Freie Universität Berlin was the first university in Berlin to adopt an open access strategy for free access to scientific findings. It is intended to give all members of the university an opportunity to anchor open access publication in their day-to-day research. The new policy takes into account the publication cultures of the individual subjects. It aims to ensure that scholarly and scientific standards are met and high-quality publications are published.
Monthly Archives: February 2018
IOP launches trio of interdisciplinary open access journals | Research Information
“IOP Publishing has launched three high-impact open access journals. The scope of these journals will focus on research covering three aspects of the physical world that will shape the future of our planet: energy, materials and light.”
Hawaii Legislators Abandon Plan for Faculty Mandate on OER
“Legislators rewrite bill that originally required use of freely accessible educational materials, amid criticism that legislation would have infringed academic freedom and harmed, not helped, the open-access movement.”
Open-Access Publishing Framework Agreement – For Austrian Research Performing and Research Funding Institutions | Zenodo
Frontiers and FWF not only signed an offsetting agreement, they made the agreement (contract) public.
GitHub – ryregier/APCDOI: Enter a list of DOIs and this python program will determine how many are Gold or Hybrid open access and how much was spent on the article processing charge (APC) for these Gold and Hybrid articles.
“Enter a list of DOIs and this python program will determine how many are Gold or Hybrid open access and how much was spent on the article processing charge (APC) for these Gold and Hybrid articles.”
2018 SPARC Program Plan – SPARC
“Our leadership work will be concentrated in three program areas: Open Access, Open Data, and Open Education. Additionally, to maximize progress, SPARC will support efforts that champion intellectual freedom, a free and open Internet, privacy, confidentiality, and equitable copyright and intellectual property policies.”
Towards our next ten years
0000-0002-6370-4254 Over the course of the past year we have celebrated PLOS ONE’s 10 year anniversary. It was exciting to use this opportunity to look back at our accomplishments so far and thank and celebrate
Peter Suber reports how Openness advances | petermr’s blog
“Peter Suber is one of my role models as one of the clearest and therefore most compelling advocate of Openness. He collects almost comprehensive information if what is happening and reports it in a compellingly simple clear manner. He is one of those people whose prose is a joy to read. Where others’ thinking is muddled (or deliberately obfuscated) he cuts it apart clinically and compellingly….
He’s written a review of 2010 http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/01-02-11.htm#2010, (long but compelling) and there are countless examples of organizations and people bringing in Open ideas, requirements, practices, content, tools. The involvement of governments is particularly welcome. This is mainly an account of the positive, though he also notes neutral (e.g. hybrid OA is stagnant at best [PMR – I never liked it anyway]) and some retrograde practices or vacillation of some organizations.
Without a denominator (or the true-negatives) it’s difficult to give absolute numbers to the growth in OA. For example how many governments did nothing. How many Universities don’t care about Openness (at least enough to spend money). And IMO Universities are the primary problem in much of this – publishers have built a 10-billion dollar market on the apathy of vice-chancellors and it’s now going to be hard to pull it back….”
Valid reasons not to participate in open science practices
“There are no valid reasons.”
Meeting report: Visions and versions and the future of peer review | Inside eLife | eLife
“The F1000 platform is also being used by funders (Wellcome, Gates and others), which will no doubt boost the general level of comfort with this approach. Two key questions are whether single monolithic platforms are better suited to research communication than a more distributed system of interoperable services and whether the foundational infrastructure supporting research communication should itself be open (unlike the technology underpinning F1000)….
“For the research community, the strongest message I sensed was enthusiasm for early-career researchers to review preprints and share their critiques with the authors. If that takes hold, a massive community of talented reviewers could emerge habituated in the open sharing of their opinions and ideas – a tantalising prospect for those who hope for a more transparent and collaborative scientific culture….”
Instagram is killing the way we experience art in museums — Quartzy
More and more art museums are letting patrons photograph the art.
“This is a far cry from the time when art museums banned or just barely tolerated photo-takers. Many restricted cameras to shield light-sensitive materials or protect the copyright of the owners who loaned works to an exhibition. “You are fighting an uphill battle if you restrict,” Nina Simon author of The Participatory Museum, told ArtNews in 2013. It was around that time when Instagram began to permeate every aspect of modern life, and images of artfully arranged food, pets, and kids—as well as actual art—flooded social media feeds.
Curators have come to embrace social media as a way for visitors to engage with art, explains Dr Kylie Budge, a senior research fellow at Western Sydney University. “It tips the balance of power and makes the experience more democratic on some levels,” she says. “There’s an element of co-creation involved. With platforms like Instagram available, the person experiencing the art now has the capacity to respond and create something instantly that communicates their reaction.” …”
How EHRs [Electronic Health Records] Facilitate Clinical Research
“The data in electronic health records overlaps with the types of data collected for clinical research. This provides opportunities for data sharing and reuse without reentry or transcription, thus supporting open science and learning health systems. Building better bridges between research and health care offers limitless possibilities for facilitating research and improving health care delivery….”
Blockchain offers a route to a true scholarly commons
“Elsevier’s acquisition of these open services highlights the prospect that companies will come to control the global scientific infrastructure. Even though the openness of the digital services and resources used by research is more and more taken for granted, the traditional web is not a public domain….
But there is another way, in the form of the decentralised web. Here, there are no central repositories; instead infrastructure is decentralised and information is distributed between countless different computers, accessible to all, in what are called peer-to-peer networks.
One example of this technology is BitTorrent. This allows the rapid transmission of large files by dividing them into chunks and allowing clients to load objects piece by piece, while at the same time making the already loaded pieces available to all other clients. Various initiatives, such as decentralised archive transport (DAT) and the interplanetary file system (IPFS), have adapted bit torrent for information sharing, replacing a centralised infrastructure of servers and clients with a decentralised network. In the decentralised web, trust is created not through trade names or URLs, but through cryptography….
Hosting content is no longer a special role that requires trustworthy institutions, service contracts and plausible business models. Rather, the objects are in the public domain, and their dissemination requires only the open protocols of the decentralised web. This paves the way for new business models, by opening up another area of the internet to the “permissionless innovation” that drove its development.
The benefits of such approaches for making digital objects available for research, teaching and digital cultural heritage are obvious. As well as technical improvements in the transmission and storage of information, the current situation of privileged players controlling access to content would be replaced with a true scholarly commons, distributed between many computer systems….
The impetus for the second step—complete disintermediation, doing away with centralised publishers in the same way that bitcoin renders banks unnecessary— is more likely to come from start-ups than incumbents. There are already decentralised peer-to-peer scholarly publishing platforms, for example Aletheia and Pluto. Decentralised social networking platforms, such as the Akasha Project, are also in development….”
Converting the Literature of a Scientific Field to Open Access Through Global Collaboration: the Experience of SCOAP3 in Particle Physics[v1] | Preprints
Kohls, A.; Mele, S. Converting the Literature of a Scientific Field to Open Access Through Global Collaboration: the Experience of SCOAP3 in Particle Physics. Preprints 2018
“Abstract: Gigantic particle accelerators, incredibly complex detectors, an antimatter factory and the discovery of the Higgs boson – this is part of what makes CERN famous. Only a few know that CERN also hosts the world largest Open Access initiative: SCOAP3. The Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3) started operation in 2014 and has since supported the publication of 19,000 Open Access articles in the field of particle physics, at no direct cost, nor burden, for individual authors worldwide. SCOAP3 is made possible by a 3,000-institute strong partnership, where libraries re-direct funds previously used for subscriptions to ’flip’ articles to ’gold Open Access’. With its recent expansion, the initiative now covers about 90% of the journal literature of the field. This article describes the economic principles of SCOAP3, the collaborative approach of the partnership, and finally summarizes financial results after four years of successful operation.”
Golden Rules for Repository Managers | BASE – Bielefeld Academic Search Engine | FAQ
“We are indexing all kinds of academically relevant resources – journals, institutional repositories, digital collections etc. – which provide an OAI interface and use OAI-PMH for providing their contents (learn more about OAI at the Open Archives Initiative or Wikipedia). In case your source does not provide an OAI interface, upload your documents to aggregators like DataCite or Zenodo, to subject repositories like RePEC or add your open access journal to DOAJ. We are indexing these sources regularly.
However, the best way to get your documents indexed by BASE is to provide an OAI interface. We have compiled some golden rules that might be helpful to optimize your OAI interface. If your OAI interface complies with these rules, we can assure fast and smooth indexing of your source. Data from your source will be presented completely and in the best possible way.
You can check some of the following items using our OAI-PMH validator OVAL….”