Today in the U.S. ...
"President Obama signed an Executive Order directing his administration to take historic steps to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs and others as fuel for innovation and economic growth."
Accessible data is open and machine-readable. This allows entrepreneurs to more easily incorporate the data into new and innovative technologies. Let the app coding begin!
A new award has just been announced: the Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP)
"The Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP) recognizes individuals who have used, applied, or remixed scientific research — published through Open Access — to make a difference in science, medicine, business, technology or society as a whole."
-Three top awards of $30,000 each
-A trip to Washington, D.C., to be honored at Open Access Week in October, 2013
-Inclusion in a portfolio book distributed online and in print around the world
The main sponsors of this new award include PLOS, Google, and the Wellcome Trust.
Deadline for this year's nominations is June 15, 2013.
For Program Rules and Nomination forms see this page.
With rapidly advancing Internet technologies we are no longer bound by the traditional formats of print scholarly journals - and all of their associated inefficiencies that extend the time to publication. Indeed, with the fast pace of research in many cutting-edge areas of science we can no longer afford the lag times of several months to publication.
Two innovative new models of journal publishing have recently launched that take advantage of the current technology environment and challenge traditional journal formats and peer-review workflows:
F1000 Research - is a new open access life sciences journal that offers immediate publication of all scientifically sound papers. The main time savings occurs in the peer-review process: peer-review occurs post-publication and is entirely transparent. The naming of referees in transparent peer-review processes can also encourage fair and honest reviews. A recent press release from F1000 reports that in the first months since its launch in January 2013 the average time to publication has been one week.
PeerJ - is another new open access journal in the areas of biological and medical sciences that launched early in 2013. It also does not restrict publishing to research with perceived "impact" or "novelty" but instead on "an objective determination of scientific and methodological soundness". The main innovation of PeerJ is on the economics side. Authors may purchase one-time memberships that will allow them to publish repeatedly in PeerJ without having to pay each time. There are various levels of membership, but the basic level has a one-time cost of $99 and permits one publication a year. PeerJ also asks every member to provide one peer-review each year.
In the electronic age we are no longer bound by page restrictions, there is no need to accept only the most "influential" articles (a practice that is highly subjective anyway), and we do not need to delay publication until the next designated date on the calendar that an issue is supposed to come out. Science will progress much more rapidly when we remove historical and artificial barriers to publishing - and make the results of publicly-funded research more accessible and reusable.
In case you haven't yet heard...
We will be holding a workshop Tuesday March 26, 2013 on open access! It is the last session in the Library Workshop Series for Scientists and Engineers (but all are welcome!).
Drop by to learn more about author’s rights and discover how to make your publications more accessible to readers. We will be discussing open access journals and repositories and many of the great tools listed on the Open Access LibGuide.
No registration required.
Delta Lab (2B04 Engineering Building)
Tuesday March 26, 2013
12-1pm
Today the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced a new directive to federal agencies to develop open-access policies within the next six months.
Here is the text from the brief press release:
The Obama Administration is committed to the proposition that citizens deserve easy access to the results of scientific research their tax dollars have paid for. That’s why, in a policy memorandum released today, OSTP Director John Holdren has directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research. OSTP has been looking into this issue for some time, soliciting broad public input on multiple occasions and convening an interagency working group to develop a policy. The final policy reflects substantial inputs from scientists and scientific organizations, publishers, members of Congress, and other members of the public—over 65 thousand of whom recently signed a We the People petition asking for expanded public access to the results of taxpayer-funded research.
To see the new policy memorandum, please visit: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf
To see Dr. Holdren’s response to the We the People petition, please visit: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/response/increasing-public-access-results-scientific-research
A recent article by Cory Doctorow in The Guardian has caused me to stop and rethink a basic view I've held for a while...
I think it is a no-brainer that the results of publicly-funded research should be required to be made openly accessible. What the public has paid for through taxes belongs to the public - they should not have to pay again to read the results.
...But I have always considered the results of research that private companies invest in to be theirs alone to decide how to disseminate - if at all. However, Doctorow makes a very good point that some private research results should be required to be open for ethical reasons (that could mean life or death!):
"The reason pharma companies should be required to publish their results isn't that they've received a public subsidy for the research. Rather, it is because they are asking for a governmental certification saying that their products are fit for consumption, and they are asking for regulatory space to allow doctors to write prescriptions for those products. We need them to disclose their research – even if doing so undermines their profits – because without that research, we can't know if their products are fit for use."
Pharmaceutical companies have long suppressed results that would reflect negatively on their products. They have an ethical obligation to disclose ALL results of drug tests. This is not just their bottom line that we are talking about - but someone's health and possibly their life.
In honour of Open Access Week 2012 PhD TV has posted a new video explaining what open access is and why it is important. Features narration from well-known UC Davis evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen.
Please join us for a free webcast event Wed Oct 31, 12-1pm, in the Collaborative Learning Lab (1st Floor of Murray Library).
As part of UBC's Open Access Week events, Heather Piwowar will give a talk entitled Uncovering the Impact Story of Open Research.
Piwowar is well-known and respected in the open science community for her studies regarding the accessibility and impact of research data. She is also a leader in the development of software that takes new approaches to measuring research impact (ie “altmetrics”).
Here is the abstract for the talk:
Research today is often evaluated by the journal impact factor of a published article. This has left little room for innovation: it is difficult for new journals to achieve a high impact factor, and non-traditional research products are often published outside of journals. It has also failed to recognize and reward broad impact and post-publication use. As scholarly publishing and interactions move online, scholarly and public impacts are becoming easier to follow and measure. Heather Piwowar will talk about tools that can track these impacts today, and discuss how these tools are empowering revolutions in open access publishing and open data repositories.
Open access is defined as the dissemination of scientific and scholarly research literature online, free of charge, and free of unnecessary licensing restrictions.
Open access increases the visibility and accessibility of scholarly works - increasing their citations and impact!
Open access allows the public to read the results of research that they have funded!
Open access increases the speed and efficiency of scientific research!
Come by the Natural Sciences Library this week to see our display and enter the draw for a free t-shirt. Or visit the Open Access Guide to learn more about this important issue!
The government of British Columbia announced this week that it will partner with faculty, institutions, and publishers to create free online, open textbooks for the 40 most popular post-secondary courses in the province.
An open textbook policy is in development and could be in use at B.C. institutions as early as 2013-14.
Congratulations to BC on this very progressive direction!
See the news release for more.
Ten years have passed since the landmark meeting in Budapest that many people view as the unofficial beginning of the open access (OA) movement. The meeting produced the first definition of "open access" as well as the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).
To mark the 10 year anniversary of the BOAI, leaders in the OA movement met once again in Budapest and developed new Recommendations for the next 10 years. These recommendations were released today.
(From the press release announcement):
"The Open Access recommendations include the development of Open Access policies in institutions of higher education and in funding agencies, the open licensing of scholarly works, the development of infrastructure such as Open Access repositories and creating standards of professional conduct for Open Access publishing. The recommendations also establish a new goal of achieving Open Access as the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and in every country within ten years’ time."
And from the preamble to the new recommendations themselves:
"Nothing in the last ten years makes OA less necessary or less opportune. On the contrary, it remains the case that “scientists and scholars...publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment” and “without expectation of payment.” In addition, scholars typically participate in peer review as referees and editors without expectation of payment. Yet more often than not, access barriers to peer-reviewed research literature remain firmly in place, for the benefit of intermediaries rather than authors, referees, or editors, and at the expense of research, researchers, and research institutions."
AND
"The problems that previously held up the adoption and implementation of OA are solved, and the solutions are spreading. But until OA spreads further, the problems for which OA is a solution will remain largely unsolved. In this statement, we reaffirm the ends and means of the original BOAI, and recommit ourselves to make progress. But in addition, we specifically set the new goal that within the next ten years, OA will become the default method for distributing new peer-reviewed research in every field and country."
Momentum in the Open Access movement seems to be picking up speed this summer with some notable news from Britain, and an impending response from the White House regarding the Access2Research petition (see my earlier blog entries for more on this).
Jennifer Howard, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, sums it all up very well in her Aug 13, 2012 article: A Push Grows Abroad for Open Access to Publicly Financed Research.
No news on the Canadian front however...
On July 1st 2012 a new Open Access Policy came into effect at the World Bank. From their April 10, 2012 press release:
“Knowledge is power,” World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said. “Making our knowledge widely and readily available will empower others to come up with solutions to the world’s toughest problems. Our new Open Access policy is the natural evolution for a World Bank that is opening up more and more."
Now the World Bank has been named as SPARC's July 2012 Innovator:
"For being a pioneer in sharing research on such a global scale, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition recognizes the World Bank as its July 2012 Innovator. "
An update on the "We the People Petition" I blogged about last time:
25,000 Advocates Urge White House to Open Taxpayer-Funded Research to Everyone
“We the People Petition” hits 25,000 signatures in just two weeks
Washington, DC – June 4, 2012 - The movement to make taxpayer-funded research freely available online hit a new milestone on Sunday when advocates hit their goal of 25,000 signatures to a “We the People” petition to the Obama administration. The petition,
created by Access2Research (a group of Open Access advocates, including SPARC’s
Executive Director, Heather Joseph), requests that President Obama make taxpayer-funded research freely available.
On Monday (May 21) a petition calling for Public Access to all Federally Funded Research was posted to the White House "We the People" website:
If the petition garners 25,000 signatures within 30 days, it will be reviewed by White House staff, and considered for action. At the time of my writing this blog post the petition has nearly 16 000 signatures - more than halfway there in less than a week!
You DO NOT need to be an American to sign, but you do need to register on the website (a short and simple procedure).
See this video promoting the petition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FoYxzPZDuw
The full text of the petition is here:
"We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.
The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research."
See more info at the access2research website.
