Items tagged by tvol in Open Access Tracking Project (OATP)

Open Access Publishing with Cambridge University Press Begins September 19, 2019 - Office of Scholarly Communication

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 18:52:00 -0400

Earlier this year, we shared some exciting changes that will make it easier and more affordable for UC authors to publish open access with Cambridge University Press. Those changes are now here. Beginning on September 19, 2019, authors will see UC’s discounted open access publishing option as they go through the article publication process with Cambridge.

Update on open access and academic journal contracts: a presentation to the UC Board of Regents' Academic and Student Affairs Committee - Office of Scholarly Communication

Thu, 18 Jul 2019 08:30:00 -0400

"On July 17, 2019, Acting Provost and Vice Provost Susan Carlson, University Librarian and Chief Digital Scholarship Officer Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, and Associate Vice Provost and Executive Director Günter Waibel briefed the UC Board of Regents’ Academic and Student Affairs Committee on open access and academic journal contracts."

The Great Wave: what Hokusai’s masterpiece tells us about museums, copyright and online…

Wed, 10 Jul 2019 12:47:00 -0400

“Cultural institutions that wish to be relevant to online audiences, and competitive with the offer of their peers, must provide efficient and open access – when culturally appropriate – to their digital collections.”

Views from a continent in flux

Wed, 22 May 2019 07:50:00 -0400

This needs three things in particular. First, more openness. Science must no longer be hidden from the public or from other scientists. Open science empowers researchers, fosters interdisciplinarity and levels the playing field for less well-heeled institutes. It also reflects fundamental European values of inclusiveness and respect for the individual. It means giving back to scientists the ownership and control of their work, a bit like the way that Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) allows citizens to control their data. And like GDPR, Europe is setting the standards in open science that the world will follow. [...]

PLOS Journals Now OPEN for Published Peer Review | The Official PLOS Blog

Wed, 22 May 2019 05:23:00 -0400

"Starting today, ALL PLOS journals will offer authors the option to publish their peer review history alongside their accepted manuscript! We’ve been excited to make this announcement, and make major strides towards a more open publication process, since last fall when we signed ASAPbio’s open letter committing to transparent peer review options...."

Elsevier agrees to first read-and-publish deal

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 08:33:00 -0400

In a move that could signal the beginning of a significant shift for its business model, publisher Elsevier has agreed to its first “read-and-publish” deal with a national consortium of universities and research institutions in Norway. Rather than paying separately to access content behind paywalls and make selected individual articles immediately available to the public, the Norwegian consortium has signed a deal that rolls the two costs into one.

Drug prices: Trump administration may kill deterrent to high cost - The Washington Post

Sat, 20 Apr 2019 10:43:00 -0400

March-in rights have never been used by the government, which historically has encouraged the flow of discoveries to private business for development. The National Institutes of Health, the leading drug research agency, has declined multiple times to use march-in rights to control prices — including under Democratic President Barack Obama. But in today’s hyper-charged debates over the costs of U.S. prescription drugs, especially with the advent of biotechnology and gene therapies that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, the government’s powers are getting a closer look. Consumer advocates argue that the threat of government action is one of the few checks on drug prices and could give drug companies second thoughts about gouging consumers on drugs that were invented with public funding. “The pharmaceutical manufacturer takes taxpayers’ money that was invested, and takes the government monopoly that is granted, and charges monopoly prices without any countervailing force,’’ Doggett, the chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on health, said in an interview.

Knowledge to the people

Tue, 09 Apr 2019 15:33:00 -0400

Much of UC’s research is funded publicly, by taxpayers, in the form of state budget allocations and federal research grants. Yet, the current academic publishing model requires those same taxpayers to pay a fee to access its findings. That’s hardly fair. All research that is publicly funded or conducted in public universities should be available to the public. That’s why UC has joined the academic communities of Germany, Sweden, Hungary and, most recently, Norway, in calling for a reimagination of this model — one that offers unfettered public access to our extraordinary research.

European Parliament Approves Updated Directive on Open Data and Public Sector Information - International Communia Association

Fri, 05 Apr 2019 10:34:00 -0400

On Thursday the European Parliament voted 550-34 (with 25 abstentions) to approve the Directive on Open Data and Public Sector Information. The directive updates the rules controlling the re-use of public sector information held by public sector bodies of the Member States and also governs the re-use of documents held by public undertakings, such as water, energy, transport, and postal services. The recast directive is expanded to cover publicly funded research data. It states that charges related to the provision of PSI should in principle be limited to marginal costs related to the initial provision of the documents. And it also prioritises the identification and sharing of “high-value” datasets that should be available for free re-use via APIs.

Highly Profitable Medical Journal Says Open Access Publishing Has Failed. Right.

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 17:00:00 -0400

With Plan S looming, I've no doubt we'll see more arguments against open access in the coming months, but scientists have at least one ace up our sleeves: we're the ones who do all the work. We do the experiments, we write the papers, and we review the papers. Without us, the journals would cease to exist. The journals will have no choice but to go along with plan S, because without the scientists, they'll have nothing to publish. Let's hope the U.S. will follow suit in the very near future. It's long past time to change the archaic, closed-access policies that have kept medical and scientific results–results that were funded by the public–locked behind the paywalls of for-profit publishers.

Open statement: Why UC cut ties with Elsevier | UC Berkeley Library News

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 13:53:00 -0400

Elsevier’s proposal would have imposed much higher costs on the university as a whole. Elsevier’s revenue would have increased by $30 million (an 80 percent increase in total payments) if all current UC authors were to take advantage of the open access option over the life of the three-year contract. UC is committed to cost-neutrality in the transition to open access.

Plan S and the UC-Elsevier negotiations—publication as part of research funding | ARL Policy Notes

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 05:30:00 -0500

What if universities collectively agreed to the same principles as the Plan S coalition and the UC—that fully funding research also means funding open, immediate dissemination? When we talk about academy-owned, or scholar-led publishing—inclusive of text, data, materials, software, etc.—we would do well to remember that nearly one quarter of R&D is funded by universities. And that’s just STEM. Universities fund a much higher percentage of research in the humanities and social sciences, where open access increases reach, readership, and impact in critical arenas such as policy and civic society.

Six Things UVA Researchers Need to Know About the UC System Walking Away from Elsevier | UVA Library News and Announcements

Thu, 07 Mar 2019 05:42:00 -0500

"A lot of press coverage has emphasized the UC’s demands around open access (more on that below), but it’s fairly clear from their public statements that what really broke the negotiations was their equally strong insistence on containing the runaway cost of the “Big Deal.” Like big cable TV bundles, journal Big Deals were first sold to libraries decades ago as a way of getting access to more content for less money. But the value proposition has not held up. Over the last two decades, costs for journals have far outpaced both inflation and library budgets, and that explosive growth has crowded out other resources. Mergers and acquisitions have resulted in a few oligopolies who dominate elite scholarly publishing; library collections investments now go disproportionately to this handful of massive firms, with Elsevier in the lead...."

Reflections on Plan S - Green Tea and Velociraptors

Tue, 05 Mar 2019 08:28:00 -0500

The whole point of Plan S was to disrupt the status quo and transform the world of scholarly publishing. If it yields to those who it is trying to disrupt, at the cost of the greater good, than that’s not exactly progress. Open Access is not a business model, so let us stop treating it as such. I believe that science can help us shape the world to be better, and can help solve the enormous problems that our planet currently faces. I do not believe that having it under the control of mega-corporations and elite individuals or institutes helps to realise this, or is in the principles of fundamental human rights.

Big Win For Open Access, As University Of California Cancels All Elsevier Subscriptions, Worth $11 Million A Year | Techdirt

Tue, 05 Mar 2019 08:17:00 -0500

The problems faced by the University of California (UC) are the usual ones. The publishing giant Elsevier was willing to move to an open access model -- but only if the University of California paid even more on top of what were already "rapidly escalating costs". To its credit, the institution instead decided to walk, depriving Elsevier of around $11 million a year (pdf). But that's not the most important aspect of this move. After all, $11 million is small change for a company whose operating profit is over a billion dollars per year. What will worry Elsevier more is that the University of California is effectively saying that the company's journals are not so indispensable that it will sign up to a bad deal. It's the academic publishing equivalent of pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.

Robert-Jan Smits: the future for Plan S

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 13:56:00 -0500

But [Robert-Jan Smits] said he thinks some of the arguments against Plan S have been “unfair”. He reserved his greatest ire for accusations that Plan S will prevent Coalition S-funded researchers from collaborating with people who do not face restrictions on where and how they can publish. “I thought that scientists work together across borders to extend the frontiers of knowledge and solve problems for society,” he said. “If now scientists tell me that they will not cooperate anymore if they are not allowed to publish behind a paywall, I think we have a serious problem with the role of science in our society and we probably have got to have a more fundamental debate.”

The Quest to Topple Science-Stymying Academic Paywalls | WIRED

Fri, 04 Jan 2019 12:15:00 -0500

SCIENCE IS BUILT, enhanced, and developed through the open and structured sharing of knowledge. Yet some publishers charge so much for subscriptions to their academic journals that even the libraries of the world’s wealthiest universities such as Harvard are no longer able to afford the prices. Those publishers’ profit margins rival those of the most profitable companies in the world, even though research is largely underwritten by governments, and the publishers don’t pay authors and researchers or the peer reviewers who evaluate those works. How is such an absurd structure able to sustain itself—and how might we change it?

Opinion: UC is leading fight for open access to research

Wed, 02 Jan 2019 07:36:00 -0500

If we want to live in a society in which research informs how we solve the many problems facing humankind, then the results of that research must be freely available. New advances stand on the shoulders of existing ones. From the moon landing to the Human Genome Project, virtually every landmark discovery would have been impossible without access to previous work and the ability to build upon it.

In UC's battle with the world's largest scientific publisher, the future of information is at stake - Los Angeles Times

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 09:05:00 -0500

Boiled down to dollars and cents, the battle between the University of California, the nation’s premier producer of academic research, and Reed Elsevier, the world’s leading publisher of academic journals, can seem almost trivial. UC is paying almost $11 million this year for subscriptions to some 1,500 Elsevier journals. That’s not much when measured against the university’s core budget of $9.3 billion. But in fact it’s a very big deal — big enough for the university to consider dropping the subscriptions entirely when its current five-year contract with Elsevier expires on Dec. 31. Scores of town hall meetings for UC faculty to discuss the ongoing negotiations between UC and Elsevier have been scheduled across the system as the deadline approaches. What faculty are likely to hear, in the words of Jeff MacKie-Mason, the university librarian at UC Berkeley, is that “we’re pretty far apart at this point.”

Join us for A Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain

Wed, 05 Dec 2018 07:03:00 -0500

On January 1, 2019 in the United States, tens of thousands of new works will join iconic pieces such as Katsushika Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa as a part of the public domain.

Save the date! Please join us on January 25, 2019 for a grand day of celebrating the public domain.

Co-hosted by Creative Commons and the Internet Archive, this celebration will feature a keynote address by Lawrence Lessig, lightning talks, demos, multimedia displays and more to mark the “re-opening” of the public domain in the United States. The event will take place at the Internet Archive in San Francisco, and is free and open to the public.

RSVP now before the tickets run out.

The public domain is our shared cultural heritage, a near limitless trove of creativity that’s been reused, remixed, and reimagined over centuries to create new works of art and science. The public domain forms the building blocks of culture because these works are not restricted by copyright law. Generally, works come into the public domain when their copyright term expires. But U.S. copyright law has greatly expanded over time, so that now many works don’t enter the public domain for a hundred years or more. Ever since the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, no new works have entered the public domain (well, none due to copyright expiration). But for the first time this January, hundreds of books, films, visual art, sheet music, and plays published in 1923 will be free of intellectual property restrictions, and anyone can use them for any purpose at all.

Join creative, legal, library, advocacy communities to celebrate the public domain growing again for the first time in decades, and come network with an amazing lineup of people and organizations who will help us welcome this new class of public domain works. Presenters include Larry Lessig, academic, political activist, and founder of Creative Commons, Corynne McSherry, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cory Doctorow, science fiction author and co-editor of Boing Boing, Pam Samuelson, copyright scholar, Ryan Merkley, CEO of Creative Commons, Jamie Boyle, the man who literally wrote the book on the public domain, and many others.

In the evening, the celebration continues as we transition to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the World Premiere of Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky’s Quantopia: The Evolution of the Internet,

a live concert synthesizing data and art, both original and public domain materials, in tribute to the depth and high stakes of free speech and creative expression involved in our daily use of media. Attendees of our Grand Re-Opening of the Public Domain event can get discounted tickets here. If you can’t make the daytime event, separate tickets for Quantopia are available here.

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