Open Access Publishing as a Para Academic Proposition…

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Open Access Publishing as a Para-Academic Proposition: OA as Labour Relation :

“In this commentary, I ask what is meant by the phrase Open Access (OA)? If OA publishing has emancipatory potential for the publics that are thought to benefit from the practice, why is there so much business as usual? Para-academic practices are about affirming scholarship as a symptom and creating a common good, creating a public knowledge that is a knowledgable public. It is because OA shares this concern for publics that para-academic practices include OA publishing. By debating the merits of, experimenting with, and invigorating our understanding of OA I believe para-academic practices become more apparently necessary because ultimately OA, like Academia, is haunted by the figure of the public as an already-formed thing.”

URL : http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/529

De l’intérêt des bibliothèques nationales pour l’Open Access…

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De l’intérêt des bibliothèques nationales pour l’Open Access :

“Il y a de cela dix ans, la Déclaration de Berlin sur le libre accès à la connaissance en sciences exactes, sciences de la vie, sciences humaines et sociales, désormais reconnue comme l’un des textes fondateurs du mouvement de l’Open Access (OA), précisait les deux conditions requises pour qu’une publication soit dite de libre accès :
• l’attribution d’un droit d’accès « gratuit, irrévocable et mondial » et d’une licence de réutilisation, d’une part ;
• l’archivage électronique de sa version complète, d’autre part.

À ce jour, quatre bibliothèques nationales figurent parmi les 451 signataires de ce texte : la Bibliothèque royale du Danemark, la Bibliothèque royale de Suède, la Biblioteca de Catalunya et la Bibliothèque nationale islandaise. Cela paraît bien peu et interroge sur les raisons qui pourraient pousser ces établissements à s’intéresser à la pratique de la diffusion en ligne, sans intermédiation et sans barrière financière, de la littérature scientifique.

Tout d’abord, la Déclaration de Berlin embrasse dans sa définition du libre accès non seulement les données et travaux de la recherche mais aussi les biens culturels : « Nous définissons le libre accès comme une source universelle de la connaissance humaine et du patrimoine culturel ayant recueilli l’approbation de la communauté scientifique. » Permettre à tous d’accéder à « la connaissance, la pensée, la culture et l’information » est un des engagements des bibliothèques publiques. Certes, « [l]e fonds commun de la pensée et de l’information scientifiques est [déjà] de libre parcours. » Toutefois la tendance aujourd’hui est à une privatisation du savoir. Peuvent être évoqués ici le phénomène d’extension du domaine du brevetable (au vivant, aux mathématiques, aux découvertes elles-mêmes), l’allongement de la durée des droits d’auteur et l’octroi d’une protection juridique aux « digital barbed wire 6 » (« fils de fer barbelés numériques »). Les bibliothèques nationales peuvent dès lors soutenir l’émergence de nouveaux modèles de diffusion de l’information.

Les bibliothèques nationales se sont saisies de la question de l’Open Access à des degrés divers. Certaines ont usé de leur position stratégique pour défendre la cause du libre et engager le politique à s’y intéresser à son tour. D’autres ont choisi de mettre à profit leurs compétences et leurs moyens pour faire avancer un dossier particulier, qu’il s’agisse de signalement, d’archivage ou d’édition électronique. D’autres encore ont voulu s’associer au mouvement de l’OA par la libre publication de leurs ressources sur internet.”

URL : http://bbf.enssib.fr/consulter/bbf-2013-06-0020-003

Commercialising Public Research New Trends and Strategies …

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Commercialising Public Research: New Trends and Strategies :

“Policy-makers have high hopes for public research as a new source of growth. This research has been the source of significant scientific and technological breakthroughs that have become major innovations. Well-known examples include the Global Positioning System (GPS), MP3 technology, and Apple’s Siri voice recognition technology.
The substantial economic benefits from public research, and demands by governments to reap them, have led to increased efforts toward more direct engagement in downstream commercialisation activities. In light of this, institutions and infrastructures that support the networks and markets for transferring and commercialising public research results are being reviewed across many OECD countries, as traditional approaches and models are facing considerable limitations and may be restraining further scientific advance and broader innovation.
The OECD report Commercialising Public Research: New Trends and Strategies looks closely at this evolution and provides a comprehensive review of government and institutional level policies aimed at enhancing the transfer and exploitation of public research results. The publication also compares performance in OECD countries, universities and public research institutions using both traditional and new indicators.”

URL : http://www.oecd.org/sti/sci-tech/commercialising-public-research.htm

Journal Usage Half Life An analysis of…

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Journal Usage Half-Life :

“An analysis of article downloads from 2,812 academic and professional journals published by 13 presses in the sciences, social sciences , and the humanities reveals extensive
usage of articles years after publication. Measuring usage half life — the median age of articles downloaded from a publisher’s web site — just 3% of journals had half lives shorter than 12 months. While journal usage half lives were typically shorter for journals in the Health Sciences (median half life: 25-36 months), they were considerably longer for journals in the Humanities, Physics and Mathematics (median half life: 49-60 months). Nearly 17% (475) of all journals had usage half lives exceeding six years. This study illustrates substantial variation in the usage half lives of journals both within and across subject disciplines.”

URL : http://www.publishers.org/_attachments/docs/journalusagehalflife.pdf

Disciplinary differences in faculty research data management practices…

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Disciplinary differences in faculty research data management practices and perspectives :

“Academic librarians are increasingly engaging in data curation by providing infrastructure (e.g., institutional repositories) and offering services (e.g., data management plan consultations) to support the management of research data on their campuses. Efforts to develop these resources may benefit from a greater understanding of disciplinary differences in research data management needs. After conducting a survey of data management practices and perspectives at our research university, we categorized faculty members into four research domains—arts and humanities, social sciences, medical sciences, and basic sciences—and analyzed variations in their patterns of survey responses. We found statistically significant differences among the four research domains for nearly every survey item, revealing important disciplinary distinctions in data management actions, attitudes, and interest in support services. Serious consideration of both the similarities and dissimilarities among disciplines will help guide academic librarians and other data curation professionals in developing a range of data-management services that can be tailored to the unique needs of different scholarly researchers.”

URL : http://www.ijdc.net/index.php/ijdc/article/view/8.2.5

Datasharing guía práctica para compartir datos de investigación…

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Datasharing: guía práctica para compartir datos de investigación :

“Asociar los datos de investigación a la publicación favorece que la comunidad científica los reutilice, pero no tiene suficientes garantías de preservación. Almacenarlos en bases de datos solventa esta contingencia y aporta visibilidad, pero en España no existen demasiados servicios de estas características. Por esta razón, se describen, evalúan y exponen los pros y contras de depósitos de datos multidisciplinares extranjeros que pueden ser de utilidad para investigadores y gestores de información: Dryad, Figshare, Zenodo y Dataverse. Todavía es pronto para escoger de forma óptima y definitiva entre una u otra aplicación, por lo que se concluye con unas recomendaciones que orienten a la comunidad de usuarios e intermediarios.”

“To associate research data to the published results favors their reuse by the scientific community, but this does not afford sufficient guarantees of preservation. To store them in databases solves this contingency and provides visibility, but in Spain there are not many services of this kind. For this reason, we describe, evaluate and discuss the pros and cons of foreign multidisciplinary data repositories that can be useful for researchers and information managers: Dryad, Figshare, Zenodo and Dataverse. It is still early to choose optimally and definitively one or the other application, so we conclude with recommendations to guide the user community and intermediaries.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/20907/

The Open Access Movement is Not Really about…

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The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access :

“While the open-access (OA) movement purports to be about making scholarly content open-access, its true motives are much different. The OA movement is an anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with. The movement is also actively imposing onerous mandates on researchers, mandates that restrict individual freedom. To boost the open-access movement, its leaders sacrifice the academic futures of young scholars and those from developing countries, pressuring them to publish in lower-quality open-access journals. The open-access movement has fostered the creation of numerous predatory publishers and standalone journals, increasing the amount of research misconduct in scholarly publications and the amount of pseudo-science that is published as if it were authentic science.”

URL : http://triplec.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/525