Monthly Archives: August 2017

Making Early European Books Open Access | On the Trail of the Bianchi of 1399

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“The Wellcome Library’s Early Modern European Book collection is currently accessible at Early European Books online. At the moment, you need a login and to physically be in the UK to see these books. The Wellcome are in the process of making 10% of these holdings open access, and I’m getting to choose about 200 volumes for this purpose. Incunabula, so books from the first 50 years of printing, will be automatically included, so I’m looking through the catalogue at books printed after around 1500.

[…]

I’m making a database of the books I’m choosing to show why I’ve selected them, so which criteria they fulfil as well as explaining why that particular volume is exciting. I’ll be blogging about some of the most exciting things I find. For now, I’ll have to go to the rare books room at the Wellcome library to take my own photos, but once this project is complete, you’ll be able to read the selected books online for free.”

“Contribution to Open Access Repository by the Central Universities of ” by GARVITA JHAMB and ABDUS SAMIM

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“Present paper attempts to provides the overview of the contributions made by the central universities of India to the open access repository namely Shodhganga. There are in total 46 central universities in India as listed in UGC website out of which only 25 are sharing their research outputs to Shodhganga or are the ones which have signed MoU with Shodhganga. Open ETD plays an important role in the academic community as it helps in preventing duplication of research work already been done. This paper is an intensive case study of the contribution of theses faculty wise and year wise from different central universities in India.”

Finding a third way to open access | Research Information

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“Entrenched viewpoints on both sides of the open access debate risk leaving authors stuck in no man’s land, argues Rob Johnson….In politics, the ‘third way’ emerged as a synthesis of right-wing economics and left-wing social policies. Perhaps it’s time for us to embrace a ‘third way to OA’ – enabling us to harness the dynamism of commercial players in the interests of opening up research findings to the world.“

Australian Government Response to the Productivity Commission Inquiry into Intellectual Property Arrangements

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At p. 18: “Recommendation 16.1 The Australian, and State and Territory governments should implement an open access policy for publicly funded research. The policy should provide free and open access arrangements for all publications funded by governments, directly or through university funding, within 12 months of publication. The policy should minimise exemptions. The Australian Government should seek to establish the same policy for international agencies to which it is a contributory funder, but which still charge for their publications, such as the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development….”

Reviewer criticises ‘no publication after preprint’ rule | THE News

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“An academic is boycotting peer review for a scholarly journal after it turned down a manuscript that had previously been published on the website of an education centre.

The journal in question said that if the author had posted the article behind a paywall on a conference website, it would have still accepted it for publication.”

The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship | Scientific Data

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Abstract:  There is an urgent need to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data. A diverse set of stakeholders—representing academia, industry, funding agencies, and scholarly publishers—have come together to design and jointly endorse a concise and measureable set of principles that we refer to as the FAIR Data Principles. The intent is that these may act as a guideline for those wishing to enhance the reusability of their data holdings. Distinct from peer initiatives that focus on the human scholar, the FAIR Principles put specific emphasis on enhancing the ability of machines to automatically find and use the data, in addition to supporting its reuse by individuals. This Comment is the first formal publication of the FAIR Principles, and includes the rationale behind them, and some exemplar implementations in the community.

Repository Librarian, CERN

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“Are you a skilled repository librarian, with a profound knowledge of scholarly communication, who likes to work in a dynamic environment to ensure open access to scientific results? Then you can apply your skills to improve the user experience by enriching the material made available to the community via platforms such as Inspire and the CERN Document Server (CDS). Our service helps 50,000 scientists, mainly within the field of high-energy physics, worldwide every day to find information across a million of scientific articles, seamlessly populate their scientific profile and explore connections between ideas through our graph of tens of million citations. CERN, Take part! …”

Six New Preprint Services Join a Growing Community Across Disciplines

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“This week, six communities launched preprint services to accelerate dissemination of research. INA-Rxiv, the preprint server of Indonesia; LISSA, an open scholarly platform for library and information science;  MindRxiv, a service for research on mind and contemplative practices; NutriXiv, a preprint service for the nutritional sciences; paleorXiv, a digital archive for Paleontology; and SportRxiv, an open archive for sport and exercise-related research….These new services join AgriXiv (agriculture), BITSS (research methodology), engrXiv (Engineering), LawArXiv (law), PsyArXiv (psychology), SocArXiv (social sciences), Thesis Commons (theses and dissertations), and OSF Preprints (any discipline) in using the free, open-source Open Science Framework (OSF)….The operators of these 14 preprint services illustrate the global growth and diversity of stakeholders invested in accelerating research.  Some of the services are operated by scientific societies (e.g., PsyArXiv), some are operated by research funders (e.g., MindRxiv), some are operated by libraries and library societies (e.g., LawArXiv), and some are operated by grassroots communities of researchers (e.g., SportRxiv, NutriXiv).  All groups are increasing the accessibility and impact of the research done in their community….In addition to hosting preprint services, OSF uses SHARE to aggregate and index over two million search results from preprint providers hosted on other platforms such as arXiv, bioRXiv, and PeerJ….”

Recording the past and the future in 3-D: News at IU: Indiana University

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“The handheld scanner looks like an old-school video game controller, a clunky throwback to the early days of Atari. But these mobile 3-D scanners used by the staff in the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis University Library Center for Digital Scholarship are actually very advanced technology, and they are changing the way we record recent history, ancient history and even the future….Proving its place at the front of the 3-D digital archiving crowd, the Center for Digital Scholarship recently received a grant from LYRASIS — a nonprofit organization for information professionals — to develop standards for how digital archives are recorded….”

Open and Shut?: The Open Access Interviews: Rusty Speidel, The Center for Open Science

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“The Center for Open Science (COS) has announced today that six new preprint services have launched using COS’ preprints platform, taking the number of such services to 14. 

The announcement comes at a time when we are seeing a rising tide of preprint servers being launched, both by for-profit and non-profit organisations – a development all the more remarkable given scholarly publishers’ historic opposition to preprint servers. Indeed, so antagonistic to such services have publishers been that until recently they were often able to stop them in their tracks. “

Tanzania workshop on Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) | Agricultural Information Management Standards (AIMS)

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“The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO of the UN) in conjunction with several partners organized a series of training workshops in 2016 and 2017 across Asia, Africa and Latin America focused on access to research in agriculture and fisheries. Earlier, workshops were held in Namibia, Myanmar, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Laos PDR, Honduras and Guatemala.

The workshops are aimed at drawing attention to the scope of free online agricultural information available on Access to Global Online Research in Agriculture (AGORA) and International System for Agricultural Science and Technology (AGRIS) and in effectively using these resources. Alongside this core focus, the workshops raise awareness of key trends in scientific publishing in agriculture, fisheries and forestry, with a look at the further range of resources available to researchers in agricultural research, and on Research4Life. 

The most recent workshop was held at Tanzania Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH), 26-27 July 2017. In the United Republic of Tanzania, 115 national institutions are registered for free access to scientific journals and e-books through AGORA and Research4Life.”

New milestones for open access policies at MIT | MIT Libraries News

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MIT has reached a new open access milestone: 46 percent of faculty members’ articles published since the OA policy passed in 2009 are now being shared in the Open Access Articles Collection of DSpace@MIT. (Last year, the number was 44 percent.)

Earlier this month, the MIT Libraries celebrated making live in DSpace the first paper to rely on rights retained under the new MIT authors’ opt-in open access license. The license was announced by MIT’s vice president for research, Maria Zuber, in April.

chem-bla-ics: What about postprint servers?

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“Now that preprint servers are picking up speed, let’s talk about postprint servers. Sure, we have plenty of places to place and find discussions about the content of articles (e.g. PubPeer, PubMed Commons, …), and sure we have retractions and corrections.

But what if we could just make revisions of articles?

And I’m not only talking about typo-fixes, but also clarifications that show up during post-publication peer-review. Not about full revisions; if a paper is wrong, then this is not the method of choice. They should happen frequently either, but sometimes it is just convenient. Maybe to fix broken website URLs?

One point is, ResearchGate, Academia, Mendeley, and the likes allow you to host versions, but we need to track the fixes and versioned DOIs. That metadata is essential: it is the FAIRness of the post-publication life time of a publication….”