Abstract: Organizing scholarly publishing as a cooperative business has the promise of making journals more affordable and scholarly publishing more sustainable. The authors describe the development of the modern cooperative from its beginnings in England during the Industrial Revolution and highlight the great extent and diversity of business worldwide that is currently done cooperatively. Some of the current initiatives in scholarly publishing (SPARC, PLoS, German Academic Publishing, etc.) are analysed in light of cooperative business principles, and it is shown that, while these models often partially utilize cooperative business practices, none of them has adopted the cooperative model in totality.
Monthly Archives: September 2017
Making Indian science more open and accessible – IndiaBioscience
“Sridhar Gutam is a senior scientist at ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, Bengaluru. He is also the convenor of Open access India, an organisation advocating open access, open data and open education in India….”
Amicus brief in support of Public.Resource.Org from a group of library associations and non-profits
“Access to the Text of the Law Advances Practical Interests of Vital National Importance….Access to the Text of the Law Is a Fundamental Right and Important National Interest, Superior to Private Copyrights….The Standards Organizations Need Not Depend on Copyright Royalties, and Can Be Fully Compensated by Other Means….Multiple Doctrines Involved in This Case Can Account for a Fundamental Right of Access to the Text of the Law….”
OSF | Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices
“There is no central authority determining the validity of scientific claims. Accumulation of scientific knowledge proceeds via open communication with the community. Sharing evidence for scientific claims facilitates critique, extension, and application. Despite the importance of open communication for scientific progress, present norms do not provide strong incentives for individual researchers to share data, materials, or their research process. Journals can provide such incentives by acknowledging open practices with badges in publications….”
Open Science Badges
“What are Open Science Badges?
Badges to acknowledge open science practices are incentives for researchers to share data, materials, or to preregister.
Badges signal to the reader that the content has been made available and certify its accessibility in a persistent location….
Badges seem silly. Do they work?
Yes. Implementing these badges dramatically increases the rate of data sharing (Kidwell et al, 2016).
A recent systematic review identified this badging program as the only evidence-based incentive program that this effective at increasing the rates of data sharing (Rowhani-Farid et al., 2017).
View a list of journals and organizations that have adopted badges here….”
Metadata 2020
“Metadata 2020 is a collaboration that advocates richer, connected, and reusable, open metadata for all research outputs, which will advance scholarly pursuits for the benefit of society….”Richer metadata fuels discovery and innovation. Connected metadata bridges the gaps between systems and communities. Reusable, open metadata eliminates duplication of effort.” …”
Amicus brief in support of Public.Resource.Org from Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic
“Restricting access to the law potentially violates due process and is antithetical to democratic governance….Even if this court were to find that law may be subject to copyright, publication of the law would be an inherently fair use….”
More disasters predicted as analysis exposes “widening construction knowledge gap”
“An unprecedented study of 6 million pieces of data claims to shows that the knowledge framework underpinning UK construction is not fit for purpose.
As the industry reels from the deadly Grenfell Tower fire, the study’s authors warn that practitioners do not have ready access to critical knowledge and that more mistakes are “inevitable”.
Designing Buildings Wiki, an open knowledge base, says it has undertaken the first comprehensive mapping of construction industry knowledge.
It published what it calls the “startling results” in a report this week, which found that:
Too much essential knowledge is difficult to understand, buried in long documents or locked behind pay walls and will not be used.
Practitioners need accessible, practical, easy-to-use guidance to help them carry out everyday activities.
The industry lacks the strategic leadership needed to coordinate the creation and dissemination of knowledge.
The internet has fundamentally changed the way practitioners access knowledge, but the industry has not kept up….”
Interview with PLOS ONE Academic Editor – Dong-Yan Jin
PLOS ONE Editorial Board Member and molecular virologist, Dong -Yan Jin, is our next editor to be featured in our Meet the Editors interview series. Dong-Yan Jin is currently Clara and Lawrence Fok Professor
Digital Futures Consortium at Harvard University
“The Digital Futures Consortium at Harvard University is a network of technologists, faculty, researchers, and librarians engaged in the ongoing transformation of scholarship through innovative technology. We are dedicated to sharing expertise across the global academic community, facilitating new forms and methods of research, and fostering collaborative projects that bring about field changing developments in scholarship….”
Preserving Harvard’s Early Data and Research in Astronomy
“Material originally produced during the mid-to-late 19th century and early 20th century by researchers at the Harvard College Observatory (HCO) was recently re-discovered in the HCO Astronomical Plate Stacks collection. This material helps represent the history of the HCO and acts as an irreplaceable primary source on the evolution of observation methods and astronomy as a science. The material is also relevant to the history of women in science as the collection contains log books and notebooks produced by the Harvard Computers, women who have come back into the spotlight due to the recent release of a book by author Dava Sobel titled “The Glass Universe”. Wolbach Library anticipates that this material, once preserved and made searchable, will enable research into early astronomy for future generations….”
Therapoid, from Open Therapeutics
“Open Therapeutics™ facilitates and enables collaboration among life science researchers around the world!
There are highly qualified scientists everywhere. They want to collaborate. However, there is no comprehensive platform for them to do so – until now!
The Open Therapeutics’ Therapoid™ scientific ecosystem enables much more than just collaboration.
As a web platform for scientific collaboration Therapoid includes:
Open biotechnologies for advancing research and gaining publications,
Funding to further develop open biotechnologies,
An asset exchange that hosts freely available equipment and supplies,
A manuscript development process,
A preprint server for hosting manuscripts.
Goals of Open Therapeutics’ include lowering biotechnology and pharmaceutical costs, reducing the risks and time to develop life-saving therapies, and broadening markets for therapeutics, particularly for underserved populations around the world.”
Open Therapeutics
“Open Therapeutics™ facilitates biopharma developments by enabling capable and responsible researchers around the world to collaborate. Open Therapeutics has two components: (i) an open web platform for scientific collaboration known as Therapoid™, and (ii) open biotechnologies for rapid prototyping of therapeutics.
Open Therapeutics™ enables open access, open collaboration, rapid prototyping, meritocracy, and community. The goal is to lower costs, reduce risks and time, and broaden markets for therapeutics.
The Therapoid™ web portal enables international scientists to share research easily, while it also opens a path to develop dormant technologies. Simple to use tools enable more effective collaboration. The combination of collaboration and biotechnologies will lead to better therapeutics for patients in every country….”
How to make your own work open access – Harvard Open Access Project
An online handout by Peter Suber on how to make your own work open access.
OA Info Indonesian.png
An infographic in Indonesian on how to make new work open access.