“In 2008, the Walters in Baltimore was awarded $307,500 from NEH to start digitizing their world-renowned collection of over 900 objects, some of which had never before been cataloged. The digitization began with The Islamic Digital Resource Project, a collection of the museum’s 128 illuminated Islamic manuscripts and leaves. A second grant of $315,000 included 105 manuscripts of German, Russian, Armenian, Byzantine, Ethiopian, Dutch, English, and Spanish origins, while a $265,000 grant covered digitization of 112 Flemish manuscripts, mainly the Books of Hours, dating between 1200 and 1600 CE….”
Monthly Archives: November 2020
Emerald Publishing joins the Initiative for Open Abstracts to promote the discovery of research | Emerald Publishing
“Emerald Publishing has joined the Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA), a cross-publisher initiative whereby scholarly publishers open the abstracts of their publications to allow for unrestricted availability of abstracts to boost the discovery of research. I4OA is also supported by a large number of research funders, libraries and library associations, infrastructure providers, and open science organisations….”
Towards societal impact through open research | Springer Nature | For Researchers | Springer Nature
“Open research is fundamentally changing the way that researchers communicate and collaborate to advance the pace and quality of discovery. New and dynamic open research-driven workflows are emerging, thus increasing the findability, accessibility, and reusability of results. Distribution channels are changing too, enabling others — from patients to businesses, to teachers and policy makers — to increasingly benefit from new and critical insights. This in turn has dramatically increased the societal impact of open research. But what remains less clear is the exact nature and scope of this wider impact as well as the societal relevance of the underpinning research….”
Gold Open Access research has greater societal impact as used more outside of academia | Corporate Affairs Homepage | Springer Nature
“What impact does open research have on society and progressing global societal challenges? The latest results of research carried out between Springer Nature, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and the Dutch University Libraries and the National Library consortium (UKB), illustrates a substantial advantage for content published via the Gold OA route where research is immediately and freely accessible.
Since the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were launched in 2015, researchers, their funders and other collaborative partnerships have sought to explore the impact and contribution of open research on SDG development. However – until now – it has been challenging to map, and therefore identify, emerging trends and best practice for the research and wider community. Through a bibliometric analysis of nearly 360,000 documents published in 2017 and a survey of nearly 6,000 readers on Springer Nature websites, the new white paper, Open for All, Exploring the Reach of Open Access Content to Non-Academic Audiences shows not only the effects of content being published OA but more importantly who that research is reaching.”
Guided Open Access | Nature Research
“Guided Open Access (OA) is a ground-breaking initiative designed to make the process of publishing open access simpler, quicker, and more efficient. Ultimately our aim is to help authors publish their work in the most suitable journal with just a single submission.
We will be trialling Guided OA as a pilot on three Nature research journals beginning January 2021: Nature Physics; Nature Genetics; and Nature Methods….”
Open Access Legislation and Regulation in the United States: Implications for Higher Education | Journal of Copyright in Education & Librarianship
Accessing quality research when not part of an academic institution can be challenging. Dating back to the 1980s, open access (OA) was a response to journal publishers who restricted access to publications by requiring a subscription and limited access to knowledge. Although the OA movement seeks to remove costly barriers to accessing research, especially when funded by state and federal governments, it remains the subject of continuous debates. After providing a brief overview of OA, this article summarizes OA statutory and regulatory developments at the federal and state levels regarding free and open access to research. It compares similarities and differences among enacted and proposed legislation and describes the advantages and disadvantages of these laws. It analyzes the effects of these laws in higher education, especially on university faculty regarding tenure and promotion decisions as well as intellectual property rights to provide recommendations and best practices regarding the future of legislation and regulation in the United States.
EPA’s scientific integrity in question over science rule | TheHill
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Publication Rate and Journal Review Time of COVID-19–Related Research – Mayo Clinic Proceedings
“The academic community has responded swiftly to the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Anecdotally, academic researchers have noticed a reduction in the amount of time journals require to review COVID-19 manuscripts. In this letter we describe the growth of this literature and the review time of COVID-19–related manuscripts….”
bjoern.brembs.blog » Are Nature’s APCs ‘outrageous’ or ‘very attractive’?
“What is clear is that these charges are definitely not a surprise. Already back in 2004, in a Parliamentary inquiry in the UK, Nature provided testimony that they would have to charge 10-30k for a Nature paper, given their revenues at the time (i.e., their subscription and advertising income). While back then, most people scoffed at the numbers and expected that no author would ever pay such fees, Nature got to work and invented a whole host of ‘lesser’ journals (i.e., Nature XYC as in “Nature Physics”, Nature Genetics” and so on), which would serve several purposes at once: They increase revenue. As hand-me-down journals they keep desperate authors attached to the Nature brand. As less selective journals, they would bring down average costs per article for the brand total, when they would need to go open access.
So this year, after open access advocates, funders and the now also pandemic-stricken public had kept demanding open access for 16 years after they had been warned, Nature was finally ready to deliver. Due to the dilution of their costs by way of the ‘lesser’ journals, they managed to keep their APCs close to their lower bounds of 2004, despite 16 years of inflation. Given that libraries have been paying these kinds of funds for Nature journals for decades, this price tag then really is a bargain, all things considered….
If you were even later to the party and are outraged now, direct your outrage not to Nature, who are only following external pressures, but to those who exert said pressures, such as open access advocates pushing for APC-OA and funders mandating authors to publish in such journals.”
Hyperland, Intermedia, and the Web That Never Was — Are.na
“Hyperland aired on the BBC a full year before the World Wide Web. It is a prophecy waylaid in time: the technology it predicts is not the Web. It’s what William Gibson might call a “stub,” evidence of a dead node in the timeline, a three-point turn where history took a pause and backed out before heading elsewhere. The cyberspace Adams imagines is not even online. Rather, it’s something that never properly came to exist: an open framework for moving through a body of knowledge, bending to the curiosities of a trailblazing traveler. …”
Open Science Training Handbook | FOSTER
“A group of fourteen authors came together in February 2018 at the TIB (German National Library of Science and Technology) in Hannover to create an open, living handbook on Open Science training. High-quality trainings are fundamental when aiming at a cultural change towards the implementation of Open Science principles. Teaching resources provide great support for Open Science instructors and trainers. The Open Science training handbook will be a key resource and a first step towards developing Open Access and Open Science curricula and andragogies. Supporting and connecting an emerging Open Science community that wishes to pass on their knowledge as multipliers, the handbook will enrich training activities and unlock the community’s full potential. The handbook is managed in this GitHub repository….”
» FAIR Convergence Sessions
“The theme of this symposium is convergence around ideas and implementations of FAIR. Throughout the week we will explore a range of activities which seem to be gaining influence, agreement and traction. A number of these will be introduced in Plenary Sessions 3: FAIR Convergence (Mon 30 Nov at 12:00-13:00 UTC). Watch the prerecorded presentations from the whole panel here.
The panel will discuss the central importance of FAIR Digital Objects (Luiz Bonino, GO FAIR); the contribution that can be made by FAIR Implementation Profiles (Erik Schultes, GO FAIR, and Barbara Magagna, Austrian Environment Agency); the role of FAIR Vocabularies and how these can be technically presented, maintained, governed and sustained (Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, STFC, and Simon Cox, CSIRO); the contribution which may be made by the approach taken by DDI-CDI to describing individual variable and tracking provenance (Arofan Gregory, Standards Consultant); and the fundamental need for interoperable units of measure (Bob Hanisch, NIST)….”
Indigenous data sovereignties and data sharing in biological anthropology – Tsosie – – American Journal of Physical Anthropology – Wiley Online Library
“The presumed decoloniality of increasing data access and data sharing is neither self-evident nor universal.”
The ethics of data sharing and biobanking in health research
Abstract: The importance of data sharing and biobanking are increasingly being recognised in global health research. Such practices are perceived to have the potential to promote science by maximising the utility of data and samples. However, they also raise ethical challenges which can be exacerbated by existing disparities in power, infrastructure and capacity. The Global Forum on Bioethics in Research (GFBR) convened in Stellenbosch, South Africa in November 2018, to explore the ethics of data sharing and biobanking in health research. Ninety-five participants from 35 countries drew on case studies and their experiences with sharing in their discussion of issues relating to respecting research participants and communities, promoting equitable sharing, and international and national approaches to governing data sharing and biobanking. In this editorial we will briefly review insights relating to each of these three themes.
Internet Archive lawyer Lila Bailey leads a new phase of the battle over copyright | Fortune
“The case involves the Internet Archive’s decision to create a temporary “National Emergency Library” at the height of the pandemic’s first wave—a service that expanded how many e-books clients could borrow simultaneously. The publishing industry sued, saying the non-profit was handing out digital books without permission.
The Internet Archive case has received national attention—a widely shared article in The Nation described it as “publishers taking the Internet to court”—and has drawn attention to the reality that, as library branches close over COVID concerns, patrons must often wait 10 weeks or more to borrow the digital version of a best-seller….”