Fuck Yeah Open Access

[fuckyeahopenaccess]

[fuckyeahopenaccess]

From Peter Suber’s Open Access

[arlpolicynotes-blog]

If you want to be in the business of printing truth, the best license to choose for your business is the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). For now. And if you’re printing science, medicine, technology or even philosophy, I really hope you want to print truth.

Eric Hellman (aka @gluejar) with a nice analogy between printing money and “printing truth,” and the sources of authority for each. (via arlpolicynotes)

[chealsye]

Peter Suber’s Open Access is now open access! Thanks to a fantastic agreement with MIT Press the book has become openly available one year after its publication.

Go read!

PDF HTML ePub Mobi

[openaccessmeme-blog]

Studies have shown that Open Access increases citation impact by 25-250%. http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html

http://www.istl.org/10-winter/article2.html 

Meme explanation, courtesy of Know Your Meme:

You Can’t Explain That is an image macro series associating Bill O’Reilly with a misunderstanding of how mundane natural occurrences work.

[openaccessmeme-blog]

If the whole point of publishing scholarship is to get your research seen, why hide your work behind paywalls where only a minuscule portion of the population can read it?

[penny4nasa]

This week is Open Access Week. Open Access is the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research. Typically resulting scholarly articles are only available through an expensive journal and research data isn’t openly shared. Movements calling for public access to these articles and for open data are gaining traction and momentum.

NASA has a strong track record of archiving and providing universal access to scientific data that result from its mission and programs. NASA makes datasets, tools, widgets, and catalogs openly available on data.gov (http://1.usa.gov/HiJrtn). Some of NASA’s data products include the NASA World Wind and Planetary Data System. NASA World Wind is a web service and open source project that allows people to zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth.  The Planetary Data System (PDS), which was originally developed in the 1990s, provides access to data from more than 50 years of missions.

However, NASA hasn’t been perfect in its openness. The first series of papers based on data from the Mars Curiosity rover were published in Science, a prestigious and expensive subscription journal, and were not made openly accessible to the public. Biologist and Open Access advocate Michael Eisen recently called NASA out on this and “set free” the articles by posting them on his blog. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has now posted openly accessible links to these articles on its website.

If you want NASA to continue its important research and gather more data about Earth and space, then ask Congress to give a Penny4NASA.

Learn more about NASA and open data access.

Learn more about Open Access. 

View a quick video from PhDComics explaining Open Access.

[explore-blog]

Information is only of value if you can get it to people who can do something with it. Sharing is power.

General Stanley McChrystal at TED 2014. McChrystal’s memoir, My Share of the Task, is a magnificent read. 

Nearly seven decades earlier, Vannevar Bush made an eloquent case for the same concept in his seminal essay “As We May Think.” 

(via explore-blog)

[explore-blog]

Although most academic research is funded by the public, universities all but force their scholars to publish their results in journals that take ownership of the work and place it behind expensive pay walls. Centuries ago, when printing and mailing paper journals was the most efficient way to disseminate new knowledge, a symbiotic relationship developed between scholars, who had ideas they wanted to share, and publishers, who had printing presses and the means to convey printed works to a wide audience. Transferring copyright to publishers, which protected their ability to recover costs and profit from their investment, was a reasonable price for authors to pay to further their disseminating mission. But with the birth of the internet, scholars no longer needed publishers to distribute their work. As NYU’s Clay Shirky has noted, publishing went from being an industry to being a button. Had the leaders of major research universities reacted to this technological transformation with any kind vision, Swartz’s dream of universal free access to the scholarly literature would now be a reality. But they did not. Rather than seize this opportunity to greatly facilitate research and education, both within and outside the academy, they chose instead to reify the status quo.

Excellent, necessary piece on open access and how academia betrayed and continues to betray Aaron Swartz, who took his own life earlier this month.  (via explore-blog)

[openaccessmeme-blog]

Your research is meant to add to existing knowledge and raise your profile as a scholar. Reaching a wide audience is essential to both of these goals. Why make your research harder to find?

Meme explanation, courtesy of Know Your Meme 

Bad Advice Cat is an advice animal image macro series with a cat recommending terrible or inane solutions to life’s problems..

[arlpolicynotes-blog]

[T]he price of textbooks has risen more than 800% over the past 30 years, a rate faster than medical services (575%), new home prices (325%), and the consumer price index (250%).

from The Changing Textbook Industry - a fascinating blog post by Jonathan Band for CCIA’s DisCo blog. (via arlpolicynotes)

[smithsonianlibrariesarchives]

We couldn’t let Open Access Week go by without a brief plug - for Open Access and for our researchers! Open Access - providing unrestricted online access to scholarly, peer-reviewed publications - fits in perfectly with the mission of the Smithsonian to provide for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”

Scientists, curators, and librarians at SI are committed to making our research as widely available as possible. This can take the form of “gold” Open Access - publishing in Open Access journals, or as “green” Open Access - depositing papers in open repositories, like the one we run called Smithsonian Research Online.

A bit more detailed information about Open Access at the Smithsonian Libraries can be found in this blog post written by master gif-maker (and repository data wrangler) Richard Naples.

[thepinakes]

And it’s the job of university presses to publish scholarship: not just to put it in print, but to make it available. Alas that’s getting harder and harder for them to do. Presses are still full of talented people. But costs are rising, library acquisition budgets cratering. So the prices of academic books are up, up, and away, as I ruefully observed in a recent stint as book review editor for Political Theory. Hardcovers priced over $100, with no promise of a paperback down the road, are now routine. Copyright fees for excerpts in coursepacks are exorbitant. Production values are often pretty shabby, too. Scant hundreds of copies of your book get printed, and you usually don’t see one until a year or more after you’ve submitted your final manuscript. They’re destined for university libraries and your doting mother; the book may well go out of print before the sluggish journals in your field get around to reviewing it. I once mordantly quipped that university presses might as well take your manuscript, lock it in a chest marked public, and say they’d published it. That’s not right. But I’m afraid it captures something.

Don Herzog, Guest Post: Publishing for Readers | M Publishing, University of Michigan Library (via thepinakes)

[oupacademic]

Quote from Steve Stearns, Editor-in-Chief of our new open access journal Evolution, Medicine and Public Health.

[libraryadvocates]

No one should be excluded from information because of where they live.

Emily Sheketoff, Executive Director of the ALA Washington Office (via libraryadvocates)