Comic about Creative Commons
Creative Commons has made available an online comic, Sharing Creative Works:
Sharing Creative Works is a new comic about Creative Commons. It aims to explain the basics of CC licensing as simply as possible to a general audience, including children. To make remixes and translations as easy as possible, the artwork is in SVG format and the script is plain text. Please contribute!
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For more information about Creative Commons licenses, take a look at the Commons’ frequently asked questions. Academic authors may also want to check out Scholar’s Copyright Addendum Engine from Science Commons. The addendum engine serves to help academic authors generate a form that enables them to retain certain rights to using their publications.
Scientific Research Output Metrics
A recent article (Show me the data by Mike Rossner, Heather Van Epps, and Emma Hill) published in The Journal of Cell Biology examines the calculation of the impact factor and raises concerns over its reliability:
… The impact factor data that are gathered and sold by Thomson Scientific (formerly the Institute of Scientific Information, or ISI) have a strong influence on the scientific community, affecting decisions on where to publish, whom to promote or hire (1), the success of grant applications (2), and even salary bonuses (3). Yet, members of the community seem to have little understanding of how impact factors are determined, and, to our knowledge, no one has independently audited the underlying data to validate their reliability.
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It became clear that Thomson Scientific could not or (for some as yet unexplained reason) would not sell us the data used to calculate their published impact factor. If an author is unable to produce original data to verify a figure in one of our papers, we revoke the acceptance of the paper. …
… As more publication and citation data become available to the public through services like PubMed, PubMed Central, and Google Scholar®, we hope that people will begin to develop their own metrics for assessing scientific quality rather than rely on an ill-defined and manifestly unscientific number.
Regardless of the integrity of the impact factor, there are now other scientific research output metrics available for reference. They include Eigenfactor, H-Index, and the SCImago Journal & Country Rank.
P.S.: There is an article (Free journal-ranking tool enters citation market by Declan Butler) in Nature News that talks about the SCImago Journal & Country Rank. (Thanks to Garrett Eastman and Peter Suber)
Public Access Mandate Made Law
The Alliance for Taxpayer Access reports that there is now a public access mandate for publicly funded research in the United States. From the press release:
President Bush has signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2007 (H.R. 2764), which includes a provision directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide the public with open online access to findings from its funded research. This is the first time the U.S. government has mandated public access to research funded by a major agency.
The provision directs the NIH to change its existing Public Access Policy, implemented as a voluntary measure in 2005, so that participation is required for agency-funded investigators. Researchers will now be required to deposit electronic copies of their peer-reviewed manuscripts into the National Library of Medicine’s online archive, PubMed Central. Full texts of the articles will be publicly available and searchable online in PubMed Central no later than 12 months after publication in a journal.
"Facilitated access to new knowledge is key to the rapid advancement of science," said Harold Varmus, president of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Nobel Prize Winner. "The tremendous benefits of broad, unfettered access to information are already clear from the Human Genome Project, which has made its DNA sequences immediately and freely available to all via the Internet. Providing widespread access, even with a one-year delay, to the full text of research articles supported by funds from all institutes at the NIH will increase those benefits dramatically."
"Public access to publicly funded research contributes directly to the mission of higher education,” said David Shulenburger, Vice President for Academic Affairs at NASULGC (the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges). “Improved access will enable universities to maximize their own investment in research, and widen the potential for discovery as the results are more readily available for others to build upon.”
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Update on Open Access Mandate
Dr. Peter Suber reported that the Senate and the House of Representatives had passed a bill with language that requires the National Institutes of Health to adopt an open access mandate. See this post on Open Access News for details.
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, Version 70
Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is a handy resource for researching the developments and trends of electronic scholarly publishing. Version 70 is now available online. Most of the noted materials "have been published between 1990 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1990 are also included." Users can search the bibliography. An archive of previous versions is also available.
Directory of Open Access Journals Growing
The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) now indexes more than 3,000 publications. Its goal is to "increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact." It covers "all open access scientific and scholarly journals that use a quality control system to guarantee the content." Users of DOAJ can also search the content of 974 indexed publications. That makes the retrieval of the published articles even easier!
Educational Fair Use
The Association of Research Libraries has made available online a white paper, Educational fair use today, which was authored by Mr. Jonathan Band, JD. From the press release:
[Jonathan] Band discusses three recent appellate decisions concerning fair use that should give educators and librarians greater confidence and guidance for asserting this important privilege.
In all three decisions discussed in the paper, the courts permitted extensive copying and display in the commercial context because the uses involved repurposing and recontextualization. The reasoning of these opinions could have far-reaching implications in the educational environment.
To learn more about educational fair use practices, refer to the Copyright and Fair Use Overview from Stanford University Libraries.
P.S.: Academic libraries and the technology sector have expressed concerns over a new bill, the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO IP) Act. The Library Journal Academic Newswire has a report about it.
Uses of Creative Commons Licenses
The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication has published an article (The Creative Commons and copyright protection in the digital era) that discusses the uses of Creative Commons licenses in addressing copyright issues of digital content. Here is the abstract:
As digital technology thrusts complexity upon copyright law, conflict has escalated between copyright holders desperate to institute a vigorous enforcement mechanism against copying in order to protect their ownership and others who underscore the importance of public interests in accessing and using copyrighted works. This study explores whether Creative Commons (CC) licenses are a viable solution for copyright protection in the digital era. Through a mixed-methods approach involving a web-based survey of CC licensors, a content analysis of CC-licensed works, and interviews, the study characterizes CC licensors, the ways that CC licensors produce creative works, the private interests that CC licenses serve, and the public interests that CC licenses serve. The findings suggest that the Creative Commons can alleviate some of the problems caused by the copyright conflict.
Information about Creative Commons licenses is available online. There is a list of frequently asked questions that help viewers understand what the licenses can do for them.
SPARC Innovators (Dec. 2007)
The Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) has named five students as SPARC Innovators. From the announcement:
A new generation of activists is making its presence known in the scholarly communication community. These students — undergraduates, graduates, and some who have recently left academe — are influencing university policy, organizing conferences on free culture, creating new avenues for students and faculty to publish under liberal licenses, and vocalizing their commitment to things open on campus, in the media, and all over the Web. As they enter the workforce, these students’ drive to revitalize scholarly communication will continue to impact academic institutions as well as industry. …
Collaboration between Libraries and University Presses
The past few months witnessed several collaborative projects between academic libraries and university presses. They include the Mark Twain Project Online from the University of California:
Mark Twain Project Online applies innovative technology to more than four decades’ worth of archival research by expert editors at the Mark Twain Project. It offers unfettered, intuitive access to reliable texts, accurate and exhaustive notes, and the most recently discovered letters and documents.
Its ultimate purpose is to produce a digital critical edition, fully annotated, of everything Mark Twain wrote. MTPO is a collaboration between the Mark Twain Papers and Project of The Bancroft Library, the California Digital Library, and the University of California Press.
Another press-library collaboration is digitalculturebooks:
the online home of a joint publishing project between the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library.
digitalculturebooks is and will be a work in progress, as we develop new publishing strategies to meet the needs of both our authors and readers. In the coming year we will be publishing innovative and accessible work about the social, cultural, and political impact of new media, and developing our online community to support and extend these publications.
Last but not least, the University of Pittsburgh’s University Library System and Press join forces to provide open access to the digital edition of press titles. From the press release:
Thirty-nine books from the Pitt Latin American Series published by the University of Pittsburgh Press are now available online, freely accessible to scholars and students worldwide. Ultimately, most of the Press’ titles older than 2 years will be provided through this open access platform.
For the past decade, the University Library System has been building digital collections on the Web under its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program, making available a wide array of historical documents, images and texts which can be browsed by collection and are fully searchable. The addition of the University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions collection marks the newest in an expanding number of digital collaborations between the University Library System and the University Press.
It has been pointed out that academic libraries and university presses can benefit from a collaborative working relationship. (For example, see: Libraries and university presses can collaborate to improve scholarly communication or "Why can’t we all just get along?" by Mary Alice Ball). Do the aforementioned projects herald more press-library collaborations? How far will this kind of collaboration go?
