“With $350,000 in support from The Tiffany & Co. Foundation, [the University of Delaware’s Saleem Ali] will create an open-access repository for existing global knowledge around colored gemstones and target critical research necessary to surmount challenges facing individuals involved in colored gemstone mining and manufacturing….”
Monthly Archives: April 2017
Nature journals support the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
Nature journals support the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
Open Education in Palestine: A tool for liberation | Thoughts on Open Education
“The realities of these countries are diverse, as such is their culture, therefore access to material goods and to decent life standards are subject to the oppression of neoliberalism, capitalism, and predatory economic models which affect the access to basic human rights, proper education, a good and strong health system, an income that allows you to feed your loved ones without having to work in infra-human conditions.
When we do Open (Education, Data, Government, Science and Access) we need to consider that certain rules are better skipped, in the case of Open Education there is a tendency that does not exist in other Open fields, which is to consider Open just what is under the 5 Rs, therefore OER tends to mean resources are openly licensed and follow OE rules as if this was a dogma, but Open means to me, able to share your content, to detach your research from predatory – corporate publishers and to ignore for example the University Rankings, because their metrics are in a system that may not be helping to achieve success under each region or countries our own terms, because the rules are white and Anglo-Saxon, and each country and region tend to play at other rhythms, and ways of work.
Opening up means to me to share, to do things in a transparent way, to collaborate, to support and to provide the tools for educators and students to be critical thinkers, to challenge and to question, to become communities and not to follow a rule that tells you if you are open enough according to someone else’s agenda, so just be open, under your own terms, share, distribute, communicate, participate, engage, thinking that before Open rules there are human rights, and that accessing quality education is one of these.”
Promoting High Quality Open Access Journals in African Higher Education
“Presentation at the ADEA AAU Webinar 20th April 2017 Lars Bjornshauge”
Sven Fund’s ‘Bridge’ to Open Access: Knowledge Unlatched
“In the humanities, however, two challenges have hampered open access adoption.
- Most versions of ‘gold’ open access require researchers or their funding institutions to pay the costs of publication as an ‘article processing charge,’ or APC.
- And much of the research published in the humanities and social sciences takes the form of books, which naturally have higher processing charges than articles do.
Crowd-Unlatching
Knowledge Unlatched attempts to solve this problem by importing into academic publishing a crowdfunding model not unlike that of Kickstarter.
Working with publishers to create a list of books to be “unlatched”–made freely available–it then assembles a consortium of libraries to pay the costs of publication. If enough libraries commit to funding a title, then the book is published. Each library that pledged receives a print copy, and ebook versions are made available for anyone to read as open access.
The model is finding support.
Since Frances Pinter launched Knowledge Unlatched in September 2012, the organization says it has facilitated the publication of more than 400 books in its first three collections. In February, it announced the success of its latest unlatching, its largest to date: 343 titles from more than 50 publishers.
A fourth collection now is being assembled, with the pledging process expected to start next month. This will be the first collection to include journals.”
Impact of Social Sciences – Making research articles freely available can help to negate gender citation effects in political science
“In short, when women political scientists make their work freely available online, their research is cited at similar rates to men’s work. This is a very positive finding given the current gender imbalance found in many aspects of the discipline. (Side note: many scholars, regardless of gender, fail to self-archive due to lack of know-how; Carling has written a very helpful primer on the subject. See also Atchison and Bull.)
A final caveat is necessary. These results should be interpreted with caution. First, the finding that OA can help to negate the gender citation advantage is surprising in light of previous research on gendered citation effects. This must be investigated further to determine whether it is an artefact of the data, whether the pattern holds when other data are used, and whether the pattern holds once self-archiving becomes more commonplace in political science. Second, as with any single-discipline study, the results may lack generalisability. There is considerable evidence that GCE varies by discipline, so it will be important to explore the GCE-OA interaction both within and across disciplines.”
The Evolution of Publishing Agreements at the University of Michigan Library – Digital Library
“Book chapter on the evolution of publishing agreements at the University of Michigan Library. Taking as an example an open-access journal with a single editor, this chapter discusses the various configurations of rights agreements used by the University of Michigan Library throughout the evolution of its publishing operation, the advantages of the various models, and the reasons for moving from one to another….”
Theme of 2017 International Open Access Week to be “Open in order to…”
In conjunction with this year’s Open Access Week Advisory Committee, SPARC today announces the theme for this year’s 10th International Open Access Week, to be held October 23-29, will be “Open in order to…”.
This year’s theme is an invitation to answer the question of what concrete benefits can be realized by making scholarly outputs openly available. “Open in order to…” serves as a prompt to move beyond talking about openness in itself and focus on what openness enables—in an individual discipline, at a particular institution, or in a specific context; then to take action to realize these benefits.
Open in order to increase the impact of my scholarship. Open in order to enable more equitable participation in research. Open in order to improve public health. These are just a few examples of how this question can be answered.
Established by SPARC and partners in the student community in 2008, International Open Access Week is an opportunity to take action in making openness the default for research—to raise the visibility of scholarship, accelerate research, and turn breakthroughs into better lives. This year’s Open Access Week will be held from October 23rd through the 29th; however, those celebrating the week are encouraged to schedule local events whenever is most suitable during the year and to utilize themes that are most effective locally.
This year’s theme of “Open in order to…” also recognizes the diverse contexts and communities within which the shift to Open Access is occurring and encourages specific discussion that will be most effective locally. We invite the community to help us translate this prompt into new languages at bit.ly/translateoaweek
“Effectively communicating the tangible benefits that Open Access provides is essential for open to become the default in both policy and practice,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “This year’s theme will help focus discussions during Open Access Week on those benefits of openness that are most compelling locally—whether that’s increasing citation counts, enabling anyone to learn from the latest scholarship, or accelerating the translation of research into economic gains—and encourage action to realize these benefits.
Last year’s “Open in action” theme encouraged all stakeholders to take concrete steps to make their own work more openly available and encourage others to do the same—from posting pre-prints in a repository to pledging to educate colleagues about Open Access. The 2017 theme will help build on that emphasis on action by identifying the end goals Open Access can enable and encouraging individuals and institutions to take steps to achieve those goals.
International Open Access Week is a global, community-driven week of action to open up access to research. The event is celebrated by individuals, institutions and organizations across the world. The official hashtag of Open Access Week is #OAweek. We also invite the community to use the hashtag #OpenInOrderTo to start an online conversation about the benefits of an open system of communicating scholarship.
For more information about International Open Access Week, please visit www.openaccessweek.org.
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About SPARC
SPARC®, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, is a global coalition committed to making Open the default for research and education. SPARC empowers people to solve big problems and make new discoveries though the adoption of policies and practices that advance Open Access, Open Data, and Open Education. Learn more at sparcopen.org.
The take: Open access tests | Opinion | dailyuw.com
“Perhaps the only solution [to the recycling of leaked exams and one kind of student cheating] is to require professors to post every test online, creating a university-wide test bank. It’s an extreme solution to a simple problem, but it’s the easiest way to ensure students aren’t using test files to cheat. …”
How Might A Future OA World Look? | OAnarchy
“As we have argued in previous publications, it is clear that any need for payment in the scholarly communications process will exclude significant sectors of the global research community. For example, subscription-based systems exclude less-prosperous scholars, who frequently cannot even manage sufficient access to read the literature relevant to their work. Similarly, the system based on article processing charges (APCs) favored by some sectors of the OA community excludes many scholars from authorship, however attractive the open reading may prove….Honestly, we do not see any of the OA approaches being developed and promoted as fully addressing this challenge. We have presented arguments previously that an ideal solution is what can be termed “platinum” OA: journals that are open to readers and authors alike without cost or barrier. These journals can be funded via subsidy from interested entities (institutions, funders, or societies) that prioritize effective and open communication over financial gain, and that develop under collaborations in a cross-stakeholder model (e.g., university presses with scholarly societies, libraries with funders, nonprofit publishers with scholarly societies). We note, as have many others, that funds exist for a shift to platinum OA in the form of the massive subscription budgets that institutions have maintained to keep up with the rising costs of commercial, closed-access journals….”
Autoload: a pipeline for expanding the holdings of an Institutional Repository enabled by ResourceSync
Abstract: Providing local access to locally produced content is a primary goal of the Institutional Repository (IR). Guidelines, requirements, and workflows are among the ways in which institutions attempt to ensure this content is deposited and preserved, but some content is always missed. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, the library implemented a service called LANL Research Online (LARO), to provide public access to a collection of publicly shareable LANL researcher publications authored between 2006 and 2016. LARO exposed the fact that we have full text for only about 10% of eligible publications for this time period, despite a review and release requirement that ought to have resulted in a much higher deposition rate. This discovery motivated a new effort to discover and add more full text content to LARO. Autoload attempts to locate and harvest items that were not deposited locally, but for which archivable copies exist. Here we describe the Autoload pipeline prototype and how it aggregates and utilizes Web services including Crossref, SHERPA/RoMEO, and oaDOI as it attempts to retrieve archivable copies of resources. Autoload employs a bootstrapping mechanism based on the ResourceSync standard, a NISO standard for resource replication and synchronization. We implemented support for ResourceSync atop the LARO Solr index, which exposes metadata contained in the local IR. This allowed us to utilize ResourceSync without modifying our IR. We close with a brief discussion of other uses we envision for our ResourceSync-Solr implementation, and describe how a new effort called Signposting can replace cumbersome screen scraping with a robust autodiscovery path to content which leverages Web protocols.
EU official urges scientists to ‘be vocal’ but not ‘issue advocates’ in Harvard visit | Harvard Gazette
Quoting Carlos Moedas, the EU commissioner for research, science, and innovation: “Look, I think that we live in a difficult moment worldwide. My role as a European politician is to create in Europe an environment where people believe in science, where science is valued, and where we have a system that is based on openness for science. We created this idea that our motto, or our vision, will be open innovation, open science, and openness to the world. That kind of became a political statement, but it was not a political statement to begin with. I’m a big believer that you can create more wealth and more jobs … when you attract talent from all over the world. … So I’m on the side of those who believe in openness. Science has been open for centuries….”
Seamless access to the world’s open access research papers via Resour…
Describes a set of scholarly communications use cases for ResourcesSync and present the development and integration of the PublisherConnector in CORE.
Save Tonight (and Fight the Rot of Bits): Open Access and Digital Preservation – Scholarly Communication in Raiderland
“I am writing to you about digital preservation, but this is a scholarly communication blog. So, let’s delve into what preservation has to do with open access. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) defines open access as ‘the free, immediate, online availability of research articles, coupled with the rights to uses these articles fully in the digital environment.‘ The simple answer to what digital preservation has to do with access is that we are not only advocating for open access in the here and now but also for continued access in years to come.
In the traditional sense of open access, I will encourage you to pay attention to what open access publishers say about what they intend to do with the work that you submit to them. LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) and CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) are examples of programs designed to provide publishers with digital preservation tools and networks to ensure the safety of their content. If you are submitting your articles to a publisher who is openly involved with LOCKSS or CLOCKSS, then you can be reasonably assured that they have your best preservation interests at heart. But they’re not the only tools available to publishers, so be a good investigator when you explore your publication possibilities.
This introduction is the first part of two posts about digital preservation and access. Look out for the next post with four simple rules for incorporating digital preservation into your personal research routine.”
BEAT: An Open-Source Web-Based Open-Science Platform
“With the increased interest in computational sciences, machine learning (ML), pattern recognition (PR) and big data, governmental agencies, academia and manufacturers are overwhelmed by the constant influx of new algorithms and techniques promising improved performance, generalization and robustness. Sadly, result reproducibility is often an overlooked feature accompanying original research publications, competitions and benchmark evaluations. The main reasons behind such a gap arise from natural complications in research and development in this area: the distribution of data may be a sensitive issue; software frameworks are difficult to install and maintain; Test protocols may involve a potentially large set of intricate steps which are difficult to handle. Given the raising complexity of research challenges and the constant increase in data volume, the conditions for achieving reproducible research in the domain are also increasingly difficult to meet. To bridge this gap, we built an open platform for research in computational sciences related to pattern recognition and machine learning, to help on the development, reproducibility and certification of results obtained in the field. By making use of such a system, academic, governmental or industrial organizations enable users to easily and socially develop processing toolchains, re-use data, algorithms, workflows and compare results from distinct algorithms and/or parameterizations with minimal effort. This article presents such a platform and discusses some of its key features, uses and limitations. We overview a currently operational prototype and provide design insights.”