Science Library Pad

Researchers - Create Change Canada

http://www.createchangecanada.ca/ is a Canadian adaptation of the US http://www.createchange.org/

It provides information about the new modes of communicating scholarly information in the digital environment.

getting HEP to scholarly infrastructure

As an appropriate follow-on to my previous post thinking about domain-specific sites on the net, Rolf-Dieter Heuer, CERN DG-elect, shows us what a High-Energy Physics (HEP) e-Infrastructure for Scientific Communication may look like:

1. Build a complete HEP information platform
2. Enable text- and data-mining applications
3. Demonstrate and deploy Web2.0 applications
4. Preservation and re-use of research data

www.scoap3.org/files/APE2008-Heuer.pdf

As you might expect from the URL, there is also some discussion of the SCOAP3 initiative.

Although there are of course aspects that are unique to the HEP community, there are also lots of ideas that are generally applicable to domain portals for other areas of science.

Previously:
June 11, 2007  IATUL 2007 - June 11 - Dr. Rüdiger Voss - Open Access - SCOAP3
June 11, 2007  OA and repositories : beyond green and gold - Jens Vigen - June 11 - IATUL 2007

ICSTI video - "Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information"

Videos of the presentations from the ICSTI 2007 Public Conference "Assessing the quality and impact of research: practices and initiatives in scholarly information" are now available.

You can see the programme with links to presentations, and the video page is separate, with links to each topic (RealVideo format - click on the camcorder icons on each sub-page, not on the presentation titles), I was in Quality, certification and peer review - Part 1, my presentation was Web tools for peer reviewers...and everyone (RealVideo, 35 minutes).  I encourage you to check out the other topics, I found there were some really informative presentations.

(As I said in my previous posting about my presentation, the title is not great, it's more like "categorizing the problem space of journal article exploration, and what new features or metrics we might use in this new space, as well as what new scholarly objects we might certify by applying peer review".)

My hair is, as usual, sticking out at some odd angle.  Fortunately for you, most of the time the video shows the slide I'm talking about. It's probably not entirely clear from the video, but about 14 minutes in the projector died, so I was left talking beside a blank screen (I could still see the slides on my own monitor) for about 5 minutes until everyone decided they'd had enough of that and we took a break and came back when the projector was fixed.

The next (closed, members-only) ICSTI meeting is coming up next week in Paris.  I don't know whether there is an accompanying public workshop.

UPDATE: The first version of this post ended up with an amusingly unfortunate URL.

Scholarship in the Digital Age - reviewed for Nature

My review of Christine L. Borgman's Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure and the Internet has been published in the January 24, 2008 issue of Nature

Nature 451, 401 (24 January 2008) | doi:10.1038/451401a - Published online 23 January 2008 - Full Text - PDF (110K)

UPDATE 2008-01-24:

The article is subscribers-only, although it appears to me that, for the moment at least, the preview extract provided is actually the entire 700-word article.

I have permission from Nature to post my original, unedited author manuscript.

Download borgman_scholarly.pdf

The one clarification I would like to make on the original is that I struggled with a simple way to convey that this is intentionally not a technology-focussed book.  This language: "there is no mention of “wikis”, particular types of websites that provide the ability to collaboratively edit and share text, of which Wikipedia is the best-known example.  This is by intent, not omission." I later reconsidered, since I didn't want to even mildly speculate about author intent.  The wording is considerably clearer in the final version.  Anyway the gist of it is that you shouldn't go to this book looking for technology discussion or recommendations, it's simply not there.  Borgman takes more of a "history of science" approach, looking at a high level at what people do in science, not the technologies they use.  She recommends research directions and policy approaches, not technologies.

ENDUPDATE

There are also (currently just a couple) bookmarks to support the article at

http://www.connotea.org/user/scilib/tag/digitalagereview

For more around the general topic, you can see my blog category E-Science, and my Furl bookmarks on E-Science and Scholarly Communication.

This is a reference book, a textbook, so it was rather challenging to review, it doesn't have a strong narrative that you read.  Instead it provides a comprehensive look at the sociopolitical aspects of scholarly communication in an Internet environment, with copious citations.

Borgman's approach is useful because as technology people we can often lose sight of our users.  As I said in response to a question at IATUL 2007, we need to ensure that technologies we build will work in the real workflows of researchers.  You can build wonderful repositories and lovely tools, but if no one uses them, what was the point?

In case you're wondering about some of the language in the review, I was happy to have an excuse to use "invisible college" and it is a term that shows up in the book (I wonder if I could have gotten "unseen university" past the Nature editors).  Also Borgman places her discussion quite strongly within a framework of Open Science, which she defines on pages 35-36 of the book

The notion of "open science" arises early in Western thought... Open science has been subjected to rigorous economic analysis and found to meet the needs of modern, market-based societies.  As an economic framework, open science is based on the premise that scholarly information is a "public good." ...

The emphasis in e-Research on enhancing scholarship by improving access to information is an implicit endorsement of open science.

While not exactly bedtime reading, this book definitely finds a place on my reference shelf.  Whenever you're writing a proposal or a paper in the areas of scholarly communication, e-science and "scholarly infrastructure", this will be a good book to have at hand.

Borgman used it in her course IS 204 Electronic Publishing (PDF) and via LibraryThing I see it tagged as LIS 2670 (Digital Libraries), I'm guessing for Pitt.

You can access her book site via http://snipurl.com/BorgmanDigitalAge
It includes an extensive list of references, with clickable URLs.

Rainbows End free online - Nippon 2007 Hugo science fiction nominee

There's a lot to like about Vernor Vinge's visionary novel Rainbows End.  I reviewed it in August of 2006 (I could have sworn it wasn't that long ago, time flies).

It's now available in its entirety, free online.

via Boing Boing

A nice year-end present.

As I mentioned in the title, it is a nominee for the Nippon 2007 Hugos.

If you get a taste of it and decide to buy it, here are my Amazon USA and Canada affiliate links:

   

Open Access: it's the law

The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.

signed into law on Wednesday December 26, 2007

Based on my understanding of the US political system, this involves the bill's hand being shaken and possibly streamers and balloons

Widely reported.  I'm sure there will be lots, and lots of coverage over on Open Access News.

NRC Research Press launches updated site

<marketing-mode>
NRC RP has a new site (which if you know anything about the constraints of Canadian government CLF and official languages is an accomplishment in itself).  An explanation of the open access compliance of the journals is prominently featured in the bottom centre of the front page.  I find the site has more modern look.

http://pubs.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/home.html
</marketing-mode>

New World of Open Access - Ottawa - Oct 10, 2007

The University of Ottawa Library, in association with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), hosted a public seminar entitled Open Access: the New World of Research Communication on Wednesday October 10, 2007.

Open Access: the New World of Research Communication

Speakers were Kathleen Shearer, CARL Research Associate; Stephen Choi, MD, FRCPC, Co-Editor, Open Medicine; Christian Sylvain, Policy, Planning and International Affairs Director, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC); and Professor Michael Geist.

The presentations are available along with audio

http://web20.uottawa.ca/academic/library/openaccess.mp3

(Note: Although the audio starts out in French, the main seminar is in English.)

There's a webcast as well but I couldn't get it to work.

via Resource Shelf

Wired on open data

There are some islands of innovation.  Since 2002, the Journal of Negative Results in Biomedicine has offered a peer-reviewed home to results that go negative or against the grain.  Earlier this year, the journal Nature started Nature Precedings, a Web-based forum for prepublication research and unpublished manuscripts in biomedicine, chemistry, and the earth sciences.  At Drexel University, chemist Jean-Claude Bradley practices "open notebook" science--chronicling his lab's work and sharing data via blog and wiki.  And PLoS is planning an open repository for research and data that is otherwise abandoned.

Wired - 15.10 - Mind the Gaps - by Thomas Goetz - October 2007 - pp 31-32 - not yet online UPDATE 2007-09-25: Now available.  ENDUPDATE

The article gives a good overview of the issues related to open data and the current "dark data" situation, with a particular focus on the aspect that (for the most part) only positive results and successful experiments make it into the research literature.

CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs approved

The CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs was recently approved by the CIHR Governing Council.  As a publicly-funded agency, CIHR has a fundamental interest in ensuring that research results are available to the widest possible audience and at the earliest possible opportunity in order to maximize the utility and impact of the research it funds.  This policy aims to increase the diffusion of research publications supported by CIHR, while respecting the freedom of researchers to publish where they deem their research will have its greatest impact. 

...

This policy applies to all grants awarded January 1, 2008 and onward, which have received funding in whole or in part from CIHR. While not required, researchers holding grants that were awarded prior to January 1, 2008 are encouraged to adhere to the requirements of this policy.

...

For now, CIHR has decided to limit this policy to peer-reviewed journal publications and publication-related biomedical research data, which is typically deposited into public databases as a condition of publication. CIHR is committed to improving access to research outputs and will explore broadening the policy to include research materials and other research data in the future.

...

• Grant recipients are now required to make every effort to ensure that their peer-reviewed publications are freely accessible through the Publisher's website (Option #1) or an online repository as soon as possible and in any event within six months of publication (Option #2).

• Under the second option, grant recipients must archive the final peer-reviewed full-text manuscripts immediately upon publication in a digital archive, such as PubMed Central or the grantees institutional repository. Publications must be freely accessible within six months of publication, where allowable and in accordance with publisher policies. Grant recipients may use the SHERPA/RoMEO database to locate summaries of publisher copyright policies. The SHERPA/RoMEO database will help grant recipients determine which journals allow authors to retain copyright and/or allow authors to archive journal publications in accordance with funding agency policies. However, CIHR recommends confirming with editorial staff whether archiving the postprint immediately, and making it freely accessible within six months, is permissible.

• Grant recipients may also wish to submit their manuscripts to a journal that provides immediate open access to published articles (if a suitable journal exists). CIHR considers the cost of publishing in open access journals to be an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds.

Access to Research Outputs - Modified: 2007-09-04 - Accessed: 2007-09-04
Policy on Access to Research Outputs - September 2007

Disclosure: CISTI is far from a disinterested observer in this development, but as always, if you want any kind of statement about anything CISTI is doing, please contact CISTI Communications, not me.

Previously:
July 21, 2007  Globe and Mail on Open Access
November 29, 2006  CARL and SPARC respond positively to CIHR draft research access policy
October 13, 2006  Institutional Repositories - David Moorman SSHRC

Also see other postings in my Open Access category.

Globe and Mail on Open Access

The good news is that the Globe and Mail, one of Canada's national newspapers, has a reasonable, balanced article about the open access issue.  The bad news is that you can't read it, because the article itself is closed access (paywall).  Irony, anyone?

Turning the ivory tower into an open book

This year, the University of Toronto's library system will spend $20-million on acquisitions. But less than one-third of that money will go to books. The majority will pay for the rising subscription costs of academic journals. "It's alarming," says Carole Moore, the university's chief librarian.

   Along with colleagues across the country, she has watched the price of the latest research skyrocket, with top titles such as medical journal Brain Research now hitting $21,000 or more for annual subscriptions.

...

"This is very big money," says Jean-Claude Guedon, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Montreal who founded Canada's first electronic, open-access journal, Surfaces, in 1991. "This is research that is financed by government and the articles are paid for by libraries funded by government. Then there are these guys in the middle that extract profit."

   To get around that, the open-access movement is attempting to establish high-quality publications to rival the titles of established houses. At the forefront is the Public Library of Science, a non-profit organization that has established several journals with the help of some deep-pocketed supporters, including Bill Gates.

   There also are efforts to create collections of research apart from the traditional journal format. PubMed Central, maintained by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is a digital library of peer-reviewed manuscripts. Several universities are following suit by posting archived faculty work.

   But this research must be submitted by researchers themselves. And so far uptake has been weak. That has led some funding bodies - including the powerful NIH and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research - to consider requiring researchers to post work that they help pay for in an open-access format.

   "I think of it as a democratic question. Open access is part of the public's right to know," says University of British Columbia professor John Willinsky.

open access publishing and collaborative peer review - Ulrich Pöschl - June 21 - ICSTI 2007 Nancy

Ulrich presented a very interesting open review model for publications, unfortunately his talk was a bit rushed due to factors outside his control.  Definitely an approach worth investigating further.

Ulrich Pöschl - Max Planck Society
"Interactive open access publishing and collaborative peer review for improved scientific communication and quality assurance"

www.mpch-mainz.mpg.de/~poeschl

* many motivations to do open access
- improve scientific quality assurance

with OA you can do collaborative peer review

problems with scientific publications
- fraud
- carelessness

speed vs quality
- but then neglect thorough review

Two-stage OA publication with collaborative peer review

www.egu.eu
* they [the journals] are financially viable
* they have good impact factor

Bernard F. Schultz - Albert Einstein Institute - Future styles? of assessment

Vision

- OA to high quality scientific publications
- documentation of scientific discussion (e.g. publish referee comments)
- demonstration of transparency and rationalism

Proposition

- prescribe OA to publically funded research
- transfer funds for subscription to OA
- foster OA publishing and collaborative peer review
- mere access is not enough (need to get all layers, data etc.)
- evaluate individual papers
- refine statistical parameters for citation, downloads, usage, interactive commenting and rating

OA and repositories : beyond green and gold - Jens Vigen - June 11 - IATUL 2007

Jens Vigen, Library Director
CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

Open Access and repositories : beyond green and gold

both subject repositories and institutional repositories

* subject repositories - used by researchers
* institutional repositories - store and track organisation's research output

constructing new repository system
applied for grant for 50 person years over the next 4 years

standing on digital shoulders

* more than 15 years after the invention of the Web, scientific information remains an electronic clone
of the paper era
* specialized libraries can play a pivotal role in preparing the route for their communities
towards eScience

Scientific information provision in the era of eScience

* full text and data mining
* detection of relations between articles
* treatment of large datasets for satistical and citation analyses
* identification of popular and influential articles and authors with complementary ranking criteria:
alternative metrics to ISI
* access to numerical info from figures and tables within articles
* offer integrated access to primary scientific data

[mentions some interesting work at LANL on mapping relationships between articles]

[belives the EU 7th framework will produce a lot of results in the above areas]

HEP (high energy physics)

* infrastructure for repository of scientific information
* entire corpus of HEP information in one place
* current priority
- empower the repository with new technology and conent: enabling researchs to explore information
matching the emerging expectations of the eScience era

survey to see if they are meeting user needs

results will be published as a paper

systems used

3% publisher portals
11% google

86% community services
- 28% subject repositories
- 58% specialised libraries

tagcloud (tagcrowd)

important features of an information system
* 93% depth of coverage
* 91% quality of content
* 94% access to full text
* 93% search accuracy

What changes do (surveyed responders) expect?

* seamless access to articles via portal
* improved full-text search
* conference presentations indexed and link to articles
* publication of data
* peer-review overlaid on subject repositories
* smarter search tools

dreams

* see research in context, follow a research thread
* ... more

VIsion
* build a complete HEP information system
* with full-text, data-mining etc.
* demonstrate and deploy Web 2.0 applications in the domain of sciences

Conclusions
...
* librarians have the opportunity to play a key role in the era of eScience
* express interest if you would like to join

Comment: engineering is not as advanced in information use

OA - Reaching the Masses - Dr. Håkan Carlsson - June 11 - IATUL 2007

Dr. Håkan Carlsson
Lund University, Sweden

Open Access - Reaching the Masses

OA
* increased visibility, usability, impact
* sounder business model
* full-text mining

Two Important Questions
* what is the response of the university libraries
- is it a researcher question, not a library question?
* how is the work best organised

reference to CURL/RIN report on Researcher's Use of Academic Libraries and their Services

Library Services for Research
* Scientific communication support with a focus on publication activities is a promising way to
extend services
* The library is not there to promote OA, but to support the whole publication process, in which
OA is an important part

OA at Lund University
2007 Mandatory *registration* of all university publications

library needs to assess needed competencies and provide services accordingly

Infrastructure
* new custom software - LUR (stable, combines registration/archiving)
* journal hosting - Open Journal Systems
* financial support for publication fees?

New Service
* help the researcher choose the appropriate journals to publish in, and help them with getting
published
- give information on all aspects of journals

Journal Info

http://jinfo.lub.lu.se/

IATUL 2007 - June 11 - Dr. Rüdiger Voss - Open Access - SCOAP3

UPDATE 2007-06-14: I invite you to read some additional background information about these notes.  ENDUPDATE

Dr. Rüdiger Voss
Physics Dep, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics

convert entire discipline to open access journal publishing

approximately 10,000 scientists worldwide

5016 articles published in 2005 in peer-reviewed journals
83% of all papers in 6 journals
87% of all papers published by 4 different publishers

CERN Convention (1953) is an early OA manifesto

embrace OA movement (arXiv.org)

* today particle physics is almost entirely greeen
* without mandates, without debate

peer-reviewed journals remain important as version-of-record archives and as
key instruments of merit recognition and career promotion

OA landscape in 2007

* most particle physics journals offer OA options
- hybrid model, authors buy OA to articles
- reluctant take-up by authors

* gold OA to journals is there, but variety of options bewildering

in 2005: 72.6% NO OA option
in 2007: 86.8% offer OA option

time is ripe for a full transition to OA

OA issues
* grant universal access to peer-reviewed results of publically funded research
* in a green environment authors benefit for peer review and journal prestige
* bring subscription costs under control
* raise researcher awareness of economics of scientific publishing
* inject competition into scientific publishing by linking price to quality
* stabilize the diversity and future of journals which have served particle physics well - but leave
room for new players

SCOAP3 model
http://www.cern.ch/oa/Scoap3WPReport.pdf

in a nutshell
* global consortium of funding agencies and libraries to convert all research journals important
to particle physics to open access
- funded through redirect of subscription budgets
* OA implemented through contracts between SCOAP3 and publishers
- full sponsoring of core journals
- partial sponder of broader topic journals
* SCOAP3 sponsors e-journals only; publishers free to charge readers for print and other
premium services

* estimated annual budget: 10 million euros
* contributions on a "fair share" basis by nationality (affiliation) of articles/authors

How to put it together?

LHC is a much bigger project, 40 funding agencies, 550 million $

Benefits
* online journals free to read for anybody
* preserve high-quality peer review process
* generate medium and long-term savings for libraries and funding agencies
* free to read and to publish for developing countries

SCOAP3 Status
* report distributed
* more work needed

* potential funding parters to be invited soon to sign Expressions of Interest
* once partners commit to sizeable fraction of budget, invite publishers to tender in autumn

* Goal: have SCOAP3 operational for the first LHC papers

open data and more from Peter and Paul

Both Paul Miller and Peter Murray-Rust have interesting ideas about our changing information environment, so what could be better than the former interviewing the latter?

Peter Murray-Rust Talks with Talis about Open Access, Open Data, Science, and the Semantic Web

via Open Access News

2007 IATUL and ELPUB programmes - open access and beyond

The ELPUB 2007 and IATUL 2007 programmes are up.  Both will feature topics in the areas of open access and scholarly communication.  It's interesting to me how much the technology and interests of the scholarly publishing community and the academic library community seem to be converging.

At ELPUB 2007, CISTI's Judy Best will be presenting

Challenges in the Selection, Design and Implementation of an Online Submission and Peer Review System for STM Journals

trying to open Cochrane Library for all Canadians

The CMAJ reports on work to make the Cochrane Library available to all Canadians.

Named after pioneering British medical researcher Archie Cochrane, the Cochrane Collaboration is an international non-profit organization dedicated to promoting evidence-based health care.

Currently, Cochrane provides free access to their review abstracts and plain language summaries. But access to the organization's extensive library of systematic reviews is generally available only to paid subscribers at an annual cost of about $350. But there are exceptions.

Over the past few years, the organization has convinced governments and international aid agencies to sponsor free, nationwide access for approximately 2 billion people in 15 countries, including England, Ireland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, India, Finland, Norway, Poland, South Africa, and all of Latin America and the Caribbean. Progress has been somewhat slower in Canada, where full access is only available in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories, Yukon and Nunavut. (Access in the US is limited to residents of Wyoming.)

Throwing the doors open to the general public requires a national licence that would allow anyone with a Canadian IP address instant access. Grimshaw says such a licence would cost about $450 000 annually, an amount not covered by current funding. In 2005, the Centre received 5-year funding of $7.8 million from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health.

The Canadian Network will work with stakeholders, including professional associations, to iron out a proposal for federal funding.

Cochrane Library to be available to all Canadians
CMAJ • March 27, 2007; 176 (7). doi:10.1503/cmaj.070295

This is also another piece of the Canadian National Network of Libraries for Health (NNLH) puzzle.

Side note: Every time I see a mention of Cochrane in any context I'm afraid I think of Zefram Cochrane.

Euro report: scientific information in the digital age

A remarkably concise (10 pages) report for a commision

scientific information in the digital age: access, dissemination and preservation (PDF)

http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/digital_libraries/doc/scientific_information/communication_en.pdf

In order to become an increasingly competitive knowledge-based economy, Europe must improve the production of knowledge through research, its dissemination through education, and its application through innovation. All research builds on former work, and depends on scientists’ possibilities to access and share scientific publications and research data. The rapid and widespread dissemination of research results can help accelerate innovation and avoid duplication of research efforts, although some delay for the first use by researchers or for commercial purposes can be justified.

...

Initiatives leading to wider access to and dissemination of scientific information are necessary, especially with regard to journal articles and research data produced on the basis of public funding. With respect to journal articles, the Commission is observing and considering experiments with open access publishing.

Fully publicly funded research data should in principle be accessible to all, in line with the 2004 OECD Ministerial Declaration on Access to Research Data from Public Funding.

Moreover, the Commission draws particular attention to the need for clear strategies for the digital preservation of scientific information.

via CISTI's Mary Low

UPDATE 2007-03-09: N. Miradon has posted a comment (to a mailing list as we had problems with TypePad comments).

BioMed Central OA event presentations, BMC blog

Slides and audio (MP3) are available for various presentations from the BioMed Central Open Access Colloquium held on February 8, 2007.

I was particularly interested by

UK PubMed Central within the open access movement by Richard Boulderstone, Director of e-Strategy and Programmes, British Library - PowerPoint, MP3 audio

via Francis Ouellette, indirectly

I also notice that BMC has various blogs, which appear to have all launched in January-February of this year.  Lots of interesting info about various tools to explore articles and data.

To keep you up to speed with the latest developments at BioMed Central, and to give you our take on relevant news from elsewhere, we're pleased to launch the BioMed Central blog, along with a Chemistry Central blog and a PhysMath Central blog.

Previously:
January 08, 2007  UK PubMedCentral (UKPMC) launches
September 08, 2006  the concepts of open science and information commons

UK PubMedCentral (UKPMC) launches

http://ukpmc.ac.uk/

Previously:
August 14, 2006  British Library partnership to run UKPMC

PLoS ONE launches with document meta layers and linking

I think if anyone can figure out how to do annotation well, that will be a killer app, but so far there is no "YouTube for annotations".

Most of the PLoS content is not very accessible/interesting to me, but I did explore Concentration of the Most-Cited Papers in the Scientific Literature: Analysis of Journal Ecosystems. PLoS supports both annotations and discussions.

As well, many (but not all) of the reference have a "find this article online" link. As far as I can tell, it parses the link up into a format it can pass to PubMed or Google Scholar. So for example

Garfield E. (2006) The history and meaning of the impact factor. JAMA 295: 90–93.

has a link

http://www.plosone.org/article/findArticle.action?author=Garfield&title=The history and meaning of the impact factor.

presumably if you want to hack, err, "mashup" PLoS findArticle, you just have to pass it an appropriate author= and title=

When you click the above link, you get yet another PLoS page, which says

The article may exist at:

* PubMed/NCBI
* Google Scholar

which seems like a rather click-heavy way to get to a result set.

The links it constructs are

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Garfield%5Bauthor%5D+AND+The history and meaning of the impact factor.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&safe=off&q=author%3AGarfield+%22The history and meaning of the impact factor.%22

Is it just me or are we maybe not leveraging the full richness of article metadata here?
As far as I can tell, PLoS ONE knows nothing about OpenURLs, or resolvers.

via Open Access News - PLoS ONE launches

Quebec researcher opinions on Open Access

Libre accès à la recherche scientifique : opinions et pratiques des chercheurs au Québec

in Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, Vol 1, No 1 (2006)

via openaccess.inist.fr

CARL and SPARC respond positively to CIHR draft research access policy

CARL = Canadian Association of Research Libraries
SPARC = Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
CIHR = Canadian Institutes of Health Research, one of Canada's granting councils

The press releases are both PDFs, for some reason.

The SPARC letter to CIHR is online at
http://www.arl.org/sparc/advocacy/canada/cihr_draft_policy_response.pdf.
The CARL letter is online at
http://www.carl-abrc.ca/projects/open_access/pdf/cihr_draft_policy_response.pdf.

The CIHR Draft Policy http://www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca/e/32395.html will govern peer-reviewed journal publications, research materials, and final research data stemming from CIHR funding.

In its response to the Draft Policy SPARC presents three recommendations for refinement:
- That grantees be required to comply with the policy;
- That the specifications for qualified archives and repositories should be explicitly detailed; and
- That articles must be deposited immediately upon publication in an open archive, but to offer the flexibility of allowing the grant or award recipient to perform the deposit or to require the journal (or another agent) to make the deposit on the researcher's behalf and in compliance with CIHR requirements.

The SPARC letter also highlights the importance of access to data: "As science becomes increasingly data-driven, the need to ensure broad, timely, and persistent access to this material rises in importance. We feel it is particularly notable that CIHR calls for grant holders to provide high-quality metadata to ensure effective future sharing of data and datasets."

In its response CARL asks that CIHR work with stakeholders
- To develop a Canadian-based solution for housing and making accessible the outputs of CIHR-funded research over the long term;
- To implement a more structured approach to providing access to research data; and
- To ensure that compliance to the policy is linked to future funding decisions.

via CISTI's Bev Brown

Scholarly E-Science at Stellenbosch

Via Panlibus I saw a report of an interesting presentation by Tony Hey

Dr Tony Hey Corporate vice President for Technical Computing, Microsoft - E-Science and Scholarly Communication

• e-Science all about global collaboration
• On verge of new paradigm - e-science or Data-centric science
• e-Science is a shorthand for a set of technologies to support collaborative networked data-driven  collaboration
• Huge amounts of data a problem for the scientists
• Send the calculations to the data
• Researching Publications - expose how ranking achieved (reputation/specialization/etc.) - live documents (RSS) formalized ratings

I just checked and all the Stellenbosch 2006 presentations are now online.

Check out E-Science and Scholarly Communication (PowerPoint).

There are also lots of other good ones, but E-Science is on of my main current interests.