ORCID and CrossRef Collaborate to Accurately Attribute Authorship of Scholarly Content

Two not-for profit organizations, ORCID and CrossRef, have collaborated to solve the problem of ambiguous author names in scholarly content. ORCID began assigning unique identifiers to researchers in October. As part of the ORCID Registry, individuals can search the metadata from CrossRef, the largest organization assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to scholarly content, and add their works to their personal ORCID records. For more on this, see: http://subscription-agents.org/orcid-and-crossref-collaborate-accurately-attribute-authorship-scholarly-content

For more information on ORCID, or to register for your own ORCID ID, please see http://www.orcid.org.

High-impact open access journals

Librarians are sometimes asked to identify high-impact open access journals. That’s a hard question, in part because there’s not much consensus about how to measure journal impact. Andrew Bonamici takes a stab at answering the question. http://openaccess.uoregon.edu/2012/03/02/high-impact-open-access-journals/

Open Access Explained!

Right to Research Coalition launched a video in collaboration with PhD Comics. The video entitled “Open Access Explained!” provides a quick look at the many reasons why Open Access to research is important for students, researchers, and other stakeholders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5rVH1KGBCY&feature=player_embedded&noredirect=1

Ten Years after Budapest Open Access Initiative New Recommendations Released

New guidelines for scholarly publishing have been released by the Budapest Open Access Initiative, to set the default to open for all publishing: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/boai-10-recommendations

Databib

Databib, http://databib.org, is a tool for helping people to identify and locate online repositories of research data. Over 200 data repositories have been cataloged in Databib, with more being added every week. Users and bibliographers create and curate records that describe data repositories that users can browse and search.

Is the Academic Publishing Industry on the Verge of Disruption?

U.S. News and World Report covers the open access debate: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/07/23/is-the-academic-publishing-industry-on-the-verge-of-disruption

UCSF Implements Policy to Make Research Papers Freely Accessible to Public

Health Sciences Campus Becomes Largest in Nation to Adopt Open-access Policy

The UCSF Academic Senate has voted to make electronic versions of current and future scientific articles freely available to the public, helping to reverse decades of practice on the part of medical and scientific journal publishers to restrict access to research results.


Full press release:
http://www.ucsf.edu/news/2012/05/12056/ucsf-implements-policy-make-research-papers-freely-accessible-public

Full text of policy and supporting documents
http://senate.ucsf.edu/2011-2012/j-lib-openaccess.html

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research

There is a petition to the Obama Administration to require free access to scientific journal article arising from taxpayer-funded research.  This expands greatly on the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy.  It is 300 signatures short of its 25,000 goal.

See the petition here.

World Bank Live Event Report: Open Access Policy and Development

The World Bank hosted an event called What the World Bank’s Open Access Policy Means for Development.  Participants included Peter Suber from Harvard University, Michael Carroll from American University (Mike is on the Board of Directors at Creative Commons), and Cyril Muller and Adam Wagstaff from the World Bank. The discussion was timely given the Bank’s recently-announced Open Access Policy and Open Knowledge Repository.   See more...http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/32839 

Georgia State University Decision on Fair Use

Read summary and recap here: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/gsu_issuebrief_15may12.pdf

Open Access Spreads to Miami University

http://www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/05162012/open-access-spreads-miami-university

Academic publishing: Open sesame

When research is funded by the taxpayer or by charities, the results should be available to all without charge....

http://www.economist.com/node/21552574

Harvard University: Faculty Advisory Council Memorandum on Journal Pricing

Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained

We write to communicate an untenable situation facing the Harvard Library. Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. This situation is exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers (called “providers”) to acquire, bundle, and increase the pricing on journals.

Read more at: http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k77982&tabgroupid=icb.tabgroup143448

An Open Letter to Academic Publishers About Open Access

Article from the Chronicle of Higher Education: http://proxy.cc.uic.edu/login?url=http://chronicle.com/article/Hot-Type-An-Open-Letter-to/131397/

Linking and lightening: New partnership connects and reveals dark data

• BioMed Central and LabArchives partnership ensures that valuable datasets are made publically available and linked to journal articles

• Authors granted enhanced access to Electronic Laboratory Notebook software

See more.......http://www.biomedcentral.com/presscenter/pressreleases/20120404

Administration "Big Data" Research and Development Program

These are the fact sheet and a press release at the OSTP site,

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/big_data_fact_sheet.pdf

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/big_data_press_release.pdf

The fact sheet has links to agency specific sites for more details.

Among the press coverage, see the New York Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/technology/new-us-research-will-aim-at-flood-of-digital-data.html?_r=1

E-Journal Preservation and Archiving

See Rick Anderson's recent post on the Scholarly Kitchen for some interesting commentary: http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/03/07/e-journal-preservation-and-archiving-whether-how-who-which-where-and-when/

Predatory Open Access Journals

Recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education: http://chronicle.com/article/Predatory-Online-Journals/131047/

Jeffrey Beal of the University of Colorado maintains a list of publishers considered predatory as well as publishers on the watch list: http://metadata.posterous.com/?tag=predatoryopenaccessjournals

THE NIH PUBLIC ACCESS POLICY IMPACT

Covers the NIH Public Access Policy and also some interesting facts PMC

• Over 2.4 million articles are now in PMC. In addition to the NIH‐funded papers deposited into PMC, publishers voluntarily deposit more than 100,000 papers per year.
• Every weekday, one half million users access the database, retrieving over 1 million articles.
• Based on internet addresses, an estimated 25% of users are from universities, 17% are from companies, and 40% from the general public

http://publicaccess.nih.gov/public_access_policy_implications_2012.pdf 

Issa and Maloney Issue statement backing off from RWA

https://plus.google.com/u/0/107980702132412632948/posts/a4DzVk9n7fG

ELSEVIER withdraws support for the Research Works Act

http://tinyurl.com/6umnvqo

Why do we need academic journals in the first place?

It may not get as much attention as the disruption that is occurring in newspapers, e-books or other parts of the mainstream media industry, but there is a revolution of sorts going on in the academic publishing business..... Read more:  http://gigaom.com/2012/02/22/why-do-we-need-academic-journals-in-the-first-place/

Why scientists are boycotting a publisher

Why scientists are boycotting a publisher

The Cost of Knowledge

Researchers taking a stand against Elsevier.

Academics have protested against Elsevier's business practices for years with little effect.

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Open and Shut?: Elsevier’s Alicia Wise on the RWA, the West Wing, and Universal Access

Open and Shut?: Elsevier’s Alicia Wise on the RWA, the West Wing, and Universal Access

Federal Research Public Access Act

Every year, the federal government funds tens of billions of dollars in basic and applied research. Most of this funding is concentrated within 11 departments/agencies (e.g., National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy). The research results typically are reported in articles published in a wide variety of academic journals. From NIH funding alone, it is estimated that about 65,000 papers are published each year. The Federal Research Public Access Act proposes to make manuscripts reporting on federally funded research publicly available within six months of publication in a journal.
http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/issues/frpaa/index.shtml

Elsevier Publishing Boycott Gathers Steam Among Academics

"Elsevier, the global publishing company, is responsible for The Lancet, Cell, and about 2,000 other important journals; the iconic reference work Gray’s Anatomy, along with 20,000 other books—and one fed-up, award-winning mathematician.  Timothy Gowers of the University of Cambridge, who won the Fields Medal for his research, has organized a boycott of Elsevier because, he says, its pricing and policies restrict access to work that should be much more easily available."      See full article on Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/elsevier-publishing-boycott-gathers-steam-among-academics/35216