MetaFilter posts tagged with openaccess

The best of the web - that'll be $30, please

Gyan — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 05:37:48 -0800

Open access: The true cost of science publishing

White House announces new US open access policy

brundlefly — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 16:00:28 -0800

"In a long-awaited leap forward for open access, the US government said today that publications from taxpayer-funded research should be made free to read after a year’s delay – expanding a policy which until now has only applied to biomedical science." "Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research" - Dr. John Holdren in response to the whitehouse.gov petition, "Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research." "Second shoe drops: new White House Directive mandates OA" - Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project

JSTOR Register and Read

jedicus — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 06:51:34 -0800

The digital library JSTOR has announced its new Register & Read program, under which users unaffiliated with an institution can access "approximately 1,200 journals from more than 700 publishers, a subset of the content in JSTOR. This includes content from the first volume and issue published for these journals through a recent year (generally 3-5 years ago)." The program requires a free JSTOR account. The other hitch is that users may access content by adding to their "shelf" of up to three articles. Articles may be removed from the shelf and replaced after 14 days. Downloadable PDF versions of articles may be available for purchase.

We write to communicate an untenable situation...

Toekneesan — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:53:23 -0800

Harvard’s annual cost for journals from these providers now approaches $3.75M. In 2010, the comparable amount accounted for more than 20% of all periodical subscription costs and just under 10% of all collection costs for everything the Library acquires. Some journals cost as much as $40,000 per year, others in the tens of thousands. Prices for online content from two providers have increased by about 145% over the past six years, which far exceeds not only the consumer price index, but also the higher education and the library price indices. These journals therefore claim an ever-increasing share of our overall collection budget. Even though scholarly output continues to grow and publishing can be expensive, profit margins of 35% and more suggest that the prices we must pay do not solely result from an increasing supply of new articles. Harvard's Faculty Advisory Council asks Harvard's faculty to change how they publish. The Guardian's story on the development. Harvard's Arts & Sciences faculty previously on Open Access Scholar and Harvard University Librarian, Robert Darnton, Promises to Launch an Open Digital Public Library by 2013

RIP, RWA

pantarei70 — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:23:30 -0800

Academic publisher Elsevier backs down. Reed Elsevier withdraws its support for the controversial Research Works Act. Not without some whining, of course. Reps. Issa and Maloney have apparently said they won't be moving the bill forward.

Scientists boycott Elsevier

jeffburdges — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 12:55:55 -0800

The Cost of Knowledge lets scientists register their support for a boycott of all Elsevier journals for their support of SOPA, PIPA (tag) and the Research Works Act (previously, WP, MLA, UK, Oz, etc.). It appears the boycott was inspired by Field's medalist Tim Gowers' recent comments describing his personal boycott of Elsevier journals. Elsevier has always been amongst the most hated academic publishers, largely due to their incredibly high prices (pdf).

NIH Open Access Policy Under Attack

humanfont — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:22:56 -0800

The Open Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health mandates that NIH funded research is published to PubMed Central. This provides free online full text access to the resulting research. This policy has been very popular. As a result journal publishers have seen their business models threatened. As other government agencies consider similar policies, publishing industry lobbyists have worked to put an end to the practice.. (previously) The legislation seeks to block agencies from:

duplicating the capabilities of privately available research archives which may compete with university and commercial publishers.
requiring that publicly funded research published in private sector journals be being distributed for free without authorization.
mandating that non-government authors agree to free distribution of works as a condition of receiving grants.

PLoS Impact Explorer

alby — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:02:04 -0800

The PLoS Impact Explorer visualises which papers in the Open Access PLoS family of journals are making an impact online.

"As knowledge policy, for the creators of this knowledge, this is crazy"

unknowncommand — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 22:54:03 -0800

"The Architecture of Access to Scientific Information: Just How Badly We Have Messed This Up" Lawrence Lessig speaking at CERN on April 18, 2011. Long (~50 min), but wonderful and totally worth it (and the second half is about Youtube and remix culture).

The good, the bad and the prolific moderator.

infinite intimation — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:16:02 -0800

At the Bartos Theater, in conversation with Henry Jenkins, these speakers [Yochai Benkler and Cass Sunstein] don’t so much square off as share their hopes and fears for the emergence of online democracy.

The first order of business, instructs Jenkins, is taking stock of the current “communication space” to assess whether current practices encourage the growth of digital democracy. Cass Sunstein gives the Internet a C-, for its “babble and excellence…brilliant insight and cruelty, that are not from the standpoint of self-government…what we deserve.” Yochai Benkler, describing the “good public sphere,” focuses less on sheer freedom of expression, and more on how people participate in “production of an agenda,” and how they are enabled to “investigate, pursue, differ, err, correct and discuss.” Sunstein bemoans the common opinion in the “geek world” that if you’re sovereign over your own options, you can “declare victory and go home.” In Sunstein’s version of a well-functioning system of communication, “you don’t construct a daily me, your communications cocoon, your little information chamber,” but embrace “unanticipated exposure and shared experience.” Such moments energize people, shifting them from passivity to active citizenship, declares Sunstein. Benkler sees the Internet as couched in the larger framework of power and elites, where government or commercially directed mass media typically produce our common experiences. But now, with the Web, “instead of having a few hundred or a few thousand people with a genuine ability to set the agenda, we instead have two to three million people who believe they can affect the agenda without kidding themselves too badly. That seems like a larger population that can push on power.” This is a “significant change in citizenship from the idea of sitting in front of the TV.” He finds particularly attractive organizations like Netroots, which prod traditional political parties in certain directions. But there’s a possibility for fragmentation, and even dangerous polarization, Sunstein worries, with online communities clustering around similar interests and erecting bulwarks against contrary thinking. “The notion that freedom of choice, the ability to self-select and produce our own information content is a full cure for what ails us, runs into obstacles,” he says. Benkler, though, believes the tendency to “tell each other how great and right we are and how wrong they are” is a plausible description “of how we’ve always been.” He is happily observing a new generation of children grow up deeply imbedded in new technologies that help them develop an “attitude of seeking and being able to find.” Sunstein summons his muse, Jane Jacobs, to describe his ideal: an Internet metropolis that mirrors the best an American city offers. “Walking along some street, you see a person, interaction, building that stuns you…If you really look, the fertility and surprise of that will alter what you’re interested in, what you care about, your aesthetic and even political sense.” Sunstein dreams of a digital world designed for serendipity, as well as norms of interaction, (such as on Wikipedia) that promote collaboration, self-correction and the prevention of lies and cruelty.

Of course you realize this means war!

grouse — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 11:23:48 -0800

Libraries and commercial publishers have struggled with each other over the skyrocketing costs of academic journals for years. As costs have increased more rapidly than library budgets, the libraries have had to cut journal subscriptions and other acquisitions. The recent recession has necessitated further cuts. Against this backdrop, Nature Publishing Group told the University of California that next year subscription prices would increase 400 percent, with the average annual cost of a journal increasing to $17,479. UC Libraries fought back with a combative letter to UC faculty suggesting that faculty should consider boycotting the journals, and cease submitting or reviewing articles for these journals. NPG responds, saying that UC currently pays unfairly low rates, and that "individual scientists, both within and outside of California are already suffering as a result of [UC]'s unwarranted actions."

These findings are especially taters in the context of the what cancer taters further future investigation into this field.

NikitaNikita — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 14:20:24 -0800

Research journal accepts a computer-generated nonsense paper, and leads the editor-in-chief to resign his post. The authors write about their hijinks on their blog The Scholarly Kitchen. Philip Davis, a Cornell Ph.D. graduate student in scientific communications "coauthored" the paper with Kent Anderson, executive director of international business and product development at the New England Journal of Medicine, and the help of the online auto-paper generator SCIgen. This isn't the first time Davis et al have attempted to submit this work to the publisher, Bentham Publishers, before. Bentham is also known for indiscriminately inviting academic researchers to join their editorial board. Other fun in fake academic publishing: Merck's look-a-like journal, and Previously on Metafilter.

MIT faculty vote for university-wide Open Access mandate

tarheelcoxn — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:19:53 -0800

The MIT faculty unanimously adopted a university-wide Open Access mandate. Open Access got a big boost yesterday because of MIT's move. For those of you not in academia/libraries or who are too lazy to click either of the links, this basically means that if you're on faculty at MIT and you publish something, you grant MIT (among other things) the right to make that work available for free on a website they set up to be a repository for such work.

Harvard boosts open access for faculty publications

mediareport — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 08:49:45 -0800

Harvard's Faculty of Arts & Sciences voted unanimously last week to mandate "Open Access" to published articles - a first at a U.S. university, though the dean will apparently grant a waiver to anyone who wants to opt out. More to follow? Peter Suber's Open Access News is tracking reactions. Inside Higher Ed article Open Access Overview More at the bottom of this post "Harvard authors are not supposed to publish from now on in some extremely high profile journals like Nature and Science who prohibit fee access of papers for a period of time after publication. Whether these journals will publish Harvard papers under these conditions now is a question we don't know the answer to. It could get very, very interesting." [Peter Suber previously in the blue]

Now if they'd just move back to Boston

Horace Rumpole — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 12:36:07 -0800

Atlantic Magazine opens its archives. Atlantic Magazine announced today that they will drop subscriber-only access to the site, giving full access to every issue of the last 12 years. Where to start? Well, I particularly recommend David Foster Wallace's fascinating examination of right-wing talk radio (DFW trademark footnotes intact), Hitler's Forgotten Library, and Eric Schlosser's The Prison-Industrial Complex. (via)

Closer to the heart

Blazecock Pileon — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 02:42:21 -0800

"In 2003, Americans spent an estimated US$5,635 per capita on health care, while Canadians spent US$3,003... Canada’s single-payer system, which relies on not-for-profit delivery, achieves health outcomes that are at least equal to those in the United States at two-thirds the cost." What do wealthy, educated Americans living in Canada think?

Comments open; continually revised

painquale — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 16:45:49 -0800

The Ethics of Deep Self-Modification. What will happen when machines gain the ability to modify their own psychology? Do we have a responsibility to step in? What happens when we have the ability to modify ourselves? Philosopher Peter Suber has dedicated himself to issues of self-modification... not just in psychology, but also in constitutional law. Small wonder that this is the guy who invented Nomic. His site is littered with great stuff; he now is primarily involved with the open access movement. Check out his open access primer and blog.