Monthly Archives: October 2019

OpenGLAM

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“The OpenGLAM initiative is currently working on a modern set of principles and values on Open Access for Cultural Heritage. We expect to draft a Declaration that outlines the rationales behind open access policy adoptions, acknowledges different cultural backgrounds, and addresses ethical and privacy considerations to help promote the adoption of open policies by a broader set of organizations around the world.

By February 2020 we will release a green paper focusing on the legal foundations of open access for cultural heritage, and examining some of the broader questions around copyright and open licensing, traditional knowledge, ethical and privacy concerns, and technical standards for open access. Following a consultation period, we plan to publish a final version of that paper and make the official launch of the Declaration on Open Access for Cultural Heritage by 2020. If you would like to get involved, please write to us at info [at] openglam.org….”

Job Application for Senior Program Manager, GLAM and Culture at Wikimedia Foundation

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“The Wikimedia Foundation is seeking a Senior Program Manager, GLAM and Culture, to advance the Wikimedia movement’s vision of every human being able to freely share in the sum of all knowledge; as well as its strategic direction, which states that by 2030, Wikimedia will become the essential infrastructure of the ecosystem of free knowledge, and anyone who shares our vision will be able to join us….”

Hungary and Elsevier agree pilot national license for research access and Open Access publishing

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“Hungarian Electronic Information Service National Programme (EISZ) and Elsevier, a global information analytics business specializing in science and health, today agreed a new pilot license for research access and Open Access publishing in Hungary.

The three-year agreement means researchers affiliated to EISZ consortium member institutions across Hungary have access to 16 million publications from over 2,500 journals published by Elsevier and its society partners on ScienceDirect, Elsevier’s leading platform of peer-reviewed scholarly literature. The agreement also facilitates a cost-neutral transition to Open Access and enables Hungarian researchers from EISZ affiliated institutions to publish their research Open Access without researchers having to pay an APC. More information on the Open Access Pilot can be found here….”

Daring to dream of Universal Open Access

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Abstract:  This talk will discuss recent developments with an amalgamated model for open access based on library and funder support that holds out some promise for addressing the current need for universal open access. The talk will consider the calculus underlying the model; in relation to precursors (e.g., SCOAP3, OLH, Knowledge Unlatched, Gates’ Chronos) and its advantages of the model for researchers, libraries, funders, societies, and publishers. The talk will also take into account the global dimensions of such a model; it will report on current initiatives in implementing it in the social sciences while considering its implications for the sciences.

 

The Internet Archive’s massive repository of scanned books will help Wikipedia fight the disinformation wars / Boing Boing

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“For years, the Internet Archive has been acquiring books (their goal is every book ever published) and warehousing them and scanning them. Now, these books are being “woven into Wikipedia” with a new tool that automatically links every Wikipedia citation to a print source to the exact page and passage from the book itself, which can be read on the Internet Archive.

 

Citations to print materials are both a huge potential strength and weakness for Wikipedia: a strength because there’s so much high-quality, authoritative information in print; and a weakness because people can make up (or discount) print citations and bamboozle other Wikipedians who can’t see the books in question to debate their content, context, or whether they should be included at all….”

FAIRshake: Toolkit to Evaluate the FAIRness of Research Digital Resources

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Abstract:  As more digital resources are produced by the research community, it is becoming increasingly important to harmonize and organize them for synergistic utilization. The findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) guiding principles have prompted many stakeholders to consider strategies for tackling this challenge. The FAIRshake toolkit was developed to enable the establishment of community-driven FAIR metrics and rubrics paired with manual and automated FAIR assessments. FAIR assessments are visualized as an insignia that can be embedded within digital-resources-hosting websites. Using FAIRshake, a variety of biomedical digital resources were manually and automatically evaluated for their level of FAIRness.

 

In the Library’s Web Archives: Dig If You Will the Pictures | The Signal

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“The Digital Content Management section has been working on a project to extract and make available sets of files from the Library’s significant Web Archives holdings. This is another step to explore the Web Archives and make them more widely accessible and usable. Our aim in creating these sets is to identify reusable, “real world” content in the Library’s digital collections, which we can provide for public access. The outcome of the project will be a series of datasets, each containing 1,000 files of related media types selected from .gov domains. We will announce and explore these datasets here on The Signal, and the data will be made available through LC Labs. Although we invite usage and interest from a wide range of digital enthusiasts, we are particularly hoping to interest practitioners and scholars working on digital preservation education and digital scholarship projects….”

UH Press releases 90 classic books as online open-access titles | University of Hawai?i System News

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“University of Hawai?i Press announced Hawai?i Open Books, a collection of 90 newly digitized and freely available academic titles from UH Press’s backlist, many of which have been out of print or unavailable for years.

Titles include seminal works of scholarship in Hawaiian, Pacific and Asian studies, as well as grammars, dictionaries and other resources for languages from throughout the Asia-Pacific region. The works are accessible from various online platforms, including UH’s institutional repository ScholarSpace, a newly created Hawai?i Open Books website, JSTOR and Project MUSE.

Hawai?i Open Books is the culmination of more than two years of work funded by two generous grants totaling $190,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Humanities Open Book program….”

MoRRI – Monitoring the Evolution and Benefits of Responsible Research and Innovation – Technopolis Group

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“MoRRI’s main objective is “to provide scientific evidence, data, analysis and policy intelligence to support directly Directorate General for Research and Innovation (DG-RTD) research funding activities and policy-making activities in relation with Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI)”.

RRI is a concept that is recently gaining momentum but it still lacks agreement on its definition, content and details. Hence, part of this study is to determine the scope and the benefits or RRI for Europe by:

Operationalising the concept;
Developing a sound conceptual framework and associated methodology, while at the same time;
Testing the potential of this methodology to allow monitoring the current state and short-term evolution of Responsible Research and Innovation and its socio-economic and democratic impacts….”

Diskussionspapier: Neue Indikatoren für Open Science und Open Innovation | ZBW MediaTalk

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From Google’s English: “Established indicators for research and innovation processes have so far insufficiently covered open science and open innovation. As a result, their chances and risks often remain in the fog. A new discussion paper therefore makes proposals for the extension of existing and the development of new indicators. We looked at possible innovations in the field of open science….”

Tailor-ED Raises $1.6 Million to Bring Differentiated OER to More Students | EdSurge News

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“Tailor-ED graduated from the Y Combinator startup accelerator earlier this year. At that time, the company only offered math materials for grades three to six. Now, Tailor-ED covers K-8 math. It’s used in more than 1,500 schools worldwide, with 70 schools that pay for subscriptions. Most of those paying schools are international.

CEO and co-founder Maayan Yavne says she wants to add English language arts materials next and continue to build partnerships with content publishers….”

PeerJ Preprints Succumbs

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“The number and range of preprint initiatives has been expanding for a few years now, with bioRxiv, medRxiv, chemRxiv, and socRxiv among a much longer list, some quite obscure.

The recent announcement that PeerJ Preprints won’t be posting any more preprints after the end of this month may represent the beginning of “preprint deflation,” the first obvious retreat in the preprint realm, a world that has been haunted by questions of financial viability since Day 1.

Even long-standing preprint servers like arXiv have wrestled with the expense and work involved in posting free drafts of papers. The systems, people, and bandwidth needed to support technology platforms longterm aren’t cheap. Preprint platforms are no exception. This year, arXiv moved from one part of Cornell to another, in what looked like an attempt to shuffle overheads out of budgetary approval scrutiny for a time — after all, as I’ve calculated, if you include these, arXiv is hemorrhaging money every year, and nobody seems to want to confront that possibility.

Other indications of preprint deflation are observable in the analyses I’ve done around bioRxiv and socRxiv. The goals of these platforms — to encourage collaboration and pre-publication review — aren’t shared by most users, with authors increasingly using the platforms as marketing adjuncts or to meet Green OA requirements after successful submission to a journal….”

Tackling global biodiversity loss – An Interview with Biodiversity Conservation Call for Papers Guest Editor

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  Human-induced environmental changes constitute the greatest current threat to biodiversity, comparable with other major extinction events observed in the Earth’s history. Biodiversity is the backbone of ecosystems and maintaining diversity through conservation is important

OPEN SCHOLARSHIP position statement from the Biochemical Society and Portland Press

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“Currently: ? We publish two fully-OA journals, and one of these is currently sustained by article publishing charges (APC) at an article-by-article level; in addition, we publish five hybrid journals where authors may opt to pay an APC to have their article published OA. ? For titles on the hybrid model we avoid ‘double dipping’ (charging twice for the same articles) through two routes: APCs are discounted for corresponding authors based at subscribing institutions; in addition, subscription prices are set, each year, based on the number of paywalled articles in the preceding years to account for OA content published in hybrid titles. ? There are a variety of mechanisms employed by different publishers to avoid double-dipping. We are supportive of efforts to standardize and agree common principles around transparent pricing of hybrid journals that demonstrate, objectively, the avoidance of double dipping….

Looking ahead: ? We are seeking to transition our hybrid journals to full-OA in a way that supports researchers and keeps the Society financially viable. ? We strongly believe that the ability to publish research should not be linked to individual researchers’ ability to pay; we are enthusiastic about all opportunities to remove author-facing invoices from OA publishing. To enable a transition away from paywalls, we seek to offer as much APC-free OA as possible that will be supported though continuing and new partnerships with institutions, consortia and funders….

Weaving Books into the Web—Starting with Wikipedia | Internet Archive Blogs

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“The Internet Archive has transformed 130,000 references to books in Wikipedia into live links to 50,000 digitized Internet Archive books in several Wikipedia language editions including English, Greek, and Arabic. And we are just getting started. By working with Wikipedia communities and scanning more books, both users and robots will link many more book references directly into Internet Archive books. In these cases, diving deeper into a subject will be a single click….

You can help accelerate these efforts by sponsoring books or funding the effort. It costs the Internet Archive about $20 to digitize and preserve a physical book in order to bring it to Internet readers. The goal is to bring another 4 million important books online over the next several years. …”