Research Integrity

The recent controversy over the Boston tapes has raised concerns about the protection of research in third level institutions. Clare Daly put a question to the Minister for Education and Science for his views. She received  a written answer on Tuesday, May 27th, 2014 as follows
"
The position is that the higher education institutions are autonomous bodies
and their day to day operations are matters for the governing bodies of each
institution. However, I understand that universities and institutes of
technology have procedures in place to ensure that research undertaken,
including the treatment of confidential information, is in keeping with
accepted good practice. Indeed, many have dedicated ethics committees to
oversee issues such as this. Furthermore, a policy statement on ensuring
research integrity in Ireland will shortly be launched and articulates the
commitment of higher education institutions to the highest standards of
integrity in carrying out their research. This shared statement of commitment
is intended to ensure full confidence in the Irish research system for
participants, other stakeholders and the international research community."
Article source: http://claredaly.ie/protecting-archives-in-light-of-boston-tapes-controversy/

Tipping Point

A study funded by the European Commission has stated that open access is reaching a "tipping point" with around 50% of scientific papers published in 2011 now available for free. This is about twice the level estimated in previous studies, explained by a refined methodology and a wider definition of open access.  The study also estimates that more than 40% of scientific peer reviewed articles published worldwide between 2004 and 2011 are now available online in open access form. The study looks at the EU and some neighbouring countries as well as Brazil, Canada, Japan and the USA.
The European Commissioner for Research, Innovation and Science, Ms. Maire Geoghegan-Quinn said

"these findings underline that open access is here to stay. Putting research results in the public sphere makes science better and strengthens our knowledge-based economy"

Therefore open access will be mandatory for all scientific publications produced with funding from Horizon 2020, the EU's Research and Innovation Funding Programme for 2014-2020. The Commission has also recommended that Member States take a similar approach to the Commission in their domestic programmes. This means that researchers must make their articles available through an open access repository no later than 6 months (12 months for Social Sciences and Humanities) after publication.

The study was undertaken by Science-Metrix, a research evaluation company who produced three reports looking at Open Access Availability, Open Access Policies and Open Access data. The links to these reports are provided below.
http://www.science-metrix.com/pdf/SM_EC_OA_Availability_2004-2011.pdf
http://www.science-metrix.com/pdf/SM_EC_OA_Policies.pdf
http://www.science-metrix.com/pdf/SM_EC_OA_Data.pdf 

Access the Horizon 2020 website here 

Open Access Publishing

Have you ever looked for a comprehensive explanation of Open Access Publishing and struggled to explain the concept to others? Help is now at hand! Piled High and Deeper (PhD Comics) have produced a short video introduction to the topic which is really good which is available on YouTube and you can access it here

Open Access save lives!

This is an interview with Jack Andraka, a 16 year old American teenager who has made a medical breakthrough in cancer research. He was able to do this only because he found the majority of research articles he needed on open access. Watch the interview here

Welcome Trust Extends Open Access Policy

Wellcome Trust extends open access policy to include scholarly monographs and book chapters. The Wellcome Trust today (30 May, 2013) announces that it is to extend its open access policy to include all scholarly monographs and book chapters written by its grantholders as part of their Trust-funded research. More at

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/Media-office/Press-releases/2013/WTP052746.htm

Research Data the next thing to go Open Access?

 President Obama signed an Executive Order directing his administration to take historic steps to make government-held data more accessible to the public and to entrepreneurs and others as fuel for innovation and economic growth. The Executive Order declares that information is a valuable resource and strategic asset for the nation; Newly generated government data will be required to be made available in open, machine-readable format by default -- enhancing their accessibility and usefulness, and ensuring privacy and security; These executive actions will allow entrepreneurs and companies to take advantage of this information -- fueling economic growth in communities across the Nation. Watch this short video and find out more about today's announcement:

Open Access Survey

The Irish Times survey on Open Access is now live and will remain open until May 12th. This is part of the Special Initiative for Citizen Engagement that Atomium Culture is developing together with Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, El Pais, Il Sole 24 Ore, Der Standard and the Irish Times. Here's the link to the Irish Times introductory article on Open Access:

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/have-your-say-about-science-1.1386441

This is the link to the survey itself: http://haveyoursay.eisri-summit.eu/index.php/496499/lang-en

This is the third "Have your say about science' survey to run in April/May by national newspapers in 5 pilot countries.

Taylor and Francis Survey discovers an Open Access Dichotomy among Authors.
This was a survey carried out by the publishers Taylor & Francis among researchers to ascertain opinions about open access publishing.
Authors agree that publication should not be down to the  ability to pay  (85% of authors surveyed) and all research outputs should be free to read online (66% of authors surveyed). 77% of respondents agreed publishers were an essential part of the research communication process and contribute to the dissemination of research but it was noted that "without researchers their value is substantially reduced"
Full details and the questionnaire can be found here

Elsevier buys Mendeley!

It was confirmed today that Elsevier has bought Mendeley for a sum of money somewhere between $69 and $100 million. Mendeley is a platform for academics and organisations to share research and collaborate with each other via a social network.  It has been in operation since 2008.
Given that all the Mendeley staff are moving over to Elsevier this may signal their intention to become more involved in the world of open and social educational data!

Interesting times in the United Kingdom!

Some time ago the Research Council of the United Kingdom choose to select Gold Open Access. This means that the Funders pay the publishers for open access rights for scholarly publications. The alternative is Green Open Access where the author deposits a draft of his/her article in the institutional repository thus incurring no costs whatsover.

 A report published today by the House of Lords Science and Technical Committee recommends determining whether other countries are mandating Gold or Green OA. The National Principles on Open Access published before Christmas clearly show that Ireland has opted for Green Open Access and not just because we cannot afford Gold but because it is the right thing to do!

The House of Lords report has criticised the RCUK policy stating "There are still many unknowns concering the impact of the open access policy, which is why the RCUK must commit to a wide ranging review of its policy in 2014, 2016 and before it expects full compliance in 2018". Further on the report states "Open Access is an inexorable trend. The Government must ensure that in further developing our capabilities to share research they do no inadvertently damage the "complex ecosystem" of research communication in the U.K."
Lets hope they see the "Green Light" as our government has done already!

A new kind of journal was launched in December, 2012. eLife is an open access funder sponsored journal. Their mission statement says "We are a joint initiative of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society, and the Wellcome Trust. Along with a growing number of public and private research funders worldwide, these three organisations recognise that the communication of research results is as fundamental a component of the research process as the experiments themselves. Disseminating new findings as widely and effectively as possible maximises the value of research investments. The first step in the initiative is to establish a new, open-access venue for the most important advances — from basic biological research through to applied, translational and clinical studies.". This is a recognition by these powerful bodies that open access publishing increases the speed of scholarly communication,the advancement of knowledge and assists impact. Is this the start of a new trend in publishing?

National Principles for Open Access

The Irish Government has adopted the National Principles on Open Access which will come into effect in January, 2013. This means that all publicly funded research must be made available on open access. Obviously, this can only be when to do so is not a breach of the publisher's policy but the adoption of the Principles is a great stride forward for the Open Access movement in Ireland. Read National Principles for Open Access Policy

Springer for Sale!

Rumours abound that the Springer Publishing Company is up for sale. Springer publishes approx 6,500 new titles every year and owns 60 publishing houses in 20 countries in Europe, Asia and North America. This will pose an interesting dilemma for the new owners as Springer has always promoted Gold Open Access where the researcher pays for the rights to make their work freely available. This has been opposed by librarians and many others who have always supported Green Open Access where the author retains the right to publish his final draft version on an Open Access Repository. Were the new owners to have a different policy, what happens to the money researchers have already paid over to Springer for OA rights? Interesting times ahead!

Increase the number of downloads

A useful article to read is " Can LindedIn and Academic.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories" which describes how liking your publications in such services appears to increase the number of downloads. Downloads are not necessarily an indicator of quality but they are an indication that papers are being circulated and thereby contribute to impact.

US Research Works Act abandoned

This Act would have outlawed Open Access Mandates but was quietly dropped recently. This was because Elsevier withdrew it's support for the Act because 8,500 academics had pledged to boycott the publisher if it persevered in this course of action. Self interest supports dissemination of information. Hurrah!

F1000 Research

F1000 Research is an open access journal that may radically change scholarly communication. The journal will rely on post-publication peer review. This is the latest initiative of the Faculty of 1000 where senior scientists select and evaluate top published papers in biomedicine.
The new journal will also publish the data behind the research such as incomplete data sets, negative results and "thought experiments" which normally never find a home in the journal literature.
Any submission that passes a basic "sanity check" will be published and then specific experts will be invited to post a review. Other readers can also add their comments. The journal will be funded by article fees presumably using the pay per view model. There are lots of operational questions still to be answered but the journal hopes to formally launched later in 2012.

Open Access Portal

The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) which presents a snapshot of the status of open access to scientific information was launched at a special event of the 36th. Session of the Unesco General Conference. The portal has country reports from more than 148 countries with links to more than 2,000 initiatives and projects (www.unesco.org/ci/goap) Read the Irish Report

Elsevier Responds

In an Open Letter to the Research Community Elsevier has responded to criticisms from the scholarly community. Standing firm on value for money and the fact that they facilitate some open access they do appear to be worried about the strength of the criticism. As a librarian I would not agree that bundles are good value for money, libraries are forced to take titles they don't want and don't use and for many years journal prices just rose and rose for no apparent reason. The real fact of the matter is that libraries, even in the USA, can no longer afford these prices and new models need to be found in a hurry! Another fact to remember is the whole objective of academic publishing is to circulate research in order to obtain feedback and for scholarship to grow...it may well be the case that the journal publishing model is too slow and cumbersome for the 21st.Century.

Scholars Fight Back!

There is a growing protest by academics against Elsevier the world largest scientific journal publisher. It all started with a rant on a blog post at the end of January. The post was by Timonth Gowers, a prominent mathematician at Cambridge University. He suggested it would be a good idea to have a website where mathematicians who had decided not to contribute to Elsevier journals could electronically sign their names. It had about 1800 signatures by the end of January. The website is called Cost of Knowledge
The protest is about the prices Elsevier charge for their jounals and the fact that Elsevier has supported the proposed Research Works Act in the US which would effectively lock down access to academic writing and end the Open Access Movement.
Librarians have complained for years about the high prices that journal publishers charge but now the suppliers of the material are fighting back! Academics write the articles, review them all free of charge and then have to buy back their own material and now some of them are saying enough.
Roll on Open Access and the victory of the right of everyone to access knowledge!
There is a good article on this subject in the Chronicle of Higher Education January, 31, 2012 where Elsevier puts its case

Academia as X Factor

There is an interesting snippet in the Times Higher Education of November, 2011 by John Elmes. He is reporting on an experiment carried out by Melissa Terras from University College London where she uploads one paper a week to her institutional repository and then tweets and blogs about it (Melissa Terras Blog). She writes "prior to me blogging and tweeting about the paper it got downloaded twice (not by me). The day I tweeted and blogged, it immediately got 140 downloads. This was on a Friday: on the Saturday and Sunday it got downloaded but by fewer people - on Monday it was retweeted and it got a further 140 downloads. I have no idea what happened on 24 October (Monday) - someone must have linked to it? Posted it on a blog? Then there were a further 80 downloads and then it went quiet". She says this can lead to your statistics becoming an obsession and it also may be the drift towards "academia as X-Factor". Whatever the pros and cons it does show the impact of the use of social media.