“The four editors in chief of the Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics have informed their publisher, Springer, of their intention to launch a rival open-access journal to protest the publisher’s high prices and limited accessibility. This is the latest in a string of what one observer called “editorial mutinies” over journal publishing policies….”
Monthly Archives: July 2017
Revisiting: Splitting the Difference – Does an Editorial Mutiny at a Journal Do Much Long-term Damage? – The Scholarly Kitchen
“An important question is whether these declarations [of independence] have had an impact on the individual title that was being boycotted. Did the decision by the editors have any impact that transformed scholarly communications as they usually claimed they desired or envisioned? One cannot deny the successes of the OA movement over the years, but what impact is this related movement having on the traditional publishing environment? The results of the “independence movement” appear mixed….”
The Munyonyo Declaration: Improving Health Communication and Public Understanding
“We, the stakeholders (researchers, policymakers, and knowledge intermediaries, including journalists, broadcasters, librarians, journal editors, and others) concerned with the diffusion of health information in Uganda, gathered at Munyonyo, Kampala, from 26 to 28 April 2017, on the occasion of the first in a series of Building Bridges forums, declare that: …We will build national capacity to disseminate quality, evidence-based and timely health information by establishing a health communication network comprising researchers, policy makers, and knowledge intermediaries, such as journalists, broadcasters, librarians, and journal editors. Our immediate objectives will be: …To promote, and lobby for improved access to the best health information….”
NOT-OD-16-149: NIH Policy on the Dissemination of NIH-Funded Clinical Trial Information
“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is issuing this policy to promote broad and responsible dissemination of information from NIH-funded clinical trials through ClinicalTrials.gov. The policy establishes the expectation that all investigators conducting clinical trials funded in whole or in part by the NIH will ensure that these trials are registered at ClinicalTrials.gov, and that results information of these trials is submitted to ClinicalTrials.gov. The policy is complementary to the statutory and regulatory reporting requirements. …”
WHO | Joint statement on public disclosure of results from clinical trials
“The signatories of this joint statement affirm that the prospective registration and timely public disclosure of results from all clinical trials is of critical scientific and ethical importance. Furthermore timely results disclosure reduces waste in research, increases value and efficiency in use of funds and reduces reporting bias, which should lead to better decision-making in health.
Within 12 months of becoming a signatory of this statement, we each pledge to develop and implement a policy with mandated timeframes for prospective registration and public disclosure of the results of clinical trials that we fund, co-fund, sponsor or support. We each agree to monitor registration and endorse the development of systems to monitor results reporting on an ongoing basis. We agree to share challenges and progress in the monitoring of these policies. We agree that transparency is important and therefore the outputs from the monitoring process will be publicly available….”
Open Access Strategy for a ‘New’ University Press: A View through the Stakeholder Lens | Journal of Scholarly Publishing
“Enabled by technology, brought into being in response to a crisis in scholarly communication, and increasingly driven by governmental regulations, mandates of funding bodies, and universities’ policies, open access (OA) is one of the fundamental issues that need to be considered as part of a publishing strategy and business model at a new university press. By considering the attitudes toward OA among the stakeholders of Australian university presses, I propose that a university press should take a hybrid approach to the OA publishing model to ensure diversified funding and income streams, editorial independence, and sustainability. At the same time, the press needs to maintain rigorous peer review, high-quality editing and production, and effective marketing while developing a focused publishing program in areas that are distinctive to the press and strategically aligned with the goals of its parent university.”
Good practices for university open-access policies
“This is a guide to good practices for college and university open-access (OA) policies. It’s based on the type of rights-retention OA policy first adopted at Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and the University of Kansas. Policies of this kind have since been adopted at a wide variety of institutions in North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, for example, at public and private institutions, large and small institutions, affluent and indigent institutions, research universities and liberal arts colleges, and at whole universities, schools within universities, and departments within schools….”
Open Access Tracking Project
The home page of the Open Access Tracking Project. “OATP uses social tagging to capture new developments on open access to research. The OATP mission is (1) to provide a real-time alert service for OA-related news and comment, and (2) to organize knowledge of the field by tag or subtopic. The project publishes a comprehensive primary feed of new OA developments, and hundreds of smaller secondary feeds on OA subtopics, one for each project tag.”
Practicing What You Preach: Evaluating Access of Open Access Research
Abstract: The open access movement seeks to encourage all researchers to make their works openly available and free of paywalls so more people can access their knowledge. Yet some researchers who study open access (OA) continue to publish their work in paywalled journals and fail to make it open. This project set out to study just how many published research articles about OA fall into this category, how many are being made open (whether by being published in a gold OA or hybrid journal or through open deposit), and how library and information science authors compare to other disciplines researching this field. Because of the growth of tools available to help researchers find open versions of articles, this study also sought to compare how these new tools compare to Google Scholar in their ability to disseminating OA research. From a sample collected from Web of Science of articles published since 2010, the study found that although a majority of research articles about OA are open in some form, a little more than a quarter are not. A smaller rate of library science researchers made their work open compared to non-library science researchers. In looking at the copyright of these articles published in hybrid and open journals, authors were more likely to retain copyright ownership if they printed in an open journal compared to authors in hybrid journals. Articles were more likely to be published with a Creative Commons license if published in an open journal compared to those published in hybrid journals.
Notes on the Research Works Act – Harvard Open Access Project
“The Research Works Act (HR 3699) would repeal the OA policy at the NIH and block similar policies at other federal agencies.
The main section (Section 2) is brief: “No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that — (1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or (2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.” …”
Notes on the Public Access to Public Science Act – Harvard Open Access Project
“PAPS requires covered federal agencies to develop public-access policies (Section 2.a). There are four covered agencies: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the National Weather Service….”
Notes on the Federal Research Public Access Act – Harvard Open Access Project
“The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) requires “free online public access” to a very large swath of publicly-funded research in the United States. It strengthens the open access (OA) mandate at the NIH by reducing the maximum embargo period from 12 months to six months, and extends the strengthened policy to all the major agencies of the federal government….”
Notes on the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act – Harvard Open Access Project
“The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act is the successor to the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). FRPAA had been introduced in three earlier sessions of Congress (May 2006, April 2009, and February 2012) but never came up for a vote. In the 113th Congress, Congressional supporters of OA decided to introduce a modified bill. The result is FASTR, a strengthened version of FRPAA. Both bills would require open access (OA) to peer-reviewed manuscripts of articles reporting the results of federally-funded research….”
Advocacy for Rejuvenation Research is as Much a Process of Documentation as it is a Process of Persuasion – BioscienceNews – LONGECITY
“In this model of human endeavor, knowledge flows outward while funds and newly participating members of the community flow inward – or at least, that is the ideal. In practice, managing this flow of knowledge is a big and thorny problem: many of the most important movements in technology over the last few decades have focused on how to best move knowledge from inner circles to outer circles. Consider the open science movements, fights over closed journal business models, and the many efforts to try to adopt open source practices in the scientific community, to consider but a few examples….The irony of the situation is that documentation isn’t expensive in the grand scheme of things, and certainly not in comparison to earnest clinical development. It doesn’t require more than a few weeks of part-time work for a life scientist, a graphic artist, and an editor to produce a long document that explains exactly how to replicate a demonstrated research result in longevity science – a way to extend life in mice, for example. That document will explain the research in plain English, at length, and in a way clearly comprehensible to people who are not cutting edge scientists: exactly what is needed open the door to a far wider audience for that research. More rather than less of this should be the normal state of affairs, but at present it is not the case….”
Imperial College London – journey to open scholarship
A presentation by Torsten Reimer, June 15, 2016.