Annual report 2021 published

The victory photo of Solar Team Twente, which won the Solar Challenge in Morocco last October, is prominently displayed on the cover of the University of Twente’s annual report this year. The victory of the solar car of the Twente student team is one of the nice highlights of the university in the year 2021, a year that was largely marked by COVID-19. The annual report was published today.

UT’s Creative Technology programme now also at VU Amsterdam

A technical bachelor programme where design and technology come together and where a vwo student is also admissible without a technical profile. As of academic year 2023-2024, this is possible at the VU Amsterdam. This week, the technical bachelor programme Creative Technology is officially approved by the Committee for Marco-efficiency in Higher Education and will also be offered at VU Amsterdam.

Harvard Lawyers Don’t Think That Piracy is Theft, Research Finds * TorrentFreak

“An in-depth study among 50 Harvard lawyers shows that downloading and streaming pirated content is widely tolerated and even supported by some. It is certainly not seen as a form of theft by these legal experts. Based on these findings, the researchers call for a paradigm shift where entertainment providers focus more on convenience, accessibility and affordability….”

Fairness in digital sharing legal professional attitudes toward digital piracy and digital commons – Ciesielska – 2022 – Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology – Wiley Online Library

Abstract:  Contrary to a popular belief of lawyers having the most strict perception of law, law professionals actually strongly skew toward more favorable views of digital sharing. According to our qualitative study, relying on in-depth interviews with 50 Harvard lawyers, digital piracy is quite acceptable. It is considered fair, especially among friends and for noncommercial purposes. We argue that this not only can indicate that the existing law is becoming outdated because of its inability to be enforced, but also that ethically it is not corresponding to what is considered fair, good service, or being societally beneficial. The common perception of relying on a fixed price for digital content is eroding. We show that on the verges of business, society, and law, there is a potential for the new paradigm of digital commons to emerge.

 

Top Harvard lawyers don’t think making and sharing unauthorised digital copies is theft – Walled Culture

“Our study reveals that law professionals, with raised professional ethics standards and expectations toward lawabiding behavior, highly above average understanding of law, and higher than average socio-economic status, do not equate digital piracy with physical theft, and are generally very tolerant or even supportive of it….

There is the shared sense that digital goods differ from physical goods, and that this constitutes a basis for new societal norms to emerge: while they ‘would never do anything illegal elsewhere’ [Interview 36], pirating digital content is treated morally differently and morally acceptable….”

Transformative? | Clarke & Esposito

“cOAlition S has released a report analyzing the first year of the Transformative Journal (TJ) program. As a reminder, TJs (not to be confused with TAs, or Transformative Agreements) are individual hybrid journals that have agreed to (try to) show an “annual increase in the proportion of open access (OA) research content of at least 5% points in absolute terms, and at least 15% in relative terms, year-on-year.” The journal must also publicly agree to flip to OA when 75% of its research content is published OA. These promises allow the hybrid journal to be considered compliant with Plan S and eligible for article processing charge (APC) funds.

 
The report shows that more than half (56%) of the 2,304 journals in the program did not meet their first-year OA targets. The coalition has extended its requirements another year, keeping all TJs in the program (although they must meet year 2 targets calculated as if the journal had met its year 1 numbers). 
 
Removing 56% of the journals would result in 1,290 fewer publication venues for Plan S-funded researchers, which is perhaps part of the reason for the extension. 

Notably, many of the TJs have failed to meet another cOAlition S requirement: a public statement showing how the presence of OA articles has reduced the subscription price of the journal. Elsevier and Springer Nature (182 and 1,714 TJs, respectively) instead have offered “a more generic, anti-double dipping statement,” which apparently has been accepted for 2021, but will not fly for 2022. This raises the question of how a publisher would practically be able to show such a metric. …”

 

Start-up Stories: Mindscape Commons — or, How VR is Helping Develop Medical Students’ Communication Skills

How virtual reality and immersive content is helping medical students gain insight into their patients’ experiences.

The post Start-up Stories: Mindscape Commons — or, How VR is Helping Develop Medical Students’ Communication Skills appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.

NISO vision interview with CORE’s Petr Knoth on the role of text mining in scholarly communication – Research

“This Vision Interview with Petr Knoth, Senior Research Fellow in Text and Data Mining at the Open University and Head of CORE (core.ac.uk), served as the opening segment of the NISO Hot Topic virtual conference, Text and Data Mining, held on May 25, 2022. Todd Carpenter spoke at length with Knoth about the many ways in which text and data mining impacts the present as well as the future. They discussed just how innovative this technology can be for the needs of researchers in the information community….”

June HELIOS Newsletter — Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship

“Open Scholarship Good Practices:

This working group will (1) curate current good practices resources that institutions can adapt and adopt, and (2) scope an on-demand open scholarship support service/National Open Office Hours service. Simultaneously, the working group will begin to curate curricula for training the next generation of researchers to engage in good open scholarship practices by design….”

Cambridge’s Transformative Journals see 70 per cent leap in research published open access | STM Publishing News

“The amount of new research published open access (OA) in Cambridge’s Transformative Journals (TJs) leaped by almost 70 per cent in 2021.

Cambridge University Press revealed the figure in an update to the cOAlition S group of funders on the progress of its TJ programme.

The update also shows that the programme exceeded its open access growth target for the year, playing an important role in Cambridge’s plans to transform the vast majority of the research publishing in its journals to OA by 2025.

Overall, the proportion of research articles published Gold OA in Cambridge journals increased to 36 per cent last year – a 47 per cent increase on 2020. The publisher expects that to have reached 50 per cent by the end of this year….”

Elsevier’s Acquisition of Interfolio: Risks and Responses – SPARC: Community Owned Infrastructure | report JUN 29, 2022

“This analysis details the potential risks posed by Elsevier’s acquisition of Interfolio, what institutions should watch for, and proactive steps institutions can take to reduce the negative impacts of consolidation….”