Open access to scientific research: wher…

Open access to scientific research: where are we and where are we going? Facts and figures on the occasion of the 2010 Open Access Week (October 18-24) :

“This contribution is aimed at presenting a sort of “state of the art” of Open Access on the occasion of the 2010 international Open Access Week, to be held from October 18 to October 24. We shall see facts and figures about open archives and the mandates to deposit; about Open Access journals; about impact and citation advantages for the researchers, and about economic sustainability.”

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19173/

Implementing Open Access: Policy Case St…

Implementing Open Access: Policy Case Studies :

“Implementing open access is a tough job. Legitimate authority, sufficient resources and the right timing are crucial. Pioneers, role models and flagship institutions all have faced considerable challenges in meeting their own aims and achieving a recognized success. Professionals charged with implementing policy typically need several years to accomplish significant progress. Many institutions adopting open access policies probably need to do more, much more, if the commitment to open access is to be meaningful.
A first generation of open access policy development and implementation is coming to a close. It is thus possible to begin evaluation. Evaluating implementation establishes evidence, enables reflection, and may foster the emergence of a second generation of open access policies.
This study is based on a small number of cases, examining the implementation of open access around the world. Some of the pioneer institutions with open access mandates have been included, as well as some newer cases. The emergence of the new stakeholders in publishing is examined, such as digital repositories, research funders and research organisations.
Because this is a groundbreaking study, no claim is made that the results are representative. The emphasis is on variety and on defining a methodological standard. Each case is reconstructed individually on the basis of public documents and background information, and supported by interviews with professionals responsible for open access implementation.
Implementation is typically based on targeting researchers as authors. Indeed, the author is pivotal to any open access solution. This is the ‘tertium comparationis’ that facilitates an examination of the similarities and differences across instances in an effort to build a broader policy research agenda.
In a final section, open access is placed in the wider context of the evolution of digital scholarship. This clarifies how published research results are destined to become a key component of digital research infrastructures that provide inputs and outputs for research, teaching and learning in real time.
The ten cases examined in detail are:
– Refining green open access policy: Queensland University of Technology (September 2003)
– Refining policy to foster deposit: University of Zurich (July 2005)
– National platform, open collection, decentralized policy: the HAL platform (June-October 2006)
– Maximising a funder’s impact: The Wellcome Trust (October 2006)
– Implementing open access as a digital infrastructure: UK PMC (January 2007)
– Learning from global research infrastructure: SCOAP3 (April 2007)
– Linking public access to open data: Howard Hughes Medical Institute (January 2008)
– Open access to all publications, internationally: Austrian Science Fund (FWF, March 2008)
– One policy, sixty publication strategies: Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (July 2008)
– Open Access complements the Research Information System: The University of Pretoria (May 2009)”.

URL : http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1685855

10 years of Malaria Journal: how did Ope…

10 years of Malaria Journal: how did Open Access change publication patterns ? :

“Fifteen years ago, most publications were paper-based, accessible only by subscription. By the late 1990s, this ‘traditional’ mode of access to scientific literature was about to change dramatically, as the result of the development of Open Access. This Editorial, written as Malaria Journal reaches its 10th birthday, looks at the impact of the Open Access movement on publication in the field of tropical medicine in general and malaria in particular.”
URL : http://www.malariajournal.com/content/9/1/284

The Future of the Journal? Integrating research data with scientific discourse

To advance the pace of scientific discovery we propose a conceptual format that forms the basis of a truly new way of publishing science. In our proposal, all scientific communication objects (including experimental workflows, direct results, email conversations, and all drafted and published information artifacts) are labeled and stored in a great, big, distributed data store (or many distributed data stores that are all connected).

Each item has a set of metadata attached to it, which includes (at least) the person and time it was created, the type of object it is, and the status of the object including intellectual property rights and ownership. Every researcher can (and must) deposit every knowledge item that is produced in the lab into this repository.

With this deposition goes an essential metadata component that states who has the rights to see, use, distribute, buy or sell this item. Into this grand (and system-wise distributed, cloud-based) architecture, all items produced by a single lab, or several labs, are stored, labeled and connected.

URL : http://precedings.nature.com/documents/4742/version/1

Researchers’ attitude to using institut…

Researchers’ attitude to using institutional repositories : a case study of the Oslo University Institutional Repository (DUO) :

“Institutional Repositories (IRs) have been considered one of the disseminating and preserving method for scholarly research publications. However, the success of IR is dependent on the contribution of researchers and faculty members. In order to investigate researchers’ attitudes and their contribution to the Institutional repository a survey was conducted by taking 43 researchers as a sample study at the University of Oslo. The findings indicated that researchers were found to have a low level awareness of the Institutional repository but were interested in contributing their research work to the university institutional repository and have a positive attitude towards providing free access to scholarly research results of the University of Oslo.”

URL : https://oda.hio.no/jspui/handle/10642/426

Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access I…

Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research :

Background
Articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publisher’s version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web (“Open Access”, OA) average twice as many citations as articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective
self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002-2006 in 1,984 journals.
Methdology
Principal Findings: The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression analysis showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and greatest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations).
Conclusions/Significance
The OA advantage is greater for the more citable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. It is hoped that these findings will help motivate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by universities, research institutions and research funders.”

URL : http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18493/58/MandateOA_PLOSpostprint.pdf

Intellectual Property in Publishing and …

Intellectual Property in Publishing and Research: Open Access in Biotechnology, Life Sciences, and Software :

“We show some of the parallels between three sectors: (i) research, in particular research and scholarly publishing; (ii) software, and the diversity of its rights management ecosystem; and (iii) biotechnology, with its restricted intellectual property ecosystem and declining levels of innovation. A core aspect of the research process is to be found in scholarly publishing. Some of the most advanced forms of scholarly, research publishing, relating to publishing practices including citation, are evident in biotechnology and the life sciences. Motivation for Open Access, for example, is far and away the
most pronounced in the life sciences. We look at how this ties in with the evolution of the management, generally, of intellectual property. Computing, with its basis in computational reasoning, can and should play a central role in this evolution. In fact we can already discern a future view of pharmaceuticals as a new form of software.”

URL : http://www.cepis.org/media/upenet.IV.20101.pdf