Mexico's statement to support OA

Just last week, Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto announced via his official webpage the enactment of reforms to several federal law frameworks concerning science, technology and education that will allegedly “insert Mexico into the Information and Knowledge Society”.

The legislation changes, he claimed, would:
• Give access to Mexicans open access to the scientific and academic production that is financed trough public money
. • Allow online deposit of large amounts of “knowledge, research and data” without financial or legal barriers for anyone.
• Lead to the creation of a national Open Access repository in which “quality and socio-cultural interest” of the material could be guaranteed.

 The announcement ended with a tweet by Peña Nieto: “With Open Access to scientific research, we advance to be a case of global success, and therefore, worldwide leaders.” Public opinion on the matter has been quite positive, particularly in a country where science is, at the very best, a matter of marginal public and government interest. 

Lots of background info and thoughts in the article: http://blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/luisreyes/121/

Celebrating open access (quick overview) and links

Do you what openaccess is and why it is important? Openaccess can save time in preparing instructional materials through reducing barriers to sharing educational content and research. Openaccess can provide new collaboration opportunities for faculty and students. Openaccess can provide new educational resources to students and faculty. "Peter Suber characterizes the core concept of open access this way: open access removes "price barriers" (e.g., subscription fees) and "permission barriers" (e.g., copyright and licensing restrictions) to "royalty - free literature" (i.e., scholarly works created for free by authors), making them available with "minimal use restrictions" (e.g., author attribution)". The repository in development at ATC that is funded by the TAACCCT grant is supporting those goals. Read more about Openaccess http://digital-scholarship.org/cwb/WhatIsOA.pdf #openaccess #scholarship #educationresources #Highered

Free access to British publicly funded research

The British government is planning to make all publicly funded research freely accessible by 2014.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/jul/15/free-access-british-scientific-research

"British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay "article processing charges" (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed, edited and made freely available online."

This decision comes as a result of the Finch Report, which you can read here: http://www.researchinfonet.org/publish/finch/

From the Guardian article: "The Finch report strongly recommended so-called "gold" open access, which ensures the financial security of the journal publishers by essentially swapping their revenue from library budgets to science budgets. One alternative favoured by many academics, called "green" open access, allows researchers to make their papers freely available online after they have been accepted by journals."

Institutional Repository Conference (Free!)

The Digital Commons @ Kennesaw State and the Horace W. Sturgis Library are
pleased to announce "Giving Undergraduate Research a Worldwide Voice:
Institutional Repositories as Publishers," a free one-day conference on
institutional repositories and their place in undergraduate education.

Date: Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Location: KSU Continuing Education

The keynote speaker will be Nancy Hensel, Executive Officer for the Council
on Undergraduate Research. This free event includes continental breakfast,
lunch, and a full-day program featuring speakers from around the country
discussing Institutional Repositories and how they can be used to publish and
promote undergraduate research in higher education.

More information, including online registration and a complete program of
events, can be found at: http://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/irday2011/ All
are welcome to attend.

Contact Jon Hansen: jhansen@kennesaw.edu

Public Library of Science Open access publishing

Public library of Science (PLoS) is currently publishing seven peer reviewed scientific and medical journals on the open access model. The Open Access model charges researchers for publication of their accepted papers (in the case of PLos ~1300), but researchers retain copyright and

That means everyone, everywhere can read, redistribute and reuse your research without cost:
colleagues, patients, policy makers, journalists, the next generation of researchers.

Open Library project update

The final report of the Open Library Environment project is available for reading. ♥ this project with its focus on the behind the scenes... because if the behind the scenes (processing system/database/data) doesn't work very well, the public interface is not going to work very well. I am definitely keeping an eye on this project and I hope to be able to contribute in some way in the future.

A few points of interest (amongst many....)

• The project planners chose to define a system that supports libraries as a central player in the research process.
• Libraries need to be able to leverage a dynamic information environment to support the research and educational mission of their institutions.
• Libraries must respond to the dynamic information environment by re-engineering its organization and the workflows carried out by its personnel.
  

I don't know if these statements are Yays or DUHs, because they seem so obvious, yet some do not grasp that simple reality of library catalog software and library information silos such as databases, websites, etc.

And then the key features:

• Flexibility
• Community ownership
• Service Orientation
• Enterprise-Level Integration
• Efficiency
• Sustainability
  

-----------------
Reposting:
The Open Library Environment (OLE) Project has posted a draft of its final report. We are excited to offer this report publicly to the community and welcome your comments. As a community-source project, your input is vital to the future and success of the OLE Project. You can access the report at this address:
http://oleproject.org/final-ole-project-report/

About the Open Library Environment Project:
With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a multinational group of libraries is developing the design for an Open Library Environment (OLE), an alternative to the current model of an Integrated Library System. The goal is to produce a design document to inform open source library system development efforts, to guide future library system
implementations, and to influence current Integrated Library System vendor products.

Gpeer -- Peer Review project via Google Code

... the code license is from MIT not GOOGLE btw....

http://code.google.com/p/gpeerreview/

From the website:

Why?

* Peer reviews give credibility to an author's work.
* Journals and conferences can use this tool to indicate acceptance of a paper.
* Researchers can also give credibility to each other by reviewing each others' works.
* This enables researchers to publish first, and review later.
* It meshes seamlessly with existing publication venues. Even the credibility of works that have already been published can be enhanced by obtaining additional peer reviews.
* A decentralized social-network of reviewers and papers is naturally formed by this process. The structure of this network reflects that of the research

OpenLibrary news

If you've not heard of the openlibrary.org initiative, the idea is "one web page
for every book ever published."

A pretty noble undertaking....
Anyhow, news is that have now have a total of 13.4 million books,
with about 18 million more records to go.
Of course quantity and quality are not the same. ;-D
As for where these records are coming from, they have started
merging library records with other book data (vendor data?)

An API has been created for use by developers at
http://www.openlibrary.org/dev/docs/api
Other news includes some translation services,
and the fulltext searching of 230,000 books.

To visit the openlibrary project,
http://www.openlibrary.org

Open Access Project from UT

ok, this is totally snaked off of a listserv so that I can spend more time with it later:


http://www.lib.utk.edu/newfoundpress/
Newfound Press is a new digital imprint from the University of Tennessee
University Libraries. All its publications will be Open Access. From the site:

Today’s scholarly publishing environment presents a strategic opportunity for
academic libraries to expand their role in the publications process.
Universities are both creators and consumers in the information economy. A
digital library press offers the potential for making scholarly and
specialized resources widely available at a reasonable cost. The University of
Tennessee Libraries is developing a framework to make scholarly and
specialized works available worldwide. Newfound Press, the University
Libraries digital imprint, advances the community of learning by experimenting
with effective and open systems of scholarly communication. Drawing on the
resources that the university has invested in digital library development,
Newfound Press collaborates with authors and researchers to bring new forms of
publication to an expanding scholarly universe. We consider manuscripts in all
disciplines, encompassing scientific research, humanistic scholarship, and
artistic creation.

http://www.lib.utk.edu/newfoundpress/