Open Access

See the following -

Doctors Say Data Fees Are Blocking Health Reform

Arthur Allen | Politico | February 23, 2015

As they move to exchange patient information with hospitals and other health care partners, doctors are suffering sticker shock: The vendors of the health care software want thousands of dollars to unlock the data so they can be shared. It may take an act of Congress to provide relief...The exorbitant prices to transmit and receive data, providers and IT specialists say, can amount to billions a year. And the electronic health record industry is increasingly reliant on this revenue...

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Doctors Use Wikipedia to Collaborate in the Production of Quality Medical Information

Six years ago, Doctor James Heilman was working a night shift in the ER when he came across an error-ridden article on Wikipedia. Someone else might have used the article to dismiss the online encyclopedia, which was then less than half the size it is now. Instead, Heilman decided to improve the article. “I noticed an edit button and realized that I could fix it. Sort of got hooked from there. I’m still finding lots of articles that need a great deal of work before they reflect the best available medical evidence.”

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Dramatic Growth of Open Access First Quarter 2014

Heather Morrison | Blogspot | April 7, 2014

Highlights this quarter: three open access initiatives illustrating particularly strong growth this quarter are featured (Directory of Open Access Books, Highwire Press free sites, and PubMedCentral with 5 of the top 15 spots by quarterly growth rate). The number of journals in DOAJ has decreased this quarter; please note that this reflects a vigorous weeding process at DOAJ rather than a decrease in fully open access journals.

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Dutch PhD-Workshop on Research Design, Open Access And Open Data

Esther Hoorn | Open Foundation Knowledge Blog | February 1, 2013

For some time now the library at the University of Groningen is organizing workshops for PhDs to raise awareness on the shift towards Open Access. Open Access and copyright are the main themes. The question also to address verifiability of research data came from SOM, the Research Institute of the Faculty of Economics and Business.

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eCampusOntario, Ryerson University to Create Open Publishing Infrastructure for Ontario Post-Secondary Educators, Learners

Press Release | eCampusOntario, Ryerson University | May 16, 2017

This summer, eCampusOntario and Ryerson University will be spearheading an open publishing infrastructure project designed to enhance and expand eCampusOntario's planned Open Textbook Library. This library, developed and shared by BCcampus, will provide access to over 180 high-quality, academically reviewed textbooks and open education resources (OER) for Ontario post-secondary students...

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Elsevier Acquisition Highlights the Need for Community-based Scholarly Communication Infrastructure

Heather Joseph and Kathleen Shearer | SPARC | September 6, 2017

Like many others in the scholarly community, we were very disappointed to learn about the recent acquisition by Elsevier of bepress, the provider of the popular Digital Commons repository platform. The acquisition is especially troubling for the hundreds of institutions that use Digital Commons to support their open access repositories. These institutions now find their repository services owned and managed by Elsevier, a company well known for its obstruction of open access and repositories...

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Elsevier Launches open access journal - NeuroImage: Clinical

Press Release | Elsevier | September 26, 2012

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, announces the launch of NeuroImage: Clinical, a new open access journal, and sister journal to NeuroImage. Read More »

European Commission Considering Leap into Open-Access Publishing

Martin Enserink | Science | March 29, 2017

One of Europe’s biggest science spenders could soon branch out into publishing. The European Commission, which spends more than €10 billion annually on research, may follow two other big league funders, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and set up a “publishing platform” for the scientists it funds, in an attempt to accelerate the transition to open-access publishing in Europe...

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Extra Launches Integrated Open Source Cardiology Platform in Italy

Press Release | Extra Srl | September 16, 2015

Click-ON (Clinical Knowledge ON action) is an interoperable and open-source platform for the integrated management of clinical data in cardiology, the result of a collaboration between public and private sectors for more than 18 months, involving IT specialists, clinicians, epidemiologists and computer scientists. The project was carried out by Extra Srl, a Pontedera-based company with branches in Milan, Rende (Cosenza) and London, leader in software solutions development, in collaboration with the Institute of Clinical Physiology of CNR in Pisa, with the support of the Tuscany Region under the call POR Creo FESR 2007-2013.

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Funders Punish Open-Access Dodgers

Richard Van Noorden | Nature | April 9, 2014

For years, two of the world’s largest research funders — the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Wellcome Trust in the United Kingdom — have issued a steady stream of incentives to coax academics to abide by their open-access policies.  Now they are done with just dangling carrots. Both institutions are bringing out the sticks: cautiously and discreetly cracking down on researchers who do not make their papers publicly available.

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Generation Open: Sneak Peek Into Science’s Future At OpenCon 2014

Hilda Bastian | Scientific American | November 16, 2014

...Michael Carroll is a Professor of Law and one of the founders of the Creative Commons. He was welcoming over a hundred enthusiastic students, student organizers, and early career researchers yesterday to their first international gathering on open access, OpenCon 2014...

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Germany-Wide Consortium of Research Libraries Announce Boycott of Elsevier Journals Over Open Access

Cory Doctorow | Boing Boing | December 15, 2016

Germany's DEAL project, which includes over 60 major research institutions, has announced that all of its members are canceling their subscriptions to all of Elsevier's academic and scientific journals, effective January 1, 2017. The boycott is in response to Elsevier's refusal to adopt "transparent business models" to "make publications more openly accessible". Elsevier is notorious even among academic publishers for its hostility to open access, but it also publishes some of the most prestigious journals in many fields. This creates a vicious cycle, where the best publicly funded research is published in Elsevier journals, which then claims ownership over the research...

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Global Coalition Pushes for Unrestricted Sharing of Scholarly Citation Data

This week a coalition of scholarly publishers, researchers, and nonprofit organizations launched the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC), a project to promote the unrestricted open access to scholarly citation data. From the website: "Citations are the links that knit together our scientific and cultural knowledge. They are primary data that provide both provenance and an explanation for how we know facts. They allow us to attribute and credit scientific contributions, and they enable the evaluation of research and its impacts. In sum, citations are the most important vehicle for the discovery, dissemination, and evaluation of all scholarly knowledge"...

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Goodbye Elsevier, Goodbye Tet Lett Etc

mattoddchem | Intermolecular | January 26, 2012

I’ve decided to stop refereeing for, and publishing in, Elsevier journals. I was just asked to review for Tet Lett again, and sent notice that I’m out: Read More »

Government support of open source still falling short

Simon Phipps | InfoWorld | September 28, 2012

Two news items over the last week signalled to me that the benefits of open source, open data, and other artifacts of the meshed Internet society are making it through to policy makers. A new section of the White House website and a speech by a European Commission political prove that progress is under way. But when it comes to legal support, both stop short of advocating real open innovation...

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