Building off recent momentum behind their cause, a group of public-access advocates has started a petition asking the Obama administration to require that work supported by taxpayer money be accessible online. The petition, from Access2Research, went live on the White House’s We the People public-petition site late Sunday night. Organizers got the word out quickly and broadly via social media (see the Twitter hashtag #OAMonday) and with the help of like-minded groups.
By Wednesday afternoon, close to 13,000 people had signed, more than half the goal of 25,000. According to the site’s rules, if a petition gets 25,000 signatures within 30 days, it goes to the president’s chief of staff and will get a response from the White House.
Only two paragraphs long, the petition gets to the point quickly: “We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education….
Washington — The nation’s archives contain multitudes of documents that detail the lives and experiences of individuals, families, and groups. Archivists don’t lack for material to manage. What they could use is a consistent, broadly used standard for so-called authority control—a way to reliably, thoroughly describe archival holdings and contexts so that they’re discoverable by anyone who might want to use them.
A fairly new archival-authority standard, released in 2010, could change that. It has the less-than-euphonious name of Encoded Archival…
Throwing its weight behind open access, the British government has declared it wants to make all research paid for with public money freely available online. If it succeeds, the move is likely to have significant consequences for publishers, and will boost the international momentum of the open-access movement. But the government won’t share details about how it will make the plan a reality.
David Willetts (left), Britain’s minister for universities and science and a member of the Conservative Party, made the announcement today at the general meeting of the U.K. Publishers Association in London. (The full text of Mr. Willetts’s remarks is available here.) He shared the gist of the news in a column published yesterday in TheGuardian newspaper.
“Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and…
The Modern Language Association wants evaluators to get with the digital program. In a revised set of “Guidelines for Evaluating Work in Digital Humanities and Digital Media,” the association urges departments and committees that evaluate academic work in digital media and digital humanities to give it the weight it deserves and to make sure they know how to assess it in the first place. Candidates for jobs and faculty members up for review should also make sure they understand how they’re going to be assessed, negotiate terms for evaluation, and document their work clearly, the group advises.
“Digital media are transforming literary scholarship, teaching, and service, as well as providing new venues for research, communication, and the creation of networked academic communities,” the updated guidelines say. “Academic work in digital media must be evaluated in the light of these…
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and other institutions are old hands now at taking course material from the classroom and lab and putting it online for learners anywhere to use. Yale University may be the first to reverse the process, using its Open Yale Courses as the basis for an old-fashioned book series.
This month, Yale University Press released the first batch of paperbacks based on lecture courses featured in the online-learning program. Priced at $18 and available in e-format too, the books are meant to expand the audience for the course material even further, according to Diana E.E. Kleiner. A professor of art history and classics at Yale, Ms. Kleiner is the founding project director of Open Yale Courses.
“It may seem counterintuitive for a digital project to move into books and e-books, because these are a much more conventional way of…
The World Bank is adopting an open-access policy featuring an Open Knowledge Repository and using Creative Commons licenses, the bank announced today. The policy takes full effect July 1 and will be implemented in stages, beginning with the repository. Unveiled today, it’s “a one-stop-shop for most of the bank’s research outputs and knowledge products, providing free and unrestricted access to students, libraries, government officials and anyone interested in the bank’s knowledge,” the bank said in the announcement.
The move makes the bank the first major international organization to require that its research be made available for reuse under a Creative Commons license, it said. The repository holds more than 2,100 World Bank books and papers from 2009 to …
More Americans are reading e-books than ever before, on more kinds of devices, a new report from the Pew Research Center has found. That news won’t come as a shock, given the rapid spread of e-readers and tablet computers and the rise of e-content. What might be a surprise, though: The report contains good news for print lovers, too. Readers of e-books like to read in all formats, they favor print books for sharing and to read to children, and on average they read more books over all than print-only readers do.
“They’re heavier readers. They’re more frequent readers,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the group behind the report. “These devices have allowed them to scratch that itch.”
The report, “The Rise of eReading,” analyzes findings from a survey of almost 3,000 people nationwide in November and December 2011, along with data from follow-up…
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced today that it has acquired the papers of yet another significant contemporary literary figure: the novelist and short-story writer T.C. Boyle. The author of 22 books of fiction, including The Road to Wellville, Tortilla Curtain, World’s End, and When the Killing’s Done, Mr. Boyle is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. At Texas, his papers will join those of David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Bruce Sterling, among many others whose archives are housed at the center.
“I am very pleased and honored to have my papers safely ensconced at the Ransom Center so that they may be preserved and made available to scholars,” Mr. Boyle said in the announcement. “With such an archive, there is always the danger of damage or even destruction, especially when…
“A very blunt instrument” is how Peter Binfield of the Public Library of Science describes the impact factor. It’s handy for librarians and others who make decisions about which journals to buy but not so dandy for evaluating specific papers and researchers.
Mr. Binfield is the publisher of the journal PLoS One and the PLoS community journals, like PLoS Computational Biology. PLoS works on an open-access model; the impact factor doesn’t reign supreme there as it does at so many subscription-based operations. Instead, the publisher emphasizes a variety of article-level metrics: usage statistics and citations, sure, but also how often an article is blogged about or bookmarked and what readers and media outlets are saying about it. The approach is part of a broader trend toward altmetrics, alternative ways of measuring scholarly influence.
Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council said it would require that the published results of all research it helps pay for be made publicly accessible in institutional repositories within 12 months of publication. The policy, which is to take effect in July, puts the council in line with other major supporters of scientific research, including the National Institutes of Health and Britain’s Wellcome Trust.
“The next steps will be improving public and other researchers’ access to publicly funded data,” Warwick Anderson, the council’s chief executive officer, wrote in a blog post announcing the policy. “In this second decade of the 21st century, those who pay for research through their taxes or through donations increasingly expect to be able to access what they have paid for. This expectation will only grow.”
The MIT Press and other critics say proposed legislation to
limit public access to the results of some studies would work
against the open exchange of ideas.
Stay up-to-date on the latest news, information, trends and commentary on new and evolving technologies focusing on classroom teaching, scholarship and research, and admissions management.
“A very blunt instrument” is how Peter Binfield of the Public Library of Science describes the impact factor. It’s handy for librarians and others who make decisions about which journals to buy but not so dandy for evaluating specific papers and researchers.
Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council said it would 
Follow Wired Campus through your favorite RSS reader.
Stay up-to-date on the latest news, information, trends and commentary on new and evolving technologies focusing on classroom teaching, scholarship and research, and admissions management.