Monthly Archives: February 2021

Open Access and Academic Freedom: Teasing Out Some Important Nuances – Anderson – – Development and Change – Wiley Online Library

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Abstract:  Discussion of the ways in which open access (OA) and academic freedom interact is fraught for a number of reasons, not least of which is the unwillingness of some participants in the discussion to acknowledge that OA might have any implications for academic freedom at all. Thus, any treatment of such implications must begin with foundational questions. Most basic among them are: first, what do we mean by ‘open access’; second, what do we mean by ‘academic freedom’? The answers to these questions are not as obvious as one might expect (or hope), but when they are answered it becomes much easier to address a third, also very important, question: in what ways might OA and academic freedom interact? With every new OA mandate imposed by a government agency, institution of higher education, or funding organization, careful analysis of this issue becomes more urgent. This article attempts to sort out some of these issues, controversies and confusions.

 

A reproducible picture of open access… | Wellcome Open Research

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Abstract:  Background: Open data on the locations and services provided by health facilities have, in some countries, allowed the development of software tools contributing to COVID-19 response. The UN and WHO encourage countries to make health facility location data open, to encourage use and improvement. We provide a summary of open access health facility location data in Africa using re-useable R code. We aim to support data analysts developing software tools to address COVID-19 response in individual countries. In Africa there are currently three main sources of such open data; 1) direct from national ministries of health, 2) a database for sub-Saharan Africa collated and published by a team from KEMRI-Wellcome Trust Research Programme and now hosted by WHO, and 3) The Global Healthsites Mapping Project in collaboration with OpenStreetMap.     

Methods: We searched for and documented official national facility location data that were openly available. We developed re-useable open-source R code to summarise and visualise facility location data by country from the three sources. This re-useable code is used to provide a web user interface allowing data exploration through maps and plots of facility type.

Results: Out of 52 African countries, seven currently provide an official open facility list that can be downloaded and analysed reproducibly. Considering all three sources, there are over 185,000 health facility locations available for Africa. However, there are differences and overlaps between sources and a lack of data on capacities and service provision.

Conclusions: These summaries and software tools can be used to encourage greater use of existing health facility location data, incentivise further improvements in the provision of those data by national suppliers, and encourage collaboration within wider data communities. The tools are a part of the afrimapr project, actively developing R building blocks to facilitate the use of health data in Africa.

Google Books: how to get the full text of public domain books

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“While Google Books has digitised millions of books all over the world with the help of thousands of libraries as part of the Library Project, not all of those digitised books are freely available on the website. Books that are still in copyright cannot be consulted in full-text, even though you might see a snippet preview.

Sometimes, however, Google has not assessed the copyright correctly and the book is not publicly available, although Google has scanned it and it is out-of-copyright. That is the case with all books published before 1900 and some books published between 1900 and 1930.

When you know that Google Books has a scan of a book available, and you believe that the book should be in the public domain, you can ask Google to re-evaluate the copyright situation of that publication. The Google Books team will give you an answer in a couple of days….”

Open access research

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“By making research freely available to anyone who needs it, open access (OA) publishing allows wider knowledge dissemination, removes reading restrictions in its gold form, and offers more opportunities for researchers to improve the visibility of their work and build a strong reputation.

Because of this, science can progress faster. This is good for everyone.

An open future calls.

How will you answer?…”

Elizabeth German Joins The Open Library Foundation as Senior Program Officer

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“The Open Library Foundation has named Elizabeth German to the role of Senior Program Officer. German is an associate professor and the service design librarian at Texas A&M University and will work with the Foundation’s Board to support Foundation operations and strategic initiatives.

The Open Library Foundation enables the development, accessibility and sustainability of open source software and communities for and by libraries. The Foundation also looks to increase awareness of open source initiatives and advocate for the benefits of open source in the library space….”

Elizabeth German Joins The Open Library Foundation as Senior Program Officer

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“The Open Library Foundation has named Elizabeth German to the role of Senior Program Officer. German is an associate professor and the service design librarian at Texas A&M University and will work with the Foundation’s Board to support Foundation operations and strategic initiatives.

The Open Library Foundation enables the development, accessibility and sustainability of open source software and communities for and by libraries. The Foundation also looks to increase awareness of open source initiatives and advocate for the benefits of open source in the library space….”

Why Is Access to the Scholarly Journal Literature So Expensive?

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“For more than 30 years the spiraling costs of scholarly journal subscriptions, often called the “serials crisis,” have been a hotly debated topic. Academics and librarians have pointed out the high profit levels of the major commercial publishers, despite that the content they sell is provided by unpaid authors and reviewers. The publishers then resell it to the universities of these same authors and reviewers. Publishers have attempted to justify their prices by cost increases, their investments in information technology, and the value they add. A useful framework for understanding the situation is Michael Porter’s five forces model for explaining the competitive conditions in an industry. Despite claims to the contrary, the degree of market concentration in scholarly publishing is not higher than that in many other industries, and it is not the main cause of the problem. But because the big deals of different publishers are complements rather than substitutes, the leading companies essentially do not compete for customers, in contrast to other industries, such as mobile phones or automobiles. The high barriers to new entrants, partly due to journal ranking lists and impact factors, as well as the low bargaining power of suppliers and customers, explain why this industry has been so well shielded from the disruptive forces of the Internet. The protected competitive position and high profitability are also major reasons why the big subscription publishers have been slow to adopt the open access business model….”

Open Access and Art History in the 21st Century: The Case for Open GLAM – CODART CODART

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“Almost 1000 cultural heritage institutions around the world1 have published some or all of their online collections for free reuse, modification and sharing. They are part of the ‘Open GLAM’ (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) movement that views liberal access2 and reuse (where culturally appropriate3) of digital collections as fundamental to education, research and public engagement.

A key principle of Open GLAM is that works in the public domain – in which copyright has expired or never existed – should remain in the public domain once digitized. However, many museums do assert copyright in digital reproductions of public domain artworks. How legally legitimate is this? Although the answer is not straightforward (the relevant copyright law is complex and lacks international harmonization), in the European Union the standard of originality for a new copyright requires that the work be the ‘author’s own intellectual creation’….”

Visualizing the research ecosystem via Wikidata and Scholia | Zenodo

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“Research takes place in a sociotechnical ecosystem that connects researchers with the objects of study and the natural and cultural worlds around them.

Wikidata is a community-curated open knowledge base in which concepts covered in any Wikipedia — and beyond — can be described and annotated collaboratively.

This session is devoted to demoing Scholia, an open-source tool to visualize the global research ecosystem based on information in Wikidata about research fields, researchers, institutions, funders, databases, locations, publications, methodologies and related concepts….”

Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources – American University Washington College of Law

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“We are pleased to announce the release of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Open Educational Resources. This document is intended to support authors, teachers, professors, librarians, and all open educators in evaluating when and how they can incorporate third party copyright materials into Open Educational Resources to meet their pedagogical goals….

Webinar:
Wednesday, February 17, 2021 | 3:00pm-4:30pm ET (12 pm PT)
Registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4oHpIFDnRoaJzOq8R6_fwg …”

To Prevent the Resurgence of the Pandemic, Can We Talk About Open-Source Research? – Center for Economic and Policy Research

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“But suppose Pfizer, Moderna, and the rest insist they are not selling, or at least not at a reasonable price. Then we go route two. We offer big bucks directly to the people who have this knowledge. Suppose we offer $5-$10 million to key engineers for a couple of months to work with engineers around the world. Yeah, Pfizer and Moderna can sue them. We’ll pick up the tab for their legal fees and any money they could lose in settlements. The sums involved are trivial relative to lives that could be saved and the damage prevented by more rapid diffusion of the vaccines.

If these companies actually pursued lawsuits it would also be a great teaching opportunity. It would show the world how single-mindedly these companies pursue profits and how incredibly corrupting the current system of patent monopoly financing is.

Okay, but let’s say we can overcome the obstacles and get the knowledge from these companies freely dispensed around the world. We still have the claim that there are physical limits to how rapidly vaccines can be produced.

There are two points here. First, while there clearly are limits, we can still move more quickly in the relevant time frame. No one had vaccines in March of 2019, but the leading producers had the capacity to produce tens of millions of doses a month by November, a period of less than eight months….”

Access Denied: Federal Website Governance Under the Trump Administration

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“The Trump administration pushed the boundaries of rules, guidelines, and norms in most areas of governance. Manipulating public information was a key tactic, which included dramatic and damaging changes to federal agency websites relating to environmental regulations. These changes led the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI) to identify acute gaps in federal website governance and develop recommendations for reforms under the Biden administration and beyond. Websites are the primary means by which federal environmental agencies communicate with the public and serve as resources paid for by American tax dollars to benefit the public. Changes to language, content, or access to federal websites can directly affect public knowledge of and participation in environmental decision-making. While considerable guidance exists for the delivery of federal digital services, there is scant policy focused on the web content provided by federal agencies, and born-digital resources are by and large excluded from record-keeping laws. There are no repercussions, for example, for agencies stripping websites that contain inconvenient factual information for a given political agenda….”