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Report outlining how libraries deal with database licensing, how they negotiate with vendors, what conditions libraries negotiate for, how much money libraries spend on database licenses, etc. This information would be really helpful to libraries considering shifting more towards open access sources. You can see a few key points here, but of course this report is not open! Your library might have a copy from past years.

A federal database publicly disclosing companies' payments to doctors went live this week, drawing a splash of attention to the $3.5 billion given to physicians over 5 months last year. Although one purpose of the site is to shine light on potential conflicts of interest in research, the site may fall short of that goal.

Filed by on Recently published by The Primary Research Group. The Survey of Library Database Licensing Practices, 2014-15 Edition: The report looks closely at how libraries organize their database procurement and processing bureaucracy, pinpointing the number of positions devoted to digital information, and staff time spent on tasks such as procurement and invoice processing.

Just thought I'd share a Frequently Asked Question from the Library of Congress site. The answer highlights the antithesis of open access. One would think that the LOC would lead open access given that our tax dollars fund it and democracy requires an informed citizenry. What online databases and indexes does the Library make available to researchers on site? The Library subscribes to a large number of online subscription databases which offer indexes to journals, information on library holdings, and other resources in a wide range of subject areas. Workstations for searching these services are available in all of the Library's reading rooms. The Library also subscribes to a number of Internet-based databases and full-text journal services, which are searchable on any of the public Internet workstations in the Library's reading rooms. Patrons onsite using their personal laptops or other wireless-enabled devices to connect to the Library's wireless network are also able to access these services. The Library does not offer access to these services off-site, but they are widely available at public and academic libraries...."

The same situation with all "large number of online subscription databases of indexes and full-texts" only in the libraries in many countries and many libraries, not only LOC.

A new UN database collecting documents on education in countries around the world. The information is limited to official, legalistic reports from the UN and from the countries. I found the lower parts of the country profiles very useful in giving an overview of a country's constitutional framework for education, which could offer an interesting angle for analyzing your own country and comparing it to others. This could be used as a great tool for understanding the overarching design of an education system, an important step for anyone looking to improve it. 

This is one of many examples to read about lack of privacy. I find this entry so interesting because of the importance from our privacy from a government point of view. Think about the big amount of information they have about us: health, financial, educational, and so on. It may arrive one day in which some of our politicals will be intelligent enough and will create a centralised database with all these information. Poor of us the day it arrives!

This is a weekly series highlighting Open Access Button users from around the world, discussing their work, and sharing their stories. If you would like to participate, please email oabutton@gmail.com Professor Ernesto Priego, part of the team at City University London's Library and Information Science Course, was thankfully able to chat with us after a...

This title is SO meaningful. People always ask what librarians do in this digital-Google-era. Librarians enable access, that is what they do! And in many ways. In educating people on open access, how to search databases, by searching databases for patrons, by searching the full-text, by contacting other libraries to get interlibrary loans, etc. etc. etc. The role of the librarian today is still very important and relevant. Technologies did not diminish the role of the librarians, technologies pushed it to very advanced, specialized and precise roles.

Very user friendly free chemistry database: chemicals 2D and 3D structres, most important characteristics ect

This paper throws light on the growth and development of open repositories registered with OpenDOAR database. The study explores various facets of open repositories and tries to present a lucid picture of their overall development. The study provides a detailed description of repositories in terms of continent, country and subject wise distribution. The study further delves deep into the Asian contributions and brings to light detailed profiles of Asia

"At the same time, a fair amount of resistance to OA practices still exists. Publishers object to OA on economic principles, as it undermines the revenue generated by journals. Some researchers feel that it devalues their work as well, lowering it to the level of "a database to be consulted," in Eve's words. He believes the academic community is over-reliant on scholarly publishing's status quo; as he told the crowd at Columbia, "the system reinforces itself through economies of prestige." Even as interest in altmetrics grows, the quality of research continues to be gauged by the number of citations an article gathers and the status of the journal it appears in."

This is a good overview of a project that seeks to demystify and break down resistance to open educational resources.

"MELIBEA is a Spanish database that uses a composite formula with eight weighted conditions to estimate the effectiveness of Open Access mandates (registered in ROARMAP). We analyzed 68 mandated institutions for publication years 2011-2013 to determine how well the MELIBEA score and its individual conditions predict what percentage of published articles indexed by Web of Knowledge is deposited in each institution's OA repository, and when. We found a small but significant positive correlation (0.18) between MELIBEA score and deposit percentage. We also found that for three of the eight MELIBEA conditions (deposit timing, internal use, and opt-outs), one value of each was strongly associated with deposit percentage or deposit latency (immediate deposit required, deposit required for performance evaluation, unconditional opt-out allowed for the OA requirement but no opt-out for deposit requirement). When we updated the initial values and weights of the MELIBEA formula for mandate effectiveness to reflect the empirical association we had found, the score's predictive power doubled (.36). There are not yet enough OA mandates to test further mandate conditions that might contribute to mandate effectiveness, but these findings already suggest that it would be useful for future mandates to adopt these three conditions so as to maximize their effectiveness, and thereby the growth of OA. "

Strings attached: I needed an id!

WIPO GREEN is an interactive marketplace that promotes innovation and diffusion of green technologies. Use our database and network to connect with technology and service providers, or advertise your needs.

This post (from a royalty-free stock database) summarizes acceptable and unacceptable practices for the fair use of music. Topics include sheet music, research, recordings, and copies. There are also links to related topics, e.g. copyright law, Creative Commons licensing, rules of fair use, etc.

I have found some interesting research publications on this site, in particular to MOOCs. Leading Social Science Research Delivered Daily Social Science Research Network (SSRN) is devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research and is composed of a number of specialized research networks in each of the social sciences. Each of SSRN's networks encourages the early distribution of research results by distributing Submitted abstracts and by soliciting abstracts of top quality research papers around the world. We now have hundreds of journals, publishers, and institutions in Partners in Publishing that provide working papers for distribution through SSRN's eLibrary and abstracts for publication in SSRN's electronic journals. The SSRN eLibrary consists of two parts: an Abstract Database containing abstracts on over 563,000 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 465,300 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat pdf format. The eLibrary also includes the research papers of a number of Fee Based Partner Publications. The Networks encourage readers to communicate directly with authors and other subscribers concerning their own and others' research. To facilitate this we publish detailed author contact information including email addresses for authors of each paper.

"To what extent is it possible - or desirable - to disengage from the growing cultural database? How do surveillance and "sousveillance" play a role in the policing of individuals by institutions, and vice versa? Can we disentangle the issues surrounding localized record keeping from globalized control over the archives? In this article, we discuss a range of cultural practices, epistemological regimes and intellectual discourses that have emerged to cope with these questions, and we assess the strategic options for communitarian and individual agency in an era we describe as "the end of forgetting."* I included this link as the article has an excellent model to describe the different strategic responses of agency to the openness of data and the resultant privacy issues.

Canada's new anti-spam legislation (CASL) helps protect Canadians while ensuring that businesses can continue to compete in the global marketplace. On July 1, 2014 Canada's anti-spam law came into effect. I believe it's the strictest in the world. If you email anyone in Canada you need to make sure you comply with this new law. We had to take a number of measures at my company including ceasing all bulk emails until we get our new opt-in database populates; including a footer in all our emails that allows recipients to opt out of receiving emails from us, and company-wide training on CASL and what we need to do to comply. People can be personally liable for violating this law. I'm not sure if the government has any manpower to actually monitor and prosecute any violators but we will see. As a Canadian, I don't think my SPAM had decreased - I actually received more emails to 'opt in' to mailing lists. I have also noticed that almost every message I receive has an unsubscribe option at the bottom, something I've been taking advantage of. I am not sure how this will ultimately affect open knowledge or if it will but it has made me think twice about reaching out to people I don't know over email.

"It turns out that students are poorly trained in college to effectively navigate the Internet's indiscriminate glut of information. Another Project Information Literacy study, involving more than 8,300 undergraduates at 25 American colleges, found that most make do with a very small compass. They rely on tried and true resources such as course readings, library databases, Google, and Wikipedia....The skills that students cultivate through traditional assignments-writing essays based on library research-are far different from those required to perform efficient, high-level, accurate research in the digital world. All of those types of research skills take practice under the eye of experts."

This commentary emphasises the need for students to be taught within the curricula on how to be discerning when navigating the surfeit of information on the internet.

OAIster is a good beginning place for finding open access articles, images, videos. The URL listed here is open to all on the Internet. For libraries that use OCLC WorldCat, OAIster contents (records) are automatically included.