Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) was launched on April 6th. It “aims to allow anyone to access science papers’ reference lists and to build analytical services on top of those raw data.” Here are a few stories about this initiative:
- Initiative aims to break science’s citation paywall Nature News & Comment
- Setting your cites on open eLife and PLOS
- How we know what we know: The Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) helps unlock millions of connections between scholarly research Wikimedia
- Tearing Down Science’s Citation Paywall, One Link at a Time Wired
- This post isn’t specifically about I4OC but relevant to thinking about open citations I think: Why are citations important in research writing? It’s not just about distributing credit where it’s due on Writing For Research
San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA)
— BioMed Central and SpringerOpen sign the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
— Nature journals support the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment
Several individuals, universities, publishers, funding agencies and other organizations have signed this declaration since Dec. 2012 saying that they will not use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion,or funding decisions. I don’t believe Washington University has considered it although several individuals from Washington University have endorsed DORA.
Theme of 2017 International Open Access Week to be “Open in order to…” “Open in order to… serves as a prompt to move beyond talking about openness in itself and focus on what openness enables—in an individual discipline, at a particular institution, or in a specific context; then to take action to realize these benefits. Open in order to increase the impact of my scholarship. Open in order to enable more equitable participation in research. Open in order to improve public health.” These are just a few examples. The last week in October, 2017, will provide more examples as organizations and individuals worldwide post, publish web pages, host events and webinars, etc.
APS to join SCOAP3 from 2018APS to join SCOAP3 from 2018 Lovely news that American Physical Society journals, Physical Review C, Physical Review D and Physical Review Letters, will be open access as from January 2018.
The Annual Review of Public Health is now freely available to read, reuse, and share.
US Copyright has been in the news this month. These two posts will give you a flavor of some of these discussions. I expect there will be much more this summer.
- A Worrisome Harbinger of Changes in Copyright Law, by Pamela Samuelson in Chronicle of Higher Education
- Big content cheers as Congress votes on changes to US Copyright Office, by Joe Mullin in Ars Technica
What Constitutes Peer Review of Data? A Survey of Peer Review Guidelines, by Todd Carpenter on Scholarly Kitchen. I thought this was a useful overview of a rapidly growing area.