Ach, du Lieberman

FRPAA, public access mandate, re-introduced in U.S. Senate

Senator John Cornyn, Sens. Cornyn & Lieberman Team Up To Increase Public Access To Taxpayer Funded Research, press release, June 25, 2009.

See also: http://www.openoasis.org/

Peter Suber at Berkman:

All copyright reform in the past few decades have been in the wrong direction.. . .

Librarians are among the most important allies in the OA movement. But put all the allies together and you still don’t have OSF. Libraries should be sending letters against the Conyers bill. When you negotiate subscriptions you should negotiate the right to pur articles from your authors into an OA repository. Libraries are the only buyers of peer-reviewed journals. When you’re the only buyer, you can dictate your terms, subject to anti-trust. Obama says that we have the right to demand transformation from the banks we’re saving. Librarians can do the same thing for journals. Journals are not serving all of our interests and are acting against other interests.

via JOHO. Thanks Frank.

no shit, shyballs

Findings – JSTOR usage has expanded exponentially.
...
Google indexing has had the further impact of exposing the content to a very much broader audience, creating a new set of opportunities and challenges for the organization.

Article Information:

Title: JSTOR and the changing digital landscape

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Price payable: GBP £13.00
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Opener JSTOR in Bangor

JSTOR Access

After previously only be available to library card holders from within the Bangor Public Library, access to JSTOR is now available to card holders off-site.

Bravo Bangor! If JSTOR won't see reason, free the public, one hamlet at a time.

Also noted: recent discussion on Language Hat.

Update: Maine Public Library Card Application - via Mark Wood.

what is the vertiginous chapati saying to me?

Free JSTOR

HooHa

Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences adopted a policy this evening that requires faculty members to allow the university to make their scholarly articles available free online. Chron of High Ed

On the Hahvahd initiative to incentivize faculty to publish in a more open accessible way:

Robert Darnton, director of the university library: "it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn.”

Civilities:

Let's hope that a fraction of the bloggers who were up in arms over the Times 2-year "paywall" show the same amount of passion for this development....But anybody who's spent anytime thinking about the future of ideas (bloggers, and others) ought to realize that making information "open" is merely the first step.

Civilities cites Andrew Odlyzko's essay: "Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals":

"Once a preprint was accepted, it would be available to anyone."

Peter Suber has several pertinent comments

See also: Harvard votes to free its research

David Weinberger:

If we were today building a system for evaluating scholarly research and for making it maximally available, we would not build anything like the current paper-based system. Well, we are building such a system. The Harvard proposal will, in my opinion, help.

Boy Bedlam Blog:

If successful, the vote would be a monumental step, and I am of two minds regarding it. On the negative side — and I say this as an editor and a publisher — this is a further nail in the coffin of those who engage in discriminatory, critical selection: the editor as judge of critical thought and its transmission. The Harvard University seal would constitute the totality of validity for a work of scholarship: and that’s a fallacy. On the positive side, it is a continual sin that the un-institutionalized seeker of knowledge is financially barred from acquiring the latest, most advanced research: you need a university pass, after all, to access JSTOR, or else pay a very high entry fee for a service you would use relatively rarely.

The Times, ventriloquizing "The Publishing Industry:"

Such a development would in turn damage the quality of research, they argue, by allowing articles that have not gone through a rigorous process of peer review to be broadcast on the Internet as easily as a video clip of Britney Spears’s latest hairdo.

Oh ho, those quiffy longhairs!

A commenter asks:

When will Harvard and other universities do the same for the TEACHING ACADEMICS? If the researchers must make their research papers open acccess, then it would be nice to see all of the professors who write books when they are paid by the univesity also make their books, lectue notes open access (dowloadable pdfs). What is good for the research faculty, is good for the teaching faculty!!

Great for the unwashed

very young infants are sensitive to small changes in number, and the brain organization that underlies the perception of object number and identity are established early during development.

The nice thing here is that this bit of news can now be accessed by the great unwashed, which number includes yours truly. I really must get around to washing one of these days.

The great news about this news is that this and much more of lively interest to the not incurious (incuriosity being the USian norm, almost the mandate, nay, the very bottom line of citizenly obligation in this great Nation under Bush) is available for free at Science Daily.

So for example a story that offers this about quantum drums:

Just as in the normal world, two nanostructures with different shapes can resonate in the same way, a phenomenon known as isospectrality.

was published in Science Daily on Feb. 9, citing a Feb. 8 story in Science.

For years, Science has sent teasers that pointed to inaccessible-without-paid-subscription stories.

Goodbye Science.

danah boyd to Grub St. of Academe: "Wake up or get out"

open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals

must-read - thanks to the Head Lemur, Alan Herrell, for the pointer.

Telling chickenshit artificial scarcification monopoles what to do with it

Cape Town Open Education Declaration:

Unlocking the promise of open educational resources

We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

This emerging open education movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet. It is built on the belief that everyone should have the freedom to use, customize, improve and redistribute educational resources without constraint. Educators, learners and others who share this belief are gathering together as part of a worldwide effort to make education both more accessible and more effective.

The expanding global collection of open educational resources has created fertile ground for this effort. These resources include openly licensed course materials, lesson plans, textbooks, games, software and other materials that support teaching and learning. They contribute to making education more accessible, especially where money for learning materials is scarce. They also nourish the kind of participatory culture of learning, creating, sharing and cooperation that rapidly changing knowledge societies need.

However, open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning. Understanding and embracing innovations like these is critical to the long term vision of this movement.

There are many barriers to realizing this vision. Most educators remain unaware of the growing pool of open educational resources. Many governments and educational institutions are either unaware or unconvinced of the benefits of open education. Differences among licensing schemes for open resources create confusion and incompatibility. And, of course, the majority of the world does not yet have access to the computers and networks that are integral to most current open education efforts.

These barriers can be overcome, but only by working together. We invite learners, educators, trainers, authors, schools, colleges, universities, publishers, unions, professional societies, policymakers, governments, foundations and others who share our vision to commit to the pursuit and promotion of open education and, in particular, to these three strategies to increase the reach and impact of open educational resources:

1. Educators and learners: First, we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement. Participating includes: creating, using, adapting and improving open educational resources; embracing educational practices built around collaboration, discovery and the creation of knowledge; and inviting peers and colleagues to get involved. Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly.

2. Open educational resources: Second, we call on educators, authors, publishers and institutions to release their resources openly. These open educational resources should be freely shared through open
licences which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.

3. Open education policy: Third, governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources. Educational resource repositories should actively include and highlight open educational resources within their collections.

These strategies represent more than just the right thing to do. They constitute a wise investment in teaching and learning for the 21st century. They will make it possible to redirect funds from expensive textbooks towards better learning. They will help teachers excel in their work and provide new opportunities for visibility and global impact. They will accelerate innovation in teaching. They will give more control over learning to the learners themselves. These are strategies that make sense for everyone.

Thousands of educators, learners, authors, administrators and policymakers are already involved in open education initiatives. We now have the opportunity to grow this movement to include millions of educators and institutions from all corners of the earth, richer and poorer. We have the chance to reach out to policymakers, working together to seize the opportunities ahead. We have the opportunity to engage entrepreneurs and publishers who are developing innovative open business models. We have a chance to nurture a new generation of learners who engage with open educational materials, are empowered by their learning and share their new knowledge and insights with others. Most importantly, we have an opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world through freely available, high-quality, locally relevant educational and learning opportunities.

We, the undersigned, invite all individuals and institutions to join us in signing the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, and, in doing so, to commit to pursuing the three strategies listed above. We also encourage those who sign to pursue additional strategies in open educational technology, open sharing of teaching practices and other approaches that promote the broader cause of open education. With each person or institution who makes this commitment -- and with each effort to further articulate our vision -- we move closer to a world of open, flexible and effective education for all.

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There are currently 1160 signatories to the Declaration, including:

Media Alternatives (FMA) (Philippines)
Tony Bailetti, Carleton University (Canada)
James Bosco, Western Michigan University (United States)
Katarzyna Bratkowska, (Poland)
Martin Dougiamas, Moodle (Austria)
Mark Hamlin, University of North Carolina at Asheville (UNC-Asheville) (United States)
Alicja Jania, Grammar school (Poland)
Don Johnson, Rice University (United States)
Maximillian Kaizen, Huddlemind Labs (South Africa)
Mills Kelly, George Mason University (United States)
Kathy Kikis-Papadakis, Foundation for research and Technology-Hellas (Greece)
Anna Klimowicz, National Agency of the Lifelong Learning Programme (Poland)
Lawrence Lessig, Creative Commons (United States)
Kevin McCauley, (South Africa)
ESTELLE MYNHARDT, Better Best Educational Projects (South Africa)
Zuzanna Orzel, (Poland)
Henrietta Otokunefor, University of Port Harcourt Library, University of Port Harcourt, East-West Road, Choba (Nigeria)
Natasha Primo, Association for Progressive Communication (South Africa)
Lee-Anne Prinsloo, African Career Development Centre (South Africa)
Ashoka Samuelson, Indian Institute of Science (India)
Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical (United Kingdom)
Jimmy Wales, Wikimedia Foundation/Wikia (United States)
Nahmsath Yabouri, University of Lome (Togo)
xiuli zhuang, Beijing Normal University (China)

The full list of individual signatories is here. You can also view lists of organizational signatores and the participants in the Cape Town meeting, who were the first signatories to the Declaration.

Santa's little workshop

If you ask nicely, wishes might be granted that Grinch

is unlikely to heed.

Crimson opts to Obviate Anachronism

All for Open Access
Let’s welcome the end of for-profit academic publishing
Published On Tuesday, October 02, 2007 12:22 AM
By THE CRIMSON STAFF


It seems that the for-profit academic publishing industry’s days are numbered...

more at JOHO.

2 mins, $1,000

via SPARC

Misprism

An update of the expanding universe of open access from Heather Morrison, a Canadian librarian whose blog deserves an award for its name:

The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
Imagine a world where anyone can instantly access all of the world's scholarly knowledge - as profound a change as the invention of the printing press. Technically, this is within reach. All that is needed is a little imagination, to reconsider the economics of scholarly communications from a poetic viewpoint.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series

Early figures are from my preprint, The Dramatic Growth of Open Access: Implications and Opportunities for Resource Sharing, Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve, 16, 3 (2006), and my updates:
Dec. 31, 2005 Update and 2006 Predictions
March 31, 2006 Update.
June 30, 2006 Update.
September 2006 Update.
Dramatic Growth December 2006 & Predictions for 2007
Dramatic Growth March 2007 Update & Open Data Edition
Dramatic Growth June 2007 Update
The Dramatic Growth of Open Access: June 2007 Open Data Edition
The Dramatic Growth of Open Access: Open Data Full Data Edition
DOAJ: Strong Growth, and Understanding the Numbers
Dramatic Growth of Open Access Inclusion Criteria

On the other hand, the comment thread about the utter idiocy of Prism has grown considerably.

We don't need no steenkin JSTOR

Directory of Open Access Journals -- via Dialogic. It lists 66 journals of Philosophy alone, including various publications from places like the Ecole normale supérieure, the University of Florence, the University of Dublin, the Universidad Central de Venezuela, the University of Trieste, the Queensland University of Technology (Foucault studies), Rhodes University, South Africa, the University of Limerick, the Society for the Advancement of Philosophy, Zagreb, Croatia, the Universidad del Zulia, Centro de Estudios Filosoficos, and lots more, even a couple of USian universities.

Then there are dozens of journals for arts, music, religion, languages, linguistics, etc. Have a look around. Look up something you're interested in. They are not JSTOR, or PROJECTilevomitMUSE, or SCIENCE. They'll actually let you in.

Here's a bit of a letter from David Amram, published in Chapter & Verse from the University of Leeds:

I spent the first day in Windber giving concerts, and hosting a screening of Pull My Daisy, the film in which I collaborated with Kerouac in 1959, prior to a marathon 12 hour reading of On the Road the next day, for which I provided some of music, as well as playing between and during the readings with local musicians. I also had a show of my caricatures of everyone from that era.

The DOAJ might not be the most beautifully designed site you'll ever see, but it is unquestionably the most beautiful site I've seen in a very long time.

Agriculture and Food Sciences
Arts and Architecture
Biology and Life Sciences
Business and Economics
Chemistry
Earth and Environmental Sciences
General Works
Health Sciences
History and Archaeology
Languages and Literatures
Law and Political Science
Mathematics and Statistics
Philosophy and Religion
Physics and Astronomy
Science General
Social Sciences
Technology and Engineering

Sign the Petition.

How's this for zeitgeisty? For background, this.