open access (OA)

See the following -

We Need To Talk About Open Access

Stephen Curry | Reciprocal Space | November 24, 2012

Last week I spoke on open access at the annual conference of Research Libraries UK (RLUK).[...] Read More »

Wellcome Library Pledges Support For Knowledge Unlatched Open Access Project

Press Release | Wellcome Trust, Knowledge Unlatched | December 5, 2013

Wellcome Library has signed up to a new open access pilot project, Knowledge Unlatched (KU). KU aims to make a collection of books, covering a wide range of humanities and social science topics, available on open access licenses through funding from hundreds of libraries. Read More »

Wellcome Trust Supports Open Access Award Programme

Press Release | Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP) | May 2, 2013

The Wellcome Trust has joined with the Public Library of Science and Google to launch the Accelerating Science Award Program (ASAP) to recognise the use of scientific research, published through open access, that has led to innovations in any field that benefit society. Read More »

Wellcome Trust Walks The Walk On Open Access With Images Release

Paul St. John Mackintosh | TeleRead | January 23, 2014

Already a poster child for open access in the UK scientific and medical communities, the Wellcome Trust has made another public commitment to free access to information with its announcement that: “Over 100 000 images, including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements, are being made freely available through Wellcome Images.” Read More »

What Is Open Access And Why Should We Care?

Danny Kingsley | The Conversation | January 15, 2013

The issue of open access to research findings has been in the media for a number of reasons lately, some positive – the release of the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) open access policy – and some tragic – the recent death of open internet advocate Aaron Swartz. Read More »

What Is The Future Of The Library? Bright When Digital!

Mercedes Bunz | Hybrid Publishing Lab | August 8, 2013

To sum it up: while all those libraries define their role quite differently, one thing is certain: digital technology is getting more and more important. This is what their plans are... Read More »

What Makes Aaron Swartz A Hero?

Eric Draitser | RT | February 13, 2014

The recent anti-NSA, anti-surveillance protests were the latest manifestation of a burgeoning movement for freedom from mass surveillance and the liberation of information. It is this new resistance movement, comprised of myriad individuals and organizations, which is perhaps the greatest measure of the legacy of Aaron Swartz. Read More »

What Open-Access Publishing Actually Costs

Ellen Wexler | The Chronicles of Higher Education | November 9, 2015

Advocates for open-access journals say that academic research should be free for everyone to read. But even those proponents acknowledge that publishing costs money — the disagreement is over the amount. The issue was highlighted last month, when all six editors and all 31 editorial-board members resigned from Lingua, a prominent linguistics journal, after a disagreement with the journal’s publisher, Elsevier, over how much libraries and authors should pay. ...

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What The Open Access Button Means For the Future Of Research And Publishing

Barbie E. Keiser | Information Today | December 17, 2013

The Open Access Button is designed to help researchers easily report when they hit a publisher paywall and are unable to access scholarly publications (because they lack a paid subscription to a particular journal or database or have not otherwise paid an access fee for the document). [...] Read More »

When People Freely Share, It Makes Things Better For Everyone

Ginny Skalski | OpenSource.com | September 18, 2013

Joshua Holm is the kind of guy you want to have on your chat list if you’re ever looking for an open source tool to tackle a task. That’s because he actively keeps up with the latest open source tools and projects because much of his work involves helping people find the right software tool to meet their needs. So if you’re looking for an open source version of something, chances are Joshua can make a recommendation...

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When Publishers Attack: Elsevier And The Open Access Research Dilemma

Paul St John Mackintosh | TeleRead | December 9, 2013

It’s no secret that academic publisher Reed Elsevier is facing financial and structural challenges from European Union and other regulatory challenges to its business model, from officials anxious to make sure that publicly-funded research gets to be public... Read More »

White House Call to Action to the Tech Community on New Open Access Machine Readable COVID-19 Dataset

Press Release | White House | March 16, 2020

Today, researchers and leaders from the Allen Institute for AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET), Microsoft, and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health released the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) of scholarly literature about COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, and the Coronavirus group. Requested by The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the dataset represents the most extensive machine-readable Coronavirus literature collection available for data and text mining to date, with over 29,000 articles, more than 13,000 of which have full text.

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Why All Pharmaceutical Research Should Be Made Open Access

Cory Doctorow | The Guardian | November 20, 2012

The government wants to make all publicly funded research available – but the same must be demanded of pharmas also Read More »

Why Open Access Makes No Sense

Robin Osborne | The Guardian | July 8, 2013

There can be no such thing as free access to academic research, says Robin Osborne in Debating Open Access essays – research is a process that universities teach and charge for Read More »

Why openly available abstracts are important - overview of the current state of affairs

The value of open and interoperable metadata of scientific articles is increasingly being recognized, as demonstrated by the work of organizations such as Crossref, DataCite, and OpenCitations and by initiatives such as Metadata 2020 and the Initiative for Open Citations. At the same time, scientific articles are increasingly being made openly accessible, stimulated for instance by Plan S, AmeliCA, and recent developments in the US, and also by the need for open access to coronavirus literature. In this post, we focus on a key issue at the interface of these two developments: The open availability of abstracts of scientific articles. Abstracts provide a summary of an article and are part of an article's metadata. We first discuss the many ways in which abstracts can be used and we then explore the availability of abstracts. The open availability of abstracts is surprisingly limited. This creates important obstacles to scientific literature search, bibliometric analysis, and automatic knowledge extraction.

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