Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - @ccess for everyone. A new initiative in open Scholarship « petermr's blog

“We have started a really new exciting venture in making scholarship available to everyone... About 3 weeks ago things came to a head. Many people are frustrated with the lack of real, 21stCentury, access to scholarship... But what emerged after about a week was the sense that we had exciting new opportunities to change the world in a bottom-up manner... It’s happening under the aegis of the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN)... as a new project (open-access ) and overlaps with open-bibliography and open-science. When we use “open” we are committed to the Open Knowledge Definition: This applied to several aspects of Open Scholarship – Open Access, Open Bibliography (BOAI-compliant), Open Citations and Open Data (OABCD) as a start. If we have OKD-conformant information then, for the first time, we can start to see the power of machines and humans working together. We can use automation without having to seek permission. We’re currently calling it @ccess ... So what information can we AUTOMATICALLY label as @ccess – OKD-open? ... [1]Anything specifically labelled with CC-BY, CC0, PDDL licences. [2] Datasets in CKAN labelled as Open [3] Articles from BOAI-compliant publishers (the main ones being BMC, PLoS, EGU, and a few others) [4] Data from bioscience databases (e.g. genomes, protein structures)... Here are some things that, by default, are not AUTOMATICALLY recognisable as OKD-compliant [1] Depositions in Institutional repositories. Almost no content is labelled usefully for machines[2] Self-archived manuscripts including arXiv [3] Bibliographic collections [4] Contents of Pubmed (except as above) [5] Hybrid publications... We’re going to build collections of OKD-Open material and label it as such. To show that’s it’s useful and a new approach to scholarship. Open to everyone, not just academics. Because @ccess is bidirectional – it’s about building our principles and community so that we have a say in modern scholarship.... We’re using our new bibliographic tools – Bibserver and Bibsoup – as an efficient means of collecting the information and labelling it. We’re starting with disease as there are already active communities who want to start using the tools. Our first project is based on MALARIA...”