Group items tagged

Blog post by Martin Eve commenting on the "History Journal Editors' Statement" - http://www.history.ac.uk/news/2012-12-10/statement-position-relation-open-access with particular emphasis on CC-BY and CC-BY-NC.

Details of a 2 day conference about OA strategy for institutions, individual states, and the EU, with a very interesting spread of contributors including Stevan Harnad, Michael Jubb, Alma Swan, Robert Kiley, and Stuart Shieber.

Jonathan Eisen is the academic editor-in-chief of PLoS Biology. This post, which is a reaction to the #PDFtribute surge after Aaron Swartz's suicide, presents options for making articles Open as a 10-point hierarchy.

Blog post by OKN Fellow Ross Mounce in whiich he provides a plot of APCs against Openness of various GoldOA article options.

Interesting post on the LSE "Impact of Social Sciences" blog by Glasgow University's Roderic D. M. Page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roderic_D.M._Page mainly about how Elsevier might develop Mendeley. Four options put forward:Mendeley becomes iTunes for papers; Mendeley becomes the de facto measure of research impact; Mendeley becomes an authoring tool; Mendeley becomes the focus of post-publicaton peer review.

"Now before both the House of Representatives and the Senate, FASTR would require those agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the public with online access to research manuscripts stemming from such funding no later than six months after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The bill gives individual agencies flexibility in choosing the location of the digital repository to house this content, as long as the repositories meet conditions for public accessibility and productive reuse of digital articles, and have provisions for interoperability and long-term archiving. The bill specifically covers unclassified research funded by agencies including: Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Defense, Department of Education, Department of Energy, Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Transportation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the National Science Foundation. FASTR reflects the growing trend among funding agencies - and college and university campuses - to leverage their investment in the conduct of research by maximizing the dissemination of results. It follows the successful path forged by the NIH's Public Access Policy, as well as the growing trend in adoption of similar policies by international funders such as the Research Councils United Kingdom (RCUK), private funders such as the Wellcome Trust, dozens of U.S. Institutions, such as Harvard, MIT, and the University of Kansas."

Peter Suber's overview of the FASTR is clear and to the point. One key clause: "The NIH budget alone is more than six times larger than the budgets of all seven of the UK research councils put together. Hence, it's significant that FASTR disregards or repudiates the gold-oriented RCUK/Finch policy in the UK, and sticks to the FRPAA model of a pure green mandate. For some of the reasons why I think OA mandates should be green and not gold, or green first, see my critique of the RCUK/Finch policy from September 2012. http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/9723075"

Long feature by Paul Jump (with surprisingly few comments) summarising the UK situation from the standpoint of a well-briefed (and possibly thoroughly lobbied) journalist. Has an OA timeline from 2002, and a section about the Open Library of the Humanities.

Somewhat ill informed attack on "the historians" asserting that the latter's hostility to Finch involved fear of "casting pearls before proles", and that it is the "cost of checking and editing" that has stopped the Internet bringing down the costs of scholarly publishing. [Some of the comments on the piece are interesting.]

Coherent and thoroughly argued piece, with some telling and informative calculations in paragraph 7, and an interesting suggestion that APC fee-capping be introduced.

13 January 2013 post by Martin Paul Eve on the beginnings of a possible PLOS for Humanities and Social Sciences

A consideration by Eric van de Velde of why MOOCs have caught the eye and the imagination of HE leaders in a way that OA never did. Poses three questions: 1. Why do academic leaders not make the same calculation with respect to OA? 2. Why do they fear the potential of OA-caused disruption? 3. Why do they embrace the potential of MOOCs-caused disruption? Puts forward four not entirely convincing explanatory conjectures: 1. MOOCs are in their infancy, providing cover for their pedagogic inadequacy, and allowing for experimentation. 2. MOOCs provide big first mover advantages. (Hasn't PLOS had FMA?). 3. In contrast with OA MOOCs put control in the hands of teachers (!). 4. OA is not sufficiently disruptive (PeerJ, however, is).

Conclusions: * RCUK must clarify its policy guidance to reflect its incremental approach to compliance in the initial five-year implementation phase of its open access policy; * RCUK must monitor the effects of its open access policy and its Autumn 2014 review of the policy should consider 6 key points relating to embargo periods, the case for gold; APCs and their impact; impact on Q of peer review; impact on R collaboration; impact on learned societies. * The Government should conduct a full cost-benefit analysis of the policy, in view of their stated preference for gold open access; and * The Government should review the effectiveness of RCUK's consultation regarding this significant change in policy. (RCUK holding response: http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/media/news/2013news/Pages/130222.aspx indicates that RCUK will shortly be issuing revised guidance on its policy.)

Blog post by Mike Taylor charting what he sees as a gradual weakening of the RCUK OA policy since RCUK published its March 2012 draft. He concludes: "Can anyone doubt that the nobbling of a truly progressive policy was the result of lobbying by a truly regressive publishing industry? It's been a tragedy to watch this policy erode away from something dramatic to almost nothing. Once more, it's publishers versus everyone else. Again, I have to ask this very simple question: why do we tolerate the obvious conflict of interest in allowing publishers to have any say at all in deciding how our government spends public money on publication services?"

Blog post by Peter Murray Rust examining the extent to which resetting and reformatting by publishers adds or removes value.

HEFCE seeks early input to help shape a consultation that it will be undertaking later in 2013. Six questions posed, relating mainly to the extent to which OA is mandated by HEFCE for outputs that are included in the next REF (in, say, 2020). Deadline for responses: 25 March 2013.