Jochen Robes has listed 20 open-access journals on e-learning, broadly conceived, and written (in German) a paragraph of comments on each one. (Thanks to e-paed.) I haven’t checked to see how many are listed in the DOAJ.
source: OA journals on e-learning
Brenda Chawner has blogged some notes on two presentations on DPubS, apparently at the LITA Forum 2006 (Nashville, October 26-29, 2006). Excerpt:
This concurrent session covered the background, purpose, and evolution of the DPubS (Digital Publishing Systems) open source software project, based at Cornell University Library, as well as a case study based on Pennsylvania State University Libraries’ use of the package….
David Ruddy, from Cornell University Library’s Electronic Publishing Initiatives division, who has been involved with the project for a number of years, started by saying that the project had two main objectives:
- to allow publishers to organise and deliver both open access and subscription controlled content; and
- to give users the ability to navigate and access content….
The DPubS software began as a project in the Computer Science department, and was picked up the the Library in the late 1990s….The integration with an institutional repository means that the repository software can look after preservation and archiving, while DPubs focusses on presentation and access controls.
DPubS 2.0 was released in October 2006 on Sourceforge; it supports OAI 2.0, and can be used in combination with Fedora as an underlying repository.
Further plans include extending the editorial tools to support peer review, enabling it to work with dSpace as well as Fedora, enhancing the administration interfaces, documentation, and allowing contributions from the user community using the open source development model….
Mike Furlough, from Pennsylvania State University Libraries, then gave a user’s perspective on DPubS. Penn State has been a DPubS development partner, and their involvement has included testing alpha versions of the software, testing its integration with Fedora and dSpace, developing test cases for journal backfiles and conference proceedings, and refining and testing the editorial services.
At Penn State, the University Press is part of the University Libraries. The Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing wants to provide a scholar driven service, particularly for at risk literature. They hope to experiment with different business models; currently all of their content is available as open access, except for a print on demand facility….
source: More on DPubS
The journal Astrobiology has released The Astrobiology Primer: An Outline of General Knowledge (version 1), October 29, 2006. The 78 pp. PDF is open access.
source: OA astrobiology primer
Bill Hooker, The Future of Science is Open, Part 1: Open Access, 3 Quarks Daily, October 30, 2006. Excerpt:
I’ve never had an idea that couldn’t be improved by sharing it with as many people as possible — and I don’t think anyone else has, either. That’s why I have become interested in the various “Open” movements making increasing inroads into the practice of modern science. Here I will try to give a brief introduction to Open Access to research literature; in the second instalment I will look at ways in which the same concept of “openness” is being extended to encompass data as well as publications, and beyond that, what a fully Open practice of science might look like….
By analogy with Open Source, Open Access to the research literature entails the freedom to read, use and redistribute the published results of scholarly research and derivative works based on those publications. What follows is a version of Peter Suber’s very brief introduction to OA; for more details, see his full Open Access Overview and Timeline of the OA Movement. The bottom line is this:
Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder….
[After summarizing OA journals and repositories] A personal example…I have yet to publish any data here in the US, but I published a dozen or so articles while I was at the University of Queensland. More than half of these are not freely available from the journals in which they were published (J Clin Virol, Virology, Biochim Biophys Acta, Mol Biochem Parasitol, Acta Tropica — all Elsevier journals, pfui! — and Rev Med Virol from Wiley InterScience). I couldn’t find any full-text copies online using Google Scholar or PubMed, either. You cannot read these seven papers of mine without paying a fee (usually around $30) or physically going to a library which carries (and has therefore paid for) the journal and issue in question. Neither can my professional colleagues, unless their institution happens to subscribe to the journal or some package which includes it; these subscription fees are commonly extortionate (Elsevier being a particularly egregious offender).
For you as a taxpayer, this means that you are denied access to information you’ve already paid for (since I’ve always been funded by government grants). For me as a scientist, it means that more than half of my life’s work to date is, while not useless, certainly of much less use to the world than it might be. Given that a large part of why I do what I do is that I want to leave the world a better place than I found it, that is simply not acceptable to me. Fortunately, according to RoMEO, all of the journals concerned allow postprint archiving by authors, so I might be able to rescue it….Why would I go to all this trouble? Because OA offers significant benefits and advantages to a variety of stakeholders….
Benefits of Open Access
1. Maximal research efficiency. The usual version of Linus’ Law says that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow — meaning that with enough people co-operating on a development process, nearly every problem will be rapidly discovered and solved. The same is clearly true of complex research problems. and OA provides a powerful framework for co-operation. For instance, Brody et al. showed that, for articles in the high-energy physics section of arXiv (one of the oldest archives available for such study), the time between deposit and citation has been decreasing steadily since 1991, and dropped by about half between 1999 and 2003. Alma Swan explains: “the research cycle in high energy physics is approaching maximum efficiency as a result of the early and free availability of articles that scientists in the field can use and build upon rapidly”.
Moreover, the machine readability of a properly formatted body of open access literature opens up immense new possibilities. Paul Ginsparg, founder of arXiv, observes:
True open access permits any third party to aggregate and data mine the articles, themselves treated as computable objects, linkable and interoperable with associated databases. We are still just scratching the surface of what can be done with large and comprehensive full-text aggregations….
2. Maximal return on public investment. Just as OA is, at least for now, primarily (though not exclusively) aimed at literature for which the authors are not paid any kind of royalty, so one obvious focus of attention is government-funded research. Why should taxpayers pay twice, once to support the research and then again when the scientists they are funding need access to the literature? More importantly, open access to a body of knowledge makes that knowledge more available and useful to researchers, physicians, manufacturers, inventors and others who make of it the various socially desirable outcomes, such as advances in health care, that government funding of research is intended to produce. Peter Suber has gone over this intuitive position in some detail here.
3. Advantages for authors. There are well over 20,000 scholarly journals, and even the best-funded libraries can afford subscriptions to only a fraction of them. OA offers authors a virtually unlimited, worldwide audience: the only access barrier is internet access (which is, of course, cheaper to provide in poorer nations than comprehensive libraries of print journals would be!). There is a large and steadily growing body of evidence showing that OA measurably increases citation indices (that is, the number of times other papers refer to a given article). For instance, of the papers published in the Astrophysical Journal in 2003, 75% are also available in the OA arXiv database; the latter papers account for 90% of the citations to any 2003 Astrophysical Journal article, a 250% citation advantage for OA. Repeating the exercise with other journals returns similar results.
Not only is this of vital importance to academics when it comes to applying for funding or competing for tenure, it’s more or less the whole damn point of publishing research in the first place: so that other people can read and use it!
4. Advantages for publishers: the benefits that accrue to authors of OA works also work to the advantage of publishers: more widely read, used and cited articles translates to more submissions and a wider audience for advertising, paid editorials and other value-add schemes.
5. Advantages for administrators….
6. Scalability. Peter Suber has pointed out that, because it reduces production, distribution, storage and access costs so dramatically, OA “accommodates growth on a gigantic scale and, best of all, supports more effective tools for searching, sorting, indexing, filtering, mining, and alerting –the tools for coping with information overload.” Online distribution is necessary but not sufficient for scalability, because subscribers to paid-access journals do not have unlimited budgets even if they are enormous institutional libraries. For end users to keep pace with the explosive growth of available information, the cost of access has to be kept down to the cost of getting online….
source: "The whole damn point of publishing research in the first place…"
In among the discussions over the impending future of rural communities such as the Jaymor targets of Port Credit and our own Sauble Beach, Dodge injects “Across Greater Toronto, more than 40 candidates are mounting corporate-free campaigns to protest what they see as an improper relationship between developers and city hall. They say the widespread practice of using developer donations to fund municipal campaigns has led to bad planning, environmental degradation and soaring property taxes.”
[ South Bruce Peninsular: Developer Free Candidates ]
Good to see there’s at least a few working minds out there. Here too, while we have those who’d like to take us down that Port Credit road, we also, by the looks of how this election is unfolding, could have ourselves a very interesting municipal election indeed — our local Town of South Bruce Peninsula seems poised and on a roll to elect a nearly 100% female town council! I bet that’s gonna turn some heads.
source: The Mindful Electionist
Here’s a new one, thanks to a clueless editor at the PK Advisor:
If you read the story, you’ll see that Wikipedia might buy content and then give it away (a development blogged here on October 23).
For other examples, see the false headlines I blogged on October 1.
source: False headline of the day
The President of India has launched Sakshat, an OA portal for education. From today’s story in the Hindustan Times:
A pilot scheme to boost education through a ‘one stop education portal’ Sakshat, was launched by President APJ Abdul Kalam in New Delhi on Monday….
Sakshat programme should think of extending the system for providing world class vocational skills to youth for making them internationally competitive, Kalam told the gathering of academics and students….
Terming Sakshat an impressive engine, the President said, this was of a scale not witnessed so far in India’s internet evolution and for this to succeed, the people should get free bandwidth.
“What we are starting today by the HRD Ministry is an impressive engine with great potential to change the country and change the way education is imparted,” he said, adding it was a mission worthy of India and Indian capabilities and prowess in information and communication technology….
Singh said the portal would be one of the important pillars of the National Mission on Education during the 11th Five Year plan. Lauding the project, Singh reiterated UPA government’s commitment to ensure that no person was deprived of education on economic or social reasons.
So I decided this year I would respond personally to everyone who has donated to CC. Each Paypal donation sends a copy to me, and I write a note in response. (An official tax-ready thank you gets generated by some machine later, but I wanted the first cut at the thanks).
It is an amazing process. I had expected I would know most who would donate; I know practically no one. They come from across the world, in every amount, some sometimes give twice.
I can’t express adequately how grateful I am to those who support us. Partly that’s the technology — most imagine the emails must be machine-generated; partly that’s the limits to language — we practice overusing “thank you”; how can we mean it when we really do?
Anyway, thank you again. (And I apologize if I’m a bit behind. I’ll get through all of them.)
source: pleasant chores
James G. Milles, Redefining Open Access for the Legal Information Market, Law Library Journal, Fall 2006.
Abstract: Professor Milles argues that the open access movement in legal scholarship fails to address –and in fact diverts resources from– the real problem facing law libraries today: the soaring costs of nonscholarly, commercially published, practitioner-oriented legal publications. He suggests that one solution to this problem is for law schools to redirect some of their resources –intellectual capital, reputation, and student labor– to publishing legal information for practitioners rather than legal scholars.
Comment. OA would benefit legal practitioners as well as legal scholars, and there are more legal practitioners than legal scholars. Hence, OA initiatives for legal scholarship are addressing one problem rather than another, and may be addressing a smaller problem rather than a larger one. But I see no reason to say that OA for practitioners is “the real problem”, when OA for scholars is another real problem. We should be able to recognize plural problems and encourage parallel processing to attack them all. Moreover, there are good reasons to start with legal scholarship, since its authors willingly (even eagerly) publish it without expecting to be paid. The kind of practitioner-oriented publications Milles is concerned about tend to pay royalties, which makes them higher-hanging fruit for the OA movement. I applaud attempts to pluck that fruit. But at the same time I want to give priority to OA for royalty-free rather than royalty-producing literature.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) issued its draft OA mandate on October 10, and called for comments due on November 24. Yesterday Heather Morrison posted her comment to her blog. Excerpt:
As an open access advocate who follows policy developments and has participated in policy consultations around the world, I consider this policy to be exemplary, with elements that I hope will be a role model for future policy makers.
It is heartening to see that CIHR is requiring immediate deposit of peer-reviewed research articles funded by CIHR. In my opinion, the provision for up to a maximum 6-month publisher-imposed delay is more than generous. If I were to suggest one improvement to this policy, I would suggest not permitting any delay at all. This is reasonable given that the research is conducted using public funds, and there are many open access options – from publishing to archiving – available to researchers today.
The CIHR is a leader in requiring deposit of research data immediately on publication; an important step that will lead to more rapid advances in research.
CIHR’s suggestions that researchers consider retroactively archiving important articles, and that a researchers’ track record might be considered in future grant applications, are welcome innovations that other policy-makers might wish to consider in their own policy developments.
This policy will make the research made possible by Canadian taxpayer dollars more readily available to Canadians, as well as to everyone around the globe. Students and faculty members at smaller and more remote colleges will have more access to researchers, as will high school teachers and students, and professionals outside of the major research centres, among others.
Canadian researchers will benefit from increased impact and visibility….
PS: Thanks, Heather. I hope other Canadians will submit comments before the due date and, if possible, post their comments online to help guide other commenters and build momentum.
The presentations from the University of Houston symposium, Transforming Scholarly Communication (Houston, October 4, 2006), are now online. (Thanks to Adrian Ho.)
source: Houston presentations
Germany’s Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation, DFG) is funding a German version of the SHERPA/RoMEO database of publisher policies on self-archiving. The site is maintained by the University of Stuttgart library and the office of Computer and Media Services at Humboldt University Berlin. For more information, see the Stuttgart page on the new database. (Thanks to medinfo.)
Barbara Quint, Citizendium: A Kinder, Truer Wikipedia? Information Today, October 30, 2006. Excerpt:
They say that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but over the last year, the venerable (in Internet time) Wikipedia online encyclopedia has faced an international furor over its reliability and accuracy. The collaborative processes used to create the service have been tweaked, but concerns still rumble through the Web. Now one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, has begun development of a competitive service, the Citizendium or “Citizen’s Compendium”. Sanger was one of the first and most authoritative voices to question the untrammeled openness of the Wikipedia procedures. While retaining his true believer status in support of the wiki model of public collaboration, Sanger intends to generate a new community ethos that defers to the authority of expert editors and requires contributors to use their own names, without the shield of anonymity. The main source for Citizendium content, however, will consist of Wikipedia itself as reviewed, edited, supplemented, and vetted by Citizendium. Original articles will also be part of the new service.
“Wikipedia has accomplished great things, but the world can do even better,” said Sanger, editor in chief of Citizendium. “By engaging expert editors, eliminating anonymous contribution, and launching a more mature community under a new charter, a much broader and more influential group of people and institutions will be able to improve upon Wikipedia’s extremely useful, but often uneven work. The result will be not only enormous and free, but reliable.”
Wikipedia and the new Citizendium operate under the GNU Free Documentation License rules, which means content can be shared relatively freely as long as all parties follow benign and courteous behavior –e.g., crediting the creators or issuers of the information for their work….
The structure of the new service involves three layers of participation: “[E]ditors will be the experts in their fields and [will] decide on content questions; authors or the rank and file contributors; and constables or community managers, who make decisions on behavioral matters.”…
However, in the short time since its inception, Sanger said that they have already gathered “close to 400 applications and identified over 200 plausible editors. Between three quarters [and] two thirds of the people have Ph.D.’s…and come from very distinguished universities.” …
As to the nitty-gritty issues of financial support, voluntarism seems the main basis. Citizendium receives in-kind donations of support and hardware from universities like Purdue and corporations like Steadfast Networks; grants from companies that want to use their content (though the companies could just use the GNU FDL rules to get it at no charge); sponsorship, with possible subtle credits similar to PBS announcements; individual donations; and a mysterious, “exciting and innovative” funding model “that will be revealed in good time.” The Citizendium Foundation has begun the application process for 501(c)(3) nonprofit status….
source: More on Citizendium
In case you’ve not heard:
Friday
wired
Security researcher Christopher Soghoian created the Northwest Airline
Boarding Pass Generator in the hope of spurring Congress to look
closely at the nation’s aviation security policies, which he calls
“security theater.”
The site lets anyone create a facsimile of a Northwest Airlines
boarding pass, with whatever name they choose.
On Friday, Congress heard Soghoian’s message loud and clear. But
instead of promising to reform broken airport security procedures,
Rep. Edward Markey (D- Massachusetts), a member of the House Homeland
Security committee known for his defenses of privacy, wants the site
shut down and Soghoian arrested.
[…]
In reality, the “loophole” is nothing new. Security expert Bruce
Schneier wrote about it in 2003, and the online magazine Slate covered
it as major news in 2005. Soghoian points out that Sen. Chuck Schumer
(D-New York) publicized the same security hole in April 2006. “Perhaps
Sen. Schumer will end up being my cellmate,” Soghoian said.
Soghoian, a Ph.D. student at Indiana University, says he has never
used one of the fake boarding passes, which are likely good enough to
get someone through airport security into the “sanitized” area of the
airport, but not good enough to get anyone on a plane. He was waiting
for clearance from lawyers at Indiana University before attempting to
test if the method worked to get through security.
[…]
Even if Soghoian’s site is shut down, any boarding pass purchased over
the web can still be easily edited in any browser. That means fliers
can buy a legitimate ticket through an airline’s website under a false
name — evading the TSA’s no-fly list — then use a fake boarding pass
under their real name to get past airport metal detectors, the only
spot where IDs are checked. Fliers prone to selection for additional
screening could also create boarding passes without the “SSSS” mark
that tells TSA to search them more thoroughly.
Sunday
blogs
Congressman Edward Markey (D-Mass) no longer believes the government
should arrest Christopher Soghoian, and instead says the Department of
Homeland Security should the Indiana University Ph.D student to work
“showing public officials how easily our security can be compromised.”
On Friday, Markey, a senior member of the House Homeland Security
Committee, called for the administration to shut down the fake
boarding pass generator and “apprehend” Soghoian, who says he built
the site to publicize a vulnerability in airport security, not to help
would-be terrorists.
The FBI shut the site down on Friday and raided Soghoian’s house early
Saturday morning.
Markey announced his change of heart Sunday morning in a press release:
On Friday I urged the Bush Administration to ‘apprehend’ and shut down
whoever had created a new website that enabled persons without a plane
ticket to easily fake a boarding pass and use it to clear security,
gain access to the boarding area and potentially to the cabin of a
passenger plane. Subsequently I learned that the person responsible
was a student at Indiana University, Christopher Soghoian, who
intended no harm but, rather, intended to provide a public service by
warning that this long-standing loophole could be easily
exploited. The website has now apparently been shut down.
Under the circumstances, any legal consequences for this student must
take into account his intent to perform a public service, to publicize
a problem as a way of getting it fixed. He picked a lousy way of doing
it, but he should not go to jail for his bad judgment. Better yet, the
Department of Homeland Security should put him to work showing public
officials how easily our security can be compromised.
Hmmm. They can be taught? Won’t help the guy, though.
Main website: http://slightparanoia.blogspot.com/.
source: Security Theatre
In case you’ve not heard:
Friday
wired
Security researcher Christopher Soghoian created the Northwest Airline
Boarding Pass Generator in the hope of spurring Congress to look
closely at the nation’s aviation security policies, which he calls
“security theater.”
The site lets anyone create a facsimile of a Northwest Airlines
boarding pass, with whatever name they choose.
On Friday, Congress heard Soghoian’s message loud and clear. But
instead of promising to reform broken airport security procedures,
Rep. Edward Markey (D- Massachusetts), a member of the House Homeland
Security committee known for his defenses of privacy, wants the site
shut down and Soghoian arrested.
[…]
In reality, the “loophole” is nothing new. Security expert Bruce
Schneier wrote about it in 2003, and the online magazine Slate covered
it as major news in 2005. Soghoian points out that Sen. Chuck Schumer
(D-New York) publicized the same security hole in April 2006. “Perhaps
Sen. Schumer will end up being my cellmate,” Soghoian said.
Soghoian, a Ph.D. student at Indiana University, says he has never
used one of the fake boarding passes, which are likely good enough to
get someone through airport security into the “sanitized” area of the
airport, but not good enough to get anyone on a plane. He was waiting
for clearance from lawyers at Indiana University before attempting to
test if the method worked to get through security.
[…]
Even if Soghoian’s site is shut down, any boarding pass purchased over
the web can still be easily edited in any browser. That means fliers
can buy a legitimate ticket through an airline’s website under a false
name — evading the TSA’s no-fly list — then use a fake boarding pass
under their real name to get past airport metal detectors, the only
spot where IDs are checked. Fliers prone to selection for additional
screening could also create boarding passes without the “SSSS” mark
that tells TSA to search them more thoroughly.
Sunday
blogs
Congressman Edward Markey (D-Mass) no longer believes the government
should arrest Christopher Soghoian, and instead says the Department of
Homeland Security should the Indiana University Ph.D student to work
“showing public officials how easily our security can be compromised.”
On Friday, Markey, a senior member of the House Homeland Security
Committee, called for the administration to shut down the fake
boarding pass generator and “apprehend” Soghoian, who says he built
the site to publicize a vulnerability in airport security, not to help
would-be terrorists.
The FBI shut the site down on Friday and raided Soghoian’s house early
Saturday morning.
Markey announced his change of heart Sunday morning in a press release:
On Friday I urged the Bush Administration to ‘apprehend’ and shut down
whoever had created a new website that enabled persons without a plane
ticket to easily fake a boarding pass and use it to clear security,
gain access to the boarding area and potentially to the cabin of a
passenger plane. Subsequently I learned that the person responsible
was a student at Indiana University, Christopher Soghoian, who
intended no harm but, rather, intended to provide a public service by
warning that this long-standing loophole could be easily
exploited. The website has now apparently been shut down.
Under the circumstances, any legal consequences for this student must
take into account his intent to perform a public service, to publicize
a problem as a way of getting it fixed. He picked a lousy way of doing
it, but he should not go to jail for his bad judgment. Better yet, the
Department of Homeland Security should put him to work showing public
officials how easily our security can be compromised.
Hmmm. They can be taught? Won’t help the guy, though.
Main website: http://slightparanoia.blogspot.com/.
source: Security Theatre
Charles Bailey has added Google Custom search engines to his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog and his Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography. He’s also offering the code for all six of his Google search engines (all covering OA-related content) for those who might want to add search boxes to their own pages.
source: Two more Bailey search engines
Communications in Information Literacy is a new peer-reviewed, open-access journal. It has issued a call for papers for its its first issue in Spring 2007. (Thanks to Heather Morrison.) The web site is still under development and I can’t tell yet who will publish it or whether it will charge author-side fees.
Larry Sanger has posted two essays articulating his vision for the Citizendium project, which he describes in the second essay below as “an expert-guided version of Wikipedia”:
source: The vision behind Citizendium
More funnies from Chris Pirillo:
This post was written by Scott Allen, source: Web Two Point Ohhh…
Teresa Valdez Klein and Jason Preston have been posting their notes from the various presentations at this week’s Blog Business Summit. Among the highlights:
This post was written by Scott Allen, source: Blog Business Summit Notes