Open-Access Efforts
George Cham, the author/illustrator behind PhD Comics, created a visual explainer video that unpacks the rationale behind open access: <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/L5rVH1KGBCY" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>
That's my gateway between the crypto world and my bank accounts.
Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i. e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us, but not therefore less actual. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary.
Original text avaiable here https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/germanica/Chronologie/18Jh/Kant/kan_pr04.html
I think contextualizing the applications of a tool like Unpaywall in the OA movement could be useful in the 5.3 section, as an added paragraph. Unpaywall helps researchers find papers that are available freely on the web. Often these papers are held in university repositories or author websites. The author may have transferred copyright to the publisher at the time of publication for a window of time that has expired, or the author may have retained copyright of their publication. I think that the idea of a scientific language decoder for the public is an excellent educational tool and potential public service.
At the same time, we now have several years of experience launching and running new and innovative publications in broad fields. For example, PeerJ – the Journal of Life & Environmental Sciences covers all of biology, the life sciences, and the environmental sciences in a single title; whilst PeerJ Computer Science is targeted towards a more well-defined community. In 2013 we also launched a preprint server (PeerJ Preprints) which covers all the areas in which we publish; and we have developed a comprehensive suite of journal and peer-review functionalities.
New journals released by PeerJ
Increasing Access to Learning for the Adult Basic Education Learner With Learning Disabilities: Evidence-Based Accommodation Research
Adult learning disabilities
Die Bestimmungen dieses Reglementssind auch anwendbar auf Gesuche oderBeiträge des SNF, die bis am 1. April 2018 beantragtundzugesprochenwurden,sowie auf Beiträge, die am 1. April 2018 laufend oder abgelaufen sind.
Übergangsbestimmungen OA-Bestimmungen vom 1.4.2018
Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy
access to content and knowledge should not depend on how much money you have. That isn’t fair.”
An ethics of care: what kind of open access do we want?
Immediate access and cost savings ranked at the top of respondents' list; however, it is worth noting that these two features are intertwined, as the principal reasons why students might delay obtaining their required textbooks are financial in nature (e.g., waiting for a student loan or determine whether the textbook is truly required). The tension between textbook costs and access is thrown into even sharper relief when one compares the features that respondents reported liking about open textbooks with their usual textbook purchasing behaviours. For instance, although a majority of respondents reported selling their used textbooks at the end of their courses, the majority also indicated that the ability to permanently retain their open textbook was desirable.
Opinion: Open Educational Resources Bring Huge Cost Savings. Here Are 4 More Ways They Benefit Students and Teachers
Open education does not constitute a discipline, in the manner of a hard science for example, so there is no agreed canon of research that all researchers will be familiar with. It is also an area that practitioners tend to move into from other fields, often because of an interest in applying aspects of openness to their foundational discipline. This can be seen as an advantage, in that different perspectives are brought into the domain, and it evolves rapidly. However, it also results in an absence of shared knowledge, with the consequence that existing knowledge is often ‘rediscovered’ or not built upon.
In order for open education to be more than a movement, it feels like we should be consciously moving in this direction - to define a canonical set of resources that are foundational to the field in order to help orient others and further define ourselves as a field/discipline. Because, as we have seen with MOOC's, if we do not do it, then others will do it for us.
This New Typeface Merges Braille You Can Touch With Letters You Can See
This report summarizes the primary motivations of libraries that invest in open access initiatives.
Can open educational resources, or OER, truly create more equity and access?
How do we keep building an education where students feel like full agents, owners of their own learning, while also being given the necessary tools? Laptops, domain space, but much more importantly, food, shelter, accommodations and compassion?
Access. Just being able to get through the door.
Give every family access to a free accelerated AA degree
open access
access mode
access to one-on-one (and possible small circle) consultations for a fee
access to the top researchers in the field
if cross-format identifiers like DOIs are used, annotations made in one format (eg, EPUB) can be seen in the same document published in other formats (eg, HTML, PDF) and in other locations.
Whaa..? This sounds seriously hard. But remarkably clever.
he challenge therefore is in ensuring that the Web remains open, in that it is accessible to as many users as it can be, with the aim of not disadvantaging anyone.
Challenge of accessibility
OER: Bigger Than Affordability
If OER is appealing because they can help make knowledge more accessible, then we must care about the myriad issues -- from child care to transportation -- that prevent our potential students from even coming to our classrooms in the first place.
Broader concept of access to education.
How library collections budgets work By Library Loon 27 October 2017 Library as organization, Scholarly communication 3 Comments “Why can’t open-access initiatives get some of that sweet, sweet library budget money?” the Loon was asked (well, entitledly whinged at, but it comes to much the same thing). Short answer: The librarians in charge of allocating collections money have no incentive to support open access, and the librarians (supposedly) in charge of changing scholarly communication have either zero budget or strictly-earmarked budgets that do not permit this use. QED.
This is a great article on the structure of library budgets. I think one of the most interesting reflections is that the creation of buying consortia is a response to the structure of scholarly publishing, so the two kind of fit hand in glove. Moving away from that structure is going to be very challenging.
In Bangladesh, as an example, only 0.3% of the population have access to Internet(CIA 2008).
Call for Papers: Special Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) edition
Here I have highlighted the title of the Compass Journal. I can add my notes here and also links like this to the Clipper Blog.
I can also insert images like this
face an urgent need to increase access and success when it comes to education
Sci-Hub has made nearly all articles freely available using a black open access model, leaving green and gold models in its dust
Yup
Filtering obligations -Undermining the foundations of Open Access7.The provisions of Article 13 threaten the accessibility of scientific articles, publications and research data made available through over 1250 repositoriesmanaged byEuropean non-profit institutions and academiccommunities. These repositories, which are essential for Open Access and Science in Europe, are likely to face significant additional operational costs associated with implementing new filtering technologyandthe legal costs of managing the risks of intermediary liability. The additional administrative burdens of policing this contentwould add to these costs. Such repositories, run on a not-for-profit basis, are not equipped to take onsuch responsibilities, and may face closure. This would be a significant blow, creating new risks forimplementing funder, research council and other EU Open Access policies.
Springer Nature is pleased to present the subscription price list.
a particularly influential one published in Nature in 1970 by Ulrich Laemelli, on a new method of electrophoresis revealing as yet unknown proteins in a bacteriophage (unfortunately, if you don’t have a subscription, you’ll need to pay to read the whole paper…)
To ask the author of this major sciencific paper, the OpenAccessButton enables to ask the author to upload a preprint/postprint version of his/her work in an open archive.
Guzzella: Der Closed Access kann ja wohl nicht die Alternative sein. Da gibt man gewissen Firmen oder Verlagen die Möglichkeit, massiv Profit damit zu machen. Die Forschung wurde ja von der Öffentlichkeit finanziert – also soll die Gesellschaft als Ganzes profitieren.
Doch zunehmend gewinnt man den Eindruck, dass auch Bibliotheken mehr und mehr tangiert werden von aktuellen politischen Umwälzungen und Ereignissen, denen sie sich nicht mehr verschliessen können und dürfen. Da ist zum Beispiel das Thema «Open Access», das deutlich mehr ist als eine weitere Spielart der Literaturversorgung. Es ist vielmehr eine politische und wirtschaftliche Problematik, die bis in die Führung von Staaten reicht und auf der gleichen Ebene wie Wirtschaftssubventionen oder Marktinterventio-nen abgehandelt wird. Denn die Konsequenzen sind so ge-waltig und grundlegend, dass viele Akteure sie nicht mehr zu überschauen scheinen und das Thema mit einem blossen Aktionismus mit ungewissem Ausgang vorantreiben.Gerade hier ist es wichtig, dass sich Bibliotheken ihrer Jahrhunderte alten Tradition als Kultur- und Gedächtnis-institution erinnern und neuen Trends – zumal wenn sie irreversible Konsequenzen haben – mit dem notwendigen Sachverstand und der gebotenen Tiefe nähern und die be-teiligten Akteure mit validen Informationen und Statements unterstützen. Die ETH-Bibliothek ist gerade bei diesem Thema im besten Sinne des Wortes professionell mit dabei: Qualifiziert, durchdacht, konstruktiv, aber ohne Schnell-schüsse.
Ja, kein Schnellschuss.
“bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.
In the early '90s, so-called open access journals started to make scientific research free to anyone with working WiFi by shifting costs to scientists, who pay an upfront fee to cover editing.
Why say "so called" open access journals?
60% thought they should be allowed to upload their articles regardless of publisher or journal policies
Faudra-t-il attendre des décrets d’application pour que la loi devienne applicable ? Non. L’adoption de décrets va en effet être nécessaire pour d’autres parties de la loi République numérique (notamment celle relatives à l’Open Data et à l’exception en faveur du Text et Data Mining). Néanmoins, l’article 30 ne mentionne nullement la nécessité d’adopter des décrets et il sera donc directement applicable à la date d’entrée en vigueur de la loi (c’est-à-dire le 9 octobre 2016).
Samson-Steinbach Delphine, Legeai Fabrice, Karsenty Emmanuelle et al. (2003) GénoPlante-Info (GPI): a collection of databases and bioinformatics resources for plant genomics. Nucleic Acids Res., 31, 179–182.
Lien vers l'article: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC165507/
(open access)
By "open access" to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.
Open Access definition.
Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science
Mike Caulfield Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers
focus on what is likely to be true rather than what is likely to sell
Capitalism, like state socialism and Fascism, seeks to enclose our thinking into a manageable political system. Institutions like religion, the military and education have evolved to this end. Capitalists often impose rents to limit ideas. Liberty is the opposite of this history.
largest cause of misunderstanding is lack of familiarity
This may well be, but there are numerous structural impediments built into educational institutions, their faculties and relationships with publishers. As Upton Sinclair famously said; "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Open Educational Resources and Institutional Repositories
Open Access policy adopted by IU Bloomington faculty
Request permission
but you will have to pay in order to read the results.
Except if you are working in science + in a university + which pays the subscription to this journal.
Hence, a huge percentage of concerned people won't read more that these lines – full of jargon.
AbstractThe main objective of this prospective longitudinal study was to investigate bidirectional associations between adolescent cannabis use (CU) and neurocognitive performance in a community sample of 294 young men from ages 13 to 20 years.
The result of this study is of main interest for:
Examples of bad peer review and why it is damaging to researchers
Federally Funded Research Results Are Becoming More Open and Accessible
The resource-based economy goes like this: In the future robots will do all the jobs (including creating new robots and fixing broken one). Now, imagine the world is like a public library, where you can borrow any book you want but never own it. Fresco wants all enterprise like this, whether it’s groceries, new tech, gasoline, or alcohol. He wants everything free and eventually provided to us by robots, software, and automation.
I think this is achievable, if we emphasize specialized libraries and cooperative models around resources (i.e. tool/tech libraries, food banks/co-ops)
THE NEW FACE OF THE TEXTBOOK MONOPOLY
Smarter State Spending
The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review
There is a fruitful argument for the cost of these more “traditional” publishing houses, as they spend a good amount of time with editing, formatting, and distribution (often in paper form)
One of the complaints I hear more and more often from academics is that traditional publishing houses are actually no longer doing this work. Editing and formatting are increasingly outsourced to academics themselves (as are indexing etc.) and even marketing is something publishers ask authors to so themselves using their social media profiles and academic brands. This is one of the issues many scholar-led publishing initiatives are trying to address, by highlighting for example the various processes that go into creating a scholarly publication and giving these due recognition. Mattering Press is at the forefront of this:https://www.matteringpress.org/
Unpaid Labor
If this special issue of Ephemera ever comes out (I have been keeping an eye out for it but nothing as yet) it might be highly relevant for this discussion: http://www.ephemerajournal.org/content/labour-academia-0 Back issues of Ephemera do cover topics related to this discussion too though, so might be a relevant resource anyway (and OA!)
Computers are not everything, theyare just an aspectof everything, and not to know this iscomputer illiteracy, a silly and dangerous ignorance.
This is interesting for me to consider as I've worked with populations - such as those with low income, ESL students, and people with disabilities - who have limited access to technology and are even quite scared of it. I know people who get upset when they see homeless people with smartphones - as if they're then not truly in need, but it's become a basic necessity at this point and truly should be afforded to more people.
Page 6
Borgman on the importance of scale in information retrieval. It's an interesting question for the humanities not only does large-scale introduce new methods for example just reading it also makes traditional methods more difficult EG challenges close reading. It is not enough to say (as color and others do) that they don't like distant reading. They also need to say how they propose doing the reading in a million book environment.
data and information have always been both input and output of research. What is new is the scale of the data and information involved. Information management is notoriously subject to problems of scale [bibliography removed]. Retrieval methods designed for small databases declined rapidly ineffectiveness as collections grow in size. For example a typical searcher is willing to browse a set of matches consisting of one percent of a database of 1000 documents (10 documents), maybe willing to browse a 1% set of 10,000 documents (100), rarely is willing to browse 1% of 100,000 documents (1000), and almost never would browse 1% of 1 million or 10 million documents.
Page 2
Borgman on the responsibility of rears to assess reliability and the ability of content creators to have control over their work:
these are exciting and confusing times for scholarship. The proliferation of digital content allows new questions to be asked in new ways, but also results unduplication and dispersion. Authors can disseminate their work more widely by posting online, but readers have the additional responsibility of assessing trust and authenticity. Changes in intellectual property laws give Pharmacontrol to the creators of digital content that was available for printed comment, but the resulting business models often constrain access to scholarly resources. Students acquire an insatiable appetite for digital publications, and then find an graduation that they can barely sample them without institutional affiliations.
Page XVII
Borgman on scholars access to information in the developed world
Scholars in the developed world have 24/7 access to the literature of their fields, a growing amount of research data, and sophisticated research tools and services.
Page 156
Borgman discusses a couple of things that are useful for me. The first is how students discover what they miss from the library after they graduate and no longer have access to journals.
The second is that this passage supplies some evidence for the claim that things that are not online no longer exist as far as such behavior is concerned.
There's some bibliography at the end of the passage covering both of these points in the print book.
Scholars seem to be even more dependent on library services for access to scholarly publications than in the past. Personal subscriptions to journals have declined substantially. Faculty and students have been known to panic when unable to access online library services, whether due to system failures or incorrect authentication settings. Students' dependence on these services becomes especially apparent when they graduate and no longer have access. Librarians learned early in the days of online catalogs that people rely on online sources, even if those sources are incomplete. Older material accessible only via the card catalog was quickly "widowed," which was a primary motivation for libraries to complete the retrospective conversion of card catalogs to digital form. The same phenomenon occurred with online access to journals. The more access that libraries provide, the greater the depth of coverage that users expect. The use of printed indexes in libraries has dropped to near zero, although printed finding aids remain popular in archives.
able summarizing the federal public access policies
Figure 3 illustrates at what age ceased ‘indie’ journals stopped publishing. Most journals survived the first 2–5 years period, whereas the mortality rate rose in the critical 6–9 years period. After that, the number of journals ceasing dropped sharply, indicating that the surviving journals had found stability.
Most critical period for journals is 6-9 years. After year ten, the number of journals that stop drops quickly
The development over time of active ‘indie’ OA journals before and after 2002 is shown in Figs. 1A and 1B. A journal was counted as ‘active’ in a particular year if it was still publishing articles in that year. Before 2002 the number of active journals grew very rapidly from a total of 76 journals in 1995 to 207 journals in 2002. The year 2002 was the cut-off year to be included in the studied cohort, meaning that no new journals were added to the data set after this point in time. After 2002, the number of journals in the cohort decreased steadily to the 127 that stayed active in 2014.
Interesting charts showing the rise and then decline of independent, scholar-published OA journals
The average number of articles published was 31 per year with 74% publishing 0–30 articles, and 9% 60 or more. The study also contains interesting data about the workload done, revenues etc.
Average numbers of articles in OJS journals: 31
“The key question for OA publishing is whether it can be scaled up from a single journal publishing model with relatively few articles published per year to a comprehensive major journal with of the order of 50–100 articles annually.” They further note: “The continuation of the journal relies very heavily on the personal involvement of the editor and is as such a risk to the model. Employing staff to handle, for example, management, layout and copyediting tasks, is a cost-increasing factor that also is a threat to the model.” Both questions are still highly relevant today.
Key issues facing scholar-published journals: can they ramp up; can they survive succession.
Earlier studies A number of previous studies, both snapshots and some with longitudinal elements, have shed light on different aspects of such type of journals, which for short we will call “indie” journals.
Bibliography of "independent journals"
Often the enthusiasm of the founders and their personal network can carry a volunteer-based journal for a few years. But at that same time this type of journal, which lack the support of employed staff and a professional publishing organization, are threatened by many dangers. The editor may change affiliation or retire, or the support of the university hosting the journal might be withdrawn. Authors may stop sending in good manuscripts and it may become more and more difficult to find motivated reviewers. Not being included in the Web of Science, and the impact factor that follows, may in the long run limit the number of submissions severely. On the positive side of the balance the emergence of open source software for publishing (i.e., Open Journals System) and cheap or free hosting services like Latin American Scielo have facilitated the technical parts of publishing.
Problems with Scholar-published journals
Most of the OA journals founded in the 1990s were of this variety, later many established subscription journals (particularly society ones) have made their digital versions freely available immediately or with a delay. This has been particularly noticeable in countries where cheap or free national or regional electronic portals have become available, like Scielo, Redalyc, and J-stage. Since around 2003 the OA market has become increasingly dominated by professionally published journals, which finance themselves by charging authors so-called article processing charges, APCs. At first such journals were being launched by open access publishers like BioMedCentral and PLOS, but in the last couple of years the major commercial and society publishers have increasingly started new OA journals and have also converted some subscription journals to APC-financed models.
History of OA journals. Initially scholar-published, non-APC, post 2003 mostly APC-publisher-led journals
Open Access (OA) is nowadays increasingly being used as a business model for the publishing of scholarly peer reviewed journals, both by specialized OA publishing companies and major, predominantly subscription-based publishers. However, in the early days of the web OA journals were mainly founded by independent academics, who were dissatisfied with the predominant print and subscription paradigm and wanted to test the opportunities offered by the new medium. There is still an on-going debate about how OA journals should be operated, and the volunteer model used by many such ‘indie’ journals has been proposed as a viable alternative to the model adopted by big professional publishers where publishing activities are funded by authors paying expensive article processing charges (APCs). Our longitudinal quantitative study of 250 ‘indie’ OA journals founded prior to 2002, showed that 51% of these journals were still in operation in 2014 and that the median number of articles published per year had risen from 11 to 18 among the survivors. Of these surviving journals, only 8% had started collecting APCs. A more detailed qualitative case study of five such journals provided insights into how such journals have tried to ensure the continuity and longevity of operations.
Abstract
A longitudinal study of independent scholar-published open access journals
Björk, Bo-Christer, Cenyu Shen, and Mikael Laakso. 2016. “A Longitudinal Study of Independent Scholar-Published Open Access Journals.” PeerJ 4 (May). peerj.com: e1990. doi:10.7717/peerj.1990.
expand access to some knowledge
The copyright for the materials in this collection is held by Universal Music Canada and their affiliates. These materials have been made available with their consent. Patrons may not download, reproduce, alter or transmit files/images without permission from the copyright holder(s). These files/images may not be used for commercial purposes but may be used under the fair dealing or educational exemptions outlined in the Canadian Copyright Act.
Being able to access these resources without any cost can lead to cool projects, but the fact that they maintain full copyright does restrict the type of learning which may happen through this. In other words, we’re far from Open Educational Resources. But it doesn’t mean these aren’t useful.
VIA EFF
Excellent report on the state of academic publishing— and why so much of it is still locked down.
NOTE
if we can Not access the works we fund, we can Neither annotate all knowledge.
And this case, it may pertain the most crucial body of all our knowledge — the knowledge upon what we are to found our own futures for us all. What is to be recognized as "the Human knowledge", whilst yet unknown by almost everyone us Humans ourselves.>
A history of open access academic publishing from the early 1990s to 2016.
New Hampshire System Plans Open Education Push
Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?
List of publications on open access research data
nice bibliography!
SSRN had one of the early freemium business models for an open access service.
Input feed: lkfitz's bookmarks
5 billion reasons for open access
Open access is not fully realized without open peer review, which would provide opportunities for scholarly dialogue and critique throughout the writing process and beyond, argues Alex Mueller.
Work on exploitation arising from asymmetries of information is an important example.
What is being referred to when "asymmetries of information" is mentioned? Could the open access (to scholarly publishing) movement help to reshape this asymmetry to be more symmetric?
Around 40% of Swiss research is open access
I utilize some of the useful critiques OA has generated to inform the discussion of OER creation and practice.
Though there are major differences between Open Access and Open Educational Resources, the two approaches to openness share a lot. Advocates for both are likely to have a lot of values in common, including a distaste for inequalities.
Active OER: Beyond open licensing policies
Do we mean free open access?
Yes; this isn't hard. That is what all well-established (over a decade old) definitions of "open access" mean.
The comparison to inter-library loan both is and isn't helpful. It is helpful because it shows that libraries have never been purely competitive spaces. It is less helpful because the digital environment fundamentally alters the way we disseminate material and shifts the vast majority of costs to labour-to-first-copy, rather than in the dissemination phase.
“In the last 15 years, we’ve seen a massive transition in the way academic publishing is being done,” said Jules Blais, an environmental scientist at the University of Ottawa and editor of FACETS.
Scholarly communication is the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use.” –Association of College and Research Libraries
Students as Authors: Why Students Should Publish Their Class Essays Online
Researchers have ‘ethical obligation’ to share data
Academic Publishing is a Goddamned Exploitative Farce
In the MIT Libraries we’ve just launched a new and innovative approach for our scholarly communications program — and for our collections budget: the collections budget is now part of the scholarly communications program.
Super rad!
Faculty want to share their life’s work with others that care about their niche too.
Alongside the Dutch government, which is using its presidency of the EU to push the case for open access, only Hungary, Romania, Sweden and the UK, share the view that academic publishers should stop charging readers a subscription and instead charge authors for publishing their papers.
Could be worse.
The peer-reviewed journal marks a new era in academic journal publishing. Discrete Analysis will follow the "diamond open access" model - free to read and free to publish in - and will be entirely editor-owned with no publisher middleman.
diamond open access
Sci-Hub: the debate continues
High academic journal prices justify sharing of illegal articles
federally funded research publicly accessible are becoming the norm
While there are some features shared between a university repository and us we are distinctly different for the following reasons: We offer DOIs to all content published on The Winnower All content is automatically typeset on The Winnower Content published on the winnower is not restricted to one university but is published amongst work from peers at different institutions around the world Work is published from around the world it is more discoverable We offer Altmetrics to content Our site is much more visually appealing than a typical repository Work can be openly reviewed on The Winnower but often times not even commented on in repositories. This is not to say that repositories have no place, but that we should focus on offering authors choices not restricting them to products developed in house.
Over this tension/complementary between in house and external publishing platforms I wonder where is the place for indie web self hosted publishing, like the one impulsed by grafoscopio.
A reproducible structured interactive grafoscopio notebook is self contained in software and data and holds all its history by design. Will in-house solutions and open journals like The Winnower, RIO Journal or the Self Journal of Science, support such kinds of publishing artifacts?
Technically there is not a big barrier (it's mostly about hosting fossil repositories, which is pretty easy, and adding a discoverability and author layer on top), but it seems that the only option now is going to big DVCS and data platforms now like GitHub or datahub alike for storing other research artifacts like software and data, so it is more about centralized-mostly instead of p2p-also. This other p2p alternatives seem outside the radar for most alternative Open Access and Open Science publishers now.
These 39 Sites Have Amazing Stock Photos You Can Use For Free
We need to talk about sharing
Scott Johnson tweeted a screen-capture of a message he received from academia.edu.
Would you be open to paying a small fee to submit any upcoming papers to our board of editors to be considered for recommendation? You'd only be charged if your paper was recommended.
Academia.edu founder Richard Price replied.
What is Open Access?
What the Open-Access Movement Doesn’t Want You to Know
Open Access Overview
authors have pulled around 100 papers from Lingua and transferred them to Glossa
“If I wanted to do it for the compensation, I would be better off using that time to flip burgers or go wash windows.”
True!
He refers to hybrid journals as “double-dipping journals” because they profit from both APCs and subscriptions.
True!
Publishing an open-access paper in a journal can be prohibitively expensive. Some researchers are drumming up support for a movement to change that
Green OA and the role of repositories remain controversial. This is perhaps less the case for institutional repositories, than for subject repositories, especially PubMed Central. The lack of its own independent sustainable business model means Green OA depends on its not undermining that of (subscription) journals. The evidence remains mixed: the PEER project found that availability of articles on the PEER open repository did not negatively impact downloads from the publishers’s site, but this was contrary to the experience of publishers with more substantial fractions of their journals’ content available on the longer-established and better-known arXiv and PubMed Central repositories. The PEER usage data study also provided further confirmation of the long usage half-life of journal articles and its substantial variation between fields (suggesting the importance of longer embargo periods than 6–12 months, especially for those fields with longer usage half-lives). Green proponents for their part point to the continuing profitability of STM publishing, the lack of closures of existing journals and the absence of a decline in the rate of launch of new journals since repositories came online as evidence of a lack of impact to date, and hence as evidence of low risk of impact going forward. Many publishers’ business instincts tell them otherwise; they have little choice about needing to accept submissions from large funders such as NIH, but there has been some tightening of publishers’ Green policies (page 102).
Gold open access based on APCs has a number of potential advantages. It would scale with the growth in research outputs, there are potential system-wide savings, and reuse is simplified. Research funders generally reimburse publication charges, but even with broad funder support the details regarding the funding arrangements within universities it remain to be fully worked out. It is unclear where the market will set OA publication charges: they are currently lower than the historical average cost of article publication; about 25% of authors are from developing countries;
The APC model itself has become more complicated, with variable APCs (e.g. based on length), discounts, prepayments and institutional membership schemes, offsetting and bundling arrangements for hybrid publications, an individual membership scheme, and so on (page 91; 93).
As there is a 'digital divide' so there is a 'linguistic divide'.
Access as metaphor. Security metaphor? If you don't have the key, the password, the magic symbols/handshake/medium of exchange, then you don't get in.
Guidelines for publishing GLAM data (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) on GitHub. It applies to publishing any kind of data anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Knowledge<br> http://openglam.org/faq/
“What we’re seeing is that the general public wants to read scholarly papers.”
Under our Affordable Access Initiative, Microsoft is providing grants to commercial entities for scalable solutions that enable people in underserved communities to access the Internet and use cloud services.
We believe that openness and transparency are core values of science. For a long time, technological obstacles existed preventing transparency from being the norm. With the advent of the internet, however, these obstacles have largely disappeared. The promise of open research can finally be realized, but this will require a cultural change in science. The power to create that change lies in the peer-review process.
We suggest that beginning January 1, 2017, reviewers make open practices a pre-condition for more comprehensive review. This is already in reviewers’ power; to drive the change, all that is needed is for reviewers to collectively agree that the time for change has come.
Dutch universities and Elsevier reach deal over open access
We find ourselves at a decisive moment. This is the time to recognize that the very existence of our massive knowledge commons is an act of collective civil disobedience. It is the time to emerge from hiding and put our names behind this act of resistance. You may feel isolated, but there are many of us. The anger, desperation and fear of losing our library infrastructures, voiced across the internet, tell us that. This is the time for us custodians, being dogs, humans or cyborgs, with our names, nicknames and pseudonyms, to raise our voices. Share this letter - read it in public - leave it in the printer. Share your writing - digitize a book - upload your files. Don't let our knowledge be crushed. Care for the libraries - care for the metadata - care for the backup. Water the flowers - clean the volcanoes.
In Elsevier's case against Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, the judge said: "simply making copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website, disserves the public interest"
The copyrighted material in question is academic research, much of which is paid for by public funds. This judge is confusing "public" with "publishing companies". How much has the academic journal scam cost the public?
legal changes often lead to negative outcomes. New laws can limit use, introduce new payments or make open licensing incompatible with the given legal system. In such cases, OER advocates need to take a stance in defense of the existing rules.
not all of the resources needed for education will be openly licensed — for example, modern education requires use of cultural resources that are in copyright and will never be openly licensed. We therefore need good and balanced rules allowing educators acting in the public interest to use these resources.
the development of OER provides proof for the need of strong user rights in education. By looking at effects of successful OER projects we can describe a future educational reality, in which institutions, educators, and students benefit from a more liberal copyright law. Part of the success of Wikipedia as an education tool is the fact that no one accessing the site, or copying it for students, needs to worry: “Is this legal?”
Anyone can say Anything
The “Open World Assumption” is central to this post and to the actual shift in paradigm when it comes to moving from documents to data. People/institutions have an alleged interest in protecting the way their assets are described. Even libraries. The Open World Assumption makes it sound quite chaotic, to some ears. And claims that machine learning will solve everything tend not to help the unconvinced too much. Something to note is that this ability to say something about a third party’s resource connects really well with Web annotations (which do more than “add metadata” to those resources) and with the fact that no-cost access to some item of content isn’t the end of the openness.
if free textbooks or OER offer learners free access to good quality knowledge
Big “if”. And it’s one of those cases where defining those terms (“access”, “knowledge”, “free”, “good quality”, even “learners”…) is important but risky. We don’t want sterile debates, but we need to acknowledge that we may not be talking about the same things.
Some practitioners of open education have been dismayed at the recent emphasis on "free textbooks", which implies that cost-cutting is the main goal of openness. But it should not be forgotten that for many teachers and students, open textbooks provide an introduction to broader open practices.
With over 36 million visitors each month, the San Francisco-based platform-capitalist company Academia.edu is hugely popular with researchers. Its founder and CEO Richard Price maintains it is the ‘largest social-publishing network for scientists’, and ‘larger than all its competitors put together’. Yet posting on Academia.edu is far from being ethically and politically equivalent to using an institutional open access repository, which is how it is often understood by academics. Academia.edu’s financial rationale rests on the ability of the venture-capital-funded professional entrepreneurs who run it to monetize the data flows generated by researchers. Academia.edu can thus be seen to have a parasitical relationship to a public education system from which state funding is steadily being withdrawn.
Includes links to related articles.
UNDERSTANDINGOPEN ACCESS
The limitations of access alone: Moving towards open processes in education technology
All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online. As soon as January, when the departing editors’ noncompete contracts expire, they plan to start a new open-access journal to be called Glossa.”
What Open-Access Publishing Actually Costs
Open Education Handbook 2014
All about open education
Welche OA-Lizenzen verwenden andere Journals in DOAJ?
Was ist mit "Änderungen" an wisssenschaftlichen Texten gemeint? Wie muss ich mir das vorstellen? Geht es nur um das Wiederveröffenltichen von Textteilen z.B. in Lehrbüchern oder tatsächlich um das Remixen von Sätzen?
advocate for the preservation, archiving, and free c
This is a really important question about the relative invisibility of e-lit. Distribution tends to rely on models which mimic academia and fandom - funny linking those two I suppose.
The second level of Open Access is Gold Open Access, which requires the author to pay the publishing platform a fee to have their work placed somewhere it can be accessed for free. These fees can range in the hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Not necessarily true. This is a misconception. "About 70 percent of OA journals charge no APCs at all. We’ve known this for a decade but it’s still widely overlooked by people who should know better." -Suber http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2015/09/opinion/not-dead-yet/an-interview-with-peter-suber-on-open-access-not-dead-yet/#_
Faculty Senate wants work published through Open Access
The facilitation ap-proachcreated opportunities for youth to participate in a variety of leadershiptasks. Youth participants routinely initiated the meetings, explained the agenda,and helped keep the group on task.
This finding seems to support the idea that more student involvement and less hierarchical adult control leads to more access for students to participate and, potentially to form identities of "youth activist" in their own terms.
Open Access - The book.
What Is Open Access?
access
open access
it was only a problem for researchers in the developing world
the problem of predatory open access seems highly contained to just a few countries
-- Shen and Bjork, "'Predatory' open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics", http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20150910/6b26c21e/attachment-0001.pdf
I agree with the broader point that just because this affects certain regions more, doesn't mean it's a problem. However, it's more a result of the structural incentives of: 1.) accreditation by publication; and 2.) the Anglo-American dominance of the research space at present. Researchers from elsewhere are being badly advised (and then scammed) on how to play the Anglophone system. You might just as well say that this should be addressed, rather than making it the OA community's responsibility to fix the proxies-for-quality problem
Keyan Tomaselli does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
As people have pointed out in the comments, author is Editor in Chief of Critical Arts. Relevant for potential conflict of interest given this paragraph:
Taylor & Francis in particular, via a development strategy with selected South African journals, initially facilitated by the National Research Foundation and Unisa Press, helped to position many of these titles as global, rather than only local. In so doing, they catapulted South African authors into global research networks.
In an academic world ever more infiltrated by fraudsters, con artists and pirates, one can still trust the content and academic integrity of scientific society journals and long-standing corporate publishers. They protect against article and journal cloning, identity theft, bogus journals, forgery, author substitution, fake metrics, and prevent outright intellectual property theft.
This is an incredibly conservative stance that seems to imply that only existing entities can ever be trusted. These same entities, however, are often for-profit, making over a billion dollars per year profit, even while universities cannot afford to subscribe to all the material they need.
Furthermore, using publisher brand as a measure of trust is not sound, as the recent cases of mass retractions and peer-review scams show: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/43761/title/Another-Mass-Retraction/
Shared information
The “social”, with an embedded emphasis on the data part of knowledge building and a nod to solidarity. Cloud computing does go well with collaboration and spelling out the difference can help lift some confusion.
open access
High quality editing and publication costs money, and if open access is a priority it is important to ensure that funding is available to make it possible for the important work that both the editors and the publishers do is still carried out.
In order to avoid the confused deputy problem, asubject must be careful to maintain the associationbetween each authority and its intended purpose. Using the key analogy, one could imagine immediatelyattaching a label to each key upon receiving it, wherethe label describes the purpose for which the key is tobe used. In order to know the purpose for a key, thesubject must understand the context in which the key is received; for example, labelling is not possible if keysmagically appear on the key ring without the subject’sknowledge.
Even if one can distinguish the keys, decidingto try all available keys puts one at risk of becoming aconfused deputy.
We would argue that the “true” capability model is the object-capability model, because all known major capability systems take the object-based approach (forexamples, see [1, 4, 9, 11, 16, 17, 19, 21]). In all ofthese systems, a capability is an object reference–not something that behaves like a key or ticket in the realworld. Definitive books on capability-based systems[6, 16] also describe these systems from the object-capability perspective, and explicitly characterize themas “object-based”.
The claim that capability systemsin general cannotenforce the *-Property appears to be based on themisunderstanding that capabilities and data are notdistinguishable.
Theonly capability Bob holds to a lower level is a readcapability, so the *-Property is enforced. The onlycapability Alice holds to a higher level is a writecapability, so the Simple Security Property is enforced
This paragraph would be clearer if the capabilities were written out fully:
The only capability Bob holds to a lower level is a "read data" capability, so the *-Property is enforced. The only capability Alice holds to a higher level is a "write data" capability, so the Simple Security Property is enforced.
Maybe. But it still seems confused. As though the properties are in the wrong sentences.
Nonetheless, both properties are enforced.
we examine three different models thathave been used to describe capabilities, and define a set of seven security properties that capture the distinctions among them
Journals in which all peer reviewed scholarly articles are online available without any restrictions and for which an Article Processing Charge (APC) has been paid.
This is not what gold OA means. Gold OA refers exclusively to material made OA by the publisher. It does not refer to any particular business model. This is a gross misclassification.
Digital writing is the first kind of writing that does not reduce recorded knowledge to a rivalrous object. If we all have the right equipment, then we can all have copies of the same digital text without excluding one another, without multiplying our costs, and without depleting our resources.
Suber, Peter. Open Access. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013. 47.
Gold open access provides everyone with access to articles during all stages of publication, with processing charges paid by the author(s).
As conceived of in most of the literature, "gold open access" refers to the means of dissemination (done by the publisher), not any one specific business model. Gold open access does not intrinsically mean, however, that the author pays and, indeed, this was not integral to the term as it was coined by Stevan Harnad. At the time of writing in mid 2014, the majority of gold venues listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals do not operate on the basis of article processing charges and instead fund their operations through other means.
For more on this, see:
Suber, Peter. Open Access. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
Eve, Martin Paul. Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.
(Both books available freely online; gold open access.)
http://blogs.egu.eu/network/palaeoblog/files/2015/02/OpenGlossary1.pdf http://legacy.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
While I’d struggle to tell you how I learn best, there is one question that I’d always be able to answer enthusiastically: What would you like to learn next? Right now I’m learning JavaScript and have plans to give Spanish another go. I should probably pick up those guitar lessons again soon as well. Thankfully we live in a time when it’s trivially easy to gain access to resources and to learning activities. The problem is finding out the ones that work best for you. Perhaps that’s why we carry around in our pockets devices that can access pretty much the sum total of human knowledge yet use them to LOL at amusing pictures of cats. What are the barriers here? I’d suggest there are three main ones: 1 Curriculum - the series of activities that build towards a learning goal 2 Credentials - the ability to show what you know 3 Community - the cohort of peers you feel you are part of, along with access to ‘experts’
How do I learn best? What resources are the best ones for me?
The odds that an open access journal is referenced on the English Wikipedia are 47% higher compared to closed access journals,” say Teplitskiy and co.
list of institutions with open access policies
Good deck on open access and open publishing.
5.4 STRENGTHS AND WEAKNESSES OF MOOCS
To suggest that faculty are innocently waiting to be pounced on by predators is to deny their agency and their ability to make choices about their own work. There may be days where that metaphor seems apt, but I think overall this is a damaging mentality to librarians interested in promoting new models of scholarly communication.
A nice point about how librarians need to be thoughtful in the way they present the pitfalls of the emerging open access model of scholarly communication.
If federally funded research is going to broadly benefit society, it has to be widely accessible, not just to curious private citizens, but also to industries, private organizations, and federal, state, and local governments where scientific knowledge can help create new products, solve problems, educate students, and make policy decisions.
It is The People who will most benefit from open access to federally funded research.
Giving the public what it paid for sounds noble, but from where I sit, a scientist at a well-funded research university, ensuring that research papers are available to the public for free seems pointless.
This seems to be a comment sentiment-- the open access arguments don't address the individual "what's in it for me?" question. And it is not wrong for people to be asking this question-- not just what benefits them, but also what misery are they in for if they start down this unknown (and possibly treacherous) path? It is the rare few intrepid leaders in this space that can see beyond the immediate benefits and risks-- that can see a new world of science that could exist and are willing to make the epicly dangerous journey along with their loyal argonauts who can withstand the siren song and sail safely through the academic scylla and charybdis.
The database should have an associated web site for access by internal researchers working on atlas construction and quite likely a separate Web site for public access to published datasets.
Need for web site access by internal researchers vs web-based public access to published datasets
The initial inputs for deriving quantitative information of gene expression and embryonic morphology are raw image data, either of fluorescent proteins expressed in live embryos or of stained fluorescent markers in fixed material. These raw images are then analyzed by computational algorithms that extract features, such as cell location, cell shape, and gene product concentration. Ideally, the extracted features are then recorded in a searchable database, an atlas, that researchers from many groups can access. Building a database with quantitative graphical and visualization tools has the advantage of allowing developmental biologists who lack specialized skills in imaging and image analysis to use their knowledge to interrogate and explore the information it contains.
1) Initial input is raw image data 2) feature extraction on raw image data 3) extracted features stored in shared, searchable database 4) database available to researchers from many groups 5) quantitative graphical and visualization tools allow access to those without specialized skill in imaging and image analysis
He laid the philosophical groundwork back in 2008, in an essay entitled "Guerilla Open Access Manifesto."
Aaron Schwartz's essay: http://cryptome.org/2013/01/swartz-open-access.htm
Meeting Venue
Internet access is not suitable for digital natives like us.