Monthly Archives: May 2019

Wikimedia Foundation petitions the European Court of Human Rights to lift the block of Wikipedia in Turkey – Wikimedia Foundation

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“At the Wikimedia Foundation, we believe that free access to knowledge and freedom of expression are fundamental human rights. We believe that when people have good information, they can make better decisions. Free access to information creates economic opportunity and empowers people to build sustainable livelihoods. Knowledge makes our societies more informed, more connected, and more equitable.

Over the past two years, we have seen governments censor Wikipedia, including in Turkey and most recently in China, denying these rights to millions of people around the world.

Today, we proceed to the European Court of Human Rights, an international court which hears cases of human rights violations within the Council of Europe, to ask the Court to lift the more than two-year block of Wikipedia in Turkey. We are taking this action as part of our continued commitment to knowledge and freedom of expression as fundamental rights for every person….”

GOLD OPEN ACCESS 2013-2018 ARTICLES IN JOURNALS (GOA4)

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“This book is the fourth full study of serious gold open access—open access articles in open access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. This and previous editions are available as free PDF ebooks or paperbacks priced to cover production costs.

Thanks to SPARC’s continued support, I was able to update the database to include all journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals as of very early January 1, 2019 and to add 2018 counts and earlier counts as needed (and sometimes refine subject assignments).

This book follows the pattern of the previous versions but includes some notable changes for clarity and meaningfulness. These changes are discussed in Chapter 1; the most obvious ones are an increased emphasis on articles, decreased emphasis on percentages of no-fee journals, and the change from “APC” to “fee” and “free” to “no-fee.” Additionally, the OAWorld/APCLand split has been abandoned since it never caught on—and “visibility” was abandoned as a not-very-useful measure. A new Key Facts table replaces the old Journals and Articles table, providing a more useful quick look at any subset of journals.

Gold Open Access by Country 2013-2018 will appear a few weeks after this book appears. tShird book, Gold Open Access 2013-2018: Subject and Publisher Profiles, will appear a few weeks after that. Part or all of some books will appear as issues of what’s left of Cites & Insights….”

The European University Association and Science Europe Join Efforts to Improve Scholarly Research Assessment Methodologies

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“Evaluating research and assessing researchers is fundamental to the research enterprise and core to the activities of research funders and research performing organisations, as well as universities. The European University Association (EUA) and Science Europe are committed to building a strong dialogue between their members, who share the responsibility of developing and implementing more accurate, open, transparent and responsible approaches, that better reflect the evolution of research activity in the digital era.

Today, the outcomes of scholarly research are often measured through methods based on quantitative, albeit approximate, indicators such as the journal impact factor. There is a need to move away from reductionist ways of assessing research, as well as to establish systems that better assess research potential. Universities, research funders and research performing organisations are well-placed to explore new and improved research assessment approaches, while also being indispensable in turning these innovations into systemic reforms….”

Plan S delayed a year amid raft of changes

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“The controversial open-access initiative Plan S has been postponed for a year, to give publishers and research organisations longer to align with the intended systemic shift in academic publishing.

Revised implementation guidance for Plan S, published on 31 May, includes changes intended to address the main criticisms of draft guidance from 2018. Chief among these was that the original start date of 1 January 2020 was simply too soon for publishers and research organisations to prepare for the plan, which will require all researchers supported by signatory funders to make their work openly available immediately so that the maximum value can be squeezed from it.

“The launch of Plan S has triggered an unprecedented global debate about open access, and this in itself I think is a positive development,” Marc Schiltz, the co-initiator of Plan S and president of the association of research funders and performers Science Europe, told journalists ahead of the launch. “Based on the feedback…We have revised Plan S without compromising the fundamental principles.”

The new rules will apply to publications resulting from research funded under calls launched from 1 January 2021. But if the funders involved in the initiative want to, they can implement the rules earlier and apply them to existing grants.

Another significant change is that funders will have the option of letting researchers publish with a stricter licence than the plan’s highly permissive CC-BY default, in response to concerns particularly from social scientists about their work being misused. Permission to use a CC-BY-ND licence is foreseen on a case-by-case basis.

Funders will also not initially cap their payment of individual article-processing charges—the fees that publishers often charge for making articles available with open access instead of via subscription. Instead, they will focus more on transparency in publisher pricing, and could introduce a cap if they subsequently deem charges to be “unreasonable”.

Payment of APCs for hybrid journals that are moving away from offering paywalled publication alongside open access will be cut off on 31 December 2024, which is in line with the original timeframe of three years after the plan’s implementation. Support for hybrid journals that are not changing will end as soon as the funders begin implementing Plan S from 1 January 2021….”

Springer Nature comment on revised Plan S guidance

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“We are pleased to see public recognition of the role that transformative deals play in speeding up the transition to Open Access.  We already have nine such deals in place, the four most mature of which are delivering OA take up rates in those markets of over 70%….

However, the approach proposed for Green OA requiring a zero embargo and a CCBY licence on the authors accepted manuscript (AAM) is of particular concern as this could have serious unintended consequences….”

 

Free Machine Learning Repository Increases Accessibility in Genome Research | Technology Networks

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“Although the importance of machine learning methods in genome research has grown steadily in recent years, researchers have often had to resort to using obsolete software. Scientists in clinical research often did not have access to the most recent models. This will change with the new free open access repository: Kipoi.

Kipoi enables an easy exchange of machine learning models in the field of genome research. The repository was created by Julien Gagneur, Assistant Professor of Computational Biology at the TUM, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Cambridge, Stanford University, the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL)….”

bjoern.brembs.blog » Improved Plan S principles raise hope of more effective policies soon

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“Yesterday, cOAlition S published their updated principles and implementation guidelines for #PlanS, together with the rationale behind the update. This constitutes a very much welcome effort, as evidence of the increasing awareness among funders as to their potential leverage in infrastructure modernization, at a time when institutions have apparently abandoned their faculty completely.

These policies would have been a much-needed initiative about eight years ago, when there was still a problem of access to the scholarly literature, when Unpaywall didn’t exist and sci-hub had just launched. Today, we have so many ways to access our literature, that these policies seem more like beating a dead horse. From this perspective, Plan S targets the wrong actors (individuals rather than institutions) to achieve a minor goal (Open Access), when our infrastructure rewards unreliable research, costs ten times too much and lacks crucial functionalities. The three components of the scholarly infrastructure emergency (reliability, affordability and functionality; RAF) remain untouched by Plan S while a (today) minor problem receives more attention than it deserves. In a way, Plan S seems more like a band aid for a small cut on a hand while the large, malignant tumor remains untreated….”

Radical open-access plan delayed a year as revised effort seeks more support | Science | AAAS

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“Plan S, the program to crack down on scientific journals’ paywalls led by European research funders, has fleshed out and relaxed some of its rules in revised implementation guidelines published today. The update addresses many concerns raised by researchers, librarians, and scientific publishers about Plan S’s rollout, allowing more time before full, immediate open access (OA) is required and dropping the proposed cap on publishing fees that funders will pay to journals.

The architects of Plan S “have engaged in a good quality dialogue” with the people and institutions that are going to deal with the plan’s consequences, says Lidia Borrell-Damián, director for reseach and innovation at the European University Association in Brussels. As a result, the revised guidelines seem “much more nuanced and more realistic” than the initial set, says astrophysicist Luke Drury, former president of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin.

Still unclear is whether the changes will convince other funders to join the movement. And the plan’s fiercest detractors are unmoved….”

Principles and Implementation | Plan S

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“With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo….”

Wellcome updates open access policy to align with cOAlition S | Wellcome

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“Following a large consultation, we have updated our open access (OA) policy so it now aligns with Plan S. The changes will apply from 1 January 2021. …

These are the key changes to our OA policy.  

 

  • All Wellcome-funded research articles must be made freely available through PubMed Central (PMC) and Europe PMC at the time of publication. We previously allowed a six-month embargo period. This change will make sure that the peer-reviewed version is freely available to everyone at the time of publication.
  • All articles must be published under a Creative Commons attribution licence (CC-BY), unless we have agreed, as an exception, to allow publication under a CC-BY-ND licence. We previously only required a CC-BY licence when an article processing charge (APC) was paid. This change will make sure that others – including commercial entities and AI/text-data mining services – can reuse our funded research to discover new knowledge.
  • Authors or their institutions must retain copyright for their research articles and hold the rights necessary to make a version of the article immediately available under a compliant open licence.
  • We will no longer cover the cost of OA publishing in subscription journals (‘hybrid OA’), outside of a transformative arrangement. We previously supported this model, but no longer believe that it supports a transition to full OA.  
  • Where there is a significant public health benefit to preprints being shared widely and rapidly, such as a disease outbreak, these preprints must be published:
    • before peer review
    • on an approved platform that supports immediate publication of the complete manuscript
    • under a CC-BY licence.

    This is a new requirement which will make sure that important research findings are shared as soon possible and before peer review.

  • Wellcome-funded organisations must sign or publicly commit to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment(opens in a new tab) (DORA), or an equivalent. We may ask organisations to show that they’re complying with this as part of our organisation audits. This is a new requirement to encourage organisations to consider the intrinsic merit of the work when making promotion and tenure decisions, not just the title of the journal or publisher….”

Questions raised over the true burden of the ‘big deal’

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“Louisiana State University recently said that it could no longer afford its $2 million annualcomprehensive journal subscription deal with publisher Elsevier. By unbundling its “big deal” and subscribing to only the most essential journals, the institution’s administrators hope to save the library $1 million a year. LSU is far from the first institution to complain that publishers’ subscription costs are too high. The University of California system, Temple University, West Virginia University, the University of Oklahoma and Florida State University all announced this year that they are dropping big deal contracts with various publishers, including Elsevier, Wiley and Springer Nature.

But one skeptic is challenging the conventional wisdom about high subscription rates and raising doubts about big deals not being good deals.

Kent Anderson, CEO of publishing and data analytics company RedLink, has argued that the subscription model is actually “pretty efficient” for institutions….”

The rise in open-access publishing has decreased the value of subscription deals as more content is available for free, said Roger Schonfeld, director of the libraries, scholarly communication and museums program at Ithaka S+R.

Schonfeld says the main reason the value of the big deal is in decline is because of something he calls “leakage,” the availability of journal content through channels not controlled by publishers.

Piracy site Sci-Hub is one service through which content is “leaking,” he said. But there are other sources of content leaks that are not illicit. Institutional repositories, for example, are an accepted part of the scholarly publishing ecosystem.

“The big deal as a bundled subscription model is definitely under threat,” said Schonfeld. “Most of all from the fact that the libraries are less interested in just subscriptions — they want read-and-publish or publish-and-read agreements that capture the full stack of publishing services.” …”

Rationale for the Revisions Made to the Plan S Principles and Implementation Guidance | Plan S

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“The revised Plan S maintains the fundamental principles

  • No scholarly publication should be locked behind a paywall;
  • Open Access should be immediate i.e., without embargoes;
  • Full Open Access is implemented by the default use of a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY licence as per the Berlin Declaration;
  • Funders commit to support Open Access publication fees at a reasonable level;
  • Funders will not support publication in hybrid (or mirror/sister) journals unless they are part of a transformative arrangement with a clearly defined endpoint.

But a number of important changes are proposed in the implementation guidance

  • In order to provide more time for researchers and publishers to adapt to the changes under Plan S, the timeline has been extended by one year to 2021;
  • Transformative agreements will be supported until 2024;
  • More options for transitional arrangements (transformative agreements, transformative model agreements, ‘transformative journals’) are supported;
  • Greater clarity is provided about the various compliance routes: Plan S is NOT just about a publication fee model of Open Access publishing. cOAlition S supports a diversity of sustainability models for Open Access journals and platforms;
  • More emphasis is put on changing the research reward and incentive system: cOAlition S funders explicitly commit to adapt the criteria by which they value researchers and scholarly output;
  • The importance of transparency in Open Access publication fees is emphasised in order to inform the market and funders’ potential standardisation and capping of payments of such fees;
  • The technical requirements for Open Access repositories have been revised….”

Ambitious open-access Plan S delayed to let research community adapt

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“A major push by some science agencies to make the research they fund open-access on publication — Plan S — has been delayed by a year. Funders now don’t have to start implementing the initiative until 2021, the agencies announced today, to give researchers and publishers more time to adapt to the changes the bold plan requires….”

Job Description – OPEN EDUCATION COORDINATOR (191054)

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“OU Libraries seeks an innovative, collaborative, and highly motivated individual to serve as the Open Education Coordinator. Successful candidates will have a strong understanding of open educational resources (OER), open licensing, open pedagogy, and the landscape in which these open-enabled domains reside. This position develops strategies for increasing the use of OER and alternative textbook and course material solutions at the University of Oklahoma by leading, planning, implementing, and assessing OU’s Open Education programs and services in support of OU’s goal to reduce the cost of attendance for its students. Reporting to the Head of Open Initiatives and Scholarly Communication within the University Libraries, the Open Education Coordinator manages the Alternative Textbook Grant and otherwise works to increase students’ access to educational resources via creative and inclusive strategies….”

Depositing and reporting of reagents: Accelerating open and reproducible science. | The Official PLOS Blog

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“Centralized depositing of materials advances science in so many ways. It saves authors the time and burden of shipping requested materials. Researchers who request from repositories save time by not having to recreate reagents or wait months or years to receive samples. Many scientists have been on the receiving end of a request that was filled by an incorrect or degraded sample, which further delays research. Repositories like the ones recommended by PLOS handle the logistics of material requests, letting the scientists focus on what’s important: doing research….

By encouraging authors to deposit materials at the time of publication, journals will help accelerate research through timely distribution and accurate identification of reagents. Biological repositories exist to serve the scientific community. Take Addgene’s involvement in the explosive advancement of CRISPR research. Since 2012, over 8,400 CRISPR plasmids have been deposited and Addgene has distributed over 144,000 CRISPR plasmids worldwide, enabling researchers to share, modify, and improve this game-changing molecular tool. It is a prime example of the positive impact that biological repositories are making on research….”