Monthly Archives: March 2018

Major German Universities Cancel Elsevier Contracts | The Scientist Magazine®

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“In Germany, the fight for open access and favorable pricing for journals is getting heated. At the end of last month (June 30), four major academic institutions in Berlin announced that they would not renew their subscriptions with the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier once they end this December. Then on July 7, nine universities in Baden-Württemberg, another large German state, also declared their intention to cancel their contracts with the publisher at the end of 2017.

These institutions join around 60 others across the country that allowed their contracts to expire last year….”

What is the Future of Academic Publishing? An Interview with Gita Manaktala from MIT Press – ProfHacker – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education

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“AK: What is your press’s policy on open access publishing? Would you be open to simultaneously publishing a monograph in paperback, and a digital copy online? What sort of options for online publishing does your press offer?

GM: We have no policy but consider each project individually. In cases where it is desirable or necessary for the field, and where funding is available to support it, The MIT Press does publish open access editions simultaneously with print and paid digital editions. An example is our MacArthur Foundation supported reports series in digital media and learning. The reports in this series are downloadable in open PDF editions and simultaneously available for sale in paperback….”

Future of Publishing Group – ACM Future of Computing Academy

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“Goal 1:  Develop an evidence based understanding of current best practices in publishing across computing science.

Recent examples of reflection on peer review, which demonstrated significant variation in accept/reject decisions made by program committees (NIPS), and initiatives such as ACM Artefact Review and SIGCHI RepliCHI Award, show a desire from the research community to improve research and publication practice.  This working group will collate an evidence base from the computing science community, bringing together currently disparate efforts in this area.  Our on-going survey of practice will be publicised through a blog aimed at computing science researchers and practitioners.

Goal 2:  Re-imagine a publishing and dissemination culture that exemplifies the values of open access, open data, and rigour.

Values in publication are changing, with more support than ever for open access, open data, transparency, and accessibility.  Often, these values are also mandated by funding bodies that spend public money.  We will develop concepts for a modern approach to knowledge sharing that could support new reviewing processes, enable multimedia archives and resources, incentivise reproducibility and open practices based on empirical evidence.

Goal 3:  Advocate for change in publishing practice based on empirical evidence and ethical values.

This working group will develop channels to put these concepts into practice.  We will disseminate our results to SIG leaders and through the Publications Board to enact change in how publishing practice occurs throughout ACM….”

About the Open by Default Pilot | Open by Default

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“The Open by Default pilot demonstrates proactive release of working information which supports government transparency and accountability. This pilot will help us clear the path as we maximize the ongoing release of information across government….

Documents available through the Open by Default Pilot are snapshots of works-in-progress from Government of Canada public servants, shared for your exploration. These can include field notes, research documents, reporting documents and organizational charts from any of the four participating government departments….

Four government departments are offering documents for the pilot: Canadian Heritage, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Natural Resources Canada, and Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat….”

My take on Open Science | Open Government

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“As Canada’s Chief Science Advisor, one of my key mandate objectives is to help make government science fully available to the public.

In light of this, I led Canada’s first federal Open Science panel discussion on January 22, 2018. Webcast around the world, the interactive session drew hundreds of participants online and in-studio. Our panelists were experts from academia and government, and they provided astute insights into the benefits and challenges of Open Science, as well as what sets Canada apart….

During the panel discussion, we heard about a number of great initiatives within and outside the federal government that make science available and accessible to the public. Now it is our job to build on existing successes, work together towards an open by default model, and position Canada as a nexus of international collaboration and a global leader in Open Science….”

A few thoughts on OA Monitoring and CRISs (I) | euroCRIS | Pablo de Castro

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“In the wake of the AT2OA workshop on Open Access monitoring to be imminently held in Vienna, the post looks into recent attempts to coordinate the various national-level initiatives that are taking place in the area and suggests some possible prerequisites for this international endeavour to be able to succeed. It also argues that a successful OA monitoring in the pioneering countries should pave the way for other ones to eventually follow for their own progress assessment needs.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           A European Council statement was issued in May 2016 aiming to achieve full Open Access to research outputs by 2020. This was hailed at the time as a major step forwards in the push to widen access to the results of publicly-funded research. Nearly two years later there’s a generalised awareness of the difficulty to reach this political goal across the EU by the proposed deadline. This should however not stop the efforts to achieve further progress and to improve the way Open Access is being implemented – this 100% Open Access objective is clearly achievable in specific countries that will then to some extent provide a best practice approach.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    One of the areas where more work needs to be done is the actual monitoring of the progress in Open Access implementation. This has been on the cards for some time now, since national roadmaps with specific milestones and deadlines for reaching this 100% Open Access started to be produced quite a long time before the European Council meeting itself was held. This national-level discussions have resulted in a number of initiatives to monitor Open Access that are being implemented in different countries. The Knowledge Exchange, that brings together stakeholders like the Jisc in the UK, the DFG in Germany, SURF in the Netherlands, DEFF in Denmark or CSC in Finland, have taken a particularly relevant role in the past couple of years in ensuring that the various national-level approaches to Open Access monitoring would have the opportunity to discuss the progress with each other at a number of workshops….”

Publisher Mergers Threaten Access to Crucial Research

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“The Information Access Alliance, a coalition of six leading library organizations in North America, has published a white paper that examines the impact of mergers among scholarly and legal publishers and calls for a new standard of antitrust review of merger transactions in this industry by antitrust enforcement agencies,

http://www.informationaccess.org/WhitePaperV2Final.pdf …”

Information Access Alliance Releases White Paper and Launches Website | Association of Research Libraries® | ARL®

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“The Information Access Alliance, a coalition of six leading library organizations in North America, has published a white paper that examines the impact of mergers among scholarly and legal publishers and calls for a new standard of antitrust review of merger transactions in this industry by antitrust enforcement agencies….”

The Quiet Revolution | University of Delaware Research | Trevor A. Dawes, the May Morris Librarian and vice provost for libraries and museums at the University of Delaware

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“Trevor A. Dawes learned how libraries can change people’s lives when he was a college student. Now, he’s leading the charge to make the UD Library, Museums and Press an even greater force for good.  

Q. What led you to a career at the library? A. I never considered librarianship as a profession until I got a job working in the library as a work-study student at Columbia University. I had great mentors there who recognized my passion. James Neal, president of the American Library Association, is one of those mentors I still have today. David Roselle, president emeritus of UD and a former member of the OCLC board, also has been a great friend and supporter….”

Universities must present a united front against rising journal costs, research librarians say | University Affairs | Canada

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“The Canadian Association of Research Libraries proposes that institutions renegotiate unsustainable deals with journal publishers and transition toward open access.

For years, academic libraries have struggled to keep up with the rising costs of journal subscriptions set by a few large, international publishers. The situation “is now getting to a point of crisis,” according to the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, which recently published a briefing paper, with input from the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, to inform university administrators of the challenges and to propose solutions.

The paper notes that scholarly journal prices have risen by five to seven percent per year since 2011. This is part of a larger trend of “excessive price increases” that has been happening over the past three decades, exacerbated by the weakening of the Canadian dollar and tightening university budgets, according to CARL.

Donna Bourne-Tyson, president of CARL and university librarian at Dalhousie University, says information sharing among universities and consortia is crucial to renegotiating deals with journal publishers. “We have a pretty good sense of how each country is faring with large publishers, although we are still working against the constraints of a non-disclosure agreement in some cases,” she said. “Part of the problem is, if we aren’t able to compare apples to apples, we don’t even know what a fair price is.”…”

Trends, challenges and opportunities for LIS education: an interview with Carol Tenopir | Library Connect

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“[Q] How will open science influence LIS education?

 
[A] LIS education needs to address how open science issues, including open access and open data, affect scholarship, scholars and, ultimately, science and society. For example, there is the human side that involves helping researchers learn about and participate in the process, while recognizing their concerns. Librarians also need the technical skills to provide metadata services, manage institutional repositories and assist with research data management to further the open science practices at their institutions. Researchers are faced with funding and governmental regulations requiring deposition of data and articles in repositories. Information science professionals can help this happen by providing either repositories or links to repositories and helping researchers with the processes needed to deposit. Preservation is an important part of this as well. And the need for education about high-quality sources never goes away.”

 

WG4:Enabling technologies and infrastructures | FORCE11

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“The culture we envision for the Scholarly Commons will not just happen. We need supportive technologies and infrastructures that will enable the culture of the commons to flourish. We need to have discussions about needed technologies in a community fashion so that we can have the unity in approach and the help and support that will be needed to implement the solutions that will actually allow this culture to happen….”

 

 

Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures

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“Ultimately the question we are trying to resolve is how do we build organizations that communities trust and rely on to deliver critical infrastructures. Too often in the past we have used technical approaches, such as federation, to combat the fear that a system can be co-opted or controlled by unaccountable parties. Instead we need to consider how the community can create accountable and trustworthy organisations. Trust is built on three pillars: good governance (and therefore good intentions), capacity and resources (sustainability), and believable insurance mechanisms for when something goes wrong. These principles are an attempt to set out how these three pillars can be consistently addressed….”