Monthly Archives: January 2019

‘Bittersweet celebration’: Thousands of works enter public domain decades after originally planned – The Chronicle

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” “Not a single creative work has gone into the public domain since 1998,” said Jennifer Jenkins, clinical professor of law and director of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. “So the works that entered the public domain this year were supposed to go into the public domain in 1999.”

But they didn’t, due to an act of Congress that Jenkins attributed to “very successful lobbying and the lack of a thorough cost-benefit analysis.” …

“After 75 years, only a tiny percentage of creative works is generating commercial value whatsoever. Maybe 1 percent, maybe less,” Jenkins said.

But if you want to tap into the other 99 percent, you’re in luck, thanks to the internet. HathiTrust digital library has added more than 50,000 titles from 1923 to its online holdings.

Beyond accessing the works, the public domain also allows users to take creative liberties with them. 

“You can cut, you can paste, you can annotate, you can translate, you can do whatever you want with it,” Jenkins said….

For Jenkins, welcoming the works into the public domain also highlights what could have been 20 years ago. 

“It’s great that these works are finally entering the public domain,” she said. “But it’s a bittersweet celebration, because under rational copyright terms the public domain would be much larger, much more robust.” …”

How University of Denver Librarians used CHORUS Institution Dashboards in conjunction with their own internal data to help monitor public accessibility to the University’s publicly funded research

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“In his role as Dean of the University of Denver Libraries, Professor Levine-Clark had been grappling with a problem his librarian audience understood all too well — that monitoring public access to federally funded research had reached a critical point. By 2017, D.U.’s steadily growing research budget was approaching $30 million. Professor Levine-Clark knew that a considerable portion of this money came from various government agencies, representing a risk to future funding. He also knew that using the Library’s two and a half full-time developers to build and maintain a D.U. technical solution would take up too much of their valuable time….”

OER as an Institutional Survival Strategy | Confessions of a Community College Dean

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“Shift focus from “tuition and fees” to “total cost of attendance,” and foster the adoption of OER at scale.  Money not spent on textbooks can offset tuition increases from a student perspective, while still allowing needed operating revenue to flow to the institution.

In the right context, done well, OER represents the rare win-win.  A student facing a tuition increase of, say, a hundred dollars a semester probably breaks even with a single course moving to OER, and comes out ahead if two or more courses do.  Tuition may go up, but total cost of attendance — the meaningful number — remains flat or even drops. Even better, OER allows every single student to have the book from the first day of class, which can help with course completion and retention, and therefore enrollment.  (One of the most powerful predictors of retention is GPA. Students with GPA’s below 2.0 drop out at much higher rates than students above 2.0. Not having the book affects academic performance; presumably, having the book may affect it in a positive way.) You can maintain a sustainable funding level for the college, keep costs down for students, and improve retention rates at the same time.

In essence, it redirects revenue from publishers to colleges and students. Yes, that takes a bite out of some commercial publishers, but that’s their problem.  They should have thought of that before charging $300 for an Intro to Physics textbook, or before bundling non-transferable software codes with textbooks to short-circuit the used book market….

I ran some back-of-the-envelope numbers for Brookdale over the last few days, to see how much money OER has saved or will save students in the coming year.  Based only on courses that have already committed to adopting it, we’re looking at over a million dollars per year in textbook cost savings….”

Bibliography journals and the world of Open Access: a discussion starting from DOAJ | Salarelli | Bibliothecae.it

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Abstract:  Open access journals are playing an increasingly important role in scientific publishing. However, it is hard to find the right way in the huge amount of OA titles available on the net. In this respect DOAJ, a directory based on stringent qualitative selection criteria, represents a fundamental resource for authors, publishers and librarians. This article examines the characteristics of LIS journals listed in DOAJ, highlighting in particular their origin (born- digital or digitized) and the main topics they cover.

Is open access affordable? Why current models do not work and why we need internet?era transformation of scholarly communications – Green – 2019 – Learned Publishing – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  Progress to open access (OA) has stalled, with perhaps 20% of new papers ‘born?free’, and half of all versions of record pay?walled; why? In this paper, I review the last 12?months: librarians showing muscle in negotiations, publishers’ Read and Publish deals, and funders determined to force change with initiatives like Plan S. I conclude that these efforts will not work. For example, flipping to supply?side business models, such as article processing charges, simply flips the pay?wall to a ‘play?wall’ to the disadvantage of authors without financial support. I argue that the focus on OA makes us miss the bigger problem: today’s scholarly communications is unaffordable with today’s budgets. OA is not the problem, the publishing process is the problem. To solve it, I propose using the principles of digital transformation to reinvent publishing as a two?step process where articles are published first as preprints, and then, journal editors invite authors to submit only papers that ‘succeed’ to peer review. This would reduce costs significantly, opening a sustainable pathway for scholarly publishing and OA. The catalyst for this change is for the reputation economy to accept preprints as it does articles in minor journals today.

 

Key points

 

  • We are still failing to deliver open access (OA); around a fifth of new articles will be born free in 2018, roughly the same as in 2017.
  • Librarians, funders, and negotiators are getting tougher with publishers, but offsetting, deals, and Plan S will not deliver OA or solve the serials crisis.
  • The authors of Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin OA declarations foresaw three changes with the coming of the internet, but flipping to a barrier to publish article processing charges from a barrier to read (subscriptions) was not one of them.
  • A digital transformation of scholarly communications based on internet?era principles is needed if OA is to succeed.
  • Accepting preprints into the reputation economy could be the catalyst to solve the serials crisis, afford OA, and drive out predatory journals.
  • A model where journal editors invite submissions from authors whose preprint articles have gained attention may offer a cost?effective model for OA….”

Is Open Access Affordable? More to the point, is scholarly publishing affordable?

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“Progress to open access (OA) has stalled, with perhaps 20% of new papers ‘born?free’. After two decades trying to flip to open access, one has to ask the question: why is it taking so long?

In this paper, I review what happened in 2017-2018: librarians showing muscle in negotiations, publishers’ Read and Publish deals, and funders determined to force change with initiatives like Plan S. I conclude that these efforts will not work. I argue that the focus on OA makes us miss the bigger problem: today’s scholarly communications is too expensive for today’s budgets. So, OA is not the problem, the publishing process is the problem. To solve it, I propose using the principles of digital transformation to reinvent publishing as a two?step process where articles are published first as preprints, and then journal editors invite authors to submit only those papers that ‘succeed’ to peer review. This would reduce costs significantly, opening a sustainable pathway for scholarly publishing and OA. The catalyst for this change is for the reputation economy to accept preprints as it does articles in minor journals today….”

You are invited — Open Data Day

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“Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world. For the ninth time in history, groups from around the world will create local events on the day where they will use open data in their communities. It is an opportunity to show the benefits of open data and encourage the adoption of open data policies in government, business and civil society….”

What bioRxiv’s first 30,000 preprints reveal about biologists

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“Researchers posted more preprints to the bioRxiv server in 2018 alone than in the four previous years, according to an analysis of the 37,648 preprints posted on the site in its first 5 years.

The analysis also shows that the number of downloads from the site has topped 1 million per month. BioRxiv, which allows researchers in the life sciences to post preliminary versions of studies, turned five last November….

Preprints that are downloaded more often on bioRxiv tend to be published in journals with higher impact factors than preprints that are not downloaded as much….”

Good Practice Principles for Scholarly Communication Services

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“Science and scholarship are critical to improving our lives and solving the world’s most intractable problems. The communication of research, a vital step in the research process, should be efficient, effective and fulfill the core values of scholarship. There is growing concern about the increasing concentration of control of research communication functions in the hands of a small number of players, whose objectives do not reflect the interests of scholarship. In September 2017, COAR and SPARC published a joint statement related to this issue and pledged to collaborate with others on actions that will ensure research communication services are better aligned with the aims of research.

Accordingly, COAR and SPARC have developed seven good practice principles for scholarly communication services. The aim is to ensure that services are transparent, open, and support the aims of scholarship. These principles can be used by users/clients to make decisions about which services they will contract with, and by service providers to improve their practices and governance. These principles have drawn heavily on other existing principles and, in particular, we gratefully acknowledge the principles developed by Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2015) Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure-v1 [retrieved Nov 2018] http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859 …”

ARL-SSRC Meeting on Open Scholarship in the Social Sciences: Summary and Next Steps

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“Open scholarship and open research practices are gaining momentum in the social sciences and the academy broadly. The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) convened a meeting in December 2018 at a pivotal moment for social science leaders to discuss opportunities and commit to a shared agenda, with tangible next steps, to build on successes to date. By focusing on each participant sector’s distinctive roles, shared values, and objectives with respect to an open scholarly ecosystem, the actionoriented meeting explored how the community can increase access to social science research and ensure that scholars and scholarship thrive in an environment that is “inclusive, equitable, trustworthy, and durable.”1 In order to surface and articulate constituent values prior to the meeting, MIT Libraries visiting scholar and University of Maryland professor of sociology Philip Cohen conducted video interviews with a sample of the participants, including several who were unable to attend. Excerpts of those interviews2 and Cohen’s associated commentary was provided to the participants in advance….”

Plan U: A proposal to achieve universal access to scientific and medical research via funder preprint mandates

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“If all research funders required their grantees to post their manuscripts first on preprint servers — an approach we refer to as “Plan U” — the widespread desire to provide immediate free access to the world’s scientific output would be achieved with minimal effort and expense. As noted above, mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists have been relying on arXiv as their primary means of communication for decades. The biomedical sciences were slower to adopt preprinting, but bioRxiv is undergoing exponential growth and several million readers access articles on bioRxiv every month. Depositing preprints is thus increasingly common among scientists, and mandating it would simply accelerate adoption of a process many predict will become universal in the near future.

There is a precedent for mandating preprint deposition: since 2017, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) has mandated that all grantees deposit preprints prior to or at submission for formal publication. This requirement has been accepted by CZI-funded investigators, many of whom were already routinely depositing manuscripts on bioRxiv….”

The Cleveland Museum of Art Advances Open Access Movement | Cleveland Museum of Art

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“The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) announced today it is using Open Access to make high-resolution digital images and collections data freely available by means of the internet. Open Access means the public now has the ability to share, remix, and reuse images of as many as 30,000 CMA artworks that are in the public domain for commercial as well as scholarly and noncommercial purposes. Additional information on more than 61,000 artworks —both those in the public domain and those with copyright or other restrictions—is also now available. …”

Workshop Report: “Ethical Aspects of Open Access: A Windy Road”

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“This report on ethical aspects of open access summarises the outcomes of a workshop which was attempting to do exactly that. Throughout the various presentations, given by a variety of stakeholders, solutions from different angles are provided. We are deeply grateful to our hosts, the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, for welcoming us in Brussels, to all of our speakers, who have made invaluable contributions to the topic, to the audience for their lively and interesting participation, and to the members of the ALLEA Permanent Working Group on Science & Ethics on whose initiative this workshop came to be….”

PRESS RELEASE: Researchers Respond to Implementation of Plan S | Eurodoc

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“A joint response to the implementation guidance for Plan S has today been issued by three organisations representing early-career and senior researchers in Europe. The response by the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc), the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), and the Young Academy of Europe (YAE) offers concrete recommendations on the proposed guidance for implementing Open Access via Plan S.

Our three organisations represent a broad spectrum of researchers in Europe: Eurodoc represents 100000+ doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers from 29 national associations across Europe; MCAA has 10000+ members who are alumni fellows of the Marie Sk?odowska-Curie Actions (MSCA); YAE consists of 200+ outstanding and recognised researchers in Europe. We all strongly support the main goals of Open Science and Plan S.

The joint response builds upon previous recommendations by our organisations on the principles of Plan S and aims to ensure its realistic implementation from the perspective of European researchers. Eurodoc President Gareth O’Neill: “Plan S has shaken the academic community awake and created a lively discussion on Open Access publishing. cOAlition S has addressed some key concerns from researchers in the technical guidance but still leaves other issues open and sets too strict standards for the desired broad adoption of Plan S.” …”

Scholarly Communication Primer for Sociologists – Google Docs

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“Scholarly publishing takes place in an institutional arena that is opaque to its practitioners. As readers, writers, reviewers, and editors, we have no clear view of the system within which we’re working. Researchers starting their careers receive (if they’re lucky) folk wisdom and mythology handed down from advisor to advisee, geared more toward individual success (or survival) than toward attaining a systemic perspective. They may learn how to get their work into the right journals or books, but often don’t learn why that is the outcome that matters for their careers, how the field arrived at that decision, and what the alternatives are – or should be. Gaining a wider perspective is important both for shaping individual careers and for confronting the systematic problems we face as a community of knowledge creators and purveyors.

This primer starts from the premise that sociologists, especially those early in their careers, need to learn about the system of scholarly communication. And that sociology can help us toward that goal. Understanding the political economy of the system within which publication takes place is necessary for us to fulfill our roles as citizens of the research community, as people who play an active role in shaping the future of that system, consciously or not. Responsible citizenship requires learning about the institutional actors in the system and how they are governed, as well as who pays and who profits within the field, and who wins or loses….”