studying a science discipline at the undergrad, graduate or post-doctoral levels (up to 5 yrs post PhD)….”

Hofstra University Faculty/Administration Opportunities

Posted on by

“The Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University seeks applications for an anticipated position as Assistant Director of Digital Initiatives & Technical Services. Reporting to the Director of the Law Library, the Assistant Director provides leadership and vision for coordination of digital projects, including but not limited to the law school’s institutional repository….”

Viewing and exporting Hypothesis annotations – Hypothesis

Posted on by

“We’re delighted to see Roderic Page and Kris Shaffer putting the Hypothesis API to work. For us, the API isn’t just a great way to integrate Hypothesis with other systems. It’s also a way to try out ideas that inform the development of Hypothesis. Today I’ll share two of those ideas. One is a faceted viewer that displays sets of annotations by user, group, and tag. The other exports annotations to several formats. If you’re a Hypothesis user, you may find these helpful until proper implementations are built into the product (faceted viewer: soon, export: later). And your feedback will help us design and build those features. If you’re a developer, you can use these as examples to learn to form API queries, authenticate for access to private and group annotations, parse JSON responses, and navigate threaded conversations….”