Scholarly Authority in a Wikified Worldwww.historians.org"Like most scholars, I was skeptical about Wikipedia when Jimmy Wales first launched the site back in 2001... My initial skepticism is now proof of how little I understood what Jimmy Wales grasped far better than I. Wikipedia exploded from an initial 20,000 articles in 18 languages during its first year to more than 19 million articles in 270 languages (3.8 million of them in English alone) written or edited by 82,000 active contributors. Whatever reservations one might still have about its overall quality, I don't believe there's much doubt that Wikipedia is the largest, most comprehensive, copiously detailed, stunningly useful encyclopedia in all of human history... Wikipedia is today the gateway through which millions of people now seek access to knowledge... Whatever the reference tools we consulted—dictionaries, almanacs, encyclopedias, books of quotations, finding aids, bibliographies—we did so because their contents had been carefully scrutinized by professionals with appropriate scholarly training. No longer. Wikipedia and its kin have changed all that, and those of us who inhabit the world of scholarship need to ponder the ongoing role of professional authority when traditional disciplines can no longer maintain the kind of intellectual monopolies that their members once took for granted... Perhaps most importantly, Wikipedia provides an online home for people interested in histories long marginalized by the traditional academy. The old boundary between antiquarianism and professional history collapses in an online universe where people who love a particular subject can compile and share endless historical resources for its study in ways never possible before... What is to be done? If you can't beat 'em, join 'em... "Posted by abernard to oa.history oa.wikipedia oa.new oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 21:05 UTC | info | related

 Occupy Science? | The Scientistdalepd | Dale Dougherty, (30 Jan 2012)“Genomics research increasingly depends on access to large pools of individuals’ genetic and health data, but there is mounting dissatisfaction with governance approaches that erect barriers between donors and the biomedical research in which they are participating. Typically, participants have little or no opportunity to track how their data are being used, what discoveries result, and what the new knowledge might mean for them, even when findings are of life and death significance for the participant. Some frustrated communities have built their own scientific enterprises outside of traditional research settings.  Disease advocacy organizations have established biobanks, for example, and firms like 23andMe and PatientsLikeMe have used crowdsourcing methods to build up repositories of genomic and health data, each attracting over 100,000 participants in just a few years. Often labeled “citizen science,” these projects offer a two-way connection between participants and research—participants contribute their data, while seeing how it is used in research, what findings it generates, and how that new knowledge might impact their own lives... Such citizen science efforts have also begun to achieve something that is crucial to the future of personalized, or “precision,” medicine.  A cornerstone of such medicine, according to a 2011 National Research Council (NRC) report, is a dense “knowledge network” (i.e., biobank), built by “mining” genomic, phenotypic, health, behavioral, and environmental data from many people... Yet, few will submit to being “mined” in this way.  The NRC report notes that to realize such a vision, there must be a “gradual elimination of institutional, cultural, and regulatory barriers to widespread sharing of the molecular profiles and health histories of individuals.” But this emphasis on overcoming barriers neglects that such a knowledge network is necessarily also a social network, a network that connects people, whether they are the people who experience disease or the people who study it..”Posted by abernard to oa.crowd oa.new oa.medicine oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 20:55 UTC | info | related

 UAHuntsville business faculty investigate research ethics; Results are published in Science magazinewww.eurekalert.org"Two UAHuntsville faculty members from the College of Business were published today in the prestigious journal Science for their investigation of an important issue in research ethics. Dr. Allen W. Wilhite, and Dr. Eric A. Fong co-authored a paper on the unethical practices of some journal publications, articulating results from their research to show that some editors coerce authors into adding unnecessary citations to articles in the same journal that is considering publishing the submitted work. Journal editors want to increase the number of times articles within their journals are cited by researchers – because it raises the journal ranking and is used to make claims of prestige and importance. "When we first learned about coercion we were stunned, but after asking around we found that several people were aware of this behavior." said Dr. Wilhite, "At that point we decided to look into the extent and consequences of the practice." The duo analyzed 6,672 responses from a survey that was sent to researchers in the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, and business. According to their research, Wilhite and Fong determined that many journal editors engage in the practice of coercion, requiring authors to add citations to the journal that is considering publishing the work. They require additional citation of articles in the journal that will publish the work - without (1) indicating that the article was actually deficient in attribution, 2) suggesting particular articles, authors, or bodies of work, or 3) guiding authors to add citations from the other journals. Furthermore, the work of Wilhite and Fong indicates that many journal editors appear to even strategically target certain authors, such as assistant and associate professors, rather than full professors, relying on the fact that lower ranking authors may be more willing to add the unnecessary citations. They also found that while the majority of authors disapprove of the practice, most acquiesce and add citations when coerced...."Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.jif oa.surveys oa.citations oa.impact oa.new oa.negative on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 20:53 UTC | info | related

 LAPSI 2nd Annual Conference: Bruxelles - 23rd and 24th January 2012 | LAPSIwww.lapsi-project.euThe European Thematic Network on Legal Aspects of Public Sector Information (LAPSI)-- a European Commission-funded project on PSI-- recently held their second annual conference on January 23rd and 24th, 2012 and provides links to their program (Here you can check the program of LAPSI), member and guest list (Here you can download the list of LAPSI members & LAPSI guests), presentations (please see the Website to download individual presentations), and the 3rd LAPSI award for the most user friendly design of a public sector information portal in the European Union... “The 3rd LAPSI Award concerned the most user-friendly design of a Public Sector Information portal in the European Union... Datos.gob.es is the winner...”Posted by abernard to oa.conferneces oa.tools oa.presentations oa.awards oa.new oa.europe oa.psi on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 20:52 UTC | info | related

 JISC to fund development of TEXTUS projectSam LeonOpen Knowledge Foundation Blog, (03 Feb 2012)“We’re delighted to announce that JISC will be funding the initial development of the TEXTUS platform as part of its Digital Infrastructure Programme. TEXTUS will be a lightweight, easy-to-use platform that will enable users to read, share and collaborate around public domain texts. It will use tools already developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation such as the Annotator and build on the OKFN humanities projects such as Open Shakespeare. Goldsmiths University will lead the project... The six-month JISC funded project will focus on developing a first instance of TEXTUS to be deployed as Open Philosophy on openphilosophy.org. ... There is a dedicated Open Philosophy mailing list that will focus on discussions about the content to be made available on openphilosophy.org which you can sign up to here...”Posted by abernard to oa.okf oa.tools oa.funding oa.jisc oa.philosophy oa.new oa.pd oa.uk oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 20:50 UTC | info | related

 Data Sharing Effect on Article Citation Rate in Paleoceanographywww.komfor.netAbstract: The validation of scientific results requires reproducible methods and data. Often, however, data sets supporting research articles are not openly accessible and interlinked. This analysis tests whether open sharing and linking of supporting data through the PANGAEA® data library measurably increases the citation rate of articles published between 1993 and 2010 in the journal Paleoceanography as reported in the Thomson Reuters Web of Science database. The 12.85% (171) of articles with publicly available supporting data sets received 19.94% (8,056) of the aggregate citations (40,409). Publicly available data were thus significantly (p=0.007, 95% confidence interval) associated with about 35% more citations per article than the average of all articles sampled over the 18-year study period (1,331), and the increase is fairly consistent over time (14 of 18 years). This relationship between openly available, curated data and increased citation rate may incentivize researchers to share their data.Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.advantage oa.marine oa.citations oa.impact oa.new oa.data on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 20:49 UTC | info | related

 BioMed Central Blog : Citing and linking data to publications: more journals, more examples...more impact?blogs.openaccesscentral.com"Since BioMed Central introduced additional data sharing resources for authors and editors last year, there have been a number of further developments in the field that have necessitated an update to our supporting data information. Eight further journals, including Retrovirology, Cell & Bioscience, and Frontiers in Zoology have introduced the ‘Availability of supporting data’ section to either encourage or require all authors to consistently link their supporting data to their publication, or clearly indicate supporting data are included within the article and its additional files....It’s particularly pertinent to see links to PANGAEA from BMC Research Notes, having just returned from the EuroMarine workshop on Scientific Data Integration in Bremen, which focused on linking scientific data to journal publications. At the workshop session chair Dr. Michael Diepenbroek, who heads-up PANGAEA's systems development, alerted attendees, which included publishers, editors, researchers and software developers, to a new study of the impact of sharing data underlying publications. The study – an abstract presented at the American Geophysical Union 2011 meeting – reported a 35% increase in citations to articles published in the journal Paleoceanography, when supporting data were freely available. Of 1,331 articles sampled over the 18-year study period, the 171 articles with publicly-available data received nearly 20% (8,056) of the aggregate citations. Similarly, a study deposited in the ArXiv pre-print repository in November 2011 and distributed on Connotea also found citation rates in the astronomy field were higher for articles with links to supporting data...."Posted by petersuber to oa.data.citation ru.do ru.ps oa.integration oa.advantage oa.citations oa.impact oa.bmc oa.new oa.data on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 20:47 UTC | info | related

 Researchers feel pressure to cite superfluous papers : Nature News & Commentwww.nature.com"One in five academics in a variety of social science and business fields say they have been asked to pad their papers with superfluous references in order to get published. The figures, from a survey published today in Science1, also suggest that journal editors strategically target junior faculty, who in turn were more willing to acquiesce. The controversial practice is not new: those studying publication ethics have for many years noted that some editors encourage extra references in order to boost a journal's impact factor... But the survey is the first to try to quantify what it calls 'coercive citation', and shows that this is “uncomfortably common,” according to authors Allen Wilhite, an economist, and Eric Fong, who researches management, both at the University of Alabama in Huntsville... Wilhite and Fong asked more than 54,000 academics in the social-science and business disciplines whether they had heard of the practice, and whether in the past five years they had been pressured to add more citations to their papers for reasons not based on content. Of the 6,672 respondents, only 40% said they were aware of the practice. But half of those — 20% of the total — said that they had experienced it directly. Assistant professors were 5.5 percentage points more likely to be coerced than higher-ranking professors, and marketing, finance and information systems were the worst-offending disciplines... Excessive self-citation can inflate the impact factor of a journal, so three years ago, Thomson Reuters started publishing impact factors with and without self-citations. McVeigh says that the company sees ‘a fairly constant dribble’ of journals that have inflated their impact factors with self-citations. If doing so significantly affects the journal’s impact-factor ranking, the company removes it from the lists for two years (after which self-citations usually drop considerably). Last year, 33 journals out of around 10,000 received this treatment. McVeigh’s figures suggest that social-science journals tend to have more self-citations than basic-science journals (see 'Self-citations in research journals')...”Posted by abernard to oa.jif oa.impact oa.survey oa.new oa.journals oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 20:47 UTC | info | related

 Times Higher Education - THE Scholarly Webwww.timeshighereducation.co.uk"Professor Bishop is not alone in her frustration at the difficulty of getting published. "The very essence of the scientific process is to challenge paradigms and share the experimental details with other scientists who can then reproduce or refute the findings," writes Pamela Ronald, professor of plant pathology at the University of California, Davis, on The Tree of Life blog. "Publication is key for this process. We needed to publish." With this in mind, Professor Ronald notes the utility of submitting her paper to open-access resources before offering it to traditional journals...."Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.gold oa.new oa.journals on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 19:47 UTC | info | related

 Free research needs the free circulation of ideas: On the current development of Open Access at the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)www.fwf.ac.atA report on the OA activity of the FWF (Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung, or Fund to Promote Scientific Research) in 2011. "In the 2011, the FWF has spent € 2.1 Mio for all kind of publication costs (subsidies for book publications, page charges, submission fees, colour pictures and for Open Access publishing). That is about 1% of the FWF’s budget. Two-third of this cost was spent for Open Access publishing...."Posted by petersuber to oa.reports ru.do ru.ps oa.fwf oa.austria oa.funders oa.funding oa.mandates oa.green oa.gold oa.new on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 18:46 UTC | info | related

 Mysteries of the Elsevier BoycottRick AndersonThe Scholarly Kitchen, (02 Feb 2012)"A couple of thoughts occurred to me upon learning about this. The first was along the lines of, “Well, at least this has the potential to get Elsevier’s attention.” Unlike subscribers, authors actually have monopoly control over something that Elsevier wants. If a library or individual chooses not to buy an Elsevier product, Elsevier can always look for subscribers elsewhere, and the money will be equally valuable no matter where it comes from. The same is not true of a research article; just as the journal publisher has monopoly control over an article to which it has secured the copyright, so the author of an article has monopoly control over that article until he assigns it to a publisher. My second thought, however, was, “Wait a minute. Why is Elsevier the specific target of this boycott?” ..."Posted by petersuber to oa.pledges ru.no oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.new oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 16:58 UTC | info | related

 Boykottiert Elsevier! Unterstützt Open Access! | Detrituswww.scilogs.dePosted by petersuber to oa.pledges ru.no oa.boycotts oa.petitions oa.elsevier oa.new oa.german oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 16:56 UTC | info | related

 Tiptoeing Toward the Tipping Point | Peer to Peer ReviewBarbara FisterLibrary Journal, (02 Feb 2012)"The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has done academic librarians a huge favor. When it publicly got behind the Research Works Act, it accomplished something librarians have been trying to do for decades. It turned a lot of scholars into open access activists....we have suddenly taken a nice hop, if not a great leap, forward. Whoever wrote the AAP statement supporting the bill deserves a few valentines from us, because it managed to push buttons we [librarians] had so far been unable to reach....Perhaps scholars were jarred by the association’s indignation about the “unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles.” Hold on a minute. Isn’t that what journal articles are for, to disseminate ideas? How can it be unauthorized if the granting agency expects it? And what’s wrong with free? It’s not like researchers actually pay for the articles they use. But it’s the rest of that sentence that is real genius. The AAP lays claim to “producing” the research they publish. Whoa, stand back. Things could get a little ugly...."Posted by petersuber to oa.rwa oa.pledges ru.no oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.advocacy oa.librarians oa.copyright oa.new oa.negative oa.usa oa.nih oa.legislation oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 16:55 UTC | info | related

 Musings on the Research Works Act, Open Access pledges and WikimediaDaniel MietchenWikimedian in Residence, (02 Feb 2012)“Over on Foundation-l[mailing list for Wikimedia], an interesting thread has been developing today on the Research Works Act, Open Access pledges and any potential role therein for Wikimedia. I just posted some thoughts on the matter, quoted in full below...”Posted by abernard to oa.rwa oa.pledges oa.boycotts oa.reuse oa.wikimedia oa.business_models oa.tools oa.advocacy oa.repositories oa.licensing oa.hybrid oa.cc oa.green oa.gold oa.new oa.journals oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 16:06 UTC | info | related

 Tim Gowers's Proposed Boycott on Elsevier Only Makes Sense If It is Extended To All Subscription, Non-Free, Journals, Including those of the so-called "Non-Profit" American Mathematical Society (That is (at least) As Greedy As Private Publishers)www.math.rutgers.edu“I have always admired Tim Gowers for his great depth, breadth, and initiative, and for sharing his usually great insights in his rightfully celebrated blog. In a recent post, Tim Gowers is proposing a boycott against the commercial publisher Elsevier. I agree that Elsevier should be boycotted, but it would be really hypocritical to only boycott Elsevier... So, Tim, I will gladly join you in the boycott, if you would join me in my already unofficial boycott against all subscription journals (both electronic and print). All my single-authored papers only go to my own free electronic Journal as well as to the most important "journal" that exists today, arxiv.org... For obvious reasons, papers co-authored with collaborators who are not yet tenured, or fully promoted, still have to be submitted to ‘real’, ‘peer’-reviewed journals, that charge an arm and a leg. For example, the very mediocre ‘Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society’ charges $758.40 per ONE volume (see this page) from individuals who are not affiliated with an institution. I don't know how much an individual subscription (for non-affiliated people) to MathSciNet costs, but I am sure that it is a good amount... And beware of ‘non-profit’ official societies. They are just as greedy as commercial publishers, often more so. The Joint Mathematical Meetings have exponentially grown in recent years, but the quality of the invited talks (and attendance in these talks) has also declined exponentially. It seems that the American Mathematical Society (and to a lesser extent AMM and SIAM) only cares about the ‘bottom line...’”Posted by abernard to oa.elesievier oa.boycotts oa.business_models oa.societies oa.advocacy oa.costs oa.repositories oa.green oa.gold oa.new oa.journals oa comment publishers on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 16:04 UTC | info | related

 An arXiv for all of science? F1000 launches new immediate publication journalRetraction Watch, (30 Jan 2012)“Late last year, we published an invited commentary in Nature calling for science to more formally embrace post-publication peer review, and stop fetishizing the published paper. One of the models we cited was Faculty of 1000 (F1000), ‘in which experts flag important papers in their field.’ So it’s not surprising that F1000 is announcing today that they’re launching a new journal, F1000 Research, intended to address three major issues afflicting scientific publishing today: timely dissemination of research, peer review and sharing of data... It no longer makes sense to wait months or years to read, comment, or build upon another lab’s work, and similarly to hold back your own data and insights until the archival version is released, without the benefit of wider peer feedback. I asked F1000′s Rebecca Lawrence...the new journal’s approach meshed with the ideas we — and others — have proposed for post-publication peer review: What we are planning to do fits well with that general idea – i.e. inclusion of all comments, referee reports, author responses, corrections, updates etc, as well as trying to pull together metrics and relevant discussion around the paper that is hosted elsewhere e.g. blogs, tweets etc. The idea is that the paper never finishes refereeing...”Posted by abernard to oa.interviews oa.postprints oa.grey oa.metrics oa.versions oa.open_science oa.preprints oa.repositories oa.publishing oa.peer_review oa.green oa.gold oa.new oa.journals oa.data oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 16:01 UTC | info | related

 A Vision for the Future of Scholarly Publishingi'm a chordata! urochordata!, (31 Jan 2012)“In many ways, the Research Works Act has been a blessing (see excellent link round up here). It has taken the moderately complacent but always grousing scientific community and whipped our feelings about the current state and cost of scientific publishing into a white hot fury... And I think we’re all coming to the conclusion that a PLoS-like model is a great way to go. Science must end up in an open access repository at the end of the day... So I’ve been dreaming. A vision of the future of scientific publishing. What if arXiv, reedit, PLoS, pubcreds, slashdot’s commenting system, figshare, Data One, and Web 2.0 had a baby? This lead to an idea – a concept – a proposal. So, here’s my vision of the future. It’s not the only vision, and there is substantial room for discussion, but, it’s a start… Consider this a SciFi musing on scholarly publishing. I sit down with my morning cup of coffee and log into SciX. I am presented with several options on the main screen: [1] Read Papers [2] Submit a Paper [3] Revise a Paper [4] Review the Reviewers... So, what happens when I click on each of those? Let’s follow each one, one by one...”Posted by abernard to oa.rwa oa.advocacy oa.repositories oa.publishers oa.peer_review oa.copyright oa.green oa.gold oa.new oa.negative oa.usa oa.nih oa.journals oa.legislation oa.data oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 16:00 UTC | info | related

 A Crowdfunded Approach To Setting E-Books Free | paidContentpaidcontent.org“What do To Kill A Mockingbird, A Wrinkle in Time and Little House on the Prairie series have in common, besides being beloved? None of them are available legally as e-books... The newly launched Unglue.it, now in alpha, is a place for individuals and institutions to join together to liberate specific e-books and other types of digital content... Here’s how the site will work when it is fully up and running: A book’s digital rights holder sets the price for which he or she is willing to make a book as a Creative Commons, DRM-free e-book... Then Unglue.it begins a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding campaign to raise money to set the book ‘free.’ Users make pledges that are pre-authorized using PayPal. Once the money is raised—the practical limit of a campaign is about six months, says Hellman—the book is released and Unglue.it takes a commission. The company behind the site is called Gluejar. It is led by Eric Hellman, who writes about the intersection of technology, libraries and e-books and previously worked at the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)...”Posted by abernard to oa.crowd oa.business_models oa.funding oa.publishers oa.drm oa.libraries oa.books oa.licensing oa.copyright oa.cc oa.new oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 15:56 UTC | info | related

 Why publishers should give away ebooksRough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog, (30 Jan 2012)“I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don't anymore... But the decisive factor in the transformation of my purchasing behavior, as a marketer would say, wasn't aesthetic. It was the decision by record companies to start giving away a free digital copy of an album when you buy the vinyl version... Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand... publishers have three big imperatives today: (1) protect print sales for as long as possible (in order to fund a longer-term transition to a workable new business model); (2) help keep physical bookstores in business (for the reasons set out in this article by Julie Bosman); and (3) do anything possible to curb the power of Amazon.com, the publishers' arch-frenemy... First, you give people an added incentive to buy a print book... Second, you do something that helps physical bookstores in their own end-of-days battle with Amazon... Third, by offering the ebooks in a standard, non-proprietary format (ePub, say), you make the Kindle, which doesn't handle the ePub format, considerably less attractive...”Posted by abernard to oa.business_models oa.tools oa.publishers oa.books oa.new oa.comment on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 14:58 UTC | info | related

 NISO and NFAIS Issue Draft for Public Comment of Recommended Practice on Supplemental Materials for Journal Articles - National Information Standards Organizationwww.niso.org"The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and the National Federation for Advanced Information Services (NFAIS) have issued a new Recommended Practice on Online Supplemental Journal Article Materials, Part A: Business Policies and Practices (NISO RP-15-201x) for public comment ending on February 29, 2012. Although supplemental materials are increasingly being added to journal articles, there is no recognized set of practices to guide in the selection, delivery, discovery, or preservation of these materials. To address this gap, NISO and NFAIS jointly sponsored a working group to establish best practices that would provide guidance to publishers and authors for management of supplemental materials and would solve related problems for librarians, abstracting and indexing services, and repository administrators. The Supplemental Materials project has two groups working in tandem: one to address business practices and one to focus on technical issues. The draft currently available for comment includes the recommendations from the Business Working Group...."Posted by petersuber to oa.nfais oa.consultations ru.no oa.niso oa.recommendations oa.business_models oa.new oa.journals oa.data on Fri Feb 03 2012 at 03:25 UTC | info | related