“Student activist group UConnPIRG will increase their efforts this semester in their “Action Plan for Affordable Textbooks” campaign, which advocates for affordable class materials like open educational resources, by engaging with professors and the greater University of Connecticut community.”
Monthly Archives: January 2018
Chopin Heritage in Open Access – Radio Poland :: News from Poland
“S?awek Szefs reports that the free catalogue of some 40,000 items available in “The Chopin Heritage in Open Access” portal will at the same time help performers and music specialists in their studies related to Chopin’s artistic career and personal life.”
Reverse DOI lookup using the Crossref API · INTACT
“In principle, knowledge of an article title allows for rather easy retrival of the associated DOI: It usually involves copy-pasting the string into a search engine, following the first link to a landing page or full text PDF and looking for the DOI there. While this is doable for a small number of data points, it quickly becomes infeasible for larger sets of data, and 3000 articles is clearly too much to look up manually.”
Harvard’s Popular Free Online Architecture Course Returns for 2018 | ArchDaily
“The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s popular free online course, The Architectural Imagination, has returned for 2018, again offering anyone across the globe the opportunity to study the fundamentals of architecture from one of the world’s foremost design schools at absolutely no cost. Led by professors Erika Naginski, Antoine Picon, and K. Michael Hays, alongside PhD student Lisa Haber-Thomson, the 10-week course will begin on February 28th, and will cover topics ranging from learning to “read” buildings as cultural expression to technical drawing and modeling exercises….”
My journey towards Open Science | Research Data at Springer Nature
“CODATA-RDA schools changed my career, making me a more responsible researcher but also an Open Science ambassador for the Central American area. I now aspire to be a young researcher that can teach Open and Data Science principles through my job at the University of Costa Rica and through the CODATA-RDA Schools, as well as also serve as a mentor for other people that want to learn how to practice Open Science.”
New Article: “Redistributing Data Worlds: Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Democracy”, Statistique et Société, 5(3)
“What happens to these social practices and imaginaries of quantification when readily available digital technologies facilitate the creation, analysis and reproduction of data by different publics? What kinds of shifts, dynamics, controversies, visions and programmes can be observed when data goes digital? One recent answer to these questions can be found in the phenomenon of open data, which can be understood as set of ideas and conventions aiming to turn information into a re-usable public resource.”
Global Open Science Hardware Roadmap | Gathering for Open Science Hardware
“The Open Science Hardware (OScH) community therefore seeks to bring together developers and users of scientific tools and research infrastructures to support the pursuit and growth of knowledge through global access to hardware for science.”
APPRAISE (A Post-Publication Review and Assessment In Science Experiment) | ASAPbio
“I describe here a new project – called Appraise – that is both a model and experimental platform for what peer review can and should look like in a world without journals….
The rise of preprints gives us the perfect opportunity to create a new system that takes full advantage of the Internet to more rapidly, effectively and fairly engage the scientific community in assessing the validity, audience and impact of published works….
APPRAISE (A Post-Publication Review and Assessment In Science Experiment)…
It is perhaps easiest to think of Appraise as an editorial board without a journal (and we hope to be a model for how existing editorial boards can transition away from journals). Like journal editorial boards they will curate the scientific literature through the critical process of peer review. However members of Appraise will not be reviewing papers submitted to a journal and deciding whether it should be published. Rather Appraise reviewers are working in service of members of the scientific community, selecting papers they think warrant scrutiny and attention, and reviewing them to help others find, understand and assess published paper….
In the spirit of openness we encourage Appraise members to identify themselves, but recognize that the ability to speak freely sometimes requires anonymity. Appraise will allow members to post reviews anonymously provided that there are no conflicts of interest and the reviewer does not use anonymity as a shield for inappropriate behavior. Whether reviewers are publicly identified or not, Appraise will never tolerate personal attacks of any kind.
We are launching Appraise with a small group of scientists. This is for purely practical purposes – to develop our systems and practices without the challenges of managing a large, open community. But the goal is to as quickly as possible open the platform up to everyone.”
Which domains do open-access journals do best in? A 5-year longitudinal study – Yan – 2018 – Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library
Abstract: Although researchers have begun to investigate the difference in scientific impact between closed-access and open-access journals, studies that focus specifically on dynamic and disciplinary differences remain scarce. This study serves to fill this gap by using a large longitudinal dataset to examine these differences. Using CiteScore as a proxy for journal scientific impact, we employ a series of statistical tests to identify the quartile categories and disciplinary areas in which impact trends differ notably between closed- and open-access journals. We find that closed-access journals have a noticeable advantage in social sciences (for example, business and economics), whereas open-access journals perform well in medical and healthcare domains (for example, health profession and nursing). Moreover, we find that after controlling for a journal’s rank and disciplinary differences, there are statistically more closed-access journals in the top 10%, Quartile 1, and Quartile 2 categories as measured by CiteScore; in contrast, more open-access journals in Quartile 4 gained scientific impact from 2011 to 2015. Considering dynamic and disciplinary trends in tandem, we find that more closed-access journals in Social Sciences gained in impact, whereas in biochemistry and medicine, more open-access journals experienced such gains.
In Conversation with the Wellcome Trust – sharing & managing research outputs | Unlocking Research
“In July 2017, the Wellcome Trust updated their policy on the management and sharing of research outputs. This policy helps deliver Wellcome’s mission – to improve health for everyone by enabling great ideas to thrive. The University of Cambridge’s Research Data Management Facility invited Wellcome Trust to Cambridge to talk with their funded research community (and potential researchers) about what this updated policy means for them. On 5th December in the Gurdon Institute Tea Room, the Deputy Head of Scholarly Communication Dr Lauren Cadwallader, welcomed Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research, and David Carr, Open Research Programme Manager, from the Wellcome’s Open Research Team.
This blog summarises the presentations from David and Robert about the research outputs policy and how it has been working and the questions raised by the audience….”
Shire Continues to Uphold High Standards of Ethics and Transparency with Adoption of Open Access Policy for Publication of Shire-Supported Research
“Shire plc (LSE: SHP, NASDAQ: SHPG), the global leader in rare diseases, has implemented a new publication policy requiring the submission of all Shire-supported research manuscripts to journals that offer public availability via open access, allowing the public to obtain free, unrestricted online access to Shire’s research promptly following publication. Shire’s open access policy, which went into effect on January 2, 2018, was announced today at the 2018 European Meeting of International Society for Medical Publication Professionals (ISMPP) taking place in London, UK, January 23-24….”
To improve open data, help publishers | News | Open Data Institute
“In our quest to help speed up and automate the process of publishing high-quality open data, we spent a few months listening to the people whose role it was to publish data, and the people creating tools for them. This is what we learned….”
Open Data: The Global Effort for Open Access to Satellite Data | The MIT Press
“Mariel Borowitz’s new book, Open Space: The Global Effort for Open Access to Environmental Satellite Data traces the history of environmental satellite data sharing policies, offering a model of data-sharing policy development, case studies and practical recommendations for increasing global data sharing. Below, she writes about why some countries have adopted an open data policy, while others have not.”
OER math curriculum from Open Up Resources aces a big test
“When EdReports reviews curricula, educators take notice. So Open Up Resources and Illustrative Mathematics — partners in developing an integrated math curriculum of open educational resources (OER) for grades 6-8 — were thrilled with the results of a review released Wednesday.”
Journal subscription expenditure of UK higher education institutions – F1000Research
Abstract: The academic libraries of higher education institutions (HEIs) pay significant amounts of money each year for access to academic journals. The amounts paid are often not transparent especially when it comes to knowing how much is paid to specific publishers. Therefore data on journal subscription expenditure were obtained for UK HEIs using a series of Freedom of Information requests. Data were obtained for 153 HEIs’ expenditure with ten publishers over a five-year period. The majority of institutions have provided figures but some are still outstanding. The data will be of interest to those who wish to understand the economics of scholarly communication and see the scale of payments flowing within the system. Further research could replicate the data collection in other jurisdictions.