Recent links on Open Access

• Opening up research for better returns on taxpayers’ investment: JISC’s guide to Open Access ‘is being launched to support UK researchers in opening up their work for better returns on taxpayers’ investment.  The increased impact of wider access to academic research papers could be worth approximately £170 million per year to the UK economy.’
• Wrong Advice On Open Access: History Repeating Itself: ‘With every good intention, Jason Baird Jackson — in “Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps” is giving the wrong advice on Open Access, recommending a strategy that has not only been tried and has failed and been superseded already,’ writes Stevan Harnad.
• A *really* open university: The idea of iTunes U is that ‘universities can upload content for distribution on iTunes, generally for free’.
• Hybrid journal pricing (1): Impending Oxford Open price increases: ‘Article processing charges so far seem to spiral up in the same way as subscription charges did in the past.’
• Hybrid Journal pricing (II): when and by how much will we see EMBO
  prices decrease? ‘If publishers like NPG/EMBO do not keep their promise to adjust their pricing in response to increased OA uptake and published output, we in effect have an additional revenue model, not a mixed revenue model. In this case, universities who have installed an open access fund, should indeed ask themselves whether such journals should not be excluded from their gold OA funding on a matter of principle.’
• Open Access at Concordia: What it Means to You and Your Research: ‘A Quick Reference Card that covers most of the issues brought forward by Faculty members following recent presentations at the Faculty Councils on Open Access at Concordia by Mr. Gerald Beasley, the University Librarian.’

Recent links on Open Access

• The Liberation of Textbooks: ‘The Open Educational Resources movement works to make high-quality educational materials freely available to everyone and, through the creative use of copyright laws, permits those using the resources to improve the materials, as well as re-edit them to make them more suitable to individual teaching situations.’
• Student coalition for Open Access solidifies, now represents over 5 million students internationally: ‘The student Right to Research Coalition, a group of national, international, and local student associations that advocate for governments, universities, and researchers to adopt Open Access practices, has now grown to include some of the most prominent student organizations from the United States and across the world. The recent addition of 8 new organizations brings the number of students represented by the coalition to over 5 million, demonstrating the broad, passionate support Open Access enjoys from the student community.’
• Access to Publicly-Funded Research: Why Not Now?: Reasons to support the Federal Research Public Access (FRPAA) Act currently pending in the US Congress.
• Is open-access journal publishing a vanity publishing industry?: ‘From an empirical point of view, current open-access journals display a pricing structure that does not indicate a vanity press industry, as we demonstrate below in a new analysis of OA publication fee data.’
• The Collège de France broadcasts its courses for free on line: The prestigious French academic institution now has a channel on the online video sharing site Dailymotion.
• Massively collaborative mathematics: ‘The “Polymath Project” proved that many minds can work together to solve difficult mathematical problems. Timothy Gowers and Michael Nielsen reflect on the lessons learned for open-source science.’
• Open Access Week is 19-23 October.
• Library savings from full flip to open access via article processing fees: about two-thirds savings: ‘I calculate that library savings from a full flip from subscriptions to open access via article processing fees, at the PLoS One rate of $1,350 would be at least 64%.’
• Canadian universities closed-minded on open access: ‘Canadian universities may benefit from far more public funding than their U.S. counterparts, but they have been much more reluctant to adopt open access mandates.’
• Put it in the Depot: ‘The Depot is an assured gateway to make your research Open Access.  We provide two main services: (1) a deposit service for researchers worldwide without an institutional repository in which to deposit their papers, articles, and book chapters (e-prints); (2) a re-direct service which alerts depositors to more appropriate local services if they exist.’

Recent Links on Open Access

• Writing in the Internet’s Margins: Want to write your next book on line, and allow people to comment in the margins of your drafts?  Here’s a survey of software you can use for that.
• Yale sitting on digitized books, not sure how to scan others: Microsoft ‘abruptly terminated its multi-million dollar book digitization deal with the University’.
• Lessons learned from an open access defeat: Librarians tried to get an OA resolution passed at the University of Maryland, only to discover that most of the faculty were clueless about OA; the faculty opposed the resolution for all sorts of misguided reasons.
• Income Models for Supporting Open Access: a guide for publishers and libraries, offering ‘an overview of income models currently being used to support the open-access distribution of peer-reviewed scholarly and scientific journals’.
• Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps: What academics can do to stop supporting the hegemony of multinational for-profit corporations in scholarly publishing.
• The STM Report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing: ‘provides a comprehensive picture of the trends and currents in scholarly communication’.
• OA books in humanities and social sciences: what users want: preliminary results of ‘a study on user needs in relation to open access book publishing within the Humanities and Social Sciences’.

Recent links on Open Access

• Free Electronic Textbooks Do Not Hurt Print Sales, Report Says: And naturally the journalist reporting the story found a publisher who disputes the study’s findings.  Let’s wait to see the final report when it’s published.
• What are the current feelings on ResearchGate starting it’s own preprint (self archive) service? A discussion about whether ResearchGate, a social networking site for researchers, is doing something useful by offering a self-archiving service.
• How and why researchers disseminate their findings: ‘Our survey shows that over 60% of researchers believe that open access repositories are either “not important” or “not applicable” to the dissemination of their research. . . . 52% of physical sciences and mathematics researchers say open access repositories are “important” or “very important”; whereas only 25% of humanities researchers say the same.’
• Open Medicine provides medical knowledge to the public: An alternative to Wikipedia?
• The Open College Textbook Act of 2009: A bill has been introduced in the US Congress stipulating that ‘textbooks created through grants distributed by Federal agencies . . . shall be licensed under an open license’.
• The Journal Manifesto 2.0: An Open Access manifesto for researchers.
• Philosophers call for Open Access: One says: ‘for many years I have been crossing out portions of copyright forms that prevent me from posting papers online’.
• The Un-Scientific Method: or, how good science becomes bad press: What every journalist should know before reporting on scientific research, and how OA can help.