Monthly Archives: August 2017

VI. Open Access Policy – Faculty Handbook – Vassar College

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“Each member grants to Vassar College permission in the form of a nonexclusive, worldwide license to reproduce and publicly distribute, via Vassar’s institutional repository, each of their peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles, provided that the articles will not be sold for a profit. Each faculty member is expected to provide an electronic copy of the accepted manuscript of each article to the repository in an appropriate format as specified by the Vassar College Libraries.

The policy applies to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty of Vassar College; work completed prior to appointment at Vassar can be submitted at the faculty member’s discretion. For articles with copyright restrictions, and/or upon the express direction of the faculty author, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty will not apply the policy for a particular article or delay access for the necessary period of time. In collaboration with the Library Committee, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty will be responsible for interpreting and applying this policy….”

Workshop on Reproducible Research Practices and the Open Science Framework | Data Management Services

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“Please join us for a workshop, hosted by the Center for Open Science and JHU Data Management Services, to learn easy, practical steps researchers can take to increase the reproducibility of their work.

The workshop will be hands-on. (Please bring a laptop if possible.) Using an example study, attendees will actively participate in creating a reproducible project from start to finish.

Topics covered include:

  • Project documentation
  • Version control
  • Pre-analysis plans
  • Open source tools: in this specific instance, the Open Science Framework to easily implement these concepts in one easily accessible space”

Open Science Framework for Research Workflows October 18, 2017 | UCLA Library Events

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“Wednesday, Oct 18, 2017 – 9:00am to 12:00pm

There are many actions researchers can take to increase the openness and reproducibility of their work. Please join us for a workshop, hosted by the Center for Open Science, to learn easy, practical steps researchers can take to increase the reproducibility of their work. The workshop will be hands-on. Using example studies, attendees will actively participate in creating a reproducible project from start to finish.

Topics covered: 

  • Project documentation
  • Version control
  • Pre-Analysis plans
  • Open source tools like the Center for Open Science’s Open Science Framework to easily implement these concepts in a scientific workflow.”

Open risk assessment: methods and expertise – Verloo – 2016 – EFSA Journal – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  Risk analysis and risk governance face a decline in social trust at both the scientific and policy levels. The involvement of society in the process has been proposed as an approach to increasing trust and engagement by making better use of available data and knowledge. In this session, EFSA explored the challenges in building trust and engagement and the latest thinking and methodologies for increasing openness that can help the organisation to move beyond traditional dialogue and towards a more sustainable stakeholder and society interaction. The discussion centred on the needs of EFSA and of target audiences throughout the process, from risk assessment initiation through societal decision-making and communication. The main focus of the session was on methodologies and approaches that would enable EFSA to increase its scientific rigour and build trust from additional inputs gained by opening up its risk assessments at the level of data gathering, data analysis, expertise and innovation. This will require an approach that moves beyond traditional risk assessment practices that rely on a long chain of static information and knowledge such as scientific articles, reviews, expert groups and committees.

Open risk assessment: data – Gilsenan – 2016 – EFSA Journal – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  Since its foundation, EFSA and the Member States have made significant progress in the area of data collection for risk assessment and monitoring. In partnership with competent authorities and research organisations in the Member States, EFSA has become a central hub of the European data on food consumption, chemical occurrence and foodborne outbreaks. Beyond EFSA’s use of these data and sharing of contaminants and food consumption data with the World Health Organization and the Food and Agriculture Organization to support international risk assessment, they remain largely unexploited. In addition, for some of its risk assessments, EFSA also relies on published information, as well as on scientific studies sponsored and submitted by industry. The environment in which the Authority operates has significantly evolved since its foundation. The growth of digital technology has granted scientists and consumers alike faster and more efficient access to data and information. The open data movement, which has entered the sphere of the European Union institutions, is unleashing the potential for reuse of data. In parallel, the work of EFSA is increasingly subject to demands for more openness and transparency across its spectrum of stakeholders. EFSA aims to enhance the quality and transparency of its outputs by giving access to data and promoting the development of collaborative platforms in Europe and internationally. EFSA also plans to work with data providers and organisations funding research to adopt open data concepts and standards; gaining better access to, and making better use of, data from a wider evidence base. During the breakout session on ‘Open Risk Assessment: Data’ at the EFSA 2nd Scientific Conference ‘Shaping the Future of Food Safety, Together’ (Milan, Italy, 14–16 October 2015) opportunities and challenges associated with open data, data interoperability and data quality were discussed by sharing experiences from various sectors within and outside EFSA’s remit. This paper provides an overview of the presentations and discussions during the breakout session.

Assisting living authors in opening access to their in-copyright works: a report from Iceland

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Abstract: This article reports on a project, spanning the years 2013 to 2015, that assisted living Icelandic authors in opening access to out-of-print books that they wished to make publicly available. While this effort was small in scale, it sheds light on the complexities of releasing still-in-copyright works by living authors under a Creative Commons license. The project worked primarily with books that had been digitized by Google and included in HathiTrust’s collections. The project showed that Icelandic authors of older scholarly works were generally very interested in releasing them to the public at no charge by changing their rights status in HathiTrust. Meanwhile, authors who wished to release works that had not already been scanned were sometimes frustrated in their efforts to do so. The article concludes with some reflections on the benefits and drawbacks of author-by-author rights clearance, as compared to other ways of increasing the accessibility of out-of-print titles

RWJF Awards $1.9 Million Grant to PatientsLikeMe to Create World’s First Open Research Platform to Develop Patient-Centered Health Outcome Measurements | PatientsLikeMe

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“PatientsLikeMe has been awarded a $1.9 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to create the world’s first open-participation research platform for the development of patient-centered health outcome measures. The platform is part of a new open-science initiative that puts patients at the center of the clinical research process and will allow researchers to pilot, deploy, share, and validate new ways to measure diseases. An ‘idea worth spreading,’ the initiative will be spotlighted today in a presentation at TED2013 by Paul Wicks, Ph.D., PatientsLikeMe’s Research Director and a new TED Fellow.

Health outcome measures are typically developed by clinicians and researchers, and collect information that meet their needs. Linked with the PatientsLikeMe patient network, the new platform will help researchers develop health outcome measures that better reflect patients’ experiences with a disease, and assess health and quality of life in ways that matter to patients.”

IsoArcH – An open-access and collaborative isotope database for bioarcheological samples from the Graeco-Roman world

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“IsoArcH is an open access spatial database of bioarcheological isotopic data of the Graeco-Roman world. It consists of georeferenced isotopic, archaeological, and anthropological information related to the study of dietary and mobility patterns of human and animal populations. IsoArcH focuses on the Mediterranean region between the 12th c. BC and the 8th c. AD, although some northern European sites are also included….”

The Journal Publishing Market Between Supply- and Demand-Side Models: The Case of Open Access in Germany | Open Science

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“Without significant support for Open Access journals, large-scale transitions to Open Access may be slow to come, as the German case indicates.

A Blog Article by Pablo Markin.”

Delta Think

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“We have assembled an interactive, expertly curated, and regularly updated suite of information focused on Open Access.

How confident are you in your Open Access knowledge and strategy?

How confident would you like to be?…

Whether or not you publish open access, OA is part of the scholarly ecosystem. Do you have your finger on the pulse of changing OA market conditions?

Are you keeping track of launches of new OA journals, services, policies, and mandates?

Delta Think’s Open Access Data & Analytics helps you stay current! …”

Open Insulin Project

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“We’re a team of Bay Area biology nerds who believe that insulin should be freely available to anybody who needs it. So, we’re developing the first freely available, open protocol for insulin production. We hope our research will be the basis for generic production of this life-saving drug. Additionally, we hope our work inspires other biohackers to band together and create things nobody has ever thought of before!…”

Presseinformationen – Helmholtz-Gemeinschaft Deutscher Forschungszentren

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From Google’s English: “16 centers of the Helmholtz Association have terminated their license agreements with the scientific publishing house Elsevier at the end of 2017. With this decision the Elsevier contracts of all Helmholtz centers expire, whose contracts end on 31.12.2017. This means that the largest German research organization has now joined the more than one hundred scientific institutions that have terminated or extended their license agreements with Elsevier in order to strengthen the negotiating position of the DEAL project. Since 2016 representatives of the DEAL project on behalf of the alliance of the German scientific organizations with the publishing house Elsevier negotiate a nationwide licensing of magazines. The negotiations are very difficult, which is why the exit is now a clear sign….The President of the Helmholtz Association, Professor Dr. Otmar D. Wiestler, explains: “The Helmholtz Association will not conclude its own license agreements with Elsevier. We promote the changeover of the publication system to Open Access and therefore support the objectives of the DEAL project.” The most important goals [of the DEAL project] are: [1] All scientific institutions involved in the DEAL contract have full-time access to the full range of e-journals from Elsevier. [2] All publications by authors from German institutions are automatically submitted to Open Access (CC-BY, including peer review). [3] Appropriate pricing according to a simple, future-oriented calculation model that is oriented to the volume of publications….Dr. Martin Köhler, DESY’s director of the library and former negotiator for the Helmholtz contracts with Elsevier has no reservations about the literature supply: “The experiences of the” dropouts “at the beginning of the year showed that a contractless situation can be solved without problems. The Helmholtz libraries are well positioned and expect to be able to reliably provide the scientists with the necessary articles, even during longer lasting negotiations.”

Clinical trials revolution could change the future of medical research | Science | The Guardian

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“In tumultuous times, it is easy to miss the fact that science is undergoing a quiet revolution. For several years now, concerns have been peaking in biomedicine about the reliability of published research – that the results of too many studies cannot be reproduced when the methods are repeated. Alongside growing discontent, the scientific community has answered by driving forward a raft of open science reforms. From initiatives to making research data publicly available, to ensuring that all published research can be read by the public, the aim of these reforms is simple: to make science more credible and accessible, for the benefit of other scientists and the public who fund scientific research.”

COAF Block Grant – August Update

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“Please note that due to high demand, our block grant funding for several COAF partner charities has been depleted as of mid-August 2017….We are pleased that so many LSHTM publications in the past year have been made open access via the ‘gold’ (paid) route. Funding is expected to become available again for the aforementioned COAF partner charities from October, but in the mean time we encourage you to apply for APC waivers from your chosen journals, or follow the ‘green’ (self-archiving, free) route to open access by forwarding your accepted manuscript and acceptance email to publications@lshtm.ac.uk.”