Thursday, December 23, 2010

ELPUB 2011: Call for submissions

The deadline for proposals for the ELPUB 2011 conference, the 15th International Conference on Electronic Publishing to be held July 11-15, Istanbul, Turkey, is coming up on January 14. The theme for this year's conference is Digital Publishing and Mobile Technologies.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Open Access Week dates: 2011 - 2015

Open Access Week 2011 will take place all over the world between October 24 and 30. In future, Open Access Week will be the last *full* week of October:

2011: Oct 24 - 30
2012: Oct 22 - 28
2013: Oct 21 - 27
2014: Oct 20 - 26
2015: Oct 19 - 25

Details on the program for 2011 will be announced in the New Year.

Thanks to:

Jennifer McLennan
Program Director, Open Access Week

Thursday, December 02, 2010

December 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the December 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlights: 11th hour for SCOAP3 and The US Elections and Open Access.

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

November 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the November 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlighted this month: politically selective calls for open access.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

http://www.arl.org/news/pr/iscwebinar-04oct10.shtml

Register by Nov. 10 for next (and last) ARL ACRL Institute for Scholarly Communication Webinar with Joyce Ogburn & Heather Morrison on the topic, The Future is Now!

Friday, October 15, 2010

Happy Open Access Week!

Happy Open Access Week from and to all OA Librarians! Still scrambling to finalize plans? Don't forget to check out the OA Week Ning, or check the Open Access Directory page to see what others or doing - or add a link to your own event!

Tuesday, October 05, 2010

SPARC Open Access Week Webcast with Nobel prize winner

Free webcast, to schedule with your OA Week activities at your convenience, will be available under embargo as of October 14 - for details, see Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)

Saturday, October 02, 2010

October 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the October 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter (Peter's 150th). Highlighted this month: Peter's own experiences with self-archiving.

Monday, September 27, 2010

OASPA 2010 Videos Available

Videos of the presentations at the 2nd annual conference of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers' Association are now available.

Monday, September 06, 2010

Joint Open Letter to International Publishers

Open letter from the National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences to STM publishers regarding year-over-year double-digit price increases, completing ignoring the current status of China as a developing country.

Thursday, September 02, 2010

September 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the September 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlight this month: Discovery, rediscovery, and open access. Part 2.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

Dorothea Salo's call for open discourse

recommended reading on the Book of Trogool

Monday, August 02, 2010

Discovery, rediscovery, and open access

Peter Suber has just released the August 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month: discovery, rediscovery, and open access. Starts with: In 1979, William Garvey made a remarkable claim: " ... in some disciplines, it is easier to repeat an experiment than it is to determine that the experiment has already been done."

Friday, July 23, 2010

Thursday, July 08, 2010

Renata's Digtial Library Review

New blog, open access to reviews of open access resources - what a good idea!

Friday, July 02, 2010

July 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the July 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month: California vs. Nature.

Sunday, June 06, 2010

Changing Role of Libraries: Journal Hosting and Support (ARL ACRL Scholarly Communication Institute)

There is still time to register for the June 15th session of the ARL ACRL Scholarly Communication Institute webinar series, Changing Role of Libraries: Journal Hosting and Support. Speakers Caroline Sutton, David Solomon, Maria Bonn and Catherine Mitchell will address topics of relevance to libraries at all stages in this new area of service, from those actively engaged in this service area, to those developing or considering this service area. Each session provides opportunities to engage in discussion with speakers and with other participants. [Disclosure: Julie Garrison & I are co-coordinating this series].

Wednesday, June 02, 2010

June 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the June 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month: unanimous faculty OA votes.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Open Access Policies in Europe: David Prosser article

Enabling Open Scholarship has just released David Prosser's Open Access Policies in Europe. This succinct overview by one of open access' most noteworthy champions is a must-read for anyone involved in OA policy development or advocacy.

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Canadian action item: help vote up OA to Canadian Research in Canada's Digital Economy Consultation

Please register for Canada's Digital Economy Consultation and vote for Open Access to Canadian Research under Canada's Digital Content. Currently OA is at 8 votes, just 2 behind the lead suggestion in this section of the Ideas Forum.

OA-related items from the Alberta Library Conference

Two OA-related items came out of the Alberta Library Conference (ALC) that was held in Jasper, AB, April 29-May 2, 2010 (http://www.albertalibraryconference.com/)

First, at the AGM, the Library Association of Alberta (LAA) voted to investigate setting up an OA policy for the organization. This would follow what other Canadian library associations, such as the British Columbia Library Association (BCLA) and the Canadian Library Association (CLA), have done. In addition, LAA has already taken actions in terms of OA e.g. the LAA newsletter, the Letter of the LAA, is available as a delayed OA publication (http://www.laa.ca/page/letter%20of%20the%20laa%20archives.aspx).

(Disclosure: I moved the motion to investigate setting up an OA Policy.)

Second, the theme for ALC 2011 was announced and it includes an OA component. The theme will be "Open doors, open minds, open access".

Monday, May 10, 2010

Hurray for DOAJ! Over 5,000 journals

The DOAJ has just announced a series of milestones, including the milestone of exceeding 5,000 journals!

Kudos to DOAJ. As I point out over on the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, this is more than 20% of the world's scholarly journals that are now fully open access.

This is a conservative estimate - from the OA community, what I hear is a little frustration with the amount of time it takes to get a journal vetted and included in DOAJ. If you'd like to help DOAJ achieve better service - consider joining as a member or sponsor.

Sunday, May 02, 2010

FRPAA introduced in the US House of Representatives (May 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter)

Peter Suber just released the May 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month is concise analysis of the introduction of FRPAA and what you can do to help.

Friday, April 30, 2010

Who will preserve open access news?

Peter Suber just posted the last post to Open Access News. Closure of the blog is partly for technical reasons (the choice was either to close or migrate), and partly because the real news nowadays is posted at the Open Access Tracking Project.

Open Access News will remain as it is and where it is, for now, thanks to Google. But what about the long term? Shouldn't someone be preserving this monumental resource, and, my fellow librarians, shouldn't this someone be one of us?

Many thanks to Peter Suber and to sponsors Open Society Institute, SPARC, and the Wellcome Trust.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Friday, April 23, 2010

David Wiley's letter of support for FRPAA

David Wiley has posted his own letter of support to his representative for FRPAA. An excellent example if people are looking for ideas on how to participate effectively.

Monday, April 19, 2010

Campus open access publishing funds: SPARC resources and webcast

SPARC has issued a set of resources on Campus Open Access Publishing Funds, and is hosting a free webinar on May 5th with SPARC Consultant Greg Tannenbaum. Note that OA Library Andrew Waller is among the experts listed!

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine tutorial on blip TV

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) tutorial now available on blip TV, thanks to OA Librarian Richard Baer.

Congress takes another stride toward public access to research -- Federal Research Public Access Act introduced in the House of Representatives

ALLIANCE FOR TAXPAYER ACCESS
www.taxpayeraccess.org

For immediate release
April 15, 2010

For more information, contact
Jennifer McLennan
(202) 296-2296 ext. 121
jennifer [at] arl [dot] org

Congress takes another stride toward public access to research
Federal Research Public Access Act introduced in the House of Representatives

Washington, DC – Fueling the growing momentum toward openness, transparency, and accessibility to publicly funded information, the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2010 (FRPAA) has been introduced today in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) and a bi-partisan host of co-sponsors. The proposed bill would build on the success of the first U.S. mandate for public access to the published results of publicly funded research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and require federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from funded research no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

“Free and open access to scientific literature and data are the underpinnings of discovery in the digital age,” said Stephen Friend MD PhD, President and Co-Founder of Sage Bionetworks. “Full collaboration among researchers is essential, and we have the power now to communicate, collaborate, and innovate in ways that were previously unimaginable. I applaud the sponsors of the Federal Research Public Access Act for their commitment to ensuring the kind of access scientists need to make progress on improved disease treatments and diagnostics in the digital world.”

Like the Senate bill introduced in 2009 by Senators Lieberman (I-CT) and Cornyn (R-TX), H.R. 5037 would unlock unclassified research funded by agencies including: Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation.

H.R. 5037 follows closely on the heels of a recent expression of interest in public access policies from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which issued a request for public comment on mechanisms that would leverage federal investments in scientific research and increase access to information that promises to stimulate scientific and technological innovation and competitiveness.

“This bill recognizes the urgent need – and opportunity – to use digital technology to increase the pace of innovation,” added Elliot Schwartz, Vice President for Economic Studies at the Committee for Economic Development. “The bill is a crucial, welcome move toward advancing research through openness and avoiding making the taxpayer pay twice for taxpayer-funded research… it is good public policy.”
The introduction of H.R. 5037 was also welcomed by leaders in the higher education community, who recognize this legislation helps to ensure the United States is positioned to continue to fuel education and innovation.

"Conducting critical research that enriches and improves lives has always been a key mission of universities in this country, including Ohio State," said E. Gordon Gee, president of The Ohio State University. "Disseminating the knowledge gained from that research is an equally important part of our institutions' public purpose. The Federal Research Public Access Act will further spread new knowledge, and it has my full support."

“Advancing research is at the core of the mission of higher education, and broadening access to the scholarly record is a critical step in helping research to advance to its fullest potential,” added Karen Hanson, Provost and Executive Vice President, Indiana University. “The current system for exchanging the results of research is deeply flawed, and major changes – like this bill – are required. I welcome the introduction of the Federal Research Public Access Act.”

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access thanks and congratulates Representative Doyle and all of the bill’s co-sponsors for championing this pivotal legislation, and calls on organizations and individuals to write in support of the bill through the Web site at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

For more information about the Federal Research Public Access Act and the broad coalition that supports its passage, visit http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

###

The Alliance for Taxpayer Access is a coalition of patient, academic, research, and publishing organizations that supports open public access to the results of federally funded research. The Alliance was formed in 2004 to urge that peer-reviewed articles stemming from taxpayer-funded research become fully accessible and available online at no extra cost to the American public. Details on the ATA may be found at http://www.taxpayeraccess.org.

Thursday, April 08, 2010

WorldCat rights and responsibilities for the OCLC cooperative

OCLC has released the next draft of their WorldCat rights and responsibilities for the OCLC cooperative.

My comments can be found on The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics. In brief, my suggestion is that the OCLC Record Use Policy Council should scrap this draft, and begin fresh with a vision of how library bibliographic records should be shared for a world with an internet as free and open as it can be. Library catalogue records should be freely accessible and part of a robust and growing public domain. OCLC should refrain from using OCLC or WorldCat branding on records which are, if anything, someone else's creative work. If anyone should sign a catalogue record, it should be the cataloguer - not OCLC.

Please read the draft policy and contribute your own comments.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Open Access Week: join!

Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) 2nd annual conference: registration now open

OA journals and TOC RSS feeds

Here's an interesting blog post from the other day, dealing with OA journals and table of contents feeds:

http://tinyurl.com/yahf7ra

Friday, April 02, 2010

April 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the April 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Highlighted this month: a brief poetic thought for spring on the winter coat and OA; results of Peter's quest for a verb to describe making something OA; and the monthly roundup.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

In the interests of intellectual freedom

According to Stevan Harnad, his comments posted to Phil Davis' blog have not appeared. While blog owners have every right to moderate comments (or not allow comments, as is the policy at OA Librarian), in this case Harnad is an academic expert, a Canada Research Chair, attempting to quite appropriately respond to Phil Davis' critique of his work. If commenting is permitted, Harnad's comments should be commented IN, not out. The primary purpose of this post is to assist with intellectual freedom, a topic that Phil Davis should be familiar with as a librarian.

For the record, while my expertise is not at Harnad's level on this topic, I have read Davis' 2008 study and Alma Swan's synopsis, and I concur with Harnad. I also have posted comments to Phil Davis' blog, on topics on which I have considerable expertise, and they have not appeared.

Harnad's comments, from liblicense:

Phil,

Thanks for the helpful feedback.

I'm afraid you're mistaken about meta-analysis. It can be a
perfectly appropriate statistical technique for analyzing a large
number of studies, with positive and negative outcomes, varying
in methodological rigor, sample size and effect size. It is a way
of estimating whether or not there is a significant underlying
effect.

I think you may be inadvertently mixing up the criteria for (1)
eligibility and comparability for a meta-analysis with the
criteria for (2) a clinical drug trial (for which there rightly
tends to be an insistence on randomized control trials in
biomedical research).

Now I would again like to take the opportunity of receiving this
helpful feedback from you to remind you about some feedback I
have given you repeatedly http://bit.ly/dkieVi on your own 2008
study -- the randomized control trial that you suggest has been
the only methodologically sound test of the OA Advantage so far:

You forgot to do a self-selection control condition. That would
be rather like doing a randomized control trial on a drug - to
show that the nonrandom control trials that have reported a
positive benefit for that drug were really just self-selection
artifacts -- but neglecting to include a replication of the
self-selection artifact in your own sample, as a control.

For, you see, if your own sample was too small and/or too brief
(e.g., you didn't administer the drug for as long an interval, or
to as many patients, as the nonrandom studies reporting the
positive effects had done), then your own null effect with a
randomized trial would be just that: a null effect, not a
demonstration that randomizing eliminates the nonrandomized drug
effect. (This is the kind of methodological weakness, for
example, that multiple studies can be weighted for, in a
meta-analysis of positive, negative and null effects.)

[I am responding to your public feedback here, on the liblicense
and SERIALST lists, but not also on your SSP Blog, where you
likewise publicly posted this same feedback (along with other,
rather shriller remarks) http://j.mp/d91Jk2 because I am assuming
that you will again decline to post my response on your blog, as
you did the previous time that you publicly posted your feedback
on my work both there http://bit.ly/8LK57u and elsewhere -
refusing my response on your blog on the grounds that it had
already been publicly posted elsewhere!...]

- Stevan Harnad

PS The idea of doing a meta-analysis came from me, not from Dr.
Swan.

Thursday, March 04, 2010

New SPARC release: Guide to exloring campus-based OA funds

SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has released a website that is designed to act as a guide for those institutions who wish to explore campus-based OA funds. The site can be found at http://www.arl.org/sparc/openaccess/funds/index.shtml and includes a guide to design and implementation of OA funds, a FAQ, implementation tools, case studies, and a "living" document that describes OA funds in action.

Disclosure: I manage one of the funds that is discussed in the guide (the Open Access Authors Fund at the Univeristy of Calgary) and my input was solicited for this project.

Tuesday, March 02, 2010

March SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber just released the March 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month: Open Access, Markets and Mission.

Sunday, February 21, 2010

OpenAIRE Press Release

European Countries join forces to realize the EC Open Access pilot: OpenAIRE

OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe), a three-years project funded under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission, has now taken up its work to implement Open Access on a pan-European scale. This ambitious effort unites 38 partners from 27 European countries.

The main goal of OpenAIRE is to support the Open Access pilot, launched by the European Commission in August 2008. This Open Access pilot, which covers about 20% of the FP7 budget, commits researchers from 7 thematic areas (Health, Energy, Environment, Information & Communication Technology, Research Infrastructures, Socio-economic sciences & Humanities and Science in Society) to deposit their research publications in an institutional or disciplinary Open Access repository, to be made available worldwide in full text. OpenAIRE will establish underlying structures for researchers to support them in complying with the pilot through European Helpdesk System, build an OpenAIRE portal and e-Infrastructure for the repository networks and explore scientific data management services together with 5 disciplinary communities.

“The implementation of a Europe wide infrastructure for Open Access is a milestone for the success of Open Access,” says Dr. Norbert Lossau, Scientific Coordinator of OpenAIRE and Director of Göttingen State and University Library, Germany. “The project consortium will work closely together with the European Commission, the ERC and many other stakeholders (such as SPARC Europe, LIBER, EUA) to achieve the broadest possible impact.”

The project consortium incorporates the best available expertise for Open Access & repository infrastructures in Europe and will establish a distributed support structure based on a network of liaison offices covering all European Union member states plus Norway. Consortium partners have been identified in each country, or in the case of Luxembourg, have pledged their support for the development and implementation of strategies and services for Open Access, that have gained acceptance in the international community since 2003, the launch of the Berlin Declaration.

[thanks to Peter Suber at the Open Access Tracking Project]

Saturday, February 13, 2010

New Open Access Fund at SFU Library

Excerpt:

At its January 2010 meeting, the Senate Library Committee adopted sweeping recommendations that will make SFU one of only three Canadian universities to embrace Open Access (OA) publishing. “We’re going to put our money where our mouth is,” says Bird. OA Journals are scholarly peer-reviewed journals freely available on the web without subscription fees, but they are often supported through Article Processing Charges (APCs) levied to authors. Fees range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars per accepted paper. Prominent examples are BioMed Central, Public Library of Science, and Hindawi.

(Thanks to Gwen Bird).

Note also that there is a link to the full SFU OA Strategy document at the bottom of this page.

Kudos to Gwen Bird & SFU Library!

Global Knowledge Exchange Network launched

The Global Knowledge Exchange Network has just launched - here is a description, from the About page:

The Global Knowledge Exchange Network (GKEN) is a community for scholars and practitioners to share and explore new ideas and emerging trends related to scholarly research or everyday practice. More specifically, the community is devoted to understanding the changing role of information –its creation, management, dissemination and use– in scholarly research, higher education and business practice.

The project is sponsored jointly by the Harvard Business School Knowledge and Library Services and the Copenhagen Business School Library. The GKEN Founding Team includes Mary Lee Kennedy and Gosia Stergios (Harvard Business School), and René Steffensen and Leif Hansen (Copenhagen Business School).

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Science Commons Symposium: February 20, Redmond Washington

Lineup looks very interesting!

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

SPARC webcast: Library-press partnerships

Library-press partnerships in action: The new University of California Publishing Services
A SPARC Webcast
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
1:00 – 2:00PM EST

Free, but registration required.

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

ARL ACRL Scholarly Communication Institute Webinar Series

Registration is now open for Strengthening Programs through Collaboration, the ARL ACRL Scholarly Communication Institute Webinar Series.

[Disclosure: Julie Garrison & I are co-coordinators of this series, and fellow OA Librarian Andrew Waller is among the confirmed speakers].

February 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has just released the February 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month: analogies between the politics of open access and the politics of clean energy.

Mark your calendars: Open Access Week October 18-24, 2010

Monday, January 25, 2010

Harvard response to OSTP consultation on open access

Well said!!!

University of Calgary Students' Union passes resolution to support OA

On November 23, 2009, the Students' Academic Assembly (SAA) at the University of Calgary passed a resolution supporting Open Access. Here is the text of the resolution:

WHEREAS Open Access is defined as free, unrestricted access to high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship over the Internet[1],

WHEREAS the SU recognizes that the development of scholarly research is funded by the public through government grants and student tuition,

WHEREAS the SU believes that Open Access improves the educational experience for students,

WHEREAS the SU believes that all students should have access to full scholarly records as they are pursuing their education regardless of an institution’s ability to afford scholarly research subscriptions,

WHEREAS the SU believes open access allows for researchers to maximize the impact of their research through increased visibility in a timely manner,

WHEREAS the SU supports and is encouraged by the initiatives and funding the University of Calgary Library and Cultural Resources have dedicated to Open Access
[2],

BE IT RESOLVED THAT the SU calls upon each University of Calgary faculty and researcher to support Open Access initiatives, and

BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED THAT the SU continue to advocate for Open Access in all of its advocacy initiatives
[3]

Moved: M. Martin
Seconded: D. Pagan


[1] “Student Statement on the Right to Research,” Available: www.righttoresearch.org
Accessed: November 18, 2009.
[2] Initiatives as of October 2009 have included the $100,000 Open Access Authors Fund, being an active partner in the national Synergies project that stores and provides open access to research in Canada, the organization of Open Access Week and expanding the University of Calgary Press to include open access publishing, e-books and print on demand.
[3] Examples would include advocacy at the Canadian Alliance of Student Associations (CASA), Council of Alberta University Students (CAUS), Canadian Roundtable of Academic Materials (CRAM) and SPARC.

This resolution came in part out of the OA Week activities at the University of Calgary, in which the University of Calgary Students' Union (SU) was very active. This policy is now an official lobbying priority for the SU.

The SAA also endorsed SPARC's Student Statement on the Right to Research.

Thanks to Meg Martin for all the information.


Disclosure: I work in Libraries and Cultural Resources at the University of Calgary.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Public comments on OSTP consultation due Jan. 21

From Open Access News last Friday:

The public comment period on the Obama administration's consultation on OA for federally-funded research expires this Wednesday.  The original deadline was January 7, but was extended until January 21.

If you haven't already submitted a comment, use your weekend to write one and send it off no later than Wednesday.  You can submit your comment by email or through the OSTP blog

All signs suggest that the Obama administration is willing to generalize the NIH policy in some form and extend it across the federal government.  Show your support for this move!  You know that opponents are showing their opposition. 

And please spread the word to others who might write comments. 

Saturday, January 02, 2010

January 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter, or 2009 - Open Access Year Worldwide?

Peter Suber just released the January 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Featured this month: Open Access in 2009: "2009 was Open Access Year in the Netherlands, but it might have been Open Access Year worldwide..."