Technology Blog

Andrew I. Dayton, Beyond Open Access: Open Discourse, the next great equalizer, Retrovirology, August 30, 2006.

Abstract (provisional): The internet is expanding the realm of scientific publishing to include free and open public debate of published papers. Journals are beginning to support web posting of comments on their published articles and independent organizations are providing centralized web sites for posting comments about any published article. The trend promises to give one and all access to read and contribute to cutting edge scientific criticism and debate.

From the body of the paper:

If you are reading this you are benefiting from the Open Access movement in scientific publishing. Open Access reduces the great divide between the haves and havenots of the scientific world, allowing anyone, anywhere on the planet with internet access to read with full text and graphics the latest scientific reports, unfettered by prohibitive subscription fees or lack of affiliation with a major institution to pay for them. That the process directly delivers to the public a product paid for by their taxes can only be considered a just and additional benefit. But access to cutting edge knowledge is not the only divide between the haves and the have-nots. Even Open Access leaves a vast inequality in scientific discourse. If you can’t afford to attend the latest scientific meetings (say, for instance, you work for the US government) or are not a member of a prestigious institution, you can be frozen out of cutting edge scientific discussions. You can neither query the major players nor contribute to the debates, unless your prestige or the media value of the subject matter is such to garner you a published letter to the editor. You can’t even witness the debates until they are published in review articles, by which time they are mostly over….

Just as Open Access distributes primary knowledge, Open Discourse distributes debate….

source: Open review, open commentary, open debate

I’ve launched a new blog focused exclusively on LinkedIn at www.LinkedIntelligence.com.

Why?

From the welcome message:

I believe that much of the reason for that growth is that LinkedIn does, overall, a very good job of delivering on its promise of being an efficient, time-conservative way of maintaining and leveraging your network of contacts. While you can certainly spend a lot of time there if you so choose, it has a strong appeal to busy professionals who understand the value of their network and want to be of service to the people they know and trust, but don’t want to spend a lot of time “networking”.

What I realized recently is that while there are dozens of excellent resources for the more highly active LinkedIn power users, there wasn’t really a source that delivered information with the same kind of efficiency that appeals to the majority of LinkedIn users.

I’ll cross-post somewhat here on The Virtual Handshake, but if you’re interested in a filtered, quality source of information about LinkedIn, I hope you’ll stop by and add it to your subscription list.

This post was written by Scott Allen, source: New Blog: Linked Intelligence

I mean… can you believe the atavism at play here?
Let’s choose NOT to educate.
Let’s choose NOT to offer access to technology they will need to survive
Let’s choose to fail.

I mean… is there no hope?
Winn

Saying No to School Laptops Programs to Give All Students Computers
Come Under Fire Over Costs,
Inappropriate Use by Kids By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO
August 31, 2006; Page D1
Last

source: No Kids For Computers and VIce Versa

Today I tried changing the name of the comment script on my site, thinking that might at least slow the barrage of sp*m that took the whole server down this month.

Ha.

Within seconds of changing the script variable in the config file, I had my first new spam message.

I give up.

To comment on the site now, you will have to use a (free) TypeKey ID. Sorry. I hate to do that—nobody needs yet another hoop to jump through or password to remember. But I simply can’t spend any more time trying to safeguard the site.

source: i give up

Dominique Babini and Jorge Fraga (eds.), Edición electrónica, bibliotecas virtuales y portales para las ciencias sociales en América Latina y El Caribe, Buenos Aires: CLACSO, August 2006.  A book of essays on electronic publishing, digital libraries, and social science portals in Latin America and the Caribbean.  The book exists in both a priced, printed edition and an OA edition. Most of the articles have implications for OA, but these are directly about OA:

• Peter Suber, Una introducción al acceso abierto, a Spanish translation of my Open Access Overview
• Dominique Babini, Acceso abierto a la producción de ciencias sociales de América Latina y el Caribe: bibliotecas virtuales, redes de bibliotecas virtuales y portales
• Abel L. Packer and four co-authors, El modelo SciELO de publicación científica de calidad en acceso abierto

source: OA in Latin American and the Caribbean

The wiki of the Information Commons Interest Group of the Canadian Library Association has created a page on Open Access Advocates in Canada.

Comment. Great idea. Given the Canadian interests of the host, I understand why there aren’t (yet?) pages on other countries. But if there were, this would be start of a very useful networking tool and OA speakers bureau.

BTW, I’d add the following Canadians: Michael Geist, Russell McOrmond, G.W. Brian Owen, and Sharon Reeves.

source: OA advocates in Canada

Hernán A. Burbano, Funders should allow for cost of publication, Nature, August 30, 2006.  A letter to the editor.  Excerpt:

Open access to the literature allows scientists in the developing world to read original research papers for free, which contributes to scientific advancement. Nonetheless, in these same countries, funds are not sufficient to pay the publishing charges made by some publications, including ‘open access’ journals. For this reason, many journals waive fees for scientists from developing countries who submit to them.

Although these waivers benefit the scientists who submit, part of the solution should also come from developing countries themselves. The support from funders must include provision for submission fees, so that government agencies that support research projects take responsibility for their investment. I echo the Salvador Declaration on Open Access for Developing Countries and I urge governments of these countries to consider the cost of publication as part of the cost of the research.

Comment. I agree and have said so whenever it comes up, even if that means criticizing otherwise excellent policies like FRPAA.  However, I’d also point out that the majority of OA journals charge no author-side fees at all.

source: Using research grants to pay publication fees

Bobby Pickering, A soap opera storyline ends, Information World Review, August 30, 2006.  Pickering is leaving IWR and reflects on some of the big issues he’s covered in his three years there as editor.  Excerpt:

The open access movement made an impact, but not as much as I expected. It will undoubtedly continue to be corrosive, as the rivals parry and thrust over the big pot of gold to be made from publicly funded research. Government committees have become involved and hearings have been held, in the US, UK and Europe ­- all very exciting stuff!

Comment. Just to clarify: There’s a huge pot of money spent on scholarly journals every year (I’ve seen estimates in the $12 billion range).  But those working for OA to publicly-funded research and, if successful, those hosting it, will not make any money from it.  There’s money to be made from some kinds of OA journals (BMC and Hindawi are for-profit publishers and Hindawi is already profitable), but all national policies aimed at OA for publicly-funded research focus on OA repositories, not OA journals.

source: OA progress: slow but exciting

The first Secretary-General of the new European Research Council (ERC) will be Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, the current President of Germany’s Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).  For more details, see Gretchen Vogel’s story in yesterday’s issue of Science.

Comments.

1. This is very good news for those of us hoping that the ERC will mandate OA for ERC-funded research.  (The ERC will fund €1 billion worth of research every year.)  It’s good news because under Winnacker’s leadership, the DFG adopted a strong OA policy for DFG-funded research. 
2. Another ground for hope: one member of the ERC’s Scientific Council is Wendy Hall, a professor at the University of Southampton Department of Electronics and Computer Science, which mandates OA to the research output of the department.
3. The ERC has no web site yet.  But I’ll blog the URL as soon as I learn it.

source: Good news for the ERC

Wendy M. Grossman, Galileo satellite’s secure codes cracked, The Guardian, August 31, 2006. Excerpt:

One of the consequences of a national policy that taxpayers should have free access to the data their taxes pay for - as is the case in the US - is that if you tell American researchers something is free or open source, their expectations are raised.

So when a team of researchers led by Mark Psiaki, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell University, discovered that the signals coming from a European test satellite that they thought to be accessible were instead protected by secret codes, they set about cracking them and succeeded. But their success, which allows them and others to test prototype receivers for Europe’s new global satellite navigation system, raises two questions: can the body in charge of it, the Galileo Joint Undertaking, succeed as a public-private partnership? And how open will its service be? …

Part of Galileo’s goal is to improve global accuracy and availability. To enable that, an EU-US agreement says Galileo will use the same set of radio frequencies as [the US-built] GPS and in return must offer an open service “without direct fees for end use”.

But having had to crack the test satellite’s codes, Psiaki asks whether Galileo intends to charge for the part of the service that’s supposed to be open? …

source: "Open" satellite signals not open

Declan Butler, More on flu data access scheme, Declan Butler’s blog, August 30, 2006. Excerpt:

Nature has an Editorial in this week’s edition — ‘Boosting access to disease data’ — on the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) — see previous post. It also has a short news story — ‘Plan to pool bird-flu data takes off.’  [PS: Both are accessible only to subscribers.]

Some excerpts from the Editorial:

“A new agreement by stakeholders to improve the sharing of flu data should eventually stimulate research on many infectious diseases. Now to make it work.” […]

and the bottom line:

“GISAID’s broad endorsement of the goal of prompt sharing from multiple stakeholders, often with conflicting interests, is in itself progress and a tribute to the diplomacy of those involved. Tangible evidence of change has also come from the Indonesian government and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which both announced in August that they would share all flu genomic data; they should be congratulated on having the courage to change policy.

Agreement on the principles of GISAID is only a beginning, however. Prompt progress in establishing the ground rules for sharing will be essential to build confidence and momentum. Governments need to support laboratory capacities in those countries that need it most, where surveillance is weak. And unless donor countries also provide more funds and technical support to fight the disease in animals, which is the reservoir of human cases, we are likely to have more data to share on avian flu than we would like.”

source: More on OA to avian flu data

Three more provosts have added their signatures to the SPARC list of U.S. university presidents and provosts endorsing open access to publicly-funded research and the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 (FRPAA).

• Brad Born, Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs, Bethel College
• Rita Cheng, Provost and Vice Chancellor, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Stephen D. Gottfredson, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs, Virginia Commonwealth University

source: Three more provosts endorse FRPAA

source: Society frees access for members in developing countries

OhioLINK is recommending that Ohio scholars retain the rights they need for self-archiving and then that they actually self-archive. From its important statement of recommendations (approved in May, released yesterday):

There is a growing national and international movement for authors of peer-reviewed journal articles to self-archive their work in repositories that are openly accessible. Open access archiving has major advantages over sole reliance on the traditional publishing model. It substantially increases all researchers’ access to the research literature. There is strong evidence that articles that are made openly accessible have substantially more research impact than articles that are available only through subscriptions and licenses….OhioLINK is building the Digital Resource Commons (DRC) for [the] purpose [of self-archiving by Ohio scholars]….

If traditional publication policies are followed, Ohio authors will not retain the rights to disseminate their own works in electronic form….If this continues,
the academic community foregoes the ability to maximize access and to control the economic costs of an expanding knowledge base which under the current system is increasingly unaffordable….

1. Faculty are encouraged to publish in journals that have responsible assignment of rights policies. In instances where faculty have a choice among journals, access to scholarship will improve if they choose publishers that, as a matter of practice, have favorable polices towards author self-archiving in open access vehicles. In addition, new journals are emerging that publish according to full open access models.

2. Whether as allowed by a publisher’s standard author agreement or by amendment, authors/copyright holders must retain the NON-EXCUSIVE right to make their work openly accessible and to use it for their own non-commercial educational and research purposes. This can best be accomplished by retaining copyright and only granting the publisher first publication rights. It can also be accomplished within current common practice where copyright transfers to the publisher by the proper retention of self-archiving and use rights….

By altering an author’s agreement with a publisher certain key rights can be secured that will be advantageous for the author, the institution, and potential readers without harming the publisher….[A]n Author’s Addendum to the
publisher’s agreement can be used to ensure the author has retained a bundle of key rights. A template to do so from which a final addendum can be created is attached….

We recommend that faculty members, if the copyright owner, and institutions, if the copyright holder, retain author self-archiving and access rights in one form or another. The template illustrates the basic rights that should be retained. Several optional provisions are suggested which the author or institution can elect to incorporate. As noted below, a great number of publishers are receptive to author self-archiving rights and so a basic addendum may suffice in most cases….

3. In parallel with individual author action, OhioLINK will seek to add a clause to its licenses with publishers in its Electronic Journal Center. This clause will seek to automatically provide the recommended self archiving and access rights to all personnel of Ohio higher education institutions.

4. With the retention of rights, we strongly recommend that works in both Published and Unpublished works categories be deposited in the OhioLINK DRC or a campus repository that links to it.

Comments.

1. There are four important things going on here. First, OhioLINK is encouraging Ohio scholars to retain the rights they need for OA archiving. Second, it’s providing its own Author Addendum to help authors retain those rights. Third, it’s adding its weight as the licensing agent for member institutions to persuade publishers to agree to these terms. (It knows that most publishers already agree and is focusing on the remainder.) And finally, it’s encouraging Ohio scholars to self-archive their preprints and postprints in their institutional repository or in OhioLINK’s own repository.
2. OhioLINK is a consortium of 85 academic libraries in Ohio representing more than 600,000 faculty, students and staff. It doesn’t set campus policies on self-archiving, but it can facilitate them (by creating its own repository, by writing an Author Addendum, by pressuring publishers to drop permission barriers) and it can encourage member institutions to set policy. Here it is doing all that it can. It deserves all our thanks for that.
3. The OhioLINK Author Addendum (pp. 7-8 of the new recommendations) joins those already crafted by SPARC, MIT, and Science Commons.

source: Retain the rights to self-archive and then self-archive

The NIH is creating a database for human genetic data that will combine strong privacy protection for research subjects, open access for researchers, and incentives for researchers to deposit their data even before publishing on it.  For more details, see yesterday’s call for public comments or today’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Sam Kean (accessible only to subscribers).  Excerpt from the Chronicle article:

The genetic information would be available on two levels. “Basic descriptive information” about each genome-wide association study would be available to the public, but the health and genetic data and some pre-analysis would be accessible only to researchers cleared by the NIH Data Access Committee. The NIH would also set up mechanisms to ensure that scientists who deposit results into the database before publication receive credit for their findings. Once results have been posted, any scientist could view them; but for a certain “grace period,” only those who submitted the data could publish papers about it.

source: Balancing privacy and access for human genetic data

The University of California Libraries have released a new version of their Principles for Acquiring and Licensing Information in Digital Formats (dated July 2006 but apparently not released until yesterday).  Excerpt:

UC will evaluate the cost/benefits of licensing digital resources of out of copyright information against opportunities to digitize equivalent UC resources or participate in other non-profit third-party digitizing efforts of that information….

The libraries make principled investments in publishing business models that produce high quality scholarly content and have the potential for transforming scholarly communication. A publishing or distribution effort can be considered transformative when it is developed principally to reduce access barriers (e.g. open access models)….

UC consideration of scholarly publishing endeavors is informed by endorsements and analyses by key organizations supporting transformative models such as the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC)….

The libraries support the right of UC authors whose scholarly work is included in materials licensed by UC to retain copyright to their work, transferring only first-publication and/or commercial use rights to the publisher while retaining all other non-commercial use and distribution rights….

UC affirms the importance of fair use in fulfilling its libraries’ missions and requires that licenses not abrogate the rights allowed it or its members under copyright law, including, but not limited to, fair use and inter-library loan….

source: U of California supports transformative publishing models

Colour me disappointed. In their collective wisdom, the IAU has agreed on a definitively undefined definition of planet-hood:

After tumultuous debate in Prague, the prestigious International Astronomical Union voted to define a planet as a celestial body that orbits the sun; is massive enough for its self-gravity to pull it into a ball shape; and “has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.”
[ Pluto no longer a planet ]

And what the heck does that mean? For starters, it means the wonderfully open-ended proposed planet/plutoid definition is but a wasted opportunity for an inclusive solar model, and it means our dear friend Pluto is thrown off the island on a technicality. Sorry Scorpios, you’re out of the game.

source: Goodbye Pluto

This summer, we promised to buy Lane a new computer. He’s been doing a lot of cool stuff with borrowed time on the family computer, and a barely-hanging-on, nearly six-year-old Powerbook, so we wanted him to have a decent machine he could call his own.

Last night we headed out to the Apple Store at Eastview Mall, and headed home with a shiny new MacBook (and iPod Nano, and printer, both of which were free after rebate). We turned it on, and started in on the process of transferring files from the old computer to the new. We watched impatiently as the time remaining dropped from 45 minutes to 30 minutes to 7 minutes…and then stopped. Full stop. No animation on the progress bar, no sign of life whatsoever. We waited. And waited. Finally I tried rebooting…only to be greeted with a flat, grey screen. I tried again. Same thing. I tried putting in the system software DVD and rebooting from that drive, which seemed to work (after a lengthy delay). But two steps into the welcome sequence it froze, and generated a kernel panic screen. I followed the instructions on the Apple web site for what to do if your MacBook won’t start. No luck.

Needless to say, I was not a happy camper. I was quite sure that I’d have to (a) wait forever for a genius bar appointment the next day, and (b) end up having to send the machine back to Apple and wait an indeterminate amount of time for them to return it.

This morning we got to the store right after it opened, and I walked up to the cash register with the machine. I explained briefly what had happened, and the young man at the register quickly called over the manager. The manager listened to my (highly detailed) tale of woe and said “Sounds like you did everything you were supposed to. Let’s get you a new machine.” <blink> So not what I expected to hear.

“But what about the receipt,” I asked. After all, I’d been told quite clearly the night before that all the serial numbers had to match up on the receipt for the Nano and printer rebates to be honored. “Not a problem,” he replied. “We’ll generate brand-new receipts with the new computer’s number on them.”

Ten minutes later, we walked out of the store with a(nother) brand-new MacBook, which started up perfectly and has been making Lane happy all day.

It’s quite amazing how much good customer service can do to turn a bad out-of-box experience into a great one. You can bet I’ll be buying all my equpment there from now on. (They even gave me my faculty discount based on my RIT ID!)

source: kudos to the rochester apple store

source: Dworaczek index updated

Oxford University Press has released data on the first full year of operation for Oxford Open, its hybrid OA journal program. Excerpt:

In the first year of launch, almost 400 papers have been published under
the optional open access model across 36 of the 49 participating titles.

The majority of uptake of optional open access has, as predicted, been
in the life sciences, with approximately 10% of authors selecting the
open access option across 16 participating journals in this area,
compared with approximately 5% in medicine and public health, and 3% in
the humanities and social sciences. Three life sciences titles in the
areas of molecular and computational biology have seen over 20% uptake.
The highest of these was for Bioinformatics, which has published over 50
open access papers in 2006. 2007 online subscription prices have been
adjusted for these journals to reflect this uptake….

Twenty-one titles adopted
[the Oxford Open hybrid] model in July 2005 [when the program launched], and further titles have joined in 2006, giving 49 journals participating at present.

Claire Bird, Senior Editor, Oxford Journals, commented, “we continue to
see wide variation in uptake, and different levels of interest in
‘author-pays’ open access models between disciplines. The highest uptake
has been in areas where more funding for open access is available, such
as the life sciences, and we would expect this trend to continue in
2007.”

Managing Director, Martin Richardson also commented: “…These results show that while open access is beginning to be embraced in
some subject areas, the level of uptake is generally quite low. These
results continue to suggest that [the fee-based OA journal] is likely to be only one of
a range of models that will be necessary to support the requirements of
different research communities.”…

80% of authors
who chose open access in the first year of Oxford Open have paid a
discounted open access charge, as members of a subscribing institution….

The online subscription prices of 3 journals (Bioinformatics,
Carcinogenesis and Human Molecular Genetics) have been adjusted for 2007
to reflect how much original research material was made freely available
in the first phase of the initiative in 2005-2006.

source: Data on first full year of Oxford Open