Petition in support of a single European Data LicensePaul KellerInternational Communia Association, (06 Feb 2012)"In line with an issue raised in our [Communia's] policy paper on the proposed amendments to PSI Directive there is now a Spanish petition that asks the Europeana Commission to propose a single open data license to be used for Public Sector Information across all EU member states...."Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.petitions oa.licensing oa.new oa.spain oa.europe oa.psi oa.data on Tue Feb 07 2012 at 02:59 UTC | info | related

 Around the Web: Research Works Act & Elsevier boycottConfessions of a Science Librarian, (06 Feb 2012)"This post has superseded my previous post which focused solely on the Research Works Act. I have added some coverage of the Elsevier boycott which at least partially grew out of opposition to the RWA. I'm not attempting to be as comprehensive in coverage for the boycott as for the RWA...."Posted by petersuber to hoap.notice oa.rwa ru.no oa.boycotts oa.petitions oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.new oa.negative oa.usa oa.nih oa.legislation oa.comment on Tue Feb 07 2012 at 02:48 UTC | info | related

 Academics Revolt Against Elsevier’s Journal Pricingm.paidcontent.org"Academics are staging a mini-revolt against science and medical journal publisher Elsevier’s terms, and analysts fear the movement could hit parent Reed Elsevier. Over 4,000 researchers have signed a petition against Elsevier practices including charging libraries for bundles of journals rather than individual titles. They also object to Elsevier’s apparent stance on the U.S. bills SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act, which critics say would restrict access to taxpayer-funded academic research. The protest is currently small in the context of the world’s large researcher community, but is causing Elsevier’s business model to come under the knife. “We think that investors should ask management of Reed Elsevier (NYSE: RUK) how a PR incident of this kind could happen, why crisis management has been so tentative and what other steps management intends to take the handle the protest,” says Bernstein Research European media analyst Claudio Aspesi, in a note titled “Occupy Elsevier”. “Dropping prices, abandoning the subscription model or the bundles would all impact the economics substantially, at least for some years. So the company can only hope that the controversy will die down in time” Aspesi thinks Elsevier’s Anglo-Dutch owner Reed Elsevier, whose Reed Business Information is still shedding titles after Reed failed to sell RBI during the downturn, should be broken up, and is pessimistic about the company. “Our scepticism is based on the expectation that academic libraries will increasingly push back and request lower price increases than in the past, threatening to abandon ‘Big Deal’ contracts if the company does not lower its expectations for revenue growth,” Aspesi writes."Posted by petersuber to oa.rwa ru.do ru.ps oa.boycotts oa.petitions oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.new oa.negative oa.usa oa.nih oa.legislation oa.comment on Tue Feb 07 2012 at 02:43 UTC | info | related

 Elsevier Futures: Exane Paribusgroups.google.comSummary of a financial report on Elsevier by Sami Kassab at Exane Paribus: "Please find our report on Reed Elsevier released this morning. We argue that: [1] Noise around boycott against Elsevier offers short term trading opportunity. Reed Elsevier was the worst performing media stock last week. We believe this is due to investor concerns on the back of T. Gowers' petition to boycott publishing and refereeing in Elsevier's journals. We believe the share price reaction was overdone and recommend buying the shares. [2] Scientists are boycotting the boycott. Similar petitions in favour of Open Access were organised in 2000 and 2007, with no impact on Elsevier's fundamentals. Our tracking not only shows that this latest petition lags behind the two preceding ones but also suggests that its momentum is slowing. Fewer than 5,000 scientists have signed up, whereas Elsevier works with more than 6m scientists worldwide. The low take-up of this petition is a sign of the scientific community's improving perception of Elsevier. [3] Open Access unlikely to hurt financials in the medium term and is priced in. The proportion of Open Access is growing at less than 1% pa. Elsevier's contract lengths are getting longer and the company's growth efforts are focused on new products rather than pricing. Open Access is unlikely to hurt Elsevier in the next five years and the longer term risk is more than priced in, in our view....We remain buyers of the stock on the current share price weakness...."Posted by petersuber to oa.rwa ru.do ru.ps oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.new oa.negative oa.usa oa.nih oa.legislation oa.comment oa.boycotts oa.petitions on Tue Feb 07 2012 at 02:38 UTC | info | related

 A MESSAGE TO THE RESEARCH COMMUNITY: ELSEVIER, ACCESS, AND THE RESEARCH WORKS ACTwww.elsevier.comUnsigned and undated (but c. 2/6/12). "Why then do we support this legislation? We are against unwarranted and potentially harmful government laws that could undermine the sustainability of the peer-review publishing system. The RWA’s purpose is simply to ensure that the US government cannot enshrine in law how journal articles or accepted manuscripts are disseminated without involving publishers. We oppose in principle the notion that governments should be able to dictate the terms by which products of private sector investments are distributed, especially if they are to be distributed for free. And private sector means not just commercial publishers like Elsevier, but also not-for-profit and society publishers...."Posted by petersuber to oa.rwa ru.no oa.elsevier oa.copyright oa.new oa.negative oa.usa oa.nih oa.legislation oa.comment on Tue Feb 07 2012 at 02:28 UTC | info | related

 Arend Küster and Megan Toogood, Open accesswww.jisc-collections.ac.uk"Open access publishing has arrived. There are now more than 7000 titles listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and hundreds of thousands of open access articles deposited with institutions, subject specific repositories and published in journals. But these figures don’t represent a mature industry, the revolution is still underway and there’s much potential still to be realised....The full paper is available on the QScience.com website."Posted by petersuber to oa.ru.no oa.growth oa.new on Tue Feb 07 2012 at 01:59 UTC | info | related

 About FreeFullPDFwww.freefullpdf.com"The aim of FreeFullPDF.com is to increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific journals, theses, posters and patents. All scientific subjects are covered and all content are freely available in PDF format...."Posted by petersuber with 1 comment to ru.do ru.ps oa.formats oa.pdf oa.tools oa.search oa.new on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 20:37 UTC | info | related

 Established journal Evolutionary Applications to publish under open-access modelwww.eurekalert.org"Wiley-Blackwell, the scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., today announced that Evolutionary Applications has joined the Wiley Open Access publishing program. All newly published articles in the journal will be open access and free to view, download and share for non-commercial use. Since its launch in 2008, Evolutionary Applications has attracted very high quality submissions and has attained an Impact Factor of 5.145, as well as winning the 2009 ALPSP award for the best new journal...."Posted by petersuber to ru.do ru.ps oa.conversions oa.wiley oa.gold oa.new oa.journals on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 18:28 UTC | info | related

 Maximizing the visibility of research outputs: COAR call for actionMaxie PutlitzCOAR, (06 Feb 2012)"The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) joins the research community in condemning Elsevier for its recent business practices and lobbying that undermine policies and activities promoting open access to scholarly literature. While many commercial publishers are working to adapt their business models to rising demands for open access, Elsevier has systematically acted to counter progress being made in the scholarly community towards this end. One easy way of achieving open access is through the deposit of articles into online open access repositories. COAR strongly opposes the changes made by Elsevier to its article posting policies. These policies prohibit authors affiliated with institutions or agencies that have open access mandates to deposit copies of their articles into an open access repository unless their institution signs a very restrictive agreement with Elsevier. Despite their public commitment to “universal access”, Elsevier’s policies are greatly limiting access to scholarly literature....COAR is discouraging its members and others from entering into agreements with Elsevier or other publishers that undermine open access mandates and intervene with already established and emerging author practices of article deposit. COAR urges Elsevier to reconsider its prohibitive approach to open access and revise its policies to allow the deposit of research articles with minimum delay....COAR represents over 80 members and partners from 24 countries from throughout Europe, Latin America, Asia, and North America...."Posted by petersuber to ru.do ru.ps oa.coar oa.elsevier oa.repositories oa.mandates oa.green oa.new on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 17:24 UTC | info | related

 The Influence of the National Institutes of Health Public-Access Policy on the Publishing Habits of Principal Investigatorsgroups.google.com"This dissertation investigated the effect of the NIH public-access policy on the NIH-funded principal investigators’ publishing decisions. Four questions were examined: [1] Which factors motivate the NIH-funded PIs to publish in the PLoS open-access journals? [2] How do NIH-funded PIs perceive the NIH public-access policy? [3] How does the NIH public-access policy influence the PIs’ publishing behavior? [4] How does the NIH public-access policy influence the PIs’ decision to publish in open-access journals? ..."Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.dissertation oa.plos oa.mandates oa.green oa.gold oa.new oa.usa oa.nih on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 16:36 UTC | info | related

 Scholarly Open Accessscholarlyoa.comA new blog from Jeffrey Beall devoted to unearthing questionable practices by OA journals and OA publishers.Posted by petersuber and 1 other to ru.no ru.ps oa.blogging oa.gold oa.new oa.journals on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 14:53 UTC | info | related

 Apple Amends iBooks Author EULA, Doesn't Claim to Own Content | News & Opinion | PCMag.commobile.pcmag.com"Someone in Cupertino appears to have noticed the outcry over the user agreement for Apple's iBooks Author software. The company has updated its iBooks End-User License Agreement (EULA) to clarify that Apple is not laying claim to content that's produced using the application...."Posted by petersuber to ru.do ru.ps oa.apple oa.books oa.new on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 14:45 UTC | info | related

 The Parachute: Collaborate, don't frustratetheparachute.blogspot.com"We have seen a fair amount of activity on the web in the last few weeks with regard to protests, even boycotts, aimed at prominent publishers. Most of it seems to be about money. When money is tight, it leads to a fight....So the solution is introducing competition. ‘Gold’ Open Access publishing does just that, albeit perhaps in a fairly primitive way, so far. It’s typically a game of new entrants. But in order to be truly successful, the scientific community at large has to buy in to it. Literally ‘buy’ into it. Publishers can lead the horse to the Open Access water, but they can’t make it drink. I won’t hold my breath. And there is so much else in science publishing, besides money matters, that needs to be improved. Just one example: fragmentation. Fragmentation is a big, frustrating problem. Particularly for the efficient and effective ingestion of information. But it need not be so bad. Although science publishers are bound by antitrust rules, there are areas of a pre-competitive nature where they are allowed to collaborate. Think standards, think CrossRef. Those forms of collaboration, for the benefit of science, could be expanded. Other standards could be introduced, to do with data linking, for instance, with data representation, computer-readability, interoperability. Things like structured abstracts. Perhaps even ontologies and agreed vocabularies for scientific concepts, analogous to biological and chemical nomenclature. User licences could be standardized, pre-competitively. Et cetera....And it is not just in pre-competitive areas where fragmentation could be remedied...."Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.publishers oa.gold oa.new oa.journals oa.comment on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 14:43 UTC | info | related

 The Parachute: Publishers are not eviltheparachute.blogspot.com"Commercial publishers, as a class, are not evil. To think so is wrong. They have just been doing what the scientific community can't or won't do by itself. And like most businesses, they charge what they can get away with. It’s known as ‘the market’....Lesson: if you leave it to outsiders to provide your essential services, because you can’t, or won’t, truly assimilate and embed those outsiders, and provide the services from within your own circles, you risk losing control and you cannot blame the outsiders for taking the opportunities you give them...."Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.publishers oa.debate oa.new oa.comment on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 14:39 UTC | info | related

 2017: RIP, OER?iterating toward openness, (03 Feb 2012)"Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers. To the best of my knowledge there is no one really working on next gen OER – OER that are interactive, simulative, really rich with multimedia AND combined with OAR [Open Assessment Resources] that drive diagnosis, remediation, and adaptation. There’s certainly no one funding next gen OER. And believe me – if it took $100M to get the field to where it currently stands in terms of relatively static openly licensed content, it will take at least that much investment again over the next decade for the field to do something truly next gen...."Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.new oa.negative oa.oer oa.comment on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 14:35 UTC | info | related

The 2012 Medicine 2.0 conference will be held in Boston at Harvard Medical School. 

If you are doing research on any of the following:

• Blogs and Twitter in Health
• Building virtual communities and social networking applications for health professionals
• Building virtual communities and social networking applications for patients and consumers
• Business models in a Web 2.0 environment
• Science 2.0, collaborative biomedical research, academic / scholarly communication, publishing and peer review
• Consumer empowerment, patient-physician relationship, and sociotechnical issues
• Ethical & legal issues, confidentiality and privacy
• Health information on the web: Supply and Demand
• Innovative RSS/XML applications and Mashups
• Personal health records and Patient portals
• Public (e-)health, population health technologies, surveillance
• Digital Disease Detection and Biosurveillance using Twitter and other social media/mhealth/Internet sources
• The Quantified Self: tracking behavior and health
• Search, Collaborative Filtering and Recommender Technologies
• Semantic Web (“Web 3.0″) applications
• Go to website for more topics

You can present in one of six ways:

• Poster Presentation
• Oral Presentation
• Panel Discussion
• Gadget Exhibition & Demos: Tabletop Rental
• Rapid Fire Presentations
• Pitch for Medicine 2.0 Start-up Academy: From idea to company

The cost to attend the meeting is a cheaper than last year, but it would be best to try and get an early bird discount at $250 (first 50 to register get this discount).  Go to Medicine 2.0 Call for Abstracts to get more information on guidelines and other information.

 

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 The Exciting World of Research Information | Library Connectlibraryconnect.elsevier.com"Library Connect brings you a special guest blog post (first posted on the Liblicense listserv) from Elsevier’s Chrysanne Lowe, VP Global Marketing Communications, regarding the recently published website thecostofknowledge.com...."Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.boycotts oa.elsevier oa.new oa.comment on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 14:32 UTC | info | related

 Sunlight Foundation: Bulk Data at the House Legislative Data ConferenceJohn WonderlichSunlight Foundation Transparency Ecosystem, (02 Feb 2012)"Many of us from Sunlight have been at the House's legislative data conference today, as Daniel has noted on the blog. The conference organizers have done a fantastic job -- the day has been like an all day committee hearing, where the House's tech officials are the witnesses, and the public gets to ask the questions. This is exactly the sort of good faith attempt to take responsibility for data policy that we wrote about in 2007 with the Open House Project report. It's extraordinary for the leading providers of third party legislative information systems to sit as peers among the administrators, staff, and politicians responsible for how the House shares it work with the public. If that praise seems effusive, it should be; the House is setting an example for how to work with NGOs on data availability. That's not to say everything we're hearing is good news...."Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.new oa.usa oa.psi oa.data on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 13:30 UTC | info | related

 You are Elsevier: time to overcome our fears and kill subscription journalsMichael Eisenit is NOT junk, (03 Feb 2012)"Having spent a decade fighting the scientific publishing establishment, the last few weeks have been kind of fun. Elsevier, the Dutch publishing conglomerate that has long served as the poster child for all that is wrong with the industry, has come under withering criticism for pushing legislation that would prevent the US government from making the results of taxpayer funded research available to the public. Scores of scientists (myself included) have slammed the hypocrisy of the bill. Prominent publishers, fearing a backlash against Elsevier’s overreach, have come out in favor of government public access policies. Even the editors of The Lancet, one of Elsevier’s prized possessions, called the bill a “damaging threat to science“. But amidst all this richly deserved opprobrium, we must not forget that Elsevier are in a position to behave so poorly because we let them. Publishers control the paywalls that restrict access to the scientific literature. But individual researchers control the fate of their own papers. And the only reason a paywall ever stands between anyone and a paper they want to read is because its authors chose to put it there....The [Gowers-Neylon] boycott isn’t perfect. I wish they hadn’t focused exclusively on Elsevier – they are hardly the only bad actors in the field. And it’s crucial that the focus be on papers. Nobody views turning town invitations to review to be a big sacrifice – and publishers will just find someone else. Same thing with editors. But papers are their lifeblood....We do have a historical precedent. In late 2000 my postdoctoral mentor Pat Brown, frustrated with the refusal of most publishers to participate in the newly launched PubMed Central, began circulating a letter in which scientists pledged to exclusively publish in, review for and serve as editors of journals that placed their contents in PMC with no more than a 6 month delay. The letter quickly received a list of prominent signatures, including many Nobel Prize winners, leading us to go public with a new site to gather public support for building an “online public library of science” (from whence the name PLoS derives). Within a year 30,o00 people had signed the letter. But, when push came to shove, few followed through on their pledge....Nevermind that this widely and deeply held belief – that success in science requires publishing in high impact journals – is incorrect. When push came to shove, most signers of the open letter abandoned this effort to fix a broken system, and continued sending their papers to non-OA, non-PMC journals...."Posted by petersuber to oa.pledges ru.no oa.boycotts oa.petitions oa.elsevier oa.plos oa.new oa.comment on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 02:33 UTC | info | related

 The Tree of Life: Scary and funny: functional researcher Peter Uhnemann on OMICS group Editorial Board #JournalSPAMphylogenomics.blogspot.com"Many out there know there are journals out there that border on SPAM....But this one takes the cake. There is a journal called "Molecular Biology" from the OMICS Publishing Group.... I recommend everyone check out their Editorial Board. In addition to listing Peter Deusberg (the controversial HIV denialist) there is an amazing person on their Board - Peter Uhnemann. He is listed as being from the "Department of Oximology at Daniel-Duesentrieb Institute, Germany". Sounds a bit strange right? Well check out his Bio...It is pretty wacky right? Well it turns out, as some might have guessed - it is made up...."Posted by petersuber to ru.no oa.gold oa.new oa.negative oa.journals oa.comment on Mon Feb 06 2012 at 02:22 UTC | info | related