SPARC announces key themes for Open Access Meeting

"The program, developed by librarians, publishers, analysts, scholars, and technologists from five countries, will consider developments across four topic areas:

• Open-access publishing – the explosion of gold OA publishing and how libraries are working to support it.
• Digital repositories – building a worldwide infrastructure alongside trust for authors and users.
• Author rights – key developments and the demand for new tools and practices to maximize the potential for sharing through re-use.
• National and institutional policy adoption – the impact on faculty workflows and the role of the library."

Kenia: open Data

"The goal of Kenyan Open Government Data Portal is to make core government development, demographic, statistical and expenditure data available in a useful digital format for researchers, policymakers, ICT developers and the general public. ... there are over 160 datasets including the complete 2009 census, national budget data, nation and county public expenditure data, information on health care and school facilities."

"Making this data easily accessible is important for 3 key reasons:

1. It's a platform for innovation, that will generate economic and social value: from savings and efficiencies within government, service delivery improvements and citizen feedback systems to new wealth and jobs generated in the private sector.
2. It enables data-driven decision making: parliamentarians, policy makers, civil society organisations and individuals can see progress and make accurate, informed decisions on issues that affect people's lives.
3. It's the foundation for improving transparency and accountability: the data includes detailed, timely information on the operations of government, the results of the work it does and the opportunities that exist for improving the country."

Data Catalog
County Data Sheets

European Commission to adopt Open Data Strategy

"... the European Commission, ... has announced that they will be adopting a new Open Data Strategy from the 29th November. The aims of the strategy are to increase government transparency, and hopefully generate overall economic gains ... there is much more work to be done in standardising rules around issues such as licensing and pricing, as well as promoting better practices across the Union. ... there is much more work to be done in standardising rules around issues such as licensing and pricing, as well as promoting better practices across the Union."
The original post by Theodora Middleton

60% of journals allow the final peer-reviewed version

"... chart ... shows that 60% of journals allow the final peer-reviewed version of an article to be archived immediately, with a further 27% permitting the submitted version (pre-print) to be archived immediately. Only 13% of journals do not allow immediate archiving, but moving away from the ideal of immediate open access, the situation changes once any embargo periods have expired. ... The most common embargo period is 12 months, followed by 6 months, and then 24 months. A few embargoes are longer, the maximum recorded in RoMEO now being 5 years. ... On the date the data for these charts was compiled (15th Nov.2011), the RoMEO Journals database held about 19,000 titles."   

SHERPA Services Blog, 24 novembre 2011

A CUNY Institutional Repository ... coming soon.

"CUNY’s University Faculty Senate passed a resolution in support of the creation of a CUNY-wide institutional repository.... A CUNY institutional repository will give CUNY faculty and other researchers a permanent place to post their articles (and other work), regardless of field.... the UFS resolution is below:

WHEREAS there is a need for open-access models to assist libraries and institutions in dealing with the budgetary challenges presented by the ever-increasing costs charged by journal publishers; and
WHEREAS open-access institutional repositories do not replace traditional publishing but rather serve as an additional venue for maximizing access to the fruits of faculty research; and
WHEREAS numerous universities have created open-access institutional repositories and associated policies, and many more universities are currently working toward such repositories and policies; and
WHEREAS the City University of New York is committed to educating the public and making knowledge accessible and affordable; therefore let it be
RESOLVED that the University Faculty Senate supports the development of an open-access institutional repository for the City University of New York, and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED that in accordance with best practices, guidelines for depositing materials into the CUNY repository should be created by faculty appointed by the UFS working with the Office of Library Services and should include recommendations to faculty to deposit finished journal articles, preprints, chapters, etc. The guidelines should encourage but not require faculty to contribute to the repository, and ensure that depositing a work into the repository will not affect the author’s copyright."

Un caso di studio di openness: Salford University

Ottobre 2011

La Salford University ha pubblicato The Open Agenda at the University of Salford, un caso di studio scritto dal Prof. Martin Hall (Vice Chancellor e membro dell'EOS Board), che descrive la spinta e i benefici che porta l'openness all'Università e al suo pubblico.
"The University aims to create economic and social value through innovative ways of working together. A key element of this is openness", afferma il Prof. Hall.

Lo studio sviluppa il concetto di  "Generic Open Access University" e descrive come l'University of Salford Istitutional Repository (USIR), sia il nucleo delle agenzie di intermediazione e offra una vasta gamma di connessioni in rete.
"The open access repository is at the heart of this model, in the place that the library has occupied from the earliest days of the university", ricorda il Prof. Hall.

Knowledge Exchange: "A Surfboard for Riding the Wave"

November 2011


The report  A Surfboard for Riding the Wave " builds ... and presents an overview of the present situation with regard to research data in Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and offers broad outlines for a possible action programme for the four countries in realising the envisaged collaborative data infrastructure".


The report formulates three long-term strategic goals:
1. Data sharing will be part of the academic culture
2. Data logistics will be an integral component of academic professional life
3. Data infrastructure will be sound, both operationally and financially.

UE: "Riding the Wave"

October 2010, European Union
The report "Riding the Wave: How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data" is the result of six months of intense brainstorming and consultations with experts around the world to prepare a "vision 2030" for Scientific Data e-Infrastructures.
The report describes long term scenarios and associated challenges regarding scientific data access, curation and preservation as well as the strategy and actions necessary to realise the vision.

Apps4Italy: un concorso di idee per i dati pubblici.

"Il concorso di idee è uno degli strumenti a cui spesso ricorre la pubblica amministrazione per reclutare proposte progettuali creative sui temi su cui gli enti non hanno specifiche competenze interne ... nasce Apps4Italy, “concorso aperto a cittadini, associazioni, comunità di sviluppatori e aziende per progettare soluzioni utili e interessanti basate sull’utilizzo di dati pubblici, capaci di mostrare a tutta la società il valore del patrimonio informativo pubblico.”
... le macro categorie ... sono elencate qui di seguito:
Idee e progetti: idee e progetti per utilizzare i dati pubblici in modo interessante e utile.
Applicazioni: applicazioni in grado di catturare il valore dei dati pubblici e trasferirlo alla società.
Datasets: basi di dati con un ottimo livello di apertura prodotte da un organismo pubblico che potrà partecipare direttamente o attraverso un partner come un’azienda, un’associazione o una comunità di sviluppatori.
Visualizzazioni: visualizzazioni o elaborazioni grafiche interessanti e utili costruite sui dati pubblici."
Si possono inviare eventuali proposte dal 20 Novembre 2011 al 10 gennaio 2012 nella sezione Registrati.
Apps4italy: concorso di idee il riutilizzo creativo dei dati aperti

Lo stato dell'arte delle riviste in OA

Stuart Shieber propone la seguente analisi:

"OA journals are currently at a significant disadvantage with respect to subscription journals, because universities and funding agencies subsidize the costs of subscription journals in such a way that authors do not need to trade off money used for the subsidy against money used for other purchases ... The solution is clear: universities and funding agencies should underwrite reasonable OA publication fees just as they do subscription fees. But how should this be done? Each kind of institution needs to provide its fair share of support ...
Funding agencies ... should do so in a way that respects several important criteria:

1. They level the playing field completely, at least for cost-efficient OA journals.
2. They recognize that publication of research results often occurs after grants have ended.
3. They provide incentive for publishers to switch revenue model to the OA publication fee model, or at least provide no disincentive.
4. They avoid the moral hazard of insulating authors from the costs of their publishing.
5. They don’t place an undue burden on funders that would require reducing the impact of research they fund.

Of course, many funders already allow grantees to pay for OA publication fees from their grants. But this method falls afoul of some of this criteria ... One of the nice properties of this approach is that it doesn’t require synchronization of the many actors involved. Each funding agency can unilaterally start providing OA fee reimbursement along these lines. Until a critical mass do so, the costs would be minimal. Once a critical mass is obtained, and journals feel confident enough that a sufficient proportion of their author pool will be covered by such a fund to switch to an open-access revenue model, subscription fees to libraries will drop, allowing for overhead rates to be reduced commensurately to cover the increasing underwriting costs ..."

How should funding agencies pay open-access fees? The Occasional Pamphlet

Call to action!

"Who should respond?
It is urgent that as many individuals and organizations as possible – at all levels – respond.
For reference, the RFI specifically calls for comments from “non-Federal stakeholders, including the public, universities, nonprofit and for-profit publishers, libraries, federally funded and non-federally funded research scientists, and other organizations and institutions with a stake in long-term preservation and access to the results of federally funded research.”
If you can’t answer all of the questions, answer as many as possible – and respond to questions as directly as possible.
Organizations beyond the U.S., with experience with open-access policies, are also invited to contribute." ...
"Taxpayers paid for the research. We deserve to be able to access the results.
The main point to emphasize is that taxpayers are entitled to access the results of the research our tax dollars fund. Taxpayers should be allowed to immediately access and fully reuse the results of publicly funded research." ...
Call to action: 2011 White House RFI on public access (deadline Jan. 2) (Alliance for Taxpayer Access)

L'Open access non è una mela!!!

“Se tu hai una mela, e io ho una mela, e ce le scambiamo, allora tu ed io abbiamo sempre una mela per uno. Ma se tu hai un'idea, ed io ho un'idea, e ce le scambiamo, allora abbiamo entrambi due idee.„

George Bernard Shaw

Le conoscenze e le scoperte tecniche e scientifiche sono un patrimonio dell'umanità.

L'open access contribuisce alle conoscenze e alle scoperte tecniche e scientifiche.
L'open access è un patrimonio dell'umanità!

Simone Aliprandi è un avvocato dedito ad attività di consulenza, formazione, ricerca e divulgazione nell'ambito del diritto d'autore e più in generale del diritto dell'ICT.

Ha fondato e coordina il progetto copyleft-italia.it e ha pubblicato numerosi libri dedicati a openculture e copyleft.

Il manuale Creative Commons: a user guide è un libro fondamentale per tutti coloro che sono interessati a documentarsi nel mondo delle licenze Creative Commons.

Si tratta di un progetto editoriale indipendente: il libro è interamente curato dall'autore e pubblicato on line con un servizio di self-publishing (Lulu.com). Grazie alla licenza CC è possibile scaricarlo liberamente.

E' disponibile anche una versione cartacea di 116 pagine:  ISBN 978-88-95994-55-0

COAR: un nuovo website

COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), associazione nata nel 2009 che unisce 59 istituzioni in 23 paesi in Europa, America Latina, Asia e Nord America, ha lanciato un un nuovo website.

COAR promuove l'interoperabilità di infrastruttura e un archivio congiunto globale di dati  in OA tra i repository, per migliorare una maggiore visibilità e applicazione delle uscite di ricerca attraverso le reti globali di repository digitali ad accesso aperto.
Attualmente, COAR ha 3 gruppi di lavoro ciascuno con una propria serie di compiti, obiettivi e attività connesse, che sono:

Working Group 1 covers repository content.

Working Group 2 covers repository interoperability.

Working Group 3 focuses on support structures for repository networks and training for repository managers.

ELPUB 2012: Call for Papers

ELPUB 2012

16th International Conference on Electronic Publishing
June 14-15, 2012, Guimarães, Portugal

Social Shaping of Digital Publishing:

Exploring the interplay between Culture and Technology

1 - Digital Scholarship, Open Access and Open Science
Concepts, models and innovative applications in the field of scholarly communication. Results of recent studies on current practices. New tools and / or results of studies of their applicability. Positioning on new trends.
2 –Interoperability and the Intelligent Web
Concepts, models and innovative applications that are based on the paradigms of the Semantic Web. Metadata, linked data and open linked data, text mining, traceability, scalability, rules, inference and agents on open environments. Cloud computing and related applications, services and studies. Demonstration applications. Results of field studies and software applications.
3 – The Social and Mobile Web
Concepts, models and innovative applications for the social Web and for the mobile Web. Challenges and achievements of electronic publishing in mobile environments. Context-aware pervasive systems. Geo-location and electronic publication. Information retrieval. The social Web in mobile environments. Results of field studies and software applications.
4 – The legal, secure and trustful Web
Copyright and legal issues. Convergence, divergence and relationships between existing copyright models. Machine-readable information and interoperability on copyright. Authentication. Security and privacy on publishing and in cloud computing. Theoretical models or tools to ensure the reliability of sources. Results of field studies and software applications.
5 – Innovative interfaces, interaction and visualization
New models of interfaces for electronic publication. New interfaces for impaired people. Models and visualization applications for Web 3.0 and 4.0 and for cloud computing. Results of field studies and software applications.
6 – Failures and learnings

Papers that report experimentations that did not work and lessons learned from those failures.
7 – The future of Digital Publishing

Position papers with new insights for the future. New scholarly constructs and discourse methods. Innovative business models for electronic publishing. New technological paradigms for electronic publishing.

Call for Papers

Le storie di successo evidenziano il valore aggiunto di Open Access

In occasione della International Open Access Week 2011è stato pubblicato online un nuovo sito: www.oastories.org, promosso da Knowledge Exchange.

La piattaforma presenta le storie di ricercatori il cui lavoro ha fatto il giro del mondo, i repository che sono hanno conquistato alla ricerca nazionale uno spazio nella comunità scientifica internazionale, e mostra quindi come una varietà di partecipanti hanno beneficiato della pubblicazione dei risultati della ricerca sulle piattaforme in OA.

L'OA è diventato una importante questione strategica per i percorsi di ricerca.

White House: Science and Technology Policy Office lancia 2 consultazioni

Lo  Science and Technology Policy Office (OSTP) della Casa Bianca ha lanciato due consultazioni pubbliche il 4 novembre 2001, una su OA for data e un'altra su OA for publications  nate dalla ricerca finanziata con fondi pubblici.
Le risposte sono attese fino ai primi di gennaio.

(1) "[T]his Request for Information (RFI) offers the opportunity for interested individuals and organizations to provide recommendations on approaches for ensuring long-term stewardship and encouraging broad public access to unclassified digital data that result from federally funded scientific research....Response Date: January 12, 2012...."
Request for Information: Public Access to Digital Data Resulting From Federally Funded Scientific Research

(2) "[T]his Request for Information (RFI) offers the opportunity for interested individuals and organizations to provide recommendations on approaches for ensuring long-term stewardship and broad public access to the peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from federally funded scientific research....Response Date: January 2, 2012...."
Request for Information: Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications Resulting From Federally Funded Research

L'UNESCO lancia Global Open Access Portal

Martedì 1 novembre 2011 è stato lanciato il portale Global Open Access Portal (GOAP) in occasione di un evento speciale organizzato durante la Conferenza Generale dell'UNESCO,  presso la sede centrale di Parigi.

Il portale raccoglie le informazioni  provenienti da 148 paesi, i link di oltre 2000 iniziative e progetti in corso negli Stati membri inerenti all'OA, e mira a presentare una visuale di alto livello sul libero accesso alle informazioni scientifiche in OA.
GOAP è stato progettato per fornire le informazioni necessarie ai decisori politici per conoscere lo sviluppo globale di OA, per visualizzare lo stato dell'arte nel loro paese, e per capire dove e perché l'OA ha avuto un maggior successo.
GOAP è un  knowledge portal che ha le seguenti caratteristiche:

• descrizione dello stato dell'arte di Open Access
• principali organizzazioni impegnate in OA negli Stati membri
• aree di interesse tematico di OA
• importanti pubblicazioni su OA provenienti da diverse regioni del mondo
• valutazione critica dei principali ostacoli alla OA in ogni paese
• potenziale di OA negli Stati membri dell'UNESCO
• mandati di finanziamento e di deposito 
• link alle iniziative OA nel mondo

Lo sviluppo del portale è stato reso possibile dal contributo ricevuto dai governi di Colombia, Danimarca, Norvegia e Stati Uniti.
GOAP si propone di essere un work in progress, e di essere ulteriormente migliorato con il supporto ricevuto dalla comunità del movimento OA.
L'Unesco ritiene l'OA il cuore del mandato per fornire un accesso universale all'informazione e al sapere, e ritiene che il programma UNESCO Open Access dovrebbe continuare ad agevolare il dialogo politico tra gli Stati membri, per condividere le conoscenze e bleuone pratiche nel campo di Open Access, e costruire e condividere capacità locali attraverso la cooperazione tra il Nord-Sud e il Sud-Sud, per costruire una società della conoscenza per uno sviluppo sostenibile.

OA Mappa concettuale di Laura Briggs

Questa mappa concettuale è stata realizzata da Laura Briggs, Collections Librarian della Science & Technology Library dell'University of Alberta (Canada). 

Briggs dichiara di aver: «creato un open mappa concettuale di accesso in modo da poter sviluppare una migliore comprensione di accesso aperto», e nello spirito di open content, ispiratore del movimento OA, aggiunge: «E' un documento vivo quindi sentitevi liberi di mandarmi qualsiasi riferimento o concetti che si pensa siano mancanti. Inviatemi la vostra mappa concettuale accesso aperto e io lo posto qui!» .