Open Access

Digitization of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory Archaeometric Archives: Status Update and Availability Announcement

by Matthew Boulanger

Published in 'Society for Archaeological Sciences Bulletin' 35(2): 4-7

The Nuclear Archaeology Program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) was one of the first-generation... more The Nuclear Archaeology Program at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) was one of the first-generation archaeometry laboratories in the world, operating between the 1960s and early 1990s. During operation, the Berkeley program generated compositional data for over 12,000 archaeological and geological specimens. Most of these data were generated using neutron activation analysis and X-ray fluorescence. Though primarily known for their studies of pottery from the Near East and Mediterranean, the Berkeley program analyzed over 300 ceramic specimens from the Americas and over 800 specimens from Africa. Irradiation of archaeological specimens ended at LBNL shortly after the decommissioning of the Berkeley reactor in 1989; however, archaeometric research continued at the laboratory through the irradiation of specimens at other facilities, and through expanded and refined use of XRF. Following retirement, Frank Asaro transferred the archives of the LBNL program to the University of Missouri (MURR) Archaeometry Laboratory in 2006. Since receiving the LBNL archives, the MURR laboratory has worked to preserve these compositional, descriptive, and contextual data so as to facilitate their preservation and potential use with new and ongoing archaeometric research. Efforts have focused primarily on stabilizing the archives and generating a digital versions for public distribution. Here, I present a summary of the present status of the LBNL archive project and an announcement concerning the availability of a large portion of the archives.

AN OPEN ACCESS MANDATE IN ICELAND

by Njordur Sigurjonsson

ScieCom info – Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication. Vol 8, No 1 (2012)

Recently Bifröst University became the first higher education institution in Iceland to adopt an Open Access mandate.... more Recently Bifröst University became the first higher education institution in Iceland to adopt an Open Access mandate. The mandate, or policy depending on definitional preferences, was initiated by the faculty and is a declaration of the faculty member’s preference to publish in Open Access journals and their obligation to store research articles in the university’s
open repository. The mandate, which is closely modelled on similar ones passed by for instance Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and by the Harvard Law School, was then taken up by the Bifrost University Council, which gave it a status as a university wide policy. Below is a rough translation of the text with a brief explanation on its meaning and rational.

El Grupo de Trabajo SONEX para el análisis de cuestiones relativas a la interoperabilidad de repositorios = The SONEX Workgroup for the Analysis of Repository Interoperability-Related Issues: a Summary of Activities

by Pablo de Castro

Presentation on the SONEX work on repository interoperability delivered at the INFO2012 Conference / II Open Access Furom (Havana, Cuba, Apr 16-17, 2012)

[ES] La puesta en común de la producción académica a través de una red de repositorios de acceso abierto se está... more [ES] La puesta en común de la producción académica a través de una red de repositorios de acceso abierto se está convirtiendo en un fenómeno habitual, pero aún se requiere un análisis sistemático de los procedimientos disponibles para aumentar el ritmo de incorporación de trabajos al ecosistema de repositorios, sea a través del depósito o de la transferencia de contenidos. Como contribución a esta tarea, se ofrece en este trabajo un resumen de la labor de análisis realizada por el Grupo SONEX (Scholarly Output Notification and Exchange, o Notificación e Intercambio de la Producción Académica), un pequeño grupo de trabajo internacional, finaciado por el Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) en el Reino Unido. El Grupo SONEX se puso en marcha en 2009 con el objetivo de describir, analizar y hacer recomendaciones sobre las oportunidades y casos de uso de depósito y/o transferencia de artículos y otros materiales académicos a los repositorios, proporcionando un marco teórico para la puesta en marcha de proyectos enfocados a aumentar los contenidos almacenados en los mismos.

[EN] Sharing of academic output through an Open Access repository network is becoming commonplace, but a systematic analysis is still required of the available procedures for increasing the work ingest rate into the repository ecosystem, either through content deposit or transfer. As a contribution to this task, a summary is offered in this paper of the analysis performed on the issue by the SONEX Workgroup (Scholarly Output Notification and Exchange, http://sonexworkgroup.blogspot.com/). SONEX is a small international think tank funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in the UK. The SONEX Workgroup started working in 2009 with the aim of describing, analyzing and providing recommendations on the deposit opportunities and use cases for ingesting research papers into repossitories, thus providing a theoretical framework for JISC-funded projects focused on increasing contents filed into such repositories.

Digital Publishing and Open Access for Social Science Research Dissemination: A Case Study

by Francois van Schalkwyk

Co-authored with Eve Gray and Karen Bruns. Published in Africa Media Review 15 (1 and 2) p. 22-57

This case study charts the planning and implementation of a digital publishing programme over a three-year period at... more This case study charts the planning and implementation of a digital publishing programme over a three-year period at the Human Sciences Research Council, a large South African social science research body. This paper places the case study in the context of research dissemination in South Africa and Africa and reviews new publishing approaches, including electronic publishing and Open Access. It then charts the three phases of the consultancy — investigation, recommendations and implementation — and, at each stage, examines successes and failures; the problems encountered; and how they were addressed.

Beyond copyright: reconsidering the author/publisher/reader relationship

by Francois van Schalkwyk

Published in LOGOS: The Journal of the World Book Community, 1998

Review : Quand Google Défie Le Droit - Alain Strowel (2011)

by Maxime Lambrecht

Auteurs & Media, 6/2011, p. 605

Dans son dernier livre, Alain Strowel analyse les enjeux juridiques autour des services en ligne proposés par Google.... more Dans son dernier livre, Alain Strowel analyse les enjeux juridiques autour des services en ligne proposés par Google. La thèse principale du livre est que lorsqu'un acteur aussi incoutournable que Google défie le droit, il participe à l'écriture du droit de l'Internet. Les innovations introduites par le géant américain ont souvent suscité d'intéressants développements dans la jurisprudence, qui servent de fil rouge au propos de l'auteur.

Après avoir résumé les principaux chapitres, nous ferons un commentaire critique sur un ouvrage couvrant de manière pédagogique et stimulante une large palette de thématiques du régime juridique des droits intellectuels dans l'environnement numérique.

Congress Has a Role to Play in Making Research Public

by Ada Emmett

Peterson, A. T; Emmett, A.; Haricombe, L.; Congress Has a Role to Play in Making Research Public. Chronicle of Higher Education. March 11, 2012. Available, http://chronicle.com/article/Congress-Has-a-Role-to-Play-in/131116/

Repository Services for Students, Faculty, and Research Administration

by Susan Matveyeva

Presented at the Kansas Library Association Annual Conference, Wichita, KS, April 12, 2012

nstitutional repository services are a fast growing new academic library service. Unlike other library services... more nstitutional repository services are a fast growing new academic library service. Unlike other library services focused on delivering information created elsewhere, institutional repository services concentrate on collecting, organizing, and providing access to information created in the university or college that an academic library serves. Having students, faculty, and university / college administration as its stakeholders, the institutional repository develops services for each group. The presentation will provide a detailed description of major institutional repository programs and outlines a comprehensive and focused strategy for the institutional repository development. Based on experiences of a repository manager.

Barriers to Appropriate Technology Growth in Sustainable Development

by Joshua Pearce

I. Zelenika  and J.M. Pearce, “Barriers to Appropriate Technology Growth in Sustainable Development”, Journal of Sustainable Development 4(6), 12-22 (2011).

Given the urgency of development problems world-wide, as well as the opportunities of open source appropriate... more Given the urgency of development problems world-wide, as well as the opportunities of open source appropriate technology (OSAT) to help expedite sustainable development goals, a better understanding of the barriers limiting the scaling of OSAT is needed. In this study, key organizations and researchers working in the field of appropriate technology (AT) were interviewed to identify barriers to OSAT. The data was analyzed via pattern coding and content analysis. Results reveal that among the most pressing problems for those working in the field of AT were the need for better communication and collaboration between the agencies and communities to share the knowledge and resources, and to work in partnership. Specific barriers include: i) AT seen as inferior or “poor person's” technology, ii) technical transferability and robustness of AT, iii) insufficient funding, iv) weak institutional support, and v) the challenges of distance and time in tackling rural poverty. Finally, future work is outlined to better understand and overcome these barriers.

The Web-based Face-to-Face Economy

by Fabian Bethge

Perspectives Editorial

by Seferin James

Editorial for Perspectives: International Postgraduate Journal of Philosophy, Volume III, 2010.

Az ubuntu világa

by Tamas Kozma

Towards a New Digital Historicism? Doing History in the Age of Abundance

by Andreas Fickers

This article argues that the contemporary hype in digitization and dissemination of our cultural heritage – especially... more This article argues that the contemporary hype in digitization and dissemination of our cultural heritage – especially of audiovisual sources – is comparable to the boom of critical source editions in the late 19th century. But while the dramatic rise of accessibility to and availability of sources in the 19th century went hand in hand with the development of new scholarly skills of source interpretation and was paralleled by the institutionalization of history as an academic profession, a similar trend of an emerging digital historicism today seems absent. This essay aims at reflecting on the challenges and chances that the discipline of history – and the field of television history in particular – is actually facing. It offers some thoughts and ideas on how the digitization of sources and their online availability affects the established practices of source criticism.

Wikipedia and the Utopia of Openness: How Wikipedia Becomes Less Open to Improve its Quality

by Joris Pekel

Final paper for the Digital Methods Course of the MA New Media at the University of Amsterdam

Wikipedia has become an enormous source of information in the last decade. Because of its ubiquitous presence on the... more Wikipedia has become an enormous source of information in the last decade. Because of its ubiquitous presence on the internet and the speed of which it is updated, it has become more than a reference. It becomes 'a first rough draft of history'. In this study the changing politics of openness are analyzed. By looking at both small articles, as well as one extremely popular, the role of openness and transparency within Wikipedia is discussed. In this study I point out that in order to improve the quality of Wikipedia, it is sometimes necessary to limit the amount of openness, which is not a problem as long as the process remains completely transparent. At the same time, more transparency is needed to improve the smaller articles, which are often created by a single person.

Influencia del acceso abierto en las revistas de América Latina en el contexto internacional de la ciencia

by Zaida Chinchilla-Rodríguez

Chinchilla-Rodríguez, Z., Miguel, S., Moya-Anegón, F. (2011) Influencia del acceso abierto en las revistas de América Latina en el contexto internacional de la ciencia. BIREDIAL: Bibliotecas y Repositorios Digitales: Gestión del Conocimiento, Acceso Abierto y Visibilidad Latinoamericana. Bogotá, Colombia, 9-11 Mayo

Los últimos años han sido testigos de la emergencia del Acceso Abierto en la comunicación académica. Este movimiento... more Los últimos años han sido testigos de la emergencia del Acceso Abierto en la comunicación académica. Este movimiento puede ser agrupado en dos grandes áreas: la ruta verde la ruta dorada. Existen varios estudios que muestran cuál ha sido la extensión y la magnitud de este fenómeno pero pocos muestran los efectos en términos de impacto y visibilidad de las revistas teniendo en cuenta tanto la distribución temática como la distribución por regiones geográficas. Este estudio pretende mostrar esta extensión y presencia desde la perspectiva de las revistas contenidas en la base de datos Scopus de Elsevier, así
como sus efectos sobre la visibilidad, sobre todo centrada en la
región latinoamericana. Los resultados preliminares muestran que a nivel internacional, en todas las disciplinas temáticas la presencia de las revistas “ruta verde” sobrepasan ampliamente el
porcentaje de las revistas ruta dorada. Sin embargo, las regiones periféricas y en las emergentes en el campo de la ciencia y la tecnología, la ruta dorada es la que más predomina y además estas revistas suelen aparecer en las últimas posiciones de las distribuciones de impacto. Con estos datos de contexto, este estudio pretende caracterizar y describir cual es la presencia del acceso abierto en la región latinoamericana a nivel te o y cuáles son sus efectos sobre la visibilidad.

Open Access and Scopus: A New Approach to Scientific From the Standpoint of Access.

by Zaida Chinchilla-Rodríguez

Miguel, S., Chinchilla-Rodríguez, Z., Moya-Anegón, F. Open Access and Scopus: A New Approach to Scientific From the Standpoint of Access. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62 (6): 1130-1145, 2011. DOI: 10.1002/asi.21532

The last few years have seen the emergence of several open access (OA) options in scholarly communication, which can... more The last few years have seen the emergence of several open access (OA) options in scholarly communication, which can be grouped broadly into two areas referred to as gold and green roads. Several recent studies have shown how large the extent of OA is, but there have been few studies showing the impact of OA in the visibility of journals covering all scientific fields and geographical regions.This research presents a series of informative analyses providing a broad overview of the degree of
proliferation of OA journals in a data sample of about 17,000 active journals indexed in Scopus. This study shows a new approach to scientific visibility from a systematic combination of four databases: Scopus, the Directory of Open Access Journals, Rights Metadata for Open Archiving (RoMEO)/Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access (SHERPA), and SciMago Journal Rank] and provides an overall, global
view of journals according to their formal OA status. The results primarily relate to the number of journals, not to the number of documents published in these journals, and show that in all the disciplinary groups, the presence of green road journals widely surpasses the percentage of gold road publications. The peripheral and emerging regions have greater proportions of gold road journals. These journals belong for the most part to the last quartile. The benefits of OA on visibility of the journals are
to be found on the green route, but paradoxically, this advantage is not lent by the OA, per se, but rather by the quality of the articles/journals themselves regardless of their mode of access.

Creating an Open-Access, Peer-Reviewed Journal: The Journal of Learning Spaces

by Joe Williams

In The Entrepreneurial Librarian: Essays on the Infusion of Private-Business Dynamism into Professional Service, edited by Krautter, M., Lock, M.B., and Scanlon, M.G. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012: 49-63.

This chapter describes an open access publishing initiative currently underway at the University Libraries, The... more This chapter describes an open access publishing initiative currently underway at the University Libraries, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Through this initiative, the Libraries have begun to provide open access (OA) journal hosting, archiving, and support services at no cost to The University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s (UNCG) academic community. In order to provide working examples of this new publishing enterprise, this chapter will also look specifically at the creation and development of one new OA journal that is being led by University Libraries faculty: the Journal of Learning Spaces. Details of both the Journal of Learning Spaces and the Libraries’ broader publishing project are discussed, including the entrepreneurial aspects of these undertakings, how each began, where each project stands as of this writing, and what will come next. The authors also share their personal perspectives on how these projects have fared so far, summarize their lessons learned, and suggest how others might follow in this path.

Interview with Professor Cedric Boeckx

by Pedro Tiago Martins

Interviewee: Cedric Boeckx (CB); Interviewers: Pedro Tiago Martins (PTM) & João Veloso (JV)

Cedric Boeckx is a Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), and a member of the... more Cedric Boeckx is a Research Professor at the Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies (ICREA), and a member of the Center for Theoretical Linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Most recently he was an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He is the author and editor of various books on syntax, minimalism and language (from a biolinguistic perspective). He is also the founding co-editor, with Kleanthes K. Grohmann, of the Open Access journal Biolinguistics. The interview came to fruition after we had the idea of asking various linguists the following question: “What is the right place for linguistics?”. At first, we were looking for short, straightforward answers. The question soon proved to be hard to approach that way, and Prof. Cedric Boeckx was kind enough to accept our invitation for a more thorough elaboration on the subject, under the “Interview” section of our journal, which he generously granted us on November 7th, 2011, at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto, a day before his “Introduction to Biolinguistics” workshop, also there, and for which we are also very thankful. This text is a virtually word-for-word transcription of the recorded 2-hour long interview, subject only to minor revisions by our editorial team and some comments by the interviewee. We hope that the final result is of interest to students, researchers and people alike.

Beyond the Holy Grail: why academic librarianship is more than just reference (2008)

by Rebecca Parker

Paper presented at the 4th ALIA New Librarians Symposium (NLS4), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 05-06 December 2008

It’s easy to graduate from library school with the perception that all academic librarians spend their days behind a... more It’s easy to graduate from library school with the perception that all academic librarians spend their days behind a reference desk. Reference work is the primary focus of most information provision subjects and is held up as the exemplar of library services, the ‘holy grail’ of professional librarianship. Yet there are many other challenging quests that need the support of librarians in the academic library context. In the past there has been a tendency to focus almost exclusively on the information needs of students in the university environment, but academic libraries also serve a variety of other user groups central to the existence of universities and the advancement of research. By engaging with new areas of responsibility within universities, academic librarians step outside the traditional boundaries of librarianship and into new and exciting professional realms. Skills in information management and a detailed understanding of publication trends make librarians invaluable to universities for collecting and managing research outputs. Their support for open access publishing and institutional repositories puts academic librarians at the vanguard of the open access movement, a response to the desire for wider access to research than established scholarly publishing models allow. Increased research exposure benefits universities and individual academics, as it improves their research profiles both here and overseas. In this paper, I will show how the open access movement fosters opportunities for academic librarians to break down barriers to information access, while still actively serving researchers--and universities--who are often neglected as academic library users.

Building Swinburne Research Bank: an engaged, user-centred approach to content recruitment (2009)

by Rebecca Parker

Co-authored with Helen Wolff; appeared in Proceedings of the 14th ALIA Information Online Exhibition and Conference, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 20-22 January 2009

The now-defunct Research Quality Framework (RQF) required all Australian higher education facilities to create open... more The now-defunct Research Quality Framework (RQF) required all Australian higher education facilities to create open access institutional repositories for the storage and archival of university research outputs. Most universities followed the University of Southampton model of open access by pursuing mandates for authors to self-submit to their repositories. This well-established workflow places the onus for depositing research, managing copyright and creating metadata on authors, and as a consequence has typically achieved low contribution rates. Swinburne Research Bank repository managers have pursued a different, more involved, service model-bringing the repository to the researchers, rather than waiting for them to come to the repository. By maintaining responsibility for content sourcing, metadata creation, copyright permissions and deposit, Swinburne has been able to provide a more personalised service to its researchers. This model increases the workload for repository managers, but allows them to build valuable working relationships with individual researchers and research groups, and to gain access to a breadth of research material beyond the scope of HERDC requirements. This engaged, user-centred approach to content recruitment has seen high rates of contribution, and authors have even begun to actively contribute work for deposit. In this paper, we describe the rationale and outcomes of our unique approach, and propose a way forward for content recruitment in institutional repositories.