Sunday, December 21, 2008

Noted OA Advocate Harold Varmus to lead Obama's science advisory council

Noted OA advocate Harold Varmus - co-founder of Public Library of Science and former director of NIH - will lead Obama's science advisory council. Thanks to Heather Joseph via Gavin Baker on Open Access News.

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Please vote! OA proposal for Obama administration now in top 12

Forwarding from Peter Suber on Open Access News. Please register and vote for OA - it only takes a minute!

OA proposal for Obama administration now in top 12



The proposal to require OA for publicly-funded research has climbed to the 12th spot on Obama CTO, the unofficial web site collecting recommendations for the Obama administration, up one rank from last week.

The OA idea was posted to the site on November 15, and broke into the top 25 on December 4.  Keep spreading the word:  ranks are determined by user votes.

Monday, December 15, 2008

PKP Conference Call for Papers: January 15 Deadline Reminder

The Public Knowledge Project would like to remind interested participants that the call for papers deadline of January 15, 2009 for the second international PKP conference to be held from July 8 – 10, 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada is approaching. More information on conference topics and audiences is available on the conference website at:
http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/pkp2009/schedConf/cfp

Conference registration is also open on the website. The first PKP conference held in 2007 was oversubscribed so registrants are encouraged to register early for the 2009 event. Early bird rates are also available until June 8, 2009.

PKP welcomes inquiries from prospective conference sponsors. We would like to thank those who have already confirmed their sponsorship support for the 2009 conference:

Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)
Athabasca University
Canadian Library Association Open Access Interest Group
Gibson Library Connections
Simon Fraser University Library
University of British Columbia Library
University of Victoria Libraries

Heather Morrison
PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference Organizing Committee
http://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/pkp/index.php/pkp2009/pkp2009

SPARC and ACRL Announce Slate for Denver Forum on Open Educational Resources

For immediate release
December 15, 2008

For more information, contact:

Jennifer McLennan
SPARC
(202) 296-2996 ext. 121
jennifer@arl.org

Kara Malenfant
ACRL
(312) 280-2510
kmalenfant@ala.org

SPARC and ACRL Announce Slate for Denver Forum
on Open Educational Resources

Washington, DC & Chicago, IL – December 15, 2008 – Four pioneers from the Open Educational Resources community will offer their insights into “The transformative potential of Open Educational Resources (OER)” at the next SPARC-ACRL Forum, to be held during the 2009 American Library Association Midwinter Meeting in Denver, CO.

The forum, hosted by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), will introduce OER and the philosophy behind them to the wider library community, highlight examples of how different constituencies are currently advancing OER on campuses, and offer suggestions for how libraries can further engage to support OER.

OER are a logical extension of what the library community supports in the Open Access movement, and underscore the need for the larger playing field on which scholarly communication takes place to be made more equitable. OER focus not only on journals, but also on full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials or techniques that are critical in the learning environment.

Forum presenters will include:

• Richard Baraniuk, an architect of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration which aims to accelerate efforts to promote open resources, technology and teaching practices in education (http://www.capetowndeclaration.org); founder of Connexions, an environment for collaboratively developing, freely sharing, and rapidly publishing scholarly content on the Web (http://cnx.org); and Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at Rice University.

• David Wiley, also a leader of the Cape Town Declaration; Chief Openness Officer for Flat World Knowledge, a new approach to college textbooks offering rigorously reviewed textbooks online free of cost to students (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com); and Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology & Technology at Brigham Young University.

• Nicole Allen, leader of the Student PIRGs’ Make Textbooks Affordable campaign, which aims to develop a textbook market with both a vibrant used book market and a plethora of learning content that is priced and sold fairly (http://www.maketextbooksaffordable.org).

• Mark Nelson, Digital Content Strategist for the National Association of College Stores, the trade association representing the higher education retail industry. He facilitates NACS three-pronged digital course materials strategy—partnerships, enhanced trade infrastructure, and education and awareness (http://www.nacs.org).

The 18th biennial SPARC-ACRL Forum will be held from 4:00 – 5:30 PM on Saturday, January 24, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Centennial D. The ACRL Scholarly Communications Discussion Group will also host an open conversation about issues that surface at the Forum from 4:00 – 5:30 PM on Sunday, January 25 in room 403 of the Colorado Convention Center.

The Forum will be available via SPARC podcast at a later date. For more information, visit the SPARC Web site at http://www.arl.org/sparc.

##

SPARC
SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), with SPARC Europe and SPARC Japan, is an international alliance of more than 800 academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. SPARC's advocacy, educational and publisher partnership programs encourage expanded dissemination of research. SPARC is on the Web at http://www.arl.org/sparc/.

ACRL
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), represents more than 13,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. It is the only individual membership organization in North America that develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of academic and research librarians. Its initiatives enable the higher education community to understand the role that academic libraries play in the teaching, learning and research environments.

Saturday, December 13, 2008

Dramatic Growth of Open Access and Happy Holidays from OA Librarian!

An Early Edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available. In brief: while content recruitment for the IR may seem slow, on a global level the growth is phenomenal - more than 24 million publications in Scientific Commons, growing by close to 150,000 publications a week. DOAJ is now at over 3,780 journals, 780 more than last year, a growth rate of 2 titles per day. There are 59 open access mandates, 11 in process, and many more coming. 2009 is predicted to be a year of Walking the Talking, a shift in focus from debate to implementation.

Happy Holidays to everyone from the OA Librarian Team. While some of us may be blogging over the holidays, others will be enjoying a wedding and honeymoon, or just Working Less, resting up for a busy 2009!

Marunouchi winter illumination 2006-01 HAMACHI http://www.flickr.com/photos/mawari/323922061/

SCOAP3 at ALA Midwinter

Going to ALA Midwinter? Check out the SCOAP3 Information session:

Saturday, January 24, 2009
10:30 a.m.–noon
Colorado Convention Center, Room 705

Details are available on the SPARC Open Access Forum.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

SPARC Open Access Newsletter December 2008: Peter Suber's Predictions

Peter Suber has just released the December 2008 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlights this month are Peter's predictions for 2009, with a focus on the impact of the Obama administration and the world's economic crisis. There is also a section with a list of open access "cross-over" points - some, such as the majority of TA publishers allowing self-archiving, were crossed some time ago.

Monday, December 01, 2008

Directory of OA Librarian Profiles moves to Open Access Directory

The list of Librarians and Honorary OA Librarians from the OA Librarian Table of Contents is now part of a new list on the Open Access Directory, Interviews and Profiles.

Along with links to posts celebrating OA Librarian heroes, this new OAD list begins with links to Richard Poynder's celebrated interviews of various leaders of the open access movement, and links from the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) website, such as the SPARC Innovators series.

Please join us in building this list, and in so doing building or helping to build the possibility for writing the fascinating story of the open access movement. If you're researching on Open Access News and come across a link to an interesting story about an open access hero, please add it to the Open Access Directory. Or, do you know of open access hero about whom nothing has been written? If so, please consider writing something, even if it just a brief paragraph or two.

ELPUB 2009 - First Call for Papers

ELPUB 2009 - First Call for Papers
Rethinking Electronic Publishing : Innovation in Communication Paradigms and Technologies
13th International Conference on Electronic Publishing

10 - 12 June 2009, Milan, Italy
http://www.elpub.net

Electronic publishing via the Internet is continuously changing its shapes and models, challenging traditional players to adapt to new contexts. Innovative technologies enable individuals, scholars, communities and networks to establish contacts, exchange data, produce information, share knowledge. Open access sources and commercial players make contents available for a heterogeneous audience in diversity of environments, from business to private life, from educational and cultural activities to leisure time, and in a large variety of devices, from personal computers to mobile media.

New opportunities and new needs challenge us to rethink electronic publishing, to innovate communication paradigms and technologies, to make information not just a flat equivalent of a paper but a truly digital format, to allow machine processing and new services, to face the future of
mobile life. The ELPUB 2009 conference will focus on key issues in e-communications, exploring dissemination channels, business models, technologies, methods and concepts.

We welcome a wide variety of papers from members of the communities whose research and experiments are transforming the nature of electronic publishing and scholarly communications. Topics include but are not restricted to:

- New publishing models, tools, services and roles
- New scholarly constructs and discourse methods
- Innovative business models for scholarly publishing
- Mobile distribution of e-contents, e-books
- M2M publishing services
- Multilingual and multimodal interfaces
- Services and technology for specific user communities, media, and content
- Content search, analysis and retrieval
- Interoperability, scalability and middleware infrastructure to facilitate awareness and discovery
- Personalization technologies (e.g. social tagging, folksonomies, RSS)
- Semantic web, metadata, information granularity, digital objects
- Data mining, text harvesting, dynamic formatting
- Knowledge linking, discovery, presentation
- User generated contents
- Usage and citation impact
- Security, privacy and copyright issues
- Digital preservation, content authentication
- Recommendations, guidelines, interoperability standards

Author Guidelines
Contributions are invited for the following categories:
- Single paper (abstract minimum of 1,000 and maxximum of 1,500 words)
- Tutorial (abstract min. of 500 and max. of 1,000 words)
- Workshop (abstract min. of 500 and max. of 1,000 words)
- Poster (abstract max of 500 words)
- Demonstration (abstract max of 500 words)
See website for detailed author instructions: http://www.elpub.net.
Authors of accepted papers will be asked to register to the Conference and present their work.

Key Dates:
November 15th 2008: Opening date for submission of abstracts.
January 15th 2009: Deadline for submission of abstracts (in all categories).
February 23rd, 2009: Notification of acceptance of submitted proposals.
April 6th, 2009: Deadline for submission of final papers.

All submissions are subject to peer review (double-blind) and accepted by the international ELPUB Programme Committee. Accepted full papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Printed proceedings are distributed during the conference. Electronic versions of the contributions will be archived at: http://elpub.scix.net and indexed by the major
indexing agents.

ABOUT ELPUB
The ELPUB 2009 conference will keep the tradition of the previous international conferences on electronic publishing, held in the United Kingdom (in 1997 and 2001), Hungary (1998), Sweden (1999), Russia (2000), the Czech Republic (2002), Portugal (2003), Brazil (2004), Belgium (2005),
Bulgaria (2006), Austria (2007) and Canada (2008), which is to bring together researchers, lecturers, librarians, developers, business executives, entrepreneurs, managers, users and all those interested in issues regarding electronic publishing in a wide variety of contexts. These include the human, cultural, economic, social, technological, legal, commercial, and other relevant aspects that such an exciting theme encompasses.

Three distinguishing features of this conference are: broad scope of topics which creates a unique atmosphere of active exchange and learning about various aspects of scholarly communications and electronic publishing; combination of general and technical issues; and a condensed procedure of
submission, revision and publication of proceedings which guarantees presentations of most recent work. ELPUB 2009 will offer a variety of activities, such as workshops, tutorials, panel debates, poster presentations and demonstrations. Social events and sight-seeing tours will also be available to participants (at additional costs). Please see the conference web site for details.

Conference Location: Milan, Italy. Milan is the largest metropolitan area in Italy, one of the largest in Europe: 7,4 million population. It is the Italian capital of industry and business and well renowned as one of the world capitals of fashion and design. Milan is one of the oldest artistic
centres in Northern Italy and its surroundings include the beautiful Alps and the famous Garda, Maggiore and Como lakes. All this makes Milan a perfect place for sight-seeing, cultural visits and exciting shopping, not to mention enjoying Italian food and wines.

Conference Host: The State University of Milan is the third largest university in Italy after Rome and Naples. The venue is the main building, in the centre of Milan, 3 minutes on foot from the Cathedral. It was madein 1450 under Duke Francesco Sforza, who also built the famous Castle.
ELPUB 2009 is organized by CILEA, a consortium of Italian Universities founded in 1974 to promote the use of advanced ICT in academic and research environments, to support technological transfer and to manage ICT services, facilities and infrastructures. Within CILEA, the AePIC team deals with
innovative e-publishing technologies and models, promoting Open Access to knowledge through sustainable online publishing.

General Chair:
Susanna Mornati, CILEA - Inter-Academic Consortium for ICT, Segrate, Italy
mornati@cilea.it

Programme Chair: Turid Hedlund, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki,
Finland
turid.hedlund@hanken.fi

Conference information: elpub2009@elpub.net
Conference web site: http://www.elpub.net

Join the "ELPUB Electronic Publishing Conference" group on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=3D36376184362

ELPUB 2009 and OAI 6 are just 3 days in time and 400 km in space (4 hours by train, 50 minutes by plane) away from each other: take this unique chance to participate in both, enjoying two exciting scientific events in electronic publishing and scholarly communication and visiting Italy and
Switzerland.