Group items tagged

Founding editor and previous co-editor of the open access journal Feminist Media Studies provides an in-depth account into her experiences engaging with feminist, open access processes. Lisa McLuaghlin spends a great deal of time discussing the implications of hierarchies in (academic) publishing and the political implications of editorial boards. Also engaged throughout the article is a conversation about diversity within academic publishing. She emphasizes how Feminist Media Studies does not have a very diverse authorship despite the journal's intention and specific policies and editorial policies that are intended to encourage non-English speakers to publish in the English journal. This reflection on feminism and open access demonstrates what these fields have accomplished, while also indicating how far we still have to go. Overall, the article provided many insights from someone on-the-ground in regards to feminist, open access initiatives.

Open access publishing in Feminist/Gender studies should reflect objectivism and diversity; therefore a diverse editorial board should be elected to recruit and select journal content that suits the target profile. It seems as if the editorial management of this journal is run more along business ethics than the principles of the journal.

I would say that ethics should nearly always come ahead of journal principles.

The Open Education is one of the most discussed topics on education internationally today. Can be defined as open education practices that characterize the opening of access to knowledge, ways of learning, learning technologies, educational systems, models of educational management, leadership and certification. Integral part of the Open Education are OER (Open Educational Resources), materials of teaching, learning and research, in any format or media, licensed to allow their reuse, adaptation and sharing by others. Since 2006 ABED disseminates OER and Open Education. Prof. Fredric Litto in 2006 wrote about open content and in 2009, the publication of the book 'Distance Education: State of the Art vol.1', ABED - Pearson Education, which won the Premio Tortoise brought the seventh of chapters on concept of openness in ODL open University of Brazil, REA, learning through virtual and digital libraries and digital repositories and virtual, written by Andreia inamorato dos Santos, Ronaldo Mota, Fredric Litto, Ana Paula Leite de Camargo and Ana Cristina Birth , respectively. Since then, in Brazil, have sprouted traces of a theme that would be provided shortly international prominence - Open Education. To expand the discussion of the topic in Brazil and international trends, ABED creates workgroup ABED OPEN. Coordinator for the group, ABED invited Dr. Andreia inamorato, international researcher in the field of open education, OER and ODL. "The group intends to involve the participation of teachers of basic and higher education, researchers, students, educational administrators, publishers, departments of education, nonprofits and private institutions," says Andrea. "The goal is to have the collective and representative participation of various social actors to be a working group with legitimacy, representativeness and goals, and can promote discussions on educational priorities in Brazil with respect to open education", says the researcher.

This weeks module 6 is about Open Science and Open Data. Within the course provided videos and readings do not provide much on Open Data. This article dives into why Open Data is relevant in Open Science. Citation: Molloy JC (2011) The Open Knowledge Foundation: Open Data Means Better Science. PLoS Biol 9(12): e1001195. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001195 Published: December 6, 2011 Copyright: © 2011 Jennifer C. Molloy. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Open data leads to better science, but a community effort is needed in order to overcoming the barriers to widespread publication and availability of open scientific data.

Lu Xiao, a researcher in collaborative and social computing, carried out a study of academic perceptions of Wikipedia and open access publishing. Survey results showed that researchers’ lack of experiences with Wikipedia and/or open access journals negatively affected their perceptions of the open access publishing model. Compared to tenur...

Get involved: "Sign the petition to express your support for Open Access as the default for scientific and scholarly publishing, so researchers like Diego [Gomez] don't risk severe penalties for helping colleagues access the research they need. Sign-on statement: Scientific and scholarly progress relies upon the exchange of ideas and research. We all benefit when research is shared widely, freely, and openly. I support an Open Access system for academic publishing that makes research free for anyone to read and re-use; one that is inclusive of all and doesn't force researchers like Diego Gomez to risk severe penalties for helping colleagues access the research they need." (Creative Commons)

The first time I heard of Diego's case, I couldn't believe it and yet it was shared by the EFF, an authoritative source. I still can't wrap my head around the fact that someone would want to sue over the sharing of his thesis. I didn't even thought you could have copyright on a thesis and how do you even make money on a thesis? Especially when it is said that a large majority of all thesis are never looked up more than twice (by the author and the director). This person should be ashamed.

"Responding to rapid and steep increases in the cost of scientific journals, a growing number of scholars and librarians have advocated "open access" (OA) to the scientific literature. OA publishing models are having a significant impact on the dissemination of scientific information. Despite the success of these initiatives, their impact on researchers in the developing world is uncertain. This article analyses major OA approaches adopted in the industrialized world (so-called Green OA, Gold OA, and OA mandates, as well as non-OA information philanthropy) as they relate to the consumption and production of research in the developing world. The article concludes that while the consumption of scientific literature by developing world researchers is likely to be significantly enhanced through such programs, promoting the production of research in the developing world requires additional measures. These could include the introduction of better South-focused journal indexing systems that identify high-quality journals published in the developing world, coupled with the adjustment of academic norms to reward publication in such journals. Financial models must also be developed to decrease the reliance by institutions in the developing world on information philanthropy and to level the playing field between OA journals in industrialized and developing countries."

Here's a free webinar on Thursday, Nov. 6 at 11am PST. You can register here or go to this site on that day and see it live! Open Access and Libraries: What open access is (and isn't) "Scholarly journals are increasingly becoming digital, experimenting with new publishing models such as Open Access (OA) and incorporating multimedia into their formats. In addition, the process of research continues to evolve because of mandates from funding agencies to publicly share research findings and data. For a candid discussion of what OA is (and isn't), tune in Thursday, November 6 at 2:00 p.m. (Eastern) for the next free, streaming video broadcast of American Libraries Live. Our panel of experts will give their unique perspective on what OA means now and how it will shape the future and will answer your questions."

"OA journal publishing is disrupting the dominant subscription-based model of scientific publishing, having rapidly grown in relative annual share of published journal articles during the last decade. "

A source of some open text books with a interesting back story that should act as a warning about open--they are all now ex-open text books. After 2012 the publisher decided to abandon the CC/open textbook model and shifted the licensing on all their books. However, you can not revoke a CC license retroactively, so copies of the books downloaded prior to the change are still CC. But if the publisher no longer provides access to them, they disappear from CC circulation and access--luckily in this case, some one saved the CC versions and makes them available on this website. thanks!

Seriously useful! Indeed!

Wow, this collection is extensive, and the content seems good too! I'm so glad that someone was motivated enough to make these available according to their original licenses -- but it feels a bit bittersweet as well they had to resort to guerilla tactics to keep them available. It does make me wonder -- why did the publishing company decide to start charging for their textbooks? Was the previous model unprofitable?

Nature Communications has announced it will go open access only from 20 October in a bid to show the world that quality papers do not have to be paid for.

I've chosen to link to the article on Wired which discusses the move as the explanation is easier for those who (like me!) have little experience of academic journals to understand. One of the most important points I've taken from reading this article (and the PDF study explaining the reasons for the move to Open Access, which is linked from the article) is that to date, articles which have previously been published to Nature Communications using the OA model have earned more citations than those published under a subscription model. I'm interested to learn more about the mentioned Creative Commons 4.0 license, which I'm not yet familiar with. If anyone with experience using (or publishing to) academic journals would like to add any relevant points to the potential impact of the magazine's choice to go OA, I would really appreciate the insight!

"Although the official press release highlights that "Open Access publishing has no negative effect on book sales, and increases online usage and discovery considerably" (which is, in my opinion, only a snapshot which will sooner or later lose validity in the course of the ongoing digitalization of the academic book market), the most interesting and valuable outcomes of the pilot arise from the attempt to quantify and itemize the costs of an OA monograph."

"The trouble is that impact factor of journals where researchers publish their work is a poor surrogate to measure an individual researcher's accomplishments. "

Una mirada crítica al acceso abierto: Nature 495, 426-429 (28 March 2013) doi:10.1038/495426a http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676 As that lack of enthusiasm demonstrates, the fundamental force driving the speed of the move towards full open access is what researchers - and research funders - want. Eisen says that although PLoS has become a success story - publishing 26,000 papers last year - it didn't catalyse the industry to change in the way that he had hoped. "I didn't expect publishers to give up their profits, but my frustration lies primarily with leaders of the science community for not recognizing that open access is a perfectly viable way to do publishing," he says.

La cuestión es que no hay quien ofrezca una opción sólida que pueda remplazar al Factor de Impacto. La comunidad científica lo ha adoptado cómo "LA" manera en que se puede medir el desempeño de los investigadores en el mundo. Y ese supuesto es hegemónico en el mundo. Tan es así que Scielo, a pesar de ser un repositorio en acceso abierto que sigue la filosofía de dar a conocer la producción científica latinoamericana, se decanto por generar indicadores bibliométricos de la mano de Thomson-Reuters y entrar al Web of Science. Esto no es asunto menor, es un indicador definitivo de que el dominio del FI no decaerá. Esto repercute directamente con la política científica nacional de cada país. En México CONACYT evalúa a los miembros del SNI mediante sus publicaciones en SCOPUS -pidiendo como evidencia las citaciones en este sistema de información. En Colombia, PUBLINDEX colocá revistas en A1 por el hecho de ser JCR-WoS u SJR-SCOPUS. Esto es innegable y seguirá pasando. Es por ello que iniciativas regionales de Acceso Abierto en América Latina (ya sean repositorios, leyes, etc:) ofrecen una posibilidad diferente que debe ser explotada por los investigadores de la región para mejorar la visibilidad de su producción. Del mismo modo, es ahí donde espacios como este MOOC deben ser valorados por su capacidad para diseminar la cultura del conocimiento abierto.

"SAGE Open is a peer-reviewed, "Gold" open access journal from SAGE that publishes original research and review articles in an interactive, open access format. Articles may span the full spectrum of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities."