“…Readers who visit the Free Read Press website can download and distribute books by experienced authors, many of whom are connected with USC, at no cost and with no usage restrictions. In addition to work by Dane and Rowe, who is professor of English, American studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature, contributors include Distinguished Professor of English Percival Everett, Aerol Arnold Professor Emeritus of English Jim Kincaid, and Richard Fliegel, associate dean for undergraduate programs. Unlike traditional printing houses, there is little editing, and authors can make changes to their work at any time. For readers who prefer the texture of a crisp page over the digital swipe, Free Read Press has partnered with printers to sell physical copies of each book at cost….”
Monthly Archives: February 2018
Can patents ever be as popular as papers? | Sponsored | Chemistry World
“The value and usefulness of patents should, in fact, not only demand an increase in their popularity but make them a first-choice source for those seeking chemical information….
A final, unavoidable truth is that research papers aren’t always free. When you try to access a highly relevant paper from a website, you may be greeted by a paywall.
The emergence of open access journals does present the synthetic chemist with a free method of acquiring chemical information. However, in general, medicinal chemists will not deviate from the staple intellectual diet of JACS, JOC, BMCL, Tet. Letts., Tetrahedron, Synthesis and Synlett. These are widely considered to be the best sources of the medicinal and synthetic organic chemistry but these titles are not very supportive of open access. Any serious chemical research entity will have to foot a large annual subscription bill to gain access to them.
In stark contrast, patents are freely available from the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO)….The most important thing that a research chemist needs to know is that all patents are freely accessible to the public. All 55 million of them. Clearly, this is a data repository that rivals any journal title, especially when the cost to access this wealth of chemical information is zero….”
Big Idea Famine
“Which successful company has benefited the most from basic science and technology, yet given the least back to it? The answer: Apple. It is so extreme, that the runners-up are not even close. Apple funds internal research galore, then locks it up, reportedly refusing to allow its own scientists to attend public and open research conferences. It does make some software open (sort of), but funds no accessible research to speak of that would help further the kind of basic computer science upon which others can build. You might think that such behavior is natural; how could Apple—or any company for that matter—be competitive otherwise? And yet there is a long history of precompetitive basic science that, for example, came from the likes of Bell Labs (like semi-conductors), later IBM, and more recently Microsoft. You cannot keep skimming the cream off the top, without doing some basic, open research that is widely shared. Open and shared are the key words….”
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Chronos
“What is Chronos?
Chronos is a “one stop shop” guiding and supporting researchers through the publishing process to ensure 100% compliance with funders’ mandates and along the way providing a unique new service which reduces administration time and cost and a direct link from funders to the individuals and universities they support….
It helps you select journals which are compliant, links you directly to the publisher submission systems, and then oversees your published article is afforded the correct publishing licence and is submitted to your preferred repository. At the same time, universities and funders have access to live reporting of essential publication data. …”
ORCID Mandate Trial at Springer Nature | ORCID
“Springer Nature was one of the founding members of ORCID, and since 2012 we have encouraged our authors to submit verified ORCID identifiers and we display them on published papers. This ensures authors get credit for their publications, and contributes to improving the transparency of scholarly communication by disambiguating name homonyms. To further support the uptake of ORCID, in 2017 Springer Nature engaged in a trial mandating ORCID identifiers for corresponding authors of primary research manuscripts at 46 journals across our portfolios.
The trial ran from April 27 for 6 months and the mandate was applied at different stages of the manuscript processing: 14 Nature-branded research journals required iDs at acceptance, while 10 BioMed Central (BMC) and 22 Springer journals did so at initial submission. Corresponding authors were able to share their ORCID identifier in the manuscript tracking system (via the ORCID API); without this step the submission would not proceed to the next stage….”
Guest Post: Institutional Alignment: The University Press Redux – The Scholarly Kitchen
“That question of institutional relationship may have a whole new sense of urgency for some presses depending on how the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), and its successor Research England, unpacks a key announcement made at the conference. Actually, “announcement” is overstating it: it was more an expansion of an earlier hint on page 36 (Annex C) of December 2016’s Second Consultation on the Second Research Excellence Framework, that to be eligible for the next but one Research Excellence Framework (REF), which feeds the distribution of £1.6 billion of annual quality-related university funding in the UK, all monographs will need to be available in an OA manner. That is, in just over 1000 days from now in January 2021, when the REF 2027 cycle starts, UK university academic book authors will be expected to meet some as yet unspecified OA requirements. Only time will tell the exact form of OA that will be prescribed – Annex C somewhat frustratingly states ‘We do not intend to set out any detailed open-access policy requirements for monographs in a future REF exercise in this annex,’ and there hasn’t been a great deal of public discussion with publishers since its publication, at least until HEFCE’s Head of Research Policy, Steven Hill, threw down the gauntlet at Redux. Meanwhile, the 19 ‘new university presses’ in the UK and 12 institutions considering following suit according to JISC’s Graham Stone, look distinctly like a hedge on the long-term future of scholarly communication, and those US university presses that have been reluctant to engage with OA may feel obliged to do so or risk losing UK authors….”
Taking a piece of home with you: Farming fungi in a new Azteca ant colony
Moving to a new home is usually accompanied with a long to-do list, from painting the walls to unpacking boxes. For young queen Azteca ants however, one important job is to start growing fungus.
Looking ahead: EIFL’s plans for open access
“Open scholarship is growing in importance as a way of ensuring that there is global participation in research, improved quality and efficiency of education and science, and faster economic and social progress.
Over the next two years, the EIFL Open Access Programme will support open scholarship by focusing on four key areas: open access policies, open science training for early career researchers, sustainable open access journals and repositories, and Open Educational Resources….”
How to release scholarly communication from subscriptions and copyright retention by publishers to match the EOSC developments? : OpenAIRE blog
Within the European Open Science Cloud, research results in the form of research data will be FAIR in few years. The question is how to release scholarly communication from subscriptions and copyright retention by publishers to match the EOSC developments. The University of Ljubljana suggests that as the first step the European organizations (EC, CESAER, EARTO, EUA, LERU, SE) negotiate with scientific publishers on behalf of the European research performing organizations and research funding organizations for a total transformation from subscription peer-reviewed journals to open access peer-reviewed journals. If adequate agreements are not concluded in a reasonable timeframe to match the EOSC developments, then subscription agreements with publishers should be discontinued and efforts intensified to solidify other outlets of fully open scholarly communication.
Measuring the impact of piracy and open access on the academic library services | Archive ouverte UNIGE
Authors: Muller, Floriane Sophie; Iriarte, Pablo. Presented at: 15th Interlending and Document Supply Conference (ILDS). Paris – 04-06 October – . 2017
Abstract: “The University of Geneva library has seen, like others around the world, a slight but steady decrease in its document delivery service usage for a few years now and this decline also seems to affect the use of the electronic licensed collection. Indeed, 2016 was the first year where usage of licensed journals decreased. How could it be correlated with other actual trends, such as an ever growing open access corpus and an increased visibility of shadow libraries like Sci-Hub? To what resources and services, beside the offer of the library, can our scholars turn when they need an article? In this work we try to reveal and understand the mechanisms that operate behind this gradual disengagement of scholars in our library services. Working a reverse way, we checked in WoS all the papers published in 2015 and 2016 by authors affiliated in Geneva University STM faculties (3’833 and 3’989 articles respectively). Then we extracted all the references cited in those papers (364’445 references, 80% having DOIs) and enriched them with more identifiers, bibliographic data and access information, using bibliographic APIs from CrossRef, NLM, DOAJ and oaDOI for the Open Access corpus, and open data sets from Dryad, figshare and Zenodo for Sci-Hub data. Finally we confronted this cited information to our ILL/DD orders and licensed journals database. This deep comparison gives us a much more informed insight into our scholars’ practices and allows us to measure the impact of piracy and Open Access growth on the academic library services.”
Taylor & Francis scraps extra charges after university protests | The Bookseller
“Taylor & Francis has backtracked over plans to charge extra for access to older research papers online, after more than 110 universities signed a letter of protest.
The latest renewal of UK universities’ deal with the publisher, which is yet to be signed, only covers papers published in the last 20 years, reported Times Higher Education. Research released before this would have to be bought in a separate package by university.
The 20-year span of papers included in the main deal would have moved forward in time with each year. This would mean the archive would increase and costs would escalate further as researchers attempted to access papers from 1997 onwards, described by academics as the beginning of the born digital record.
In an open letter dated 13th February, head librarians from more than 110 UK and Irish institutions, as well as representatives from Research Libraries UK, the Society of College, National and University Libraries (Sconul), and the Irish Universities Association, urged Taylor & Francis to drop the extra charges.
“A “moving wall” approach for non-subscribed titles within the journal package will increase administration activities and costs substantially for libraries and for Taylor & Francis, impose direct additional licensing costs, and create confusion and annoyance for your customers and our reader communities,” the letter reads….”
Freedom of information regulatory action policy | Our regulatory approach | About us| Office of the Australian Information Commissioner – OAIC
“The goals of taking FOI regulatory action….Regulatory action can facilitate the objects of the Act by: …influencing Australian Government open access culture.”
Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science | Science
The co-authors of this work call themselves the Open Science Collaboration.
“No single indicator sufficiently describes replication success, and the five indicators examined here are not the only ways to evaluate reproducibility. Nonetheless, collectively these results offer a clear conclusion: A large portion of replications produced weaker evidence for the original findings despite using materials provided by the original authors, review in advance for methodological fidelity, and high statistical power to detect the original effect sizes. Moreover, correlational evidence is consistent with the conclusion that variation in the strength of initial evidence (such as original P value) was more predictive of replication success than variation in the characteristics of the teams conducting the research (such as experience and expertise). The latter factors certainly can influence replication success, but they did not appear to do so here.
Reproducibility is not well understood because the incentives for individual scientists prioritize novelty over replication. Innovation is the engine of discovery and is vital for a productive, effective scientific enterprise. However, innovative ideas become old news fast. Journal reviewers and editors may dismiss a new test of a published idea as unoriginal. The claim that “we already know this” belies the uncertainty of scientific evidence. Innovation points out paths that are possible; replication points out paths that are likely; progress relies on both. Replication can increase certainty when findings are reproduced and promote innovation when they are not. This project provides accumulating evidence for many findings in psychological research and suggests that there is still more work to do to verify whether we know what we think we know….”
Elsevier Collaborates with Hypothesis to Integrate Open Annotation – Hypothesis
“Today, Elsevier and Hypothesis are announcing a collaboration to align annotation capabilities in Elsevier’s Research Products with the emerging ecosystem of interoperable clients and services for annotation based on open standards and technologies.
Hypothesis is a nonprofit dedicated to the development of open annotation. Through its new open-source technology, academics and scientists are able to make notes on documents they are reading and share those notes with others. Elsevier is a world leading information analytics business specializing in science and health.
By working together, Elsevier and Hypothesis demonstrate two important shifts in scholarly communications: first, the growing role that annotation plays within the life cycle of research and publication; and second, that data standards and open frameworks are increasingly essential to scientific collaboration and progress….”