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Wanted: a verb meaning "to provide OA to" The word contest in my March newsletter is generating some enthusiastic responses. In the first 24 hours, I've received 79 suggestions from 16 people. Here's the contest again if you didn't see it:
I just mailed the March issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. This issue takes a close look at how "market-oriented" economic sectors differ from "mission-oriented" sectors, and where scholarly publishing belongs on this spectrum. The roundup section briefly notes 112 OA developments from February. Labels: Hot
Happy birthday to the Budapest Open Access Initiative, which is eight years old today. The BOAI "statement of principle,...statement of strategy, and...statement of commitment" was the first to offer a public definition of OA (combining gratis and libre access, though not in those terms), the first to use the term open access, the first to call for green and gold OA as complementary strategies (though not in those terms), the first to call for OA in all disciplines and countries, and the first to be accompanied by significant funding. A good number of OA projects were already under way, but it helped catalyze the OA movement and give it energy and unity. The BOAI was hammered out in a December 2001 meeting convened in Budapest by the Open Society Institute, which committed $3 million to carrying out the vision. The BOAI public statement was released on February 14, 2002.
Happy birthday, BOAI, and many happy returns. And to all OA activists around the world, Happy Valentines Day. (Disclosure: I helped draft the BOAI and have received support from the Open Society Institute. I'm probably not neutral on the subject, which is a reason to write your own birthday greeting!)
True or false? Defend your answer. Prepping for your Graduate Record Exams? Here's a sample essay topic from a GRE study guide:
See GRE Exam 2009 Edition Comprehensive Program, Kaplan Publishing, June 2008, p. 231. (Thanks to Amber Smith for the discovery.)
I just mailed the February issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. This issue takes a close look at four analogies between the political fortunes of open access and the political fortunes of clean energy. The roundup section briefly notes 116 OA developments from January. Here's a quick overview of the four analogies:
Update (3 hours later). A list problem has snagged delivery of the email edition. Apologies for the delay. Meantime, the online edition (link above) is the same as the email edition and already available. Labels: Hot
Comments to Obama administration due in 5 days The public comment period on the Obama administration's consultation on OA for federally-funded research expires this Wednesday. The original deadline was January 7, but was extended until January 21. If you haven't already submitted a comment, use your weekend to write one and send it off no later than Wednesday. You can submit your comment by email or through the OSTP blog. All signs suggest that the Obama administration is willing to generalize the NIH policy in some form and extend it across the federal government. Show your support for this move! You know that opponents are showing their opposition. And please spread the word to others who might write comments. Now that Gavin has departed, and my time is still occupied with other OA work, what will become of Open Access News? To understand my answer, first allow me to recap a little history. When Gavin came aboard two years ago, there was already more OA news than one person could cover alone, and with his help we made a substantial gain on adequacy. But soon there was too much news for two people to cover together. If the problem was to cover the news comprehensively, one solution was to add more people. But it was clear that OAN was already too long. We couldn't capture everything, but what we did capture was too much for people to read. The rapid growth of the OA movement made both problems worse because it made the inadequacy and volume of the blog grow at the same time. (That's why I had to keep reminding myself that this was a side effect of success.) So there were two problems to solve --enlarge the scope and reduce the volume. To solve both at once I decided that we needed a very different kind of alert service, and launched the OA tracking project (OATP) as a scalable alternative. OATP is more comprehensive than a large blog because it is crowdsourced and distributes the labor to all who want to take part. It's leaner than a large blog because most of its news alerts are just citations, links, and brief descriptions. I could look for other news bloggers to do what Gavin and I had been doing. But that would replicate one or both of the problems that plagued OAN. You knew I was going to say this: the future of OAN is OATP. I'll continue to blog, but only sporadically. OAN will continue to exist, but its output will be greatly reduced. Meantime, OATP is a daily, comprehensive source of OA-related news. OATP's austere format doesn't do what good blogs do. But it supports good bloggers in doing what good bloggers do. Bloggers can be selective in what they cover in depth, knowing that OATP is taking care of breadth. And when they do cover the news in depth, OATP itself will point us to their coverage. OATP is still in Phase 1, with relatively few taggers and most of them using just one tag (the one official project tag, oa.new). In Phase 2, which I hope to roll out later this year, we'll have more taggers, more of them will use "subtopic tags", it will be easier for taggers to avoid adding duplicates to the project feed, it will be easier for taggers to use convergent rather than divergent tags, and it will be easier for users to subscribe to versions of the feed covering just the subtopics they care to follow. As I note in the sidebar to the right,
Please take part, as a reader, a tagger, or both. If you've had a widget on your blog running the headlines from OAN, please replace it with a widget running the headlines from the OATP. Am I deliberately steering readers away from my blog? Not exactly. I'll keep blogging, at a low level, and will appreciate any eyeballs that linger here. But I am deliberately recommending another news source over my own. I'm doing it to be useful: it's a better way to track new developments. It's not a better way to comment thoughtfully on new developments. But it doesn't interfere with any of the existing ways to comment thoughtfully on new developments, and it will helps all of us find the thoughtful comments people are moved to make. Labels: Meta
Housekeeping: Good bye to Gavin Baker Gavin Baker joined Open Access News as assistant editor in February 2008, two weeks shy of two years ago. When he started, there was already too much news for me to cover alone. His help was indispensable to the blog and to me personally. After July 2009, when I took a new position and had to curtail my own blogging, he carried virtually the whole, still-growing load at OAN on his own. Today is his last day, and OAN will not be the same. Gavin was highly qualified for this job on Day One. As I described his background in my blog post introducing him to my readers (February 3, 2008):
In the past two years, his understanding of this topic and the worldwide campaign behind it grew even further, embodied in a daily stream of succinct posts. Behind the scenes he was skilled and dogged at the time-consuming tasks required to blog well: finding the relevant policies of the journals, publishers, projects, institutions, or countries we were covering; discovering whether a development in the news was really new; deciphering gibberish and PR-speak and restating it clearly; gaining access to articles that were not OA; understanding stories or documents not written in English; finding URLs for items to which we'd like to link; and reading long documents in order to select the most relevant excerpts. When a news article or press release was vague on a point important to us and our readers, Gavin often took the initiative to ask the right questions and track down people who might be in a position to answer. His work at OAN --as well as the OA tracking project-- has been valuable to me, our readers, and the wider OA movement. I'm grateful to him and wish him the best in the next chapters of his life and career, starting with graduate school in the fall.
Postscript 1. For an idea of what he's been up to, see his article, Open access: Advice on working with faculty senates, published just this week in the January issue of College & Research Libraries News. Postscript 2. I'll soon post more on the future of OAN itself. Labels: Meta For the past two years, my work on Open Access News has been funded by SPARC. My funding ends today, and with it my tenure at OAN. I'll leave it to Peter to say what becomes of OAN from here. The Open Access Tracking Project, which we launched last year, continues. (Anticipating this moment was one motivation behind the project: anyone can contribute to the OATP feed, allowing the workload to be distributed.) I give my sincerest thanks to Peter and to SPARC for affording me this incredible opportunity. There are few better ways to engage so deeply and globally with the topic of open access. I've learned so much. I hope my work has also been useful to you, our readers. It has been a challenge and a privilege to make sense of the world of open access and communicate it to you. Thank you for your support and engagement. As for me, I intend to begin work on my Ph.D. in the fall. Until then, I'm available to work on new projects: if you have any ideas, please contact me. Thanks for reading, and for all you do. Keep in touch,
New OA database on facial genetics
National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, NIDCR Launches the FaceBase Consortium, press release, October 5, 2009.
New draft attribution data license
Draft of an Open Data Commons Attribution License, Open Data Commons, January 11, 2010.
House Science Committee on roundtable report
U.S. House Science and Technology Committee, Report Finds Common Ground in Efforts to Balance Public Access, Scholarly Publishing, press release, January 13, 2010.
Is Mendeley heading for copyright trouble?
David Crotty, Going Legit: The Difficult Path from Piracy to Partnership, The Scholarly Kitchen, January 13, 2010.
Maney launches hybrid option for 39 journals
Maney Publishing launches open access model, press release, January 15, 2010.
Optical Society is newest SPARC Innovator
SPARC honors Optical Society of America as a pioneer in scholarly publishing innovation, press release, January 14, 2010.
OA journal announcements, launches, and conversions spotted in the past week:
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