Tag Archives: Open Access

Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL)

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"The Technical Report Archive and Image Library (TRAIL) project was established by the Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA) to digitize and preserve federal technical reports, particularly those produced before 1976. We define federal technical reports as material that is primarily of a scientific or technical nature issued by agencies of the federal government. The digitized reports will be freely available in a searchable electronic archive. It is our belief that unfettered access to this material will facilitate scientific progress. For more information, visit: http://trail.gwla.org/"

From
Mike Culbertson 
Engineering Librarian
Colorado State University Libraries
(Email received through American Libraries Assoc., Sci-Tech Section)

P.S.  What reports should be digitized?  Reply to : http://trailproject.blogspot.com/

American Institute of Physics to secure all journals in dark archive

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Melville, NY, June 12, 2009 – "The American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced today that online versions of all its journals will soon reside in the dark archive, CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe), a joint venture by libraries and publishers committed to ensuring long-term access to scholarly publications in digital format. CLOCKSS will make AIP content freely available in the event that AIP is no longer able to provide access." 

"CLOCKSS creates a secure, multi-site archive of web-published content that can be tapped into to provide ongoing access to researchers worldwide, free of charge."

"The American Institute of Physics is a federation of 10 physical science societies representing more than 135,000 scientists, engineers, and educators and is one of the world’s largest publishers of scientific information in physics. Offering full-solution publishing services for physics scientific societies and for similar organizations in science and engineering, AIP pursues innovation in electronic publishing of scholarly journals. AIP publishes its own

12 journals (many of which have the highest impact factors in their category); two magazines, including its flagship publication Physics Today; and the AIP Conference Proceedings. Its online publishing platform Scitation hosts nearly two million articles from more than 185 scholarly journals, and other publications of 28 learned society publishers."

From BShriver@AIP.org

Applied Math and Science Education Repository — AMSER

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The Applied Math and Science Education Repository is aimed at providing web resources for community colleges, technical schools, and the general public.  The link takes you to the science — and technology — resources.

From their home page: "AMSER is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use."

"AMSER is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the National Science Digital Library, and is being created by a team of project partners led by Internet Scout."

Connexions — an Open Education Resource

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If you want to customize some lecture notes, create a textbook  or collect some special readings for your class, Connexions might help.  It is rather like Open Courseware, but it is a wiki textbook product, and developed in modules.  Prof. Peter M. Grant from the University of Edinburgh gave a presentation about it at the Friend Center yesterday.  It was developed at Rice University but now is independently run in Houston, TX, being funded by Heulett.  It’s content is continually growing…recently consisting of 500 collections, courses, or books, and 10,500 modules or chapters of 4-8 pages.  It operates under a Creative  Commons license.  147 countries are involved.  The most prevalent language is Spanish, but there is also English, Thai, Japanese and Chinese.  All subjects are present, even though it was first developed as a Communications and Digital Signal Processing (DSP) resource.  Introduction to Music Theory is a popular text available at Connexions.  However, ~65% covers science and technology.  Anyone can contribute, become an author, and most contributions are peer reviewed at some point.  "Lenses" for quality control and review are centered at IEEE, Rice and IMS, and other institutions and individuals depending on the subjects.  One very cool application is LabVIEW which displays active analytics, for example, the graphical output readings resulting from different input filtering devices in electronics.   (More about LabVIEW. ) XML is used to store content, and texts are easily uploaded from Microsoft Word or LaTeX. 

Information about the presentation and Prof. Grant which was sponsored by: The Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education.

MIT Faculty votes for open access to scholarly articles

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 MIT faculty votes for open access to their scholarly articles – 24 Mar 2009

The faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), US, has voted to make their scholarly articles available to the public for free and open access on the Web. The move is aimed at broadening access to MIT’s research and scholarship.

The new policy was approved unanimously at a recently held MIT faculty meeting and took immediate effect. Under the new policy, faculty authors give MIT nonexclusive permission to disseminate their journal articles for open access through DSpace, an open-source software platform developed by the MIT Libraries and Hewlett Packard. The policy gives MIT and its faculty the right to use and share the articles for any purpose other than to make a profit. Authors may opt out on a paper-by-paper basis.

MIT’s DSpace repository contains the digital research materials of MIT faculty and researchers and allows them to be saved, searched and shared worldwide. MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) was launched in 2001 with the goal of making all MIT course materials available, free of charge, to anyone over the World Wide Web. Since then, OCW has shared MIT course materials with more than 50 million visitors worldwide and inspired hundreds of other universities to do the same. The new open access resolution will now remove barriers to making all of MIT’s research openly available to the world.

A faculty committee will work with the MIT Libraries to oversee implementation and determine a workflow for adding articles to DSpace. Under the new open access model, potentially thousands of papers published by MIT faculty each year will be added to DSpace and made freely available on the web and accessible through search engines such as Google.

MIT’s policy claims to be the first faculty-driven, university-wide initiative of its kind in the US. While Harvard and Stanford universities have implemented open access mandates at some of their schools, MIT is the first to fully implement the policy university-wide as a result of a faculty vote. MIT’s resolution is built on similar language adopted by the Harvard Faculty of Arts & Sciences in 2008.

Click here

Open Access & Article Depostion from Nature Pub. Group

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 Nature Publishing Group and ASGT announce open access and article deposition services for authors – 26 Jan 2009

Scientific publisher Nature Publishing Group (NPG), UK, and the American Society of Gene Therapy (ASGT) have announced the launch of two new services to help authors comply with funder and institutional mandates for public access. Under the initiative, Molecular Therapy, the official journal of the ASGT, will now offer authors the option of immediate open access on publication, including deposition in PubMed Central, subject to the payment of a publication fee. In addition, as a further author benefit to aid compliance with several funding body mandates, NPG will deposit all Molecular Therapy articles to PubMed Central upon final publication, to be made public after 12 months.

Upon submission of original research articles, authors have the option of publishing their articles as open access for a publication fee of £2,000 / $3,000 / €2,400. Open access articles will be freely available upon publication. By paying this one-time fee, authors are also entitled to self-archive the final published PDF of their articles on a website, institutional repository, or other free public server upon publication. Open access articles will be designated by the MTOpen logo in both the print and online editions of the journal and will be freely accessible via PubMed Central immediately after publication.

Open access articles will be published under a Creative Commons license. Authors may choose between the Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported and the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Licence. The Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Licence permits derivative works, ensuring that authors can comply with funders such as the Wellcome Trust. Under both licenses, the final published version of MTOpen articles can be downloaded and shared as long as the author and original publication are cited.

Under the terms of NPG’s License to Publish, self-archiving is encouraged on all original research articles published in Molecular Therapy. In all cases, the author’s version of the accepted manuscript can be made publicly accessible six months after publication. This applies regardless of whether the authors choose the MTOpen option.

Molecular Therapy joins The EMBO Journal, EMBO reports and British Journal of Cancer, which already offer an open access option to authors. NPG also announced the introduction of an open access option on ten further journals.

Click here
 

Knowledgespeak Newsletter, 26 Jan., 2009

Technical Report & Image Library – TRAIL

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I just learned of this database of technical reports housed at Manoa, Univ. of Hawaii, via the Chemical Information Listserv — from the Univ. of Arkansas’ Engineering and Math Librarian.

"TRAIL-Technical Report Archive and Image Library: a collaborative project to digitize, archive, and provide persistent and unrestricted access to federal technical reports issued prior to 1975."

Actually, they have reports from much later than 1975.  Browsing is available, as well as detailed search functionality.

STATISTICS:

  • Total reports in database: 1052
  • Total fulltexts in database: 330
  • Total images in database: 946

Organizations Involved:
The Greater Western Library Alliance (GWLA – www.gwla.org) and the Center for Research Libraries (CRL – www.crl.edu) are collaborating on a pilot project.

These are picked up by Google, not (necessarily?)  Google Scholar, and not by Scirus. Scopus and  U.S. Government databases will pick up (index) the reports, but probably won’t link to the full texts.

SPARC Digital repositories meeting summaries, Baltimore, Nov.17-18

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US Resources and presentations from recent SPARC repositories meeting now online – 23 Dec 2008

Thought leaders and practitioners from higher education and beyond called on participants at the SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting in Baltimore on November 17-18 to continue their digital repository development efforts and offered strategies for building on experience gained to date.

In the opening keynote, John Wilbanks, who heads the Science Commons project at Creative Commons, pointed to the unique qualities of digital repositories, and the need to highlight their potential to serve the academic community. He encouraged universities to adopt open-access policies modeled after the one adopted by Harvard University earlier this year rather than inventing their own.

Bob Witeck, chief executive officer and founding partner of Witeck-Combs Communications Inc., pointed to the importance of smart marketing in getting digital repositories off the ground and valued by faculty. He encouraged librarians and repository managers to use plain language and vivid stories to communicate the impact of the open sharing of information. By making digital repositories more visible and demonstrating their value to the public, universities can win needed support from taxpayers and communities, said David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs, National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), in the closing keynote of the meeting.

A summary of each keynote and every panel discussion, along with available podcasts, slides, and an invitation to online discussion, are now available online through the SPARC website at http://www.arl.org/sparc/ir08.

Click here

Source: Knowledgespeak Newsletter,  Dec. 23, 2008