[GOAL] EPT announces the winner of its 2011 Award
Press Release January 1st 2012 INAUGURAL EPT AWARD for OPEN ACCESS The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development is pleased to announce the winners of a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developing countries who have made a significant personal contribution to advancing the cause of open access and the free exchange of research findings. We received 30 proposals from organisations in 17 developing countries on four continents, naming individuals who have worked hard to promote Open Access and who have achieved substantial progress. The selection of a single winner was extremely difficult as we received nominations for so many individuals who have made impressive strides by any or all of the following means:- a.. establishing OA institutional repositories;setting up or encouraging conversion to OA journals; b.. achieving establishment of OA mandates requiring research to be OA on publication, or other policy developments; c.. advocating OA via seminars, publications, workshops, videos; d.. training others in the technology of setting up IRs; e.. preparing and establishing e-learning projects; f.. working towards the acceptance of Creative Commons licensing arrangements for research publications; g.. developing software for use in OA practices. Because of the high standard of the applicants, we have decided to name a single winner, but also to recognise three other individuals who were very close runners-up. All will receive a certificate and the winner will receive in addition an engraved plaque in the next few weeks. We are very happy to announce that the winner of the inaugural award is Dr Francis Jayakanth of the National Centre for Scientific Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Dr Jayakanth played a significant role in the establishment of India's first institutional repository (IR) (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in). He now manages the IR and has provided technical support for establishing IRs in many other universities and institutes in India. He has been the key resource person at many events to train people in setting up IRs and OA journals. He has delivered presentations on IRs, OA journals, the OAI protocol, OAI compliance, the benefits of OA to authors and institutions and the role of libraries. He has developed a free and open source software tool (CDSOAI), which is widely used. The Indian Institute of Science is the most prestigious institute in India and its IR now holds 31,400 records, making the century-old institute's research far more globally visible than before. The University Grants Commission in India has been impressed by the IISC's IR and has directed all universities in India to replicate this effort. Francis Jayakanth can indeed be considered an OA 'renaissance man', an advocate and technical expert in all aspect of Open Access development and an inspiration to all, both at the research and policy level. The EPT is proud to congratulate Dr Jayakanth as our first Award winner. We believe this Award and the example of our first winner will inspire many others and lead to similarly impressive nominations in 2012. The runners-up for this award were (in alphabetical order): - Ina Smith, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa; - Tatyan Zayseva, Khazar University, Azerbaijan; - Xiaolin Zhang, National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Science. The EPT wishes to congratulate them and all who have been proposed, since without exception they have made a significant personal contribution to the sharing of research findings across the world. We will be sharing some of their stories and successes on our blog over the next few weeks. Electronic Publishing Trust for Development Web site http://www.epublishingtrust.org Ept Blog http://www.epublishingtrust.blogspot.com -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120101/f4f92a5f/attachment.html
[GOAL] Deadline Extended to Jan 12 for White House Public Access and Digital Data RFIs
In November, OSTP issued two Requests for Information (RFI), one on open access to scientific publications and the other on the management of digital data. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/11/07/request-information-public-access-digital-data-and-scientific-publications Yesterday, responding to numerous requests, we submitted to the Federal Register an extension of the deadlines for those RFIs to January 12, 2012. We anticipate the official notice of that extension appearing in the Federal Register this Friday, but wanted to ensure that all stakeholders knew as soon as possible about the extended deadline. The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, signed by President Obama earlier this year, calls upon OSTP to coordinate with agencies to develop policies that assure widespread public access to and long-term stewardship of the results of federally funded unclassified research. Towards that goal, OSTP issued the two RFIs soliciting public input on long-term preservation of and public access to the results of federally funded research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications. We encourage stakeholders to carefully consider the questions in the RFIs and provide comments to the addresses specified. Soon after the conclusion of the comment periods, OSTP will make all comments available on its website (including the names of the authors and their institutional affiliations, so please do not include any proprietary or confidential information when responding). All comments are now due by January 12, 2012. You can see the RFI on public access here: http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/11/04/2011-28623/request-for-information-public-access-to-peer-reviewed-scholarly-publications-resulting-from and the RFI on digital data here: http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/11/04/2011-28621/request-for-information-public-access-to-digital-data-resulting-from-federally-funded-scientific Rick Weiss http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/21/extended-deadline-public-access-and-digital-data-rfis
[GOAL] Re: Scope of the GOAL list and discussions on open access
Heather, my comments are interspersed on two paragraphs of your recent post. Happy New Year. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia ... [Heather] Libraries. Currently, library subscriptions account for about 80-90% of the financial support for the scholarly publishing system, with 68-73% coming from academic libraries alone. (Ware and Mabe, 2009). I argue that transitioning this economic support from subscriptions to open access is key to a successful transition to open access. Library budgets need not be the only source of support, however they should be one of the main sources of support. Librarians have a lot of experience negotiating terms including pricing for subscriptions which can easily translate into open access negotiations. [Disclosure: this is my day job]. The SCOAP3 project is doing just this, transitioning one sub-discipline from subscriptions to open access. [Arthur] I assume you mean the project SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access in Particle Physics Publishing) discussed in http://elpub.scix.net/data/works/att/223_elpub2008.content.pdf and http://www.arl.org/sparc/publications/papers/scoap3_09april.shtml. There are a lot of things with the SCOAP acronym. Unfortunately high energy physics does not offer a transferable model for most disciplines, for several reasons. Do you have any experience in your day job of transitioning a discipline or initiating the process? I ask because there is a quite solid move in my university at transitioning from some subscriptions to on-demand acquisition of toll-access articles. Especially in specialized journals. Adding OA publishing fees to such a scheme might be feasible. ... [Heather] One model that might be optimal for reasons of fiscal prudence, which is the approach of N.I.H. and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, I understand, is to allow researchers to use grant funds or some portion thereof for dissemination purposes, without specifying that these be OA article processing fees or if so, how much. This gives the researcher an incentive to look for cost-effective alternatives, to use the remaining funds for other purposes, for example sending grad students to conferences to present on the research. [Disclosure: I'm a grad student, and have many friends who are grad students]. This approach also avoids the possibility of the research funder setting an overly generous trend. [Arthur] Giving researchers one-line freedom over their grants is no solution, because (a) there are very strong competitive needs for these funds, and (b) researchers see journal publication as traditionally free to them. Only people with an institutional perspective see the costs. Separate funding (eg Library, Government, funder) seems to be necessary to persuade researchers to see a level playing field between reader-side and author-side fees. ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: How many researchers are there?
Some suggestions: (1) Estimate the total number of papers P published per year y, Py, rather than the number of researchers. (2) Start with the Thompson-Reuters-ISI-indexed (or SCOPUS-indexed) subset. (3) For Py, sample the web (Google Scholar) to see what percentage of it is freely available (OA). Our latest rough estimate with this method, using a robot, is about 20%. (Using estimates of the number of researchers, if the margin of error for the total is 1M - 10M then the margin of error for the percentage OA would be 10% - 100%, which is too big. Using known, published papers as the estimator also eliminates the multi-author problem.) Cheers, Stevan On 2011-12-31, at 6:25 PM, Arthur Sale wrote: I am trying to get a rough estimate of the number of active researchers in the world. Unfortunately all the estimates seem to be as rough as the famous Drake equation for calculating the number of technological civilizations in the universe: in other words all the factors are extremely fuzzy. I seek your help. My interest is that this is the number of people who need to adopt OA for us to have 100% OA. (Actually, we will approach that sooner, as the average publication has more than one author and we need only one to make it OA.  To share some thinking, let me take Australia. In 2011 it had 35 universities and 29,226 academic staff with a PhD. Let me assume that this is the number of research active staff. The average per institution is 835, and this spans big universities down to small ones. Australia produces according to the OECD 2.5% of the worldâs research, so letâs estimate the number of active researchers in the world (taking Australia as âtypicalâ of researchers) as 29226 / 0.025 = 1,169,040 researchers in universities. Note that I have not counted non-university research organizations (theyâll make a small difference) nor PhD students (there is usually a supervisor listed in the author list of any publication they produce).  Letâs take another tack. I have read the number of 10,000 research universities in the world bandied about. Letâs regard âresearch universityâ as equal to âPhD-granting universityâ. If each of them have 1,000 research active staff on average, then that implies 1 x 1000 = 10,000,000 researchers.  That narrows the estimate, rough as it is, to         1.1M no of researchers 10M I can live with this, as it is only one power of ten (order of magnitude) between the two bounds. The upper limit is around 0.2% of the worldâs population.  Another tactic is to try to estimate the number of people whose name appeared in an author list in the last decade. Disambiguation of names rears its ugly head. This will also include many non-researchers in big labs, some of them will be dead, and there will be new researchers who have just not yet published, but I am looking for ball-park figures, not pinpoint accuracy. I havenât done this work yet.  Can we do better than these estimates, in the face of different national styles? It is even difficult to get one number for PhD granting universities in the US, and as for India and China @$#!  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia   ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] EPT announces the winner of its 2011 Award
Press Release January 1st 2012 INAUGURAL EPT AWARD for OPEN ACCESS The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development is pleased to announce the winners of a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developing countries who have made a significant personal contribution to advancing the cause of open access and the free exchange of research findings. We received 30 proposals from organisations in 17 developing countries on four continents, naming individuals who have worked hard to promote Open Access and who have achieved substantial progress. The selection of a single winner was extremely difficult as we received nominations for so many individuals who have made impressive strides by any or all of the following means:- * establishing OA institutional repositories;setting up or encouraging conversion to OA journals; * achieving establishment of OA mandates requiring research to be OA on publication, or other policy developments; * advocating OA via seminars, publications, workshops, videos; * training others in the technology of setting up IRs; *  preparing and establishing e-learning projects; * working towards the acceptance of Creative Commons licensing arrangements for research publications; * developing software for use in OA practices. Because of the high standard of the applicants, we have decided to name a single winner, but also to recognise three other individuals who were very close runners-up. All will receive a certificate and the winner will receive in addition an engraved plaque in the next few weeks. We are very happy to announce that the winner of the inaugural award is Dr Francis Jayakanth of the National Centre for Scientific Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. Dr Jayakanth played a significant role in the establishment of India?s first institutional repository (IR) (http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in). He now manages the IR and has provided technical support for establishing IRs in many other universities and institutes in India. He has been the key resource person at many events to train people in setting up IRs and OA journals. He has delivered presentations on IRs, OA journals, the OAI protocol, OAI compliance, the benefits of OA to authors and institutions and the role of libraries. He has developed a free and open source software tool (CDSOAI), which is widely used. The Indian Institute of Science is the most prestigious institute in India and its IR now holds 31,400 records, making the century-old institute's research far more globally visible than before. The University Grants Commission in India has been impressed by the IISC?s IR and has directed all universities in India to replicate this effort. Francis Jayakanth can indeed be considered an OA ?renaissance man?, an advocate and technical expert in all aspect of Open Access development and an inspiration to all, both at the research and policy level. The EPT is proud to congratulate Dr Jayakanth as our first Award winner. We believe this Award and the example of our first winner will inspire many others and lead to similarly impressive nominations in 2012. The runners-up for this award were (in alphabetical order):  - Ina Smith, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa;  - Tatyan Zayseva, Khazar University, Azerbaijan;  - Xiaolin Zhang, National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Science. The EPT wishes to congratulate them and all who have been proposed, since without exception they have made a significant personal contribution to the sharing of research findings across the world. We will be sharing some of their stories and successes on our blog over the next few weeks. Electronic Publishing Trust for Development Web site http://www.epublishingtrust.org Ept Blog http://www.epublishingtrust.blogspot.com [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Deadline Extended to Jan 12 for White House Public Access and Digital Data RFIs
In November, OSTP issued two Requests for Information (RFI), one on open access to scientific publications and the other on the management of digital data. http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/11/07/request-information-public-access-digital-data-and-scientific-publications Yesterday, responding to numerous requests, we submitted to the Federal Register an extension of the deadlines for those RFIs to January 12, 2012. We anticipate the official notice of that extension appearing in the Federal Register this Friday, but wanted to ensure that all stakeholders knew as soon as possible about the extended deadline. The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, signed by President Obama earlier this year, calls upon OSTP to coordinate with agencies to develop policies that assure widespread public access to and long-term stewardship of the results of federally funded unclassified research. Towards that goal, OSTP issued the two RFIs soliciting public input on long-term preservation of and public access to the results of federally funded research, including digital data and peer-reviewed scholarly publications. We encourage stakeholders to carefully consider the questions in the RFIs and provide comments to the addresses specified. Soon after the conclusion of the comment periods, OSTP will make all comments available on its website (including the names of the authors and their institutional affiliations, so please do not include any proprietary or confidential information when responding). All comments are now due by January 12, 2012. You can see the RFI on public access here: http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/11/04/2011-28623/request-for-information-public-access-to-peer-reviewed-scholarly-publications-resulting-from and the RFI on digital data here: http://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2011/11/04/2011-28621/request-for-information-public-access-to-digital-data-resulting-from-federally-funded-scientific Rick Weiss http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/12/21/extended-deadline-public-access-and-digital-data-rfis ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
