About Author: Brett Cloyd

Posts by Brett Cloyd

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Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announce new Open Access policy

In a recent post to its Impatient Optimists Blog, the Gates Foundation states “…we are adopting an Open Access (OA) policy to enable the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed published research funded by the foundation, including any underlying data sets. ”

The Foundation went into further detail in an email to SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition):

“Our new Open Access Policy  goes into effect on January 1, 2015  We are really excited to make the research we fund more accessible to our grantees and researchers, policy makers, and to governments around the world.  Our new Open Access Policy enables the unrestricted access and reuse of all peer-reviewed, published research, including underlying datasets.  We join many other institutions in the Open Access movement, such as the Research Councils UK, the Wellcome Trust, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Health Organization. We believe this policy will help accelerate identifying solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.”

” As noted, the policy goes into effect on January 1, 2015, but will be fully implemented over a two-year period, at which time all peer-reviewed published research, and underlying data sets resulting from foundation funded research will be immediately available upon publication.  The implications are as follows:

  • For all agreements that are currently signed, there is no change.

  • For all new agreements, signed after January 1, 2015, the Open Access Policy will apply.

  • This policy will be implemented over a transition period over a two year period to allow for new standards around immediate access and data repositories to be adopted and developed.  We will focus on developing a process that minimizes operational impact.

The Gates Foundation has an asset trust endowment of $42.3 billion.  Total 2013 grant payments were $3.6 billion (source: Foundation Facts

Insider Higher Ed has a lengthy analysis of the announcement.

 

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Reflections from a librarian on the tenure clock

Meredith Farkas has a popular feature in American Libraries magazine in which she often talks about technology and libraries. She is also a faculty librarian at Portland Community College in Oregon. In a post from last year, she highlights that most of her scholarly research is publicly available:

“But, you know what? You can find all of my writing (other than what’s on this blog) in PDXScholar, our institutional repository (IR). Want to read my peer-reviewed articles? My American Libraries columns from the past few years? The book chapters I’ve written since 2008? They’re all in there. My most recently article, co-authored with Lisa Hinchliffe and applying a management model to building a culture of assessment where librarians have faculty status, is in an open access journal.

Throughout her blog post she talks about making the effort to have a copy of her work available to the general public.

I just made a small amount of effort to make my scholarship open to all. I don’t expect anyone to jeopardize tenure to make stuff more open [emphasise mine], but it does disappoint me that people in our profession won’t ask a publisher for permission or even take the time to put something in their IR that could benefit so many. Mostly I just don’t understand why one wouldn’t if they could.

With some effort, one may publicly share work, and have a strong chance at tenure too.

 

 

 

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Open Access in Geography

Earlier this year, , Liaison/Scholarly Communication Librarian at Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada, lead a presentation called “Shifting Ground: Scholarly Communication in Geography.” It was at the Canadian Association of Geographers meeting in May.  Among the highlights include a discussion on Open Access issues, guidelines for picking journals to publish your work, the problems with metrics to measure scholarly impact, and negotiating your copyright. She her Slides and transcript

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New Political Science Journal is Open Access

This post from the London School of Economics and Political Science announces the launch of Research & Politics (R&P), a new Open Access Journal.

Here is a snapshot of what the journal intends to do in Political Science

“The recently launched journal Research and Politics (R&P) has been established to aid political scientists in fully utilizing the internet as a platform to accelerate the impact of their research without sacrificing the rigorous reviewing practices of a leading journal. R&P publishes short, accessible articles of 4,000 words (along with research notes of just 2,000 words), which focus on new findings or insights with a clarification of how the author got to these results. Elsewhere, like in the natural and medical sciences, short and focused articles have become the norm. Within political science successful blogs, like the Monkey Cage or the LSE blogs, show that is possible to present research findings in a meaningful and accessible way, often in less than 2,000 words, and that this enhances widespread readership.”

Among their goals is “to add to our repertoire of tools available to political scientists in order to disseminate their findings. R&P’s openness, format and speed to publication will appeal to those wishing to publish cutting edge analyses of current events and debates, predictions about upcoming elections, or evidence-based analyses of new crisis situations. Although accusations of political science being out of touch with the real-world are surely overblown, the time lags in conventional publishing and the limited accessibility of articles can undermine researchers’ attempts to maximise the impact of their work. The internet, in this way, can help to change academic communication and its impact on policy-makers and others.”

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Chronicle: Publisher threatens to sue blogger

Following up on a lawsuit attempt by Edwin Mellen Press to quiet its’ critics, Jeffrey Beall has been threatened with a $1 billion lawsuit from an Indian publisher, OMICS Publishing Group. Beall has achieved notoriety for creating and maintaining Beall’s list and popular blog Scholarly Open Access. Both attempt to assist scholars assess the credibility of Open Access publishing organizations, and identify publishers that authors should avoid.

See the full story at: http://chronicle.com/article/Publisher-Threatens-to-Sue/139243/

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Amherst College launches no-cost digital only press.

Be sure to read this news story from Inside Higher Ed about an ambitious new plan from Amherst College.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/06/amherst-college-launches-open-access-scholarly-press

Amherst will emphasize high quality, peer-reviewed monographs in its new endeavor. They are currently hiring a press director and two editors to staff the press. Much of the initiative is coming from the Amherst College Librarian, Bryn Geffert.

“My grand dream — quixotic though may be — is that if enough libraries begin  doing what we’re doing, at some point there is going to be a critical mass of  freely available scholarly literature — literature that libraries don’t have to  purchase. And if they use those savings to publish more material, you reach a  tipping point.”

 

 

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Appealing the Georgia State case

From Bernie Sloan in Publishers Weekly:

“The three publisher plaintiffs in the Georgia State University e-reserve case yesterday lodged an appeal with the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, seeking to overturn one of the most significant fair use rulings in decades.”

Full text at: http://bit.ly/OdNDbb

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Fister: “An Academic Spring”

Be sure to check out Barbara Fister’s piece “An Academic Spring“. She follows scholar Timothy Gowers’ decision to withraw his participation from the scholarly activities of the large publisher, Elsevier:

“Gowers faulted the corporation for high prices, bundling subscriptions in ways that made selection prohibitively expensive for libraries, and for supporting the Research Works Act (RWA), proposed legislation that would prohibit government agencies from requiring that publicly funded research be freely accessible within a year.”

Gowers’ decision prompted action across academia. A petition against Elsevier was created, and brought together 10,800 signatures from those scholars who intended to boycott Elsevier as well.

Fister connects the “Academic Spring” with last year’s “Arab Spring” in a clever way that just might propel sudden change.

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MLA Changes Copyright Policy

The Modern Language Association (MLA) has recently changed its copyright policy to allow authors in its publications to retain copyright. Authors will now be able to include versions of their work on their own web sites and in institutional repositories. Inside Higher Education has this article for more information.

Kevin Smith’s “Saying the right things, then doing them” goes into further detail and analyses what MLA’s shift may do to the humanities.

These 3 points may be most important,

  1. Open access is not only possible, but is even vitally important, in the humanities.
  2. Open access, especially in its “green” form of author self-archiving, is not a threat to scholarly societies.
  3. The value of organized publishing efforts is in the services they provide around the content, not in the content itself (which, of course, the publishers do not create).
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UCLA video case is dismissed.

According to Brandon Butler, Director of Policy Initiatives at the Association of Research Libraries, “the federal district court in central California has dismissed the complaint against UCLA over ripping and streaming DVDs to authenticated users over the Internet. The case was dismissed on both procedural grounds (state sovereign immunity, standing) and substantive ones (UCLA did not infringe copyright).” Experts are not saying this case makes sweeping changes to laws or regulations.  However, in the context of pending litigation on copyright it may offer some hope for fair use applications for video presentations.

ARL Policy Notes.  “A Copyright Victory: Video Vendor Case Dismissed!”
http://policynotes.arl.org/post/11024602634/a-copyright-victory-video-vendor-case-dismissed

Scholarly Communications at Duke. “Streaming Video Case Dismissed”
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2011/10/04/streaming-video-case-dismissed/

Full-text of the decision
http://www.aime.org/news.php?download=nG0kWaN9ozI3plMlCGRm&u=111004120000