Editors' Choice
By Andrew Wesolek | June 19, 2013
In recognition of its first anniversary, the editors of OA now interviewed PeerJ Co-founder and publisher, Peter Binfield. Peter has worked in publishing for twenty years. Prior to Co-founding PeerJ, he served as the publisher of PLOS ONE, which he led to become the largest journal in the world.
Read Peter’s full bio here.
1: First, could you survey the first year of PeerJ, noting some of the successes and challenges you have faced?
Certainly – this first year has been an amazing journey! We announced ourselves on June 12th 2012 with little more than a press release, the 2 co-founders, and a basic web site. But the response we saw as a result of that announcement was incredible – people were truly excited, and of course intrigued, about the potential for this model. In large part that was down to the new OA business model that we created for PeerJ (low cost lifetime memberships giving academics the rights to publish freely with us thereafter), however the names of the founders (Jason Hoyt – from Mendeley, myself – from PLOS ONE) and the financial involvement of Tim O’Reilly (of O’Reilly Media Group) also meant that people sat up and took notice. At that time, Nature described us as “a significant innovation” (http://www.nature.com/news/journal-offers-flat-fee-for-all-you-can-publish-1.10811); we were covered in places such as Ars Technica (http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/06/new-open-access-journal-aims-to-disrupt-scholarly-publishing/), Huffington Post (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/12/peerj-oreilly-open-access-publishing_n_1589638.html) and the Times Higher Education (http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/420315.article); and Science magazine won the award for best headline with “New Open Access Journal Lets Scientists Publish ’til They Perish” (http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/06/new-open-access-journal-lets-sci.html)!
We spent the next year building the company up to where it is today. That involved recruiting an Editorial Board of 800 Editors (including 5 Nobel Laureates); recruiting staff (we now have 5 staff total); building submission, peer review and publication software entirely from scratch; re-thinking the publication process from bottom up to work better in a ‘digital first Open Access’ mode; designing beautiful, user-friendly interfaces; and establishing ourselves with all the third party services and agencies who support the journal publishing ecosystem (for example memberships of OASPA (http://blog.peerj.com/post/50498436021/peerj-now-a-member-of-oaspa), COPE (http://blog.peerj.com/post/50412709909/peerj-member-of-cope) , and CrossRef; listings with the DOAJ (http://blog.peerj.com/post/50567500713/peerj-in-the-doaj), PubMed Central, PubMed (http://blog.peerj.com/post/49845635560/peerj-articles-in-pubmed-and-pmc) and Scopus (http://blog.peerj.com/post/47445954946/pubmed-central-pubmed-and-scopus-indexing-peerj); long term archiving at CLOCKSS and LOCKSS (http://blog.peerj.com/post/40018981867/archiving-and-peerj) and so on).
Having put all the pieces in place, we opened for PeerJ submissions on Dec 3rd 2012, published our first PeerJ articles on Feb 12th 2013, and launched PeerJ PrePrints (our preprint server) on April 3rd 2013 (http://blog.peerj.com/post/52783384704/celebrating-the-one-year-anniversary-of-peerj). Even in an established publishing company, with more resources and a pre-existing infrastructure, this would have been moving fast – and yet the whole ecosystem is now launched and running very smoothly. As of today, we have already published 89 PeerJ articles and 31 PeerJ PrePrints and several hundred articles are at some stage or other in our peer review system.
2: One of the most interesting aspects of PeerJ’s membership model is that one can imagine it developing and enhancing OA scholarly publishing communities. If this is indeed happening, could you describe the initial stages of community-based scholarship developing at PeerJ and how you anticipate this development to progress? If it is not happening, can you give some thoughts as to why not?
At the moment it is probably too early to provide concrete examples of this happening – we have ‘only’ published 89 articles and so the network and community effects that we expect to see don’t really have a big enough database to work on yet. However, I think you can see the beginnings of where this will take us.
I often tell people that because we have a membership model, and because we have a single system for our submission, peer review and publication processes then by natural consequence we have a very good understanding of how our users contribute to the overall system. As a result, as we go forwards, we expect to develop functionality which is more ‘person centric’, as opposed to ‘article centric’. This contrasts with a ‘normal’ publisher (either OA or subscription in fact) who typically doesn’t care or know very much about who their authors or reviewers are, or whether they have had prior interactions with them – these publishers have usually outsourced their peer review and/or publication systems to third parties and as a result their databases of users are split over several services and are not even disambiguated. Because of our membership model we have a greater knowledge of our users and this will then allow us to do new and exciting things with our functionality at the level of the individual user.
For example, you can already go to an individual’s profile page on PeerJ (https://peerj.com/MathewWedel/ ) and see interactions they have had in our system (for example as an author, editor, reviewer or commenter). And because we know what actions they have completed then we can award ‘contribution points’ (https://peerj.com/about/FAQ/academic-contribution/) to them, meaning that they can now be recognized for their involvement in the publication process.
Similarly, if an individual chooses to comment on a PeerJ article (as they can do on PeerJ PrePrints already) then the author, or other users, can choose to highlight the comment as insightful and ‘vote it up’ (see the Feedback on https://peerj.com/preprints/15/ for example). In this way, members will be able to demonstrate which areas they are expert in, and whether they have supplied insightful feedback.
And if you use our search engine (https://peerj.com/articles/) then you can see that we present faceted search results from article text, from preprint text, from user profiles, from editor biographies etc
Going forwards, expect to see us build more of these types of functionalities, which will then start to act on an ever widening database content and interactions.
3: Last year you emphasized PeerJ’s focus on the Biological and Medical sciences, claiming that “you need to concentrate on one thing at a time.” Over the past year, have you given any more thought to moving beyond these disciplines? In particular, what are your thoughts on how PeerJ’s model might work in disciples, in which published articles typically have fewer, if any, coauthors?
At the moment we have no plans to move outside these core areas. The disciplines we are publishing in have an output of well over 1 million articles per year, and these are also the areas that are seeing the most development and adoption of Open Access. Therefore, this is a market that we need to ‘crack’ first, before focusing elsewhere.
In addition, as you point out, there are fields with quite different publication profiles to ours – for example, humanities articles typically have just one author and can be very long in extent. Therefore, a move into any new area would need to be accompanied with an analysis of whether or not the business model works there. Clearly, anyone else is at liberty to emulate our model (and we have heard rumors of people considering this) and so it will be interesting to see if our model gets adopted and/or tweaked for other fields.
4: In response to the OSTP memo on public access to federally funded research, ARL proposed SHARE while a coalition of publishers proposed CHORUS. What role do you see OA publishers, such as PeerJ playing here?
Although I am certainly no expert in either proposal, my understanding is that both SHARE and CHORUS are, in large part, an attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole – i.e. one of their primary purposes would be to find a way to take ‘openly available’ (not necessarily open access) content published in a non-Open Access journal (together with ‘full’ OA content of course) and make it sufficiently discoverable and accessible that it would meet the requirements of the OSTP memo. As such, both schemes represent an attempt to provide a useful service during a time of transition towards ‘full’ Open Access.
Once we get to the point when all articles are ‘born’ OA (in an open access journal, not as part of a hybrid arrangement), with an appropriately liberal distribution license (we use CC-BY) then much of the problem they are both addressing will actually go away. The sooner we transition to full OA, and publish all content in the most openly available format, the sooner we can realize the benefits of OA that things like the OSTP memo are really aiming towards.
Therefore, the role of publishers such as PeerJ is to continue to push the world towards a situation where all content is published in as openly accessible a format as possible!
5: Could you explain the role you see download counts playing in evaluating the overall impact of a scholarly work? How does this apply to PeerJ PrePrints?
PeerJ advocates using alternate metrics (so called ‘alt-metrics’) to help evaluate scholarly work. The most ‘trusted’ metric is a citation from another scholarly work, however it is clear that there are many other possible indicators of impact, such as downloads, tweets, facebook likes, blog posts, news coverage, influencing governmental policy and so on. There are several groups now actively working on this problem and attempting to find as much altmetric data as possible and to discern a signal from the noise.
You asked about download counts in particular, and we would say that these are just one possible indicator of impact. In many ways simple download stats are really just a popularity rating and so it is important when considering them to know what they represent. For example, a more nuanced view of download counts would be to normalize them by subject area, and article age. And an even better approach would be to measure who it is that is downloading the articles, or how long they are spending looking at certain parts of an article etc. Therefore, although raw download counts are important (provided people recognize their limitations), they actually have the potential to be much more important in the future. Right now we are still in the early days of ‘alt metrics’ and there is a lot of work still to do!
As to how it applies to PeerJ PrePrints and PeerJ – for usage reporting, we currently provide number of visitors, number of page views and the hits from the various referral sources (something which few other publishers do). In addition, we provide a full suite of other metrics such as tweets, facebook likes, google +’s etc – all via Impact Story. We keep up to date with the latest developments in the alt metrics community, and as new metrics evolve (or new ways to evaluate the existing data are developed) then we will look to integrate those sources as well.
6: You recently announced that some institutions have entered into arrangements with PeerJ – can you explain how that works?
We have two ways that an institution (usually a university library) can work with us. Institutions can choose to ‘bulk purchase’ individual memberships for their authors in advance (and distribute them as they choose), or they can pre-pay for memberships which are then used by their faculty as and when they come to publish at PeerJ. Both options allow an institution to provide an Open Access option to a large number of their authors, in an extremely affordable way – literally for the price of just one year of access to one or two subscription journals an institution can provide hundreds of their faculty with a way to publish freely with PeerJ for the rest of their career. This has to be a great (and cost effective) way for institutions to help encourage their faculty towards publishing in Open Access as a matter of course.
So far institutions such as Duke, Birmingham, Nottingham, Newfoundland and Trinity have signed up for an arrangement like this and if anyone would like more information then they should direct their librarian to: https://peerj.com/pricing/institutions/
By Jen Waller | June 18, 2013
ALA Annual is fast approaching! No doubt, Chicago is on your radar, but have you had time to investigate the offerings about scholarly communication and open access? Never fear! OANow is here!
The not so fine print: We didn’t include pre-conferences, vendor events, closed sessions, or author events. Conference coordinators lead complicated lives, so room numbers, times, etc. are subject to change. Please use the ALA conference website and the ALA Conference Scheduler to double check event details. All times are CDT.
Because we’re human, this list may not be all inclusive. If you know about an event that should be on this list, please use the comments to let us know. We’ll do our best to add events we inadvertently forgot.
Finally, don’t forget to be a good customer and let our vendors and publishers know what we think about their OA author-side fees, embargoes, etc. You can find your favorites and not-so-favorites on ALA’s Exhibitor List.
Friday, June 28, 2013
3:30 – 5:30pm
Office of Information Technology Policy (OITP) Copyright Subcommittee Meeting I
McCormick Place Convention Center, S504-bc
Committee meeting
4:30 – 5:30pm
Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI) Meeting
Gray Seminar Room; Lurie, Feinberg School of Medicine
303 Superior St., Chicago, IL
The primary order of business will be discussion of the COAPI processes and procedures document.
Saturday, June 29, 2013
8:30 – 10:30am
ACRL Science & Technology Section (STS) Scholarly Communication Committee Meeting
Hyatt Regency Chicago, Grand E
Committee meeting
8:30 – 10:00am
Data, E-Data, Data Curation: Our New Frontier
McCormick Place Convention Center, S501 bcd
Data management and curation may be a great new opportunity, but how are libraries tackling it? We already know how to archive traditional materials, but what do we do with terabytes of faculty research data? How do we manage that data set for our students’ research? Join us for a big picture view of the issues surrounding e-data collection and access. With Abigail Goben, Sarah Sheehan, Dorothea Salo, James Mullins, Joan Starr, and Robert Sandusky.
8:30 – 10:00am
The Research Footprint: Libraries Tracking and Enhancing Scholarly and Scientific Impact
McCormick Place Convention Center, N427bc
Increasingly, libraries are building services designed to assess and improve the impact of their institutions’ research activities. This is an increasingly important but complex task, as more and more scholarship is digitally shared and accessed through traditional and non-traditional pathways. This program will offer knowledge about the data and expertise libraries are using to track and enhance research dissemination and library programs built upon this data and expertise. With Cathy Sarli, Jason Priem, Kristi Holmes, and Rush G. Miller.
10:30 – 11:30am
ACRL Copyright Discussion Group
McCormick Place Convention Center, S402b
The ACRL Copyright Discussion Group reviews and discusses legislative, judicial, and regulatory developments related to copyright and libraries in higher education.
10:30am – 12:00pm
Poster Session – Open Folklore: Improving Open Access
McCormick Place Convention Center, Hall A, Exhibit Floor
1:00 – 2:30pm
Copyright in a Non-Book Media: A Primer in Art, Music, and Film
McCormick Place Convention Center, S402a
Librarians and copyright experts will discuss the complexities of the copyright law as applied to music, film, and other non-print formats. With Eric Harbeson, Laura Quilter, and Tom Lipinski.
1:00 – 2:30pm
Literary Texts and the Library in the Digital Age: New Collaborations for European and American Studies
McCormick Place Convention Center, S105d
Digital technologies are opening up new possibilities for the investigation of literary and history texts. They are also changing library spaces and reconfiguring relationships between librarians and researchers. This program investigates new roles for European and American Studies librarians in this emerging physical and virtual environment. What old skills remain relevant and what new skills are needed? What new forms of collaboration are developing between librarians, scholars, and IT personnel? With Patricia Thurston, Glen Worthey, Laura Mandell, and Paula Kaufman.
1:00 – 2:30pm
Preparing, Sharing, and Archiving: What Scholars in Political Science and Law Need to Know and How Librarians Can Help Them
McCormick Place Convention Center, N427d
Scholarly communication is in flux. While new publishing models are appearing and ground breaking legislation and court cases signal far reaching changes to the dissemination of research, university faculty are grappling with questions about copyright, author’s rights, and open access. Join us for a discussion with a panel of influential and active professionals engaged in the work of scholarly communications. Discover what political science and law scholars at your university need to know and how librarians can help them navigate the various choices open to them.
1:00 – 2:30pm
ALCTS Scholarly Communications Interest Group
McCormick Place Convention Center, N128
ORCID: Facilitating Interoperability for Research Universities
and
The Library Publishing Coalition Project: Building Capacity for an Emerging Area of Library Service Provision.
1:00 – 2:30pm
Success Stories and Challenges: How Librarians are Employing Fair Use with their Code
McCormick Place Convention Center, N427a
Creators of the ARL Fair Use Code describe the achievements and challenges of employing the ARL code, including innovative ways that librarians have implemented the code, common reactions and obstacles, and the latest legislation. Next, the workshop examines the educational use of images, including the VRA Fair Use Statement and a Code being developed by the College Art Association on image use in scholarly publications and on the creation and exhibition of new artistic works. With Robin Leach, Brandon Butler, and Kevin Smith.
3:00 – 4:00pm
ACRL/SPARC Forum - Understanding the Implications of Open Education: MOOCs and More
Hyatt Regency Chicago, Grand A
The open access movement has focused on making scholarship freely available, expanding distribution while lowering barriers for re-use. The open educational resources movement has focused on making teaching and learning materials freely accessible and openly licensed. The skyrocketing rise in the popularity of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) has put this trend squarely on the front burner, bringing openness to pedagogy in a way not previously experienced in higher education – and expanding free distribution of a university course to tens of thousands of students around the globe. This convergence holds great promise for open education, and also raises questions on what the future might look like. A panel of experts will explore the recent developments and policy implications of open education, the rise of open resources, and the potential impacts of this trend on libraries and higher education. They will also discuss both the promise and potential pitfalls of MOOCs and OER as part of open education.
3:00 – 4:00pm
EBSS Research Forum
Hyatt Regency McCormick Place, Field 20A-C
Three presentations, one of which is entitled Faculty Research & Publication Practices
This qualitative study examines how select faculty in education, and health and behavioral sciences, locate, retrieve and use information resources for research and writing and how they publish and store their publications. Results provide useful information that will aid the library in providing informed support for faculty scholarship. By Kate Zoellner, Samantha Hines, Teressa Keenan, and Sue Samson.
4:30 – 5:30pm
Committee on Legislation (COL) Copyright Subcommittee Meeting
McCormick Place Convention Center, N136
Committee meeting
4:30 – 5:30pm
Multiple Identities: Managing Authorities in Repositories and Digital Collections
McCormick Place Convention Center, S402a
This program will discuss existing implementations of authority control in repositories and digital collections. Presenters will demonstrate current working models and workflows of controlled access points outside of traditional cataloging systems, potentially including linked data schemes and research I.D. registries. With Banurekha Lakshminarayanan, Davit T. Palmer, Donald A. Brower, and Natalie K. Meyers.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
8:30 – 11:30am
ACRL Research and Scholarly Environment (formerly Scholarly Communication) Committee Meeting
Hyatt Regency Chicago, Soldier Field
Committee meeting
8:30 – 10:00am
Sustainable Models of Open Access Publishing
McCormick Place Convention Center, N139
Join the College and Research Libraries Interest Group for a panel discussion on sustainable models of open access publishing and what those models mean for libraries and faculty. With Ann Okerson, David Crotty, Matt Straiges, and Jonathan Nabe.
10:30 – 11:30am
Office of Information Technology Policy (OITP) Copyright Subcommittee Meeting II
Hilton Chicago, PDR 1
Committee meeting
10:30am – 12:00pm
Poster Session – The Green Road of Open Access in Africa, Europe and North America: Differences in Rhetoric and their Implications for the OA Movement
McCormick Place Convention Center, Hall A, Exhibit Floor
2:30 – 4:00pm
Poster Session – Connecting the Dots: Defining Scholarly Services in a Research Lifecycle Model
McCormick Place Convention Center, Hall A, Exhibit Floor
2:30 – 4:00pm
Poster Session – Marketing an Established Institutional Repository
McCormick Place Convention Center, Hall A, Exhibit Floor
3:00 – 4:00pm
ACRL Scholarly Communication Discussion Group
McCormick Place Convention Center, N127
The Scholarly Communication Discussion Group is an informal and in-depth discussion of one or more of the topics highlighted in the ACRL-SPARC Forum on Saturday afternoon. With Scott Lapinski.
4:30 – 5:30pm
ACRL Digital Humanities Discussion Group
McCormick Place Convention Center, N227a
The Digital Humanities Discussion Group will cover DH space in libraries; DH and data management; DH training for librarians; and the demographics of DH librarians.
4:30 – 5:30pm
Office of Information Technology Policy (OITP) Copyright Subcommittee Meeting III – CopyNight
McCormick Place Convention Center, S504d
Committee meeting
Monday, July 1, 2013
8:30 – 10:00am
International Perspectives on Open Access and Scholarly Communication
McCormick Place Convention Center, S402a
Presenters with North American, South American, European, and Asian perspectives will discuss open access and scholarly publishing from a librarian, scholar, and publisher’s point of view. From the Open Access (OA) models of Latin America to an international publisher’s assessment of the economics of OA to understanding authors’ considerations for submitting works to and perceptions of OA journals, this program will cover an extensive array of OA issues from across the globe.
10:30 – 11:30am
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – The future of learning?
McCormick Place Convention Center, S404bc
MOOCs (massive open online courses) have taken the education world by storm recently with numerous colleges and universities offering a wide variety of learning opportunities for no cost online. In fact, the New York Times called 2012 the “Year of the MOOC.” These “open source” courses usually earn no credit, but allow students of different age levels and expertise to pursue personal interests through interactive learning across distance. This session will share examples of MOOCs, advantages and disadvantages, alongside the potential for global education at all levels and the impact on libraries in the future.
10:30 – 11:30am
Print Principles in a Digital World: Intellectual Freedom in the 21st Century Academic Library
McCormick Place Convention Center, S402a
The panelists will explore the impact of the continuing digital revolution on academic libraries and their users. What will be the implications for scholars when almost all information is born digital and no paper copies exist – when libraries no longer buy anything physical other than paper towels and soap? Issues will include the implications of licensed access and external storage versus outright purchase for the availability, preservation and reliability of data and researcher privacy. With J. Douglas Archer and Martin Garnar.
4:00 – 4:45pm
Altmetrics, the Decoupled Journal, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing
McCormick Place Convention Center, S102d
In growing numbers, scholars are moving their workflows online. As that happens, important, once-invisible parts of the scientific process – conversations, arguments, recommendations, reads, bookmarks, and more – are leaving online traces. Mining these traces or “altmetrics” can give us faster, more diverse, and more accurate data of scholarly impact. What is more, this information could inform powerful, network-aware filters that supplement and even replace the increasingly overwhelmed peer-review system. We’ll discuss the current research and practice of altmetrics, as well as their long-term implications: the potential to power a fast, open, and truly web-native scholarly communication ecosystem.
And finally, two events where you will be encouraged to discuss scholarly communication topics of importance to you. At unconferences and camps, content is decided upon by the participants. So consider attending and sharing information about copyright, open access, digital humanities, academic publishing, altmetrics, or your favorite scholarly communication topic.
Friday, June 28, 9:00am – 12:00pm
Annual Unconference
McCormick Place Convention Center, S104a
Monday, July 1, 1:00pm – 3:00pm
Annual Library Camp
McCormick Place Convention Center, N226
We hope you have a fun, productive, and engaging time at ALA Annual!
By Andrew Wesolek | June 12, 2013
This past February, OA Now commented on the first batch of articles published by start-up Open Access publisher, PeerJ. Today, PeerJ celebrates its first anniversary. Early next week, the editors of OA now will interview PeerJ co-founder Peter Binfield to present his thoughts on the successes and challenges seen in first year of membership-based OA publication, the state of OA, and possible future directions. Stay tuned!
By Chealsye Bowley | June 4, 2013
Last Thursday, the California House Assembly passed the California Taxpayer Access to Publicly Funded Research Act (AB 609). AB 609 would provide free public access to the published results of more than $200 million in annual, state-funded research. All publications resulting from a state-funded grant would be made openly accessible to the public within 6 months of publication through the California Digital Library. The bill will be heard in the state Senate later this summer.
AB 609 is a bi-partisan bill co-authored by Republican Assemblyman Brian Nestande and Democratic Assemblyman Mike Gatto. The idea for the bill originated in Nestande’s office by a Science and Technology Fellow after the fellow discovered her colleagues in medical and biotechnology professions were unable to access the latest research articles. This lack of access impacts their ability to help patients and develop cutting-edge technologies.
Gatto’s legislation was inspired by Aaron Swartz‘s work. California Newswire quoted Gatto as saying, “Aaron Swartz followed in the footsteps of our founding fathers and stood up to authority in the pursuit of knowledge.” Gatto provided additional comments about the bill and the high cost of journal articles:
“Forcing someone to pay large fees to find the results of research paid for by tax dollars limits the public’s ability to be informed and stifles innovation. We must ensure that Californians have access to the most up-to-date and cutting-edge research. This bill is a simple solution that promotes the sharing of knowledge and investment in our future.”
Currently, the majority of articles on the results of publicly funded research are only available through costly journal subscription services. Single articles cost an individual approximately $30 each, and journal subscriptions for school’s can be as high as $40,000 per year. The 10-campus University of California system spends nearly $40 million on academic journal subscriptions per year. Many of these articles are written, reviewed, and edited by University of California professors as part of their scholarly duties.
California residents in support of the bill should write to their state representatives in support of AB 609. SPARC has set up a legislative action center to help with this process.
Learn more about the bill from SPARC.
By Chealsye Bowley | May 21, 2013
The United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) will make its digital publications available free of charge and under an open license. UNESCO’s open access repository will launch in July 2013, have a multilingual interface, and contain hundreds of digital UNESCO publications available for download.
Janis Karklins, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, announced the new open access policy during the opening of the World Summit on the Information Society Forum on May 13.
“Researchers from all countries, but especially from developing and least developed countries will benefit and capitalize on Open Access to knowledge. Our new policy will enable us to increase the visibility, accessibility, and rapid distribution of our publications,” said Karklins.
Resources that are published by UNESCO after June 1 will be immediately deposited into the repository. For resources that are published by external publishers, UNESCO will respect an embargo period up to 12 months. A Creative Commons license was not specifically stated in the announcement, but the policy appears to be similar to CC BY for UNESCO published resources and CC BY-NC-ND for resources published externally.
UNESCO is the first member of the United Nations to adopt such an open access policy for its publications. Read the full policy here.
Read the full announcement here.
By Andrew Wesolek | May 9, 2013
Today, the White house issued an important Executive Order on open data. Acknowledging the public and economic benefits derived from the open availability of government weather and GPS data, the Executive Order mandates all government data, where possible and legally permissible will be open and machine readable. The Order also ensures that “data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable.” Effectively making Openness the default for government data. According to John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation:
“Today’s Executive Order demonstrates a new approach to open data, moving beyond rhetoric and aspiration, requiring agencies to publicly report on what data can be made public, building a new backbone for federal open data policy, and setting an example for other governments to follow”
This Order also comes on the heels of an increasingly bright spring for OA advocates. In addition to the White House Directive mandating OA, FASTR and FRPAA, Several state legislatures are considering OA for state funded research. Most recently, the California and New York State legislatures began considering such legislation. COAPI applauds these efforts and signed letters notifying legislators in each state of our support. Residents of these states may consider contacting their representatives.
Read more about the Order here:
Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information
The White House Blog
By Chealsye Bowley | April 30, 2013
Science Europe, an association of fifty-one European national research organizations, released a major open access position statement on Monday. The statement titled “Principles for the Transition to Open Access to Research Publications” contained a set of agreed upon commons principles and actions to support the transition to open access.
The following is the set of principles:
With regard to Open Access to research publications, Science Europe Member Organisations share the view that:
• publication and dissemination of results are an integral part of the research process. The allocation of resources within the research system must take this into account;
• Open Access to the published results of publicly-funded research will have huge value for the research community and will offer significant social and economic benefits to potential users in industry, charitable and public sectors, to individual professionals, and to the general public;
• Open Access, as defined in the Berlin Declaration, is not only about the right of access, but also about the opportunity to re-use information with as few restrictions as possible, subject to proper attribution;
• the common goal of Science Europe Members is to shift to a research publication system in which free
access to research publications is guaranteed, and which avoids undue publication barriers. This involves a move towards Open Access, replacing the present subscription system with other publication models whilst redirecting and reorganising the current resources accordingly.
The statement then outlined some key actions for the Science Europe member organizations. The follow is an excerpt of the action list:
• recognise repositories and related facilities as key strategic research infrastructure which should comply with high quality standards;
• require that as part of the publication services provided against the payment of Open Access publication fees, effective mechanisms are in place to ensure that the publication of research outputs is subject to rigorous quality assurance;
• accept that it is essential that Open Access transactions need to be managed efficiently, with the
co-operation of all parties involved;
• stress that the hybrid model, as currently defined and implemented by publishers, is not a working and viable pathway to Open Access. Any model for transition to Open Access supported by Science Europe Member Organisations must prevent ‘double dipping’ and increase cost transparency;
Additionally, Peter Suber highlighted an important aspect about the statement. Suber wrote on his G+ page, ”Note in particular how these 51 organizations reject the RCUK/Finch approach in part by supporting green on the same terms as gold, in part by recognizing OA repositories as “key research infrastructure”, and in part by criticizing hybrid OA journals and condemning double-dipping.”
Science Europe encourages the European Commission, national governments, and researching funding and performing organizations to adopt this approach to open access.
Read the full statement here.
By Yuan Li | April 18, 2013
Nothing is hotter in the education world right now than the massive open online course or MOOC. MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course and is a model for delivering course online, free to any person with no limit on attendance. The recent development started from three courses offered by Stanford University in fall 2011, each of which had an enrollment of about 100,000. Now hundreds of MOOCs are offered by institutions through the world and the number keeps increasing. Here is a list of MOOCs offered by the best university and entities http://www.mooc-list.com/
A great deal of discussion has been going around MOOCs about its value proposition, issue to consider, potential development, business model, policy, copyright concerns, technology, etc. If you are interested in exploring this topic, here are a few resources that you can start with.
The Chronicle of Higher Education MOOC Resources
The EDUCAUSE MOOC Resources
The Devlin MOOC discussion series (Youtube videos)
By Andrew Wesolek | April 11, 2013
Earlier this week, Tech Crunch confirmed that Elsevier acquired Mendeley for between $69M and $100M. Given the generally positive feelings many academics and OA advocates have for Mendeley and their perhaps not-so-positive feelings towards Elsevier, this acquisition has caused a great deal of unease. Academics are raising the perhaps legitimate concern that Mendeley is on the verge of transforming into something a bit more closed and restrictive.
The Mendeley team insists that the acquisition will allow them to use Elsevier’s resources to enhance research and development and retain its freemium pricing model. And, just in case users still have concerns—they get more free stuff (double the storage space) out of the deal!
Though we are unlikely to understand the full impact of this acquisition for months or perhaps years, Martin Fenner notes that it is an indication that:
publishers have realized that we are moving into an Open Access publishing model, which in contrast to subscription publishing is not about owning the content, but about providing valuable services around content that is free to read and reuse.
This could very well be a good thing, however, the acquisition is not without risks. As Kent Anderson suggests, Mendeley, may now become more vulnerable to the developing court perspectives on the transfer of born-digital property.
From the perspective of the Mendeley team, the acquisition is welcome news. However, others have reservations about the possible Mendeley’s ability to persist as a largely free and open collaborative tool. Only time will tell whether or not these reservations come to pass. Until that time, though, we’ll certainly have plenty to read about.
Read more about the acquisition here:
Tech Crunch Confirmation
Mendeley Q&A
A Matter of Perspective
Enjoy the Disruption
Why I’ll Keep Using Mendeley
Mendeley and Elsevier
The Mendeley Endgame
By Anne Langley | April 5, 2013
New open access journals are born frequently. Some of these journals are quite real and useful while others are not. The bad ones prey on unknowing faculty and researchers, and their practices have given good OA journals a bad reputation. In any wild frontier, lawlessness is pretty much certain. Because of the confusing lay of the OA landscape out in its own wild frontier, there is quite a bit of education that needs to take place for those inhabiting the badlands. We must make it our business to include, as part of any OA action, an education program that explains what OA is, how it works, what the roles of the various players are (researchers, publishers, librarians, etc.), and what being a good citizen means in this OA frontier. It pays to check out the journal on both the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org), and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (www.oaspa.org) before you submit an article.
Two brand new OA Journals:
New GHSP Journal Pushes the Open Access Envelope | K4Health.
6 reasons to publish with peerj.
Read about predatory OA publishing in this Nature Article from March 27, 2013 (this includes tips on how to figure out if an OA journal is reputable):
Investigating journals: The dark side of publishing.
