Category Archives: Open Access

MIT’s open access policy supported by scholarly publishers

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"Scholarly publishers confirm support for MIT’s open access policy – 22 Mar 2010

The faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has announced that a year after the faculty adopted a policy to open access to their scholarly articles, many scholarly publishers have confirmed their support. More than 850 articles have been added to the MIT Open Access articles collection in the MIT Libraries’ digital repository, DSpace@MIT, where they are freely available on the web.

Publishers who are supporting the MIT policy include American Economic Association, American Institute of Physics, American Mathematical Society, Beilstein-Institut, BioMed Central, Hindawi Publishing, The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), The Optical Society of America (OSA), Public Library of Science (PLoS) and the University of California Press, among others. Many of these publishers allow the MIT Libraries to capture copies of the final published PDF for deposit, so that authors do not need to take any action in order to have their articles openly accessible.

In a move aimed at broadening access to the institution’s research and scholarship, MIT faculty, in March 2009, voted to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free and open access on the web. The MIT Libraries, with the guidance of the Faculty Committee on the Library System, continue to work with MIT faculty to help further the policy’s goal of broadening access to MIT’s research and scholarship.

Search for more open access related information

Click here"

Source: Knowledgespeak Newletter 3/22/10

DSpace at Princeton University is open for business!

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DataSpace can now be used to store papers and data.  From the homepage:

"DataSpace is a digital repository meant for both archiving and publicly disseminating digital data which are the result of research, academic, or administrative work performed by members of the Princeton University community. DataSpace will promote awareness of the data and address concerns for ensuring the long-term availability of data in the repository."

There are papers from 2 groups or communities available so far: 

Civil and Environmental Engineering
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs

There is a useful "About" page, and the "Help" page gives you the mechanics of running searches using the Jakarta Lucerne search engine, which bears lots of similarities to Google.

Contact:  Mark Ratliff, Digital Repository Architect, Phone: (609) 258-0228.

BioTorrents — easier, faster exchange of science-related open-access software and datasets

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The goal of BioTorrents is to allow easier and faster exchange of science-related open-access software and datasets.
BioTorrents allows scientists to rapidly share their results, datasets, and software using the popular BitTorrent file sharing technology.   (The BioTorrents website)

From Alain Borel (Bibliotheque Scientifique, Lausanne) on the CHMINF Listserv, 1/18/10,  in response to the introduction of the subject by Egon Willighagen at Uppsala Univ.:

 
"The distributed nature of BitTorrents sounds nice (it doesn’t matter that zillions of users start downloading stuff, since they rapidly all become data sources themselves). However, I wonder how the updates will be treated? OAI-PMH feels like a much better protocol from this point of view. Maybe OAI-PMH could be used as a wrapper for publishing and harvesting BitTorrent seeds (one seed par article)?" (A.B.)
 
From the website:
"The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. Data Providers are repositories that expose structured metadata via OAI-PMH. Service Providers then make OAI-PMH service requests to harvest that metadata. OAI-PMH is a set of six verbs or services that are invoked within HTTP."
…offering Interoperability through Metadata Exchange

Open Access “propaganda”

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SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING & ACADEMIC RESEARCH COALITION

From the SPARC eNews December, 2009:  Opportunities to support open access:

U.S. Government invites comments on Open Access Policy

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 US US government launches interactive public forum on Public Access Policy – 11 Dec 2009

"The US’ Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) has launched a public consultation on its Public Access Policy. The Administration is seeking public input on access to publicly-funded research results, such as those that appear in academic and scholarly journal articles. Currently, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) require that research funded by its grants be made available to the public online at no charge within 12 months of publication. The Administration is seeking views as to whether this policy should be extended to other science agencies and, if so, how it should be implemented.

OSTP launched an interactive, online discussion on December 10. The discussion is focused on three major areas of interest. These include: Implementation (Dec. 10 to 20): Which Federal agencies are good candidates to adopt public access policies? What variables (field of science, proportion of research funded by public or private entities, etc.) should affect how public access is implemented at various agencies, including the maximum length of time between publication a public release?; Features and Technology (Dec. 21 to 31): In what format should the data be submitted in order to make it easy to search and retrieve information, and to make it easy for others to link to it? Are there existing digital standards for archiving and interoperability to maximise public benefit? How are these anticipated to change; and Management (Jan. 1 to 7): What are the best mechanisms to ensure compliance? What would be the best metrics of success? What are the best examples of usability in the private sector (both domestic and international)? Should those who access papers be given the opportunity to comment or provide feedback?

Each of these topics will form the basis of a blog posting that will appear at www.whitehouse.gov/open and will be open for comment on the OSTP blog.

Search for more Public funded research information in K-Store"

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter
 

‘Open Science’ report — part of the UK’s “Research 3.0”

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JISC releases ‘Open Science’ report – 13 Nov 2009

"The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), UK, has released a report as part of its ‘Research 3.0 – driving the knowledge economy’ activity, which launches at the end of November. The new ‘Open Science’ report trails key research trends that could purportedly have far-reaching implications for science, universities and the UK society."

"The report looks at how technologies can support the open movement to share data, workflows, methods and research outputs. It also illustrates the vital role librarians could have in supporting these new trends and the recognised need to build relationships between researchers and librarians to support the research of the future."

"Open Science — the future for research?"  Link to this press release:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/11/openscience.aspx

From KnowledgeSpeak Newsletter

Google Books now has magazine content

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Many popular magazines are now included in Google books cover-to-cover.  One can search the whole lot, or within individual titles.  Two of the titles which might be of interest to readers of this news are Popular Mechanics and Popular Science.  The listing by title (cover) is here:

http://books.google.com/books?as_pt=MAGAZINES&rview=1.

Don’t expect the very latest issues!  The inclusive dates differ for each title.

Source: ResearchBuzz [tara@researchbuzz.com]

Open Access to research is coming — eventually!

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Open Access to Research Is Inevitable, Libraries Are Told [The Chronicle of Higher Education]

 

 

Here is the link: http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Open-Access-to-Research-Is/8475/

 

From "Library Link of the Day" October 19th.

 

ArXiv, the physics open repository, is mentioned as the exception, and even this doesn’t get all of the papers  researchers should, or would want to see.  The Director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, says that the U.S. lags way behind Europe and other countries.

On a more hopeful note, the Johns Hopkins Data Conservancy project Director, Sayeed Choudhury, envisions a time when huge amounts of data will be available to researchers everywhere.

An Association of Research Libraries panel admits that progess is slow-going, but will come to pass.

Open Access Repositories joined by the UK’s JISC

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UK JISC becomes founding member of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories – 26 Oct 2009

"The UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has become a founding member of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). COAR is an international not-for-profit association that aims to promote greater visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of Open Access (OA) digital repositories.

Inspired from the European DRIVER repositories project, which helps to enhance repository development, COAR takes this vision to an international scale. Founding members of the Confederation include members from North America, China, Japan and Europe. Joining COAR at the early stage of its development means members will be able to contribute to shaping the organisation’s objectives which will look at interoperability, raising awareness and promoting OA repositories, supporting the repository community and working with partners in closely related fields such as research management and publishing.

Open Access repositories seek to offer researchers and universities the chance to significantly increase the impact of their research outputs, with the potential for significant benefits for UK higher education and the economy and society more widely. The aim of COAR is to enhance and progress the provision, visibility and application of research outputs through global networks of Open Access repositories."
 

Source:  Knowledgespeak Newsletter, Oct. 26, 2009

Scitopia now with streamlined links to RefWorks

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"Federated search services provider Deep Web Technologies, US, has announced that its federated search product, Explorit Research Accelerator, now includes seamless integration with RefWorks, a web-based solution for citations management."

source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter, July 30, 2009

Scitopia was developed by 21 top technological and scientific societies.  It is a freely available database mainly in physics and engineering.  Component societies are listed on a webpage off www.scitopia.org.  It lists papers going back as early as 1665, some of which are digitized.

Full text is offered on a pay-per-view basis, so currently it is better to search Princeton’s subscription databases which have links to our full-text subscription resources.  INSPEC  and Compendex  cover even more resources than Scitopia.  IEEE  — Xplore & IEL — are other overlapping subscription databases we have, and they are completely full-text.