Free Culture projects:
Do you mainly access your journals online or in print? From the findings of our report on Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications process (May 2008), we are keen to know how many of you have now switched to accessing journals mainly online and the implications this might have on the cost of publishing. Click here to vote.
Posted 13 August 2008
Hi,
It is something quite interesting !!
A Genuine online money earning affiliated programme!! You can earn
more than $250 to $500 dollars per day!!
It is really amazing!!!
Create your Account & refer your friends to earn launch referral bonus
on every new registration.
Try this...
Hi,
I'm not sure this is the right place to ask... I've been registered a
timeline - works fine in FF, but there is a problem with Internet
explorer (timeline is empty, data doesn't show at all).
Maybe someone can help with this. thanks.
code from the page that causes the problem:
{{Event new
Today marks the publication of a special neuroscience Review in PLoS Computational Biology that we expect will become a key reference work. Gustavo Deco, Viktor K. Jirsa, Peter A. Robinson, Michael Breakspear, and Karl Friston present the results of several years of collaboration in response to a challenge posed at a Brain Connectivity Workshop to define and clarify the true meanings and usage of models in constant, but approximate use. Terms such as mean-field approximations, mass-action, neural-mass models, neural-field models, density-dynamics, etc. were in regular use but in undefined ways. This article tries to address how different models, used to simulate and predict observed brain dynamics, can be traced back to their common fundaments. In an accompanying Editorial also published today, Karl Friston, PLoS Computational Biology’s neuroscience editor, explains the origin and purpose of the article, which should standardise many concepts for some time.
Another special notice for this month is the new Developing Computational Biology Collection, available for free at: http://collections.plos.org/ploscompbiol/developing.php. These articles, published over the last year, are a series of personal Perspectives from computational biologists in a variety of developing, and often under-represented, countries. Featuring viewpoints from Goran Neshich in Brazil, Sebastian Bassi in Argentina, Liping Wei in China, and more, the series has brought a different voice to science around the world.
And finally, PLoS Computational Biology also sheds light on the difficulties for some of these same scientists to travel internationally, either to conferences or for more permanent work. In an Editorial published in collaboration with the International Society for Computational Biology following a survey conducted by the Society, Barb Bryant considers the travel restrictions imposed on many scientists, especially with regard to US visas. If you have anything you would like to add to this topic, please use our commentary features to add your thoughts.
Hi All,
I am trying do writing up some extended function in C/C++.
and I currently created two file "ocr-greenstone.cc", "ocr-
greenstone.h"
my question is that for all the functions that I implemented in .cc
file all within namespace ocropus {}
do I need to add all the function header to .h file? also I defined
Jonathan Gray, A Map of Openness? Open Knowledge Foundation Weblog, August 28, 2008. Excerpt:
We’ve recently been in conversation with various individuals about starting a project to map open projects and groups....
We’ve put a few notes about the project on the OKF [Open Knowledge Foundation] wiki [here].
A tentative description of the projects reads:
A versioned database of open projects, open initiatives and the organisations and individuals behind them. A publicly editable directory and knowledge base of information about these projects and groups. A visual interface to explore and analyse the material.
Related developments include:
- Michel [Bauwens] has blogged a bit about the initiative here, and has made an ‘Open’ category on the P2P Foundation wiki - including “descriptions of nearly 400 open concepts and initiatives, a list of open definitions, a directory of podcasts on the topics to learn more (and soon: a directory of video webcasts)”.
- Heather [Ford] has put a diagram - which she used in her iSummit ‘08 keynote speech - on her blog.
- Mark [Surman] started a page on the Open Everything wiki for starting to gather examples of different kinds of open projects.
We’d love to have a wiki-like registry (like CKAN) with a visual interface for exploring the material - perhaps using something like Prefuse or Processing.
If you have any thoughts - or you’d like to get involved - please get in touch on our discuss list or at info at the OKF domain name!
Comment. This is a great idea. If I can speak for the Open Access Directory, we've been considering something similar, at least a list of university-based initiatives and at least those initiatives focused on OA to research literature and data. We have a draft list under development, but it's on hold while we try to figure out how make the best use of the limited database functionality of the Mediawiki software, e.g. so that we can tag each initiative by type, discipline, nation, and so on. But no matter who does it, and now matter how many similar projects overlap, it's still a great idea.
SPARC, PLoS, and Students for Free Culture have picked October 14, 2008, to be the first Open Access Day. From today's announcemeant:
Building on the worldwide momentum toward Open Access to publicly funded research, Open Access Day will create a key opportunity for the higher education community and the general public to understand more clearly the opportunities of wider access and use of content.
Open Access Day will invite researchers, educators, librarians, students, and the public to participate in live, worldwide broadcasts of events. In North America, events will be held at 7:00 PM (Eastern) and 7:00 PM (Pacific) and feature appearances from:
Sir Richard Roberts, Ph.D., F.R.S.
Joint winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1993 for discovering split genes and RNA splicing, one of 26 Nobel Prize-winners to sign the Open Letter to U.S. Congress in support of taxpayer access to publicly funded research, and currently at New England Biolabs, USA. [7PM Eastern]Philip E. Bourne, Ph.D.
Philip E. Bourne is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Computational Biology and the author of the popular PLoS Computational Biology Ten Simple Rules Series. He is Professor in the Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California San Diego, Associate Director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank, Senior Advisor to the San Diego Supercomputer Center, an Adjunct Professor at the Burnham Institute, and Co-Founder of SciVee. [7PM Pacific]Librarians and student organizers are invited to host meetings around the broadcast. To see a list of participating campuses and to sign up, visit the Open Access Day Web site....Additional international events will be announced shortly.
The event will also mark the launch of the new “Voices of Open Access Video Series.” Key members of the research community, including a teacher, librarian, researcher, student, patient advocate, and a funder, will speak on why they are committed to Open Access....
Open Access Day was inspired by the National Day of Action on February 15, 2007, led by Students for FreeCulture with support from the Alliance for Taxpayer Access....
PS: For background, see our past posts on the February 15, 2007, National Day of Action.
Update. I hope you participate. Take the message directly to the faculty, students, librarians, and administrators at your institution. Set up a campus meeting. Point to the existing university OA mandates, explain them, and set up a local committee to help launch one on your own campus.
Update. Dorothea Salo plans to win the blog contest. Give her a run for the money goodie bag.
Hi, I already requested it on past but as i can see we have a bigger
community on SF and new developers, I would like to know if someone is
interested in implement or have this feature:
As i can see to show different fields on a form is necessary a new
template.
Example: the first field on my form is a drop down field with two
Okay, I have to go back to my day job, but I did hang one more bag on
the side of Semantic Forms, so I guess I'll float it up and see if
anyone else has a use for it.
(Daniel, you should cover your eyes now...)
I was looking for a way to change a field in an SF generated page with
a single click.
Yesterday, the FBI, UC Berkeley police, and Alameda County Sheriff's deputies conducted a raid on the Long Haul Infoshop, a community space that is home to a number of leftist and anarchist groups, including a newspaper and a radio station. Armed with a warrant (PDF), authorities entered and quickly removed every computer in the Long Haul space.
According to the Associated Press, a UC Berkeley spokesman said that the raid was part of an investigation into threatening e-mails tracked to computers there. Among the computers seized were computers belonging to the Slingshot newspaper, and the Berkeley Daily Planet reports that police "got [Berkeley Liberation Radio's] hard drive."
Even with a warrant, the authorities may have acted in violation of federal law when they seized the computers. The seizure of media computers would appear to be a violation of the Privacy Protection Act, which says that the authorities are not entitled to "search for or seize any work product materials possessed by a person reasonably believed to have a purpose to disseminate to the public a newspaper [or] broadcast."
The purpose of the Privacy Protection Act is to ensure the freedom of speech and of the press. While there are exceptions to the act (such as when the documents seized themselves contain classified information or child pornography), the intent of the act is to prevent the government from using its search and seizure powers to shut down newspapers and radio stations, or otherwise interfere with the free flow of information to the public.
The seizure of computers is of special interest to EFF, since the first case we fought — and won — was a result of the illegal seizure of several computers from Steve Jackson Games in 1990. In that case, the federal court held that the Secret Service violated the Privacy Protection Act, and ordered the agency to pay for the harm it had caused.
In comments filed today, EFF joined with other public interest and consumer groups in urging the Copyright Office to clarify the process for licensing digital music services, but to steer clear of larger digital copyright controversies. The comments were filed in a rulemaking involving the Section 115 compulsory license for "digital phonorecord deliveries" (DPDs) that has been dragging on since 2001 (read the July 16, 2008 "notice of proposed rulemaking" for a summary of the tortured history of the proceeding).
The issues are fantastically complex (even most copyright experts are perplexed by the morass surrounding digital music licensing), but the current logjam boils down to music publishers against everyone else. Every music recording involves two copyrights: one for the sound recording (i.e., the "master"), which is usually controlled by a record label, and one for the musical work (i.e., the "composition"), which is usually controlled by a music publisher. Different music services need different sorts of licenses (and those that simply host materials uploaded by users or simply distribute software may need no license at all), and it has been notoriously complicated to figure out who to contact for the relevant licenses.
The licensing of sound recordings has been getting easier, not least because the four major labels cover so much of the waterfront, and because licensing aggregators are consolidating the independent labels. It's the music publishers that represent the last great obstacle to streamlined licensing, in large part because there are so many of them. The good news here is that Congress in 1995 created a compulsory license in Section 115 of the Copyright Act, which means that so long as you pay a set rate, you can get a license to any and all musical works that you need. The bad news is that the interpretation of what the compulsory license covers, as well as the rate setting, has been trapped in regulatory limbo for years, creating uncertainty for everyone.
The Copyright Office has been trying to break the logjam with respect to digital music services by issuing regulations clarifying the scope of the DPD compulsory license. In particular, the Copyright Office is aiming to cut through some of the complexity by saying that the compulsory license is broad enough to cover any and all copies (whether server-side or client-side, whether on a hard drive or in a RAM buffer) made in the course of any kind of digital music service (whether downloading, streaming, or time-limited subscription).
So far, so good. The DPD compulsory license was created by Congress to prevent music services from having to find and negotiate one-by-one with every music publisher for every song. If some incidental copy is left hanging outside the 115 license, that goal would be frustrated.
But, as discussed in the EFF comments, the Copyright Office's proposal goes a bit too far by trying to resolve a number of other, unnecessary, copyright controversies that should be resolved by the courts or Congress. In particular, the proposed regulations took the position that temporary RAM buffer copies made in the course of streaming should qualify as copies under copyright law, precisely the issue that the Cablevision DVR opinion decided the other way just a few weeks ago. The proposed regulations also unnecessarily weigh in on the question of whether the distribution right reaches digital transmissions, an issue EFF has addressed in several court cases.
There is no need for the Copyright Office to get entangled in these continuing controversies in order to clarify the DPD compulsory license. It is enough for the regulations to clarify that all of the activities of digital music services can be licensed under the compulsory license, without coming to any conclusions about whether any particular activities must be licensed. Rather than issuing broad statements that will only spawn more litigation, the Copyright Office should stay out of these extraneous controversies and focus instead on clarifying the Section 115 compulsory license.
CENDI, the US federal government STI managers group, released an August 2008 update to its extensive FAQ About Copyright.
Section 4 is devoted to Works Created Under a Federal Contract or Grant. Question 4.12 directly addresses the NIH policy:
4.12 What Language could be used in a copyright agreement between a contractor or grantee author and a publisher to clarify the author’s right to deposit journal articles in the electronic repository of the government agency that funded the author’s research?
In 2005 the National Institutes of Health (NIH) implemented a Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-Funded Research. The NIH Policy explicitly recognizes and upholds the principles of copyright. Authors and journals can continue to assert copyright in NIH-funded scientific publications, in accordance with current practice. The policy encourages authors to exercise their right to give NIH a copy of their final manuscript before publication. While individual copyright arrangements can take many forms, NIH encourages investigators to sign agreements that specifically allow the manuscript to be deposited with NIH for public posting on PubMed Central as soon as possible after journal publication. Institutions and investigators may wish to develop particular contract terms in consultation with their own legal counsel, as appropriate. But, as an example, the kind of language that an author or institution might add to a copyright agreement includes the following:
"Journal acknowledges that Author retains the right to provide a copy of the final manuscript to NIH upon acceptance for Journal publication or thereafter, for public archiving in PubMed Central as soon as possible after publication by Journal."
a collection of mainly graphical results from a research project that focused on revealing how people feel anger, joy, fear, sadness & love. a simple survey asked 250 participants between the ages of 6 & 75 years from 35 different countries to graphically represent these emotions on a set of human silhouettes. the resulting drawings were compiled in layered Photoshop documents. in addition, participants could express emotions textually or choose appropriate colors. the text results were analyzed on frequency, while the color choices determine a DNA-like frequency pattern.
[link: emotionallyvague.com]
see also: personality DNA test & Playboy centerfold averaging & Google Project.
an online information dashboard that summarizes & graphs the Internet activity relating to the 2008 presidential elections, in an attempt to compare the similarities & the disparities between the mainstream media & user-generated content.
perspctv's current graphs include the "CNN national poll of polls", news mentions, blogosphere mentions, Twitter mentions, a US electoral map & Google Trends-based timelines comparing the names of the candidates.
[link: perspctv.com|thnkx toshio]
Inequality is an area I’m very interested in but I’m always frustrated by headlines like this: “Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale”
To me this seems to state the obvious.
In this case, the headline belongs to a news article about a report released yesterday by the World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Determinants of Health called “Closing the gap in a generation: Health equity through action on the social determinants of health.”
According to the press release, the report “shows how the conditions in which people live and work directly affects the quality of their health.”
Sound familiar?
The report runs over 250 pages long and essentially reminds us that social determinants (housing, nutrition, physical activity, the environment) are more important to health than biomedical ones (medical care, drugs, hospitals, technological interventions). The Commission's three recommendations to reduce health equity are to 1) improve daily living conditions; 2) tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money and resources, especially between the genders; and 3) measure, understand, and evaluate the problem of health inequity.
I have no doubt a lot of time and effort was involved in the Commission’s work, and I do hope it succeeds in raising awareness about social injustice. But I feel like this message about the social determinants of health has been out there a long time with little action or progress.
I dusted off my copy of the Lalonde Report, a Canadian governmental report that is considered by many to be the first acknowledgment by a major industrialised nation that health is determined by more than just biological factors. It was produced in 1974.
The Lalonde report was seminal, and led to other important international documents like the WHO’s Declaration of Alma-Ata. This for the first time internationally asserted the importance of primary health care, but is also credited with advancing the notion of health as a human right.
Alma-Ata also declared the inequity between the developed and the developing world to be unacceptable, stated that economic and social development was necessary for health, and that in turn health contributes to economic and social development and world peace. Alma-Ata was released in 1978.
Given the conclusions of yesterday’s report, it’s fascinating to look back over these declarations and see how prescient they were. The Lalonde report, for example, begins with these words: “Good health is the bedrock on which social progress is built. A nation of healthy people can do those things that make life worthwhile, and as the level of health increases so does the potential for happiness.”
It goes on to state “The health care system, however, is only one of many ways of maintaining and improving health....For these environmental and behavioural threats to health [environmental pollution, city living, habits of indolence, the abuse of alcohol, tobacco and drugs, and eating patterns which put the pleasing of the senses above the needs of the human body], the organized health care system can do little more than serve as a catchment net for the victims.”
Thirty four years later we have a new report, with seemingly no new messages. Regrettably I think we can assume no new progress on social justice.
Hi all,
I am happy to announce the release of the version 071 of UMBEL. The
subject structure is based on the latest OpenCyc knowledge base version
5014. Otherwise some things have been fixed, and some others added.
Please read the full story of this new version here:
[link]
Heather Piwowar has posted two two participation statements for upcoming conferences on the topic of data sharing -- the titles are our paraphrases:
Molecules@gnu-darwin.org is an OA database of "more than 4 million small molecule structure files in pdb format, and molecular graphics representations. About 50 million molecules are still in the pipe ...". (Thanks to Antony Williams.)
See also Williams' comments on the database:
The statement that there are 50 million molecules in total coming suggests that the database is a republication of PubChem and the SDF archives seem to suggest so too ...
At present the database therefore appears to be the PubChem database in PDB format. ...
Chem4Word is a project by Microsoft to "investigat[e]he introduction of chemistry-related features in Microsoft Office Word, including authoring and semantic annotations". (Thanks to Antony Williams.) One of the project's goals is to
Store and expose chemical information in a semantically rich manner to support publishing and mining scenarios, for authors, readers, publishers, and other vendors across the broad chemical information community ...
Maura Marx Named First Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance, press release, August 26, 2008.
The Internet Archive and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced today the appointment of Maura Marx as the first Executive Director of the Open Content Alliance (OCA). A search committee representing OCA member institutions made the appointment after an intensive search process. Ms. Marx will move to the OCA from the Boston Public Library, where she most recently founded the Digital Library Program and was instrumental in evolving the Library’s philosophy toward Open Content principles.
The Open Content Alliance is an international alliance of leading academic and cultural heritage institutions working to build joint digital collections for free public access. Ms. Marx has been appointed to the new position of Executive Director in order to expand its activities as the preeminent center in the world for promoting the creation and open sharing of digital content. ...
Among Ms. Marx's first actions will be incorporation of the OCA in the State of Massachusetts and creation of a Board of Directors. She will focus on building collaborations across institutional boundaries, expanding the OCA community and becoming involved in public policy advocacy efforts. ...
Antony Williams has posted his presentation on ChemSpider at Drexel University from August 21, 2008. The presentation is a screencast (slides + audio) and is about 80 minutes long.
Antony Williams, Can a free access structure-centric community for chemists benefit drug discovery?, American Chemical Society National Meeting (Philadelphia, August 17-21, 2008). Abstract:
ChemSpider is an online database of over 20 million chemical structures assembled from well over a hundred data sources including chemical and screening library vendors, publicly accessible databases and resources, commercial databases and Open Access literature articles. Such a public resource provides a rich source of ligands for the purpose of virtual screening experiments. These can take many forms. This work will present results from two specific types of studies: 1) Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR) based analyses and 2) In-silico docking into protein receptor sites. We will review results from the application of both approaches to a number of specific examples. QSAR analyses utilizing the ChemModLab environment for assessing quantitative structure-activity relationships will and screening using a molecular surface descriptor model.
The Student PIRGs's Make Textbooks Affordable campaign has released a report, Course Correction: How Digital Textbooks are Off Track and How to Set Them Straight, dated August 2008, recommending OA for digital textbooks. (Thanks to Creative Commons.) From the executive summary:
Textbooks are an essential but increasingly expensive part of obtaining a college degree. With students spending between $700 and $1,000 per year and prices rising faster than inflation, the need for a solution is increasingly urgent.
Digital textbooks are a promising way to lower costs for students. The digital format has the potential to cut production costs, increase options for students, and open up the market to more competition. ...
The Student PIRGs conducted this study to determine how digital textbooks can live up to their potential as a solution. ... [W]e confirm three fundamental criteria – affordability, printing options, and accessibility. We found that publishers’ digital “e-textbooks” fail to meet these criteria, and that an emerging form of digital textbooks – open textbooks – are a perfect match.
Donna Wentworth, What’s open science?, Science Commons blog, August 22, 2008. Links and excerpts to blog discussions following BioBarCamp and SciFoo.
See also our past posts on SciFoo.
A new version of DSpace, 1.5.1, was released on August 15, 2008. The software is available for download here. See also the release notes.
This release contains numerous bug fixes from the 1.5.0 release ...Update. Dorothea Salo points out via email that this is a beta release.
On August 15, the Democratic National Committee released the party's national platform for 2008. The platform has this to say about public sector information:
... We will lift the veil of secret deals in Washington by publishing searchable, online information about federal grants, contracts, earmarks, loans, and lobbyist contacts with government officials. We will make government data available online and will have an online video archive of significant agency meetings. ...
The British Library has released its Digitisation Strategy 2008-2011, August 2008. (Thanks to Charles Bailey.) Excerpt:
...Through digitisation, we are creating a valuable and enduring resource for scholars and the public alike. We estimate that this digitisation activity to date represents less than 1% of our collection. We want to build on our achievements in this area by maintaining and extending our digitisation programme....
By digitising our collection we aim to:
- Open up access to content in the British Library’s collection;
- Create a critical mass of digitised content;
- Add value to, and open up previously unimagined areas for research;
- Support innovative methods of research;
- Facilitate the interpretation of our content by others for new audiences;
- Transform discoverability of our content;
- Make our content more visible and increase use;
- Preserve unique, rare and fragile heritage items by digital reproduction and protect vulnerable documents;
- Reveal illegible and hidden text or images and permit non-intrusive testing of materials;
- Generate income to support our long-term digitisation programme.
Over the next 3 years we will build on our existing digitisation programme. Current projects include the digitisation of:
- 20 million pages of 19th century literature [approximately 80,000 books];
- 1 million pages of historic newspapers in addition to the 3m already digitised;
- 4,000 hours of Archival Sound Recordings in addition to the 4,000 hours already digitised;
- 100,000 pages of Greek manuscripts....
We want to make the Library’s collection available to as wide a range of users as possible through digitisation and ensure sustainability of the service. We will develop a range of business models including:
- Open access, provided free of charge;
- Limited open access (where funding allows for free as well as fee-based models);
- Mediated access provided through a fee-paid service....
We will protect Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)....
- We will reserve our right to assert IPR over the digitised collections we create....
I'm trying to train tesseract but just stopped already when making a
box file. I used the command line as given in the wiki, but all I got
was the following message in the terreract.log: "Could not open file,
batch.nochop". There seems to be something wrong with reading the
parameters, I guess. I'm using the windows executable and tried both
Sports Medicine, Arthroscopy, Rehabilitation Therapy & Technology is an OA, peer-reviewed journal soon to be launched by BioMed Central. It will be the official journal of the Asia Pacific Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine. The journal is now accepting submissions.
In an important ruling handed down yesterday, a federal district court threw out a copyright infringement suit brought by adult video producer Io Group against Veoh, concluding that the video hosting site qualifies for the DMCA safe harbor. The ruling should be required reading for the executives of every "Web 2.0" business that relies on "user-generated content."
Veoh, like YouTube, is a streaming video site that hosts videos uploaded by users. Io Group sued Veoh in 2006 after finding clips from 10 of its copyrighted adult films on the Veoh site. So far, this is a familiar story -- user-generated content site gets sued by copyright owner for naughty uploading habits of users (see, e.g., lawsuits against MySpace, iMeem, YouTube, Redlasso, Hi5, Multiply, Stage6, MP3tunes, Scribd, Usenet.com, Bolt, and Grouper). But this is the first case to get to a final ruling, and it's a total victory for Veoh.
The key to Veoh's victory was its scrupulous attention to the DMCA safe harbors. Veoh responded to compliant DMCA takedown notices on a same-day basis, it notified users of its policies against copyright infringement, it registered a Copyright Agent with the Copyright Office, it terminated users who were repeat infringers and blocked new registrations from the same email addresses, it used hashes to stop the same infringing videos from being uploaded by other users. These efforts actually go beyond the requirements of the DMCA safe harbors, and made it clear that Veoh was serious about responding to copyright infringement notices.
This ruling provides valuable guidance to companies that host video, audio, and text files on behalf of users (see, e.g., Muxtape). Too many "Web 2.0" start-ups are careless about the requirements of the DMCA safe harbors. They don't register a Copyright Agent, or keep good records of their responses to takedown notices, or have a demonstrable policy of terminating "repeat infringers." Sure, doing this "compliance" work costs time and money. But, as the Veoh decision demonstrates, the payoff can be enormous, since copyright is almost certainly the biggest liability risk these sites face.
The ruling also debunks some of the favorite anti-safe harbor arguments bandied about by entertainment industry lawyers (and gives a boost to YouTube in its fight with Viacom). The court specifically rejects the argument that "transcoding" content to facilitate access disqualifies a service provider from the safe harbor (Veoh automatically transcodes uploaded videos into Flash). The ruling also joins other courts in concluding that, even if Veoh made money from advertising around the videos, it still qualifies for the safe harbor because it lacks the "right and ability to control" (see Section 512(c)(1)(B) of the Copyright Act) the infringing activities of its users.
While there are still plenty of unexplored legal questions surrounding the DMCA safe harbors, this ruling provides important practical guidance for companies that host user-uploaded content.
In Guardian Technology of August 21 we reported on Ordnance Survey’s hiring of a lobbying company called Mandate, and how it had kept watch on MPs and organisations which seemed to be interested in the whole “free data” concept. Ordnance Survey responded to the story: this is a reprint in full of its letter. Following this, [...]
Coming late to posting this (I blame holidays), but Mike Cross entered an FOI request after we noticed in May that it had paid a lobbying company called Mandate about £49,000 for “consultancy and advice on Corporate Communications and Public Affairs”. Except that that description seems rather askew from what we found in the emails (released [...]
Claire Bird, Keith Fox, and Rich Roberts, Publication Charges, Nucleic Acids Research, August 12, 2008. An editorial. NAR is the first full OA (not hybrid OA) journal from Oxford University Press. Excerpt:
NAR's full open access initiative is now in its fourth year. There is no question that during this period the greatest challenge has been to set author charges that are within the reach of authors’ hard-won funding, yet financially sustainable for the journal. This is a continued topic of discussion for NAR's editors and publishers....
NAR does not apply additional submission fees, page charges for up to nine pages, colour or supplementary data charges, or charges for depositing in NIH or supplying a PDF version of the published article to authors. A recent review of other journals in this field suggests that the total costs of publishing may not always be dissimilar to publishing in NAR....
The open access element of NAR's publication charge is mandatory, the choice we made when we adopted this alternative business model in 2005. In turn, authors can decide whether publishing in NAR warrants any additional costs, but it is certainly worth considering that page and colour charges alone in other journals may often reach the USD 1000–1500 range.
It is also important to note that authors are entitled to a 50% discount on the NAR open access charge if they are based at a member institution or have paid the full charge for another NAR paper in the last 12 months....
Fair and fast peer review of your paper, with first decision times averaging 26 days. Rapid online publication of the final version within 4 weeks of acceptance on average, and we continue to look for ways to make this process faster. Immediate open access to all online users. The NAR site attracts over 380 000 full-text downloads per month, with a further 260 000 downloads per month via PubMed Central. Automatic deposit of the final version of your article in PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central, assuring easy compliance with the policies of funders including HHMI, NIH, UK MRC and the Wellcome Trust....
Released at Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:34:24 GMT by leonb
Includes files: djvulibre-3.5.21+djview-4.4-win32.zip (8218359 bytes, 851 downloads to date)
[Download] [Release Notes]
Government Computer News has put together a list Great .gov web sites from the US federal and state governments. (Thanks to ResourceShelf.) Here are its Top 10. Of course, all are OA.
When the European Commission announced its OA pilot project and experimental OA mandate last week, the project home page was largely empty. But it has now been filled with the basic information already promulgated through last week's press release and associated documents.
One document is new, however: Open Access Pilot in FP7: information for researchers, a short brochure highlighting the main points of the policy.
The EC says we can expect more information on September 1. Stay tuned.
Hjálmar Gíslason, The Case for Open Access to Public Sector Data, Technology and other wonders, August 28, 2008. An article forthcoming in The Reykjavík Grapevine. Excerpt:
Government institutions and other public organizations gather a lot of data....In these public data collections lies tremendous value. The data that has been collected for taxpayers’ money for decades or in a few cases even centuries (like population statistics) is a treasure trove of economical and social value. Yet, the state of public data is such that only a fraction of this value is being realized.
The reason is that accessing this data is often very hard. First of all its often hard to even find out what exists, as the sources are scattered, there is no central registry for existing data sets and many agencies don’t even publish information on the data that they have.
More worrying is that access to these data sets is made difficult by a number of restrictions, some accidental, other due to lack of funding to make them more accessible and some of these restrictions are even deliberate. These restrictions include license fees, proprietary or inadequate formats and unjustified legal complications.
I’d like to argue that any data gathered by a government organization should be made openly accessible online....
The only exception to this rule should be when other interests - most importantly privacy issues - warrant access limitations.
There is a number of reasons for this. First of all, we (the taxpayers) have already paid for it....Secondly it gives the public insight into the work done by our organizations in a similar way as Freedom of Information laws have done....The most important argument - however - is that open access really pays off. Opening access and thereby getting the data in the hands of businesses, scientists, students and creative individuals will spur innovation and release value far beyond anything that a government organization can ever think of or would ever spend their limited resources on....
Macquarie University has adopted an OA policy. From today's announcement:
Research conducted by Macquarie University experts will soon be freely available to anyone with access to the internet, following a unanimous decision by the Macquarie University Council last night.
Council voted to endorse University Senate recommendations that research articles be deposited in the online Macquarie University repository ResearchOnline after their acceptance for publication.
"This historic decision will make Macquarie's scholarly work much more available to researchers, including those in developing countries and those without access to expensive journal subscriptions," said Vice-Chancellor, Professor Steven Schwartz.
"It is an example of using modern communication technology to achieve one of the oldest and most central academic aims - the free dissemination of knowledge."The Macquarie decision follows similar initiatives by overseas universities such as Harvard and Stanford, and funding bodies such as the US National Institutes of Health, National Research Council of Canada and European Research Council....
[Said Schwartz:] "Although academics do much of the work associated with these journals for free, the journals can still be prohibitively expensive. Some cost $20,000 for a one-year subscription."
Manuscripts of Macquarie research that are accepted for publication will now be immediately available to anyone on the web. In a few cases, access to some articles may be temporarily embargoed because of a journal's policy. However, Professor Schwartz said that embargoes are the exception rather than the rule.
"The great majority of scholarly journals do not object to making authors' self-archived papers 'Open Access' immediately," he said....
Comments
The September issue of Walt Crawford's Cites & Insights is now online. This issue contains a length section, Updating the Book Discovery Projects, on recent developments with Microsoft Live Search Books, Google Book Search, the Open Content Alliance, and the Open Library.
We’re pleased to announce the creation of a new blog site to help us promote and organize the first ever Open Access Day which will be held on October 14, 2008. This is the day after our birthday (the fifth publishing anniversary of our first ever journal PLoS Biology is October 13, 2008, a public holiday in the USA).
When we were thinking about ways to celebrate our birthday, we did two things. We talked to some of our fans and asked them what they would like to see us do and we discussed it amongst ourselves.
Our community of supporters very much wanted us to focus on the achievements of the Open Access (OA) movement and find fun, cool and interactive ways to get the broadest possible audience to understand what OA is all about and we agreed with that. The end result of this informal dialogue is the first ever Open Access Day.
This educational and fun series of events, competitions, and give-aways is brought to you by SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), Students for Free Culture, and the Public Library of Science.
Open Access Day will help to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access, including recent mandates and emerging policies, within the international higher education community and the general public.
The Day will include:
- Two live Webcasts from the Nobelist Sir Richard Roberts and PLoS Computational Biology Editor-In-Chief Dr Philip E Bourne. They will discuss how Open Access impacts research and will answer questions on this topic from participating university campuses.
- Voices of Open Access Video Series. Key members of the research community, including a teacher, a librarian, a researcher, a patient advocate, and a funder, will speak on why Open Access matters to them.
- Blog competition about why Open Access matters to you, goodie bag and blog publicity to the winner.
- Free PLoS branded goodies. Your choice of T-shirt design, 25 to give away and 50 runners up get OA buttons.
Here's what, Peter Jerram, PLoS CEO, said today about the announcement of the Day (you can read more in the full press release). "The momentum behind Open Access to research has been accelerating for some time now, even before the mandates at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and Harvard University. Events beyond the US especially underscore the higher education community's commitment to having the access they need. Open Access Day will provide a perfect way for folks to come together, consider and celebrate the ramifications of the global shift that we are experiencing". <
