[GOAL] Re: Google's role in sustaining the public good to research parallel to developments in open access?
It is easy to forget that they are a commercial company and not an official part of the web architecture. However, they are only a commercial company, and just one of the myriad web indexers that account for about 50% of the visits to any OA repository. They have contributed significant public good to research (eg research findability, google scholar), and they would likely contribute vastly more if they weren't hampered by the lack of OA. Sent from my iPhone On 13 Jul 2012, at 15:25, Omega Alpha Open Access oa.openacc...@gmail.commailto:oa.openacc...@gmail.com wrote: Greetings. I get the sense that Google Scholar is becoming the default indexer for open access research in STM with slower but also increasing uptake in the SS and humanities. Google is so nearly ubiquitous now it is easy to forget they are also a commercial company. At some point, a conversation surely needs to happen regarding Google’s role in sustaining the public good to research parallel to developments in open access. Is anyone aware of the status of such a conversation? Thanks. Gary F. Daught Omega Alpha | Open Access Advocate for open access academic publishing in religion and theology oa.openacc...@gmail.commailto:oa.openacc...@gmail.com http://oaopenaccess.wordpress.com ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.orgmailto:GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Willett's Speech in Support of OA
Some colleagues have a meeting with him next week. We're briefing them. Sent from my iPhone On 3 May 2012, at 08:57, CHARLES OPPENHEIM c.oppenh...@btinternet.com wrote: An excellent suggestion from Andrew.  Who would be willing to approach Willetts to set up a meeting? Charles Professor Charles Oppenheim --- On Thu, 3/5/12, Andrew A. Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp wrote: From: Andrew A. Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Subject: [GOAL] Re: Willett's Speech in Support of OA To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) goal@eprints.org Date: Thursday, 3 May, 2012, 2:04 As trailed earlier, the speech made to the Publishers' Association earlier today by David Willetts (the UK Minister for Universities and Science) is now available. While we may quibble at some aspects, it is hugely supportive of OA: http://www.bis.gov.uk/news/speeches/david-willetts-public-access-to-research I'm afraid I do rather more than quibble at some aspects. This shows the dangerous misunderstandings about OA that are hindering real progress (alongside the bizarre inability of most academics to see that we need OA as a body and that the quickest and easiest way to achieve it is to provide it mutually). Here are the phrases which worry me: Our starting point is very simple. The Coalition is committed to the principle of public access to publicly-funded research results... Perhaps I might speak from the experience of writing my own book, The Pinch, on fairness between the generations. It was very frustrating to track down an article and then find it hidden behind a pay wall. That meant it was freely accessible to a professional in an academic institution, but not to me as an independent writer. He misunderstands that this problem exists for academics as well as the general public. It would be deeply irresponsible to get rid of one business model and not put anything in its place. I am worried that he is concerned about the profits of publishers. Profits are not necessarily a natural part of academic publishing. If a profitable business model exists that reflects added value, then that's fine. However, finding a model in which costs are covered (and that can include subsidy from other sources such as membership to scholarly societies, direct university funding, direct public funding) without those costs being diverted into the coffers of a rent-seeking parasitic business is needed, not a way to ensure that someone makes profits while potentially hindering academic communication. Communication (between academics and from them to the rest of society) is the goal. The crucial options are, as you know, called green and gold. Green means publishers are required to make research openly accessible within an agreed embargo period. Here is my biggest problem. Davd Willetts does not understand Green OA. Well, he's a minister. He generally won't understand all the details of every speech he makes (the two brains nickname notwithstanding. What is more worrying is the fact that this speech reflects the lack of understanding amongst his speechwriters (political and civil servants who act as his general staff in deciding policy). With this fundamental misunderstanding of the fact that Green OA is about academics and institutions making their papers' contents available gratis while Gold OA is about publishers making papers' content available, any policy developed by the BIUS will be deeply flawed. I understand that in this speech he was talking to publishers. Perhaps we can somehow arrange for the Minister for Universities to come and give a talk at a UK university at which his message might be targetted to academics, instead. -- Professor Andrew A Adams           a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan     http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ 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] Re: Wikipedia founder to help in [UK] government's research scheme
I don't think we need to worry about WIkipedia because Jimmy Wales is being used as an expert in crowd-sourced knowledge initiatives, rather than the purveyor of a system for providing OA. In the UK I think that the best way forward is to embrace the welcome aspects of the government's initiative in an enthusiastic fashion, while showing that a network of institutional OA repositories are just what they were thinking of! Interestingly enough, Jimmy is being co-opted into this agenda having been signed up by the government to look at provisioning Open Data, underlining my feeling that OA in the UK could become a subset of the Open Data agenda. -- Les Carr On 2 May 2012, at 12:40, brent...@ulg.ac.be wrote: Sorry, but I disagree with this. I understand all the help that celebrities can bring to a cause, but the choice of the celebrity should be wise. In this case, there is a dangerous risk of mixing up concepts. Wikipedia is, by definition, the negation of peer reviewing. Or, at best, it is considering everyone as a peer to everyone else. It works surprisingly well, by the way, in many cases, but it fails completely at times as well. Expurging mistakes from WP (whether they are willingly forged or not) is a very difficult task and it can take forever. And you cannot control everything. I do not want to engage in a debate on Wikipedia's qualities and weaknesses, but tens of thousands of professors around the world spend time explaining their students why WP, though comfortable (who has never used it?), is a dangerous tool because it makes widely public a lot of informations that have not been reviewed by acknowledged specialists. Considering how people these days conflate Open Access and lack of peer reviewing, considering our relentless efforts to fight this confusion, I find it dangerous for a government to choose WP's founder as an advocate of scholarly OA. Bernard Rentier Chairman, EOS (Enabling Open Scholarship) http://www.openscholarship.org/jcms/j_6/accueil Le 2 mai 2012 à 12:47, Jan Velterop velte...@gmail.com a écrit : Strict logic is not what we win the battle for open access with. Some celebrity involvement is to be welcomed. On a visceral level the success of Wikipedia (not a logical outcome at the outset on the basis of the premises) may well influence the perception of open access. Jan Velterop On 2 May 2012, at 11:00, Andrew A. Adams wrote: The [UK] government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it. I was hoping that the new government might be less star-struck than the previous one. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose, it would seem. We really don't need Jimmy Wales advising on this. The team behind eprints has been (with minimal funding) developing the technology needed for many years and there are many academics in the UK much better versed in the intricacies of UK academic work and life than Mr Wales. Sigh. I foresee another lost couple of years wasted on this instead of getting to grips with the known problem and the known solution (including providing better funding for eprints development to the team that created it and still does the software engineering for it). -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/ ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Re: Les Carr's analyses of Mendeley on Repositoryman
On 3 Jan 2012, at 18:49, Stevan Harnad wrote: That's UNMANDATED repositories, of course. MANDATED repositories are far more successful than either Mendeley or unmandated repositories: http://openaccess.eprints.org/uploads/greenmand60.png I've just realised that I made THREE posts, and the link to the third went missing! Many apologies for presenting half an argument. The rest of it (my original work) is available on my blog: http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2010/08/comparing-social-sharing-of.html My conclusion was that a particular discipline (Computer Science) in Mendeley was about as successful as our mandated departmental repository. In other words, IN THEORY, the whole of Mendeley would be equivalent to a THEORETICAL institutional repository which had equivalent institutional mandate compliance to the departmental compliance of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. Whether that is still true at the beginning of 2012, I don't know. Mendeley is a combination of there services (1) a personal bibliographic tool (aka EndNote) (2) a web/social bibliographic sharing service (3) an open access sharing service (which is a public extension of #2). Its huge success is definitely slanted towards #1, and the hope is that there will be some kind of trickle-down towards #3 . -- Les Stevan Begin forwarded message: From: Les A Carr lac -- ecs.soton.ac.uk Date: January 3, 2012 11:24:40 AM EST Subject: Re: Mendeley users ...I did do a couple of analyses of Mendeley effectiveness for OA about 12 months ago. You can see my writeups here: http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2011/06/mendeley-download-vs-upload-growth.html and http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2011/06/mendeley-measuring-oa-rates.html ...Mendley is not any more successful in providing OA than repositories are and in fact it is very disappointing in the number of open PDFs that it has created... I have detailed spreadsheets and can redo the analyses if they are interesting/useful. -- les On 24 Dec 2011, at 04:06, Stevan Harnad wrote: Arthur, Thanks for the data about Mendeley. I have a few questions about things I don't understand; 1.4 million people have downloaded and installed Mendeley, from 32,000 institutions. This means little, I think, though giving us another estimate of the number of research institutions. That there are 122,000 groups totally dwarfs the number of institutional repositories As far as I can tell, groups are subsets of people who have agreed to share their reference lists. This is the power set of the number of institutions, indeed of the number of individuals, so it is bound to be huge, given the number of k/N subgroupings are combinatorially possible! and 143 million articles is not to be sneezed at, though there is doubtless a lot of replicates. But what are they. Assuming they are indeed full-texts and not just bibliographic citations (of writings by Aristotle, for example) what we need to know is what percentage of total papers published in (say) 2010 they represent. (About 20% is the figure to beat. That's the spontaneous UNMANDATED self-archiving rate -- including both websites and repositories. Seventy percent would be the figure to match or beat for MANDATED self-archiving. To pursue the analysis a bit further, if the eight ID/OA mandated institutions have about 1000 academics each on overage, thatâs 8,000 authors. The 200 dubious mandates contribute 1000 x 200 x 10% = 20,000 people, making 28,000 people contributing. I'm not quite sure why we are counting these authors from mandating institutions. The percentage of Mendel-OA papers per year is one benchmark. Another is the percentage of Mendel-OA papers at a given UNMANDATED institution. Do you see why I am now interested in the âsocial mediaâ pull rather than the IR push? Not yet, I'm afraid. What are needed in order to judge how well Mendel-OA is doing relative to gold OA, unmandated green OA ad mandated green OA is the comparative percentages I mention above. This perhaps begins to answer whether I can I justify my excitement? Mendeley is an exciting, useful tool -- but whether it is accelerating OA is not at all clear from the data you cite. (And I'm not clear on how how Mendeley stocks up: Only through authors importing, or does it also harvest from what's already on the web (i.e., unmandated green OA? Chrs, S ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
Re: ACM Announces Innovative Article Linking Service for Authors
I am so pleased that the ACM is innovating this new OA mechanism and I want to heartily congratulate them. Especially since they are my professional and scholarly society (go team CS!) However, this initiative is so not going to gain traction in its current form. It requires an inordinate amount of work by the authors, including copying an pasting magic HTML into the source of their web page / institutional repository page. For each paper. Even assuming that this were technically possible (arbitrary HTML injection into institutional web pages by its users is a security nightmare) it is complex and longwinded. So, 10/10 for effort, 4/10 for achievement in this initiative's current form. Having said that, I would love to have the opportunity to work with the ACM to automate this process at the institutional level in some way (and I am seeking routes to do that). -- Les Carr On 12 Oct 2011, at 17:26, Andrew A. Adams wrote: An announcement from the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is below. Quick summary: authors of articles included in the ACM's toll-access Digital Library (DL) can now nominate one URL from which toll-free access to the DL version (usually the publisher's version of record) will work. Central or institutional repository pages can be used as the launch-point. Other notes: 1. The ACM is a green publisher and endorse the deposit of the author's version of the post-print on their web pages or in repositories. 2. The ACM's copyright policy, although a copyright transfer, provides significant libre rights back to the original author(s) (though not to others). 3. The ACM Digital Library includes material not originally published by the ACM. These materials are also covered by the toll-free access provision (the ACM will fund any charges incurred for access to third-party materials from the DL subscriptions in the same way it does for subscriber access). 4. This applies retroactively to all material currently in the DL, not just new material appearing from now on. --- Forwarded Message Dear Colleague: I am pleased to announce a unique service that ACM is introducing called ACM Author-Izer. It enables ACM authors to post links on either their own web page or institutional repository for visitors to download the definitive version of their articles from the ACM Digital Library at no charge. ACM Author-Izer also enables the dynamic display of download and citation statistics for each authorized article on the author's personal page. By linking the author's personal bibliography with the ACM Digital Library, downloads from the author's site are captured in official ACM statistics, more accurately reflecting total usage. ACM Author-Izer also expands ACM's reputation as an innovative Green Path publisher. This service is based on ACM's strong belief that the computing community should have the widest possible access to the definitive versions of scholarly literature. By making ACM Author-Izer a free service to both authors and visitors to those authors' websites, ACM is emphasizing its continuing commitment to the interests of its authors and to the computing community in ways that are consistent with its existing subscription access models. For additional information including a PowerPoint presentation that illustrates ACM Author-Izer, please visit http://www.acm.org/publications/acm- author-izer-service. I hope you will use this service and inform friends and colleagues about the existence of ACM Author-Izer. Your actions will help contribute to improving the community's access to ACM published articles. I value any thoughts you may have about it at dl-feedb...@acm.org. Regards, John R. White Executive Director/CEO Association for Computing Machinery --- End of Forwarded Message -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Chair, ACM SIGCAS http://www.sigcas.org/ (Special Interest Group on Computers and Society) Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
Re: Organisation of Repository Managers?
There is UKCoRR, an organisation of 200+ repository managers. http://www.ukcorr.org/ --- Les On 30/11/2010 00:42, Andrew A. Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp wrote: I gave a talk last week at a Digital Repository Foundation meeting in Japan. This is a group of (primarily) librarians involved in running repositories for their institutions here in Japan. They asked if there was an equivalent organisation in the UK or elsewhere. I don't know of one, but that doesn't mean there isn't, since I'm not actively involved in running a repository, merely evangelising about IRs and mandates. Does anyone know of similar organisations elsewhere that I can point the Japanese DRF people at? -- Professor Andrew A Adams a...@meiji.ac.jp Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
