Science Library Pad

update on Open Science and Open Access for Government of Canada research

This is a bit of a complicated trail, but here goes:

Open science is in the Digital Canada 150 strategy.

Open science was a proposed idea in the phase 2 ideas consultation for the 2nd Open Government Action Plan.

Open science is now a proposed action (proposed commitment) in the phase 3 activitives consultation.  This is the last phase of online consultation.  The next step will be to issue the OGAP 2 plan.

The feedback on the proposed idea does not carry over to the proposed action.  If you want to be heard again, you have to post comments on the proposed action: Open Science.

UPDATE 2014-09-20: The action consultation (phase 3 consultation) is now closed, as of Sept. 19, 2014.  However, the data.gc.ca mailing list has announced that there will be a 4th phase of consultation "to request public input on the draft version of Canada’s Action Plan on Open Government 2.0" from Oct. 6-17, 2014 Oct 9, 2014.  ENDUPDATE

There are also still in-person consultations to be completed.  You can read about them here and here.

I do not have the exact schedule.  Contact [email protected] for the correct information.

It looks something like this, but there may be changes:

Round Table #6

September 11 – Halifax (1841 Argyle St., Halifax City Hall, Halifax Hall)

3 hour session

September 12 – Saint John, New Brunswick ?

Round Table #7	October – Edmonton (date and location to be confirmed)	3 hour session
GTEC	October – Ottawa (details forthcoming)	Workshop
Round Table #8	Lethbridge (date and location to be confirmed)	3 hour session

okfest14 - Open Digital Science - notes

Open Knowledge Festival 2014 - July 16, 2014

Session "Open, Digital Science - moving beyond open access" by Celina Ramjoué and Silvia Luber.

Sched entry.

Etherpad https://pad.okfn.org/p/Open,_Digital_Science

Dr. Ramjoué and Dr. Luber presented the progress on open science in the EU to date

• full open access mandate in Horizon 2020 research program
• also pilot on open research data in Horizon 2020 - see Guidelines on Data Management in Horizon 2020 (PDF)
• now working on next step: Open Digital Science
• public consultation: http://www.consultation-science20.eu/ closes 30 September 2014

They presented a framework of the larger set of issues involved when you look at the impact of digital technologies on all of science:

The session was mainly group discussions; these are summarized in the Etherpad.

The question of what policy actions are needed to support this new scientific ecosystem is an interesting one; it's a complex system and we are still figuring out necessary pieces.

okfest14 - Neelie Kroes - notes

Open Knowledge Festival 2014 - July 16, 2014

Keynote - Neelie Kroes @NeelieKroesEU - European Commissioner for Digital Agenda

Video of presentation at http://youtu.be/0UNRZEsLxKc?t=29m45s

Interview video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGTLIfk-1BQ

• "I am in a hurry"
• we are in a dialogue, between politicians and the open knowledge community
• Why should we be open?
• 1. transparency. Better information should lead to better decisions.
• 2. fairness. Give taxpayers back what they pay for.
• 3. innovation.  The more you share, the more people have to build on.
• information can long sit gathering dust - let's release and turn dust into gold
• information should only ever be charged at the marginal cost, which in the digital environment is basically zero
• EU member states only have 1 year left to put this approach into national law
• Call for Tender now open: Pan-European open data infrastructure
• this work involves laws + portals + mindset change
• EU has delivered for open science.  Open access can be good for citizens, good for scientists, and good for society. 
• Horizon 2020 will offer 80 billion euros for research, and every resulting publication will be openly and [freely] available. Plus opening a lot more research data.
• EU also calling on member states to open up their publications from their national research funding
• citizens need to be informed + involved + engaged (with science)
• Consultation on science in transition - Open Digital Science http://www.consultation-science20.eu/ - closes 30 September 2014
• Open Internet
• We have "absolutely out-of-date" ideas from telecoms
• there must be an open Internet for all
• there must be an end of blocking and throttling of Internet, across the EU
• Open Education
• it is a crime when teachers are prevented from sharing open education resources
• copyright rules need to change
• rules were designed for a different age, more about limitation and control than creativity
• data mining copyright needs urgent reform
• whole EU Commission needs to have a digital mindset
• there is a better way - an open way

csvconf 2014 - The Content Mine - notes

csv,conf 2014 - July 15, 2014

14:00 The Content Mine by Peter Murray-Rust @petermurrayrust

Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/petermurrayrust/csvconf

• "liberating scientific facts for humanity"
• crawl, then data mine the literature, publish resulting facts CC0
• uses technology to extract information from PDFs, "can now turn PDFs into science"
• information will go to Wikipedia and as linked open data to DBpedia
• site is contentmine.org

Peter is using the UK Exceptions to Copyright for Research (PDF), specifically the text and data mining exception.

csvconf 2014 - Data Hacking with Wikimedia Projects - notes

csv,conf 2014 - July 15, 2014

12:20 Data-Hacking with Wikimedia Projects: Learn by Example, Including Wikipedia, WikiData and Beyond by Matt Senate @wrought and Max Klein @notconfusing

Matt and Max have clearly done a lot of thinking about how to make a project work within the WikiMedia context.  The project they described is about automatically extracting information about open access content and then enriching multiple WikiMedia sites with the appropriate information.

Video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5T6RoEckAQ

• Wikipedia is by far the largest of the WikiMedia projects
• In order to contribute successfully, you need to understand the community for each project, the cultural protocols.
• Rambot added US Census data to WikiMedia
• When contributing from an open access article to WikiMedia
• text to WikiSource
• media (images etc.) to WikiMedia Commons
• metadata to Wikidata
• signals (information about the article such as license) used to enrich e.g. citations in Wikipedia
• the bot is called RecitationBot
• goals:
• improve citation management
• integrate metadata into wikidata
• forge deep knowledge resources
• automation combined with human judgement
• Paths for Data Hackers (things to work on in order to succeed, particularly in WikiMedia context)
• reputation
• understanding of cultural protocols
• knowing the history and context of previous efforts, and fitting your work into that narrative
• connecting to community e.g. IRC, mailing lists
• RecitationBot is essentially a process of enriching newly posted citations
• can also initiate RecitationBot with a DOI as you create a reference

Open Science in Digital Canada 150

The Digital Canada 150 landing page is Canada.ca/DigitalCanada

The strategy is available on the Industry Canada site at the rather less elegant URL http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/028.nsf/eng/h_00569.html

Pillar 4 of the strategy is Digital Government, under which one of the new items is

We will develop Open Science to facilitate open access to the publications and related data resulting from federally funded research.

This item is also mentioned specifically in the April 4, 2014 speech in which Minister Moore introduced the strategy.

Ideas consultation for Canada's Open Gov Action Plan 2

You can submit ideas as well as upvote and comment on existing ideas in the Government of Canada's Open Government Action Plan 2 Ideas Dialogue.  It runs until end of June 2014.

One of the current ideas is Open Science, it could use some comments clarifying that open access is more than just "free online public access".

The Action Plan is national but is also part of Canada's participation in the Open Government Partnership.  You can see Canada's current Action Plan and other information at

http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/canada

Previously:
Oct 31, 2013  Open Government Partnership and Canada - survey and more

Canadian open access policy - consultation

The three Canadian granting councils (funding for researchers) are NSERC (natural sciences), SSHRC (social sciences), and CIHR (health & medicine). Collectively the Tri-Councils or Tri-Agencies. They have a proposed open access policy available as HTML and PDF.

Please note that the draft policy is accessible until December 13, at which time the consultation period ends. Responses should be sent electronically to [email protected]

Please indicate the section(s) of the draft policy being referred to, within your written feedback. For more information please consult our Frequently Asked Questions or contact [email protected]

Information from Consultation on the draft Tri-Agency Open Access Policy.

CIHR has an existing policy, including support for the use of PMC Canada for access to papers.

Disclaimer: My organisation at NRC is one of the partners in PMC Canada.

Related articles

Canadian Tri-Agency Draft Open Access Policy & Consultations: NSERC, SSHRC, CIHR [Confessions of a Science Librarian]

Canadian research funding agencies want feedback on open access

2013 G8 Science Ministers Statement

G8 Science Ministers met in London on Wednesday 12 June with Presidents of our respective national science academies, as part of the UK’s G8 Presidency

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/g8-science-ministers-statement

Themes of statement:

1. working on antimicrobial drug resistance issues
2. Global Research Infrastructure
3. Open Scientific Research Data
4. Expanding Access to Scientific Research Results

Under Scientific Research Data, 4 items including

i. To the greatest extent and with the fewest constraints possible publicly funded scientific research data should be open, while at the same time respecting concerns in relation to privacy, safety, security and commercial interests, whilst acknowledging the legitimate concerns of private partners.

ii. Open scientific research data should be easily discoverable, accessible, assessable, intelligible, useable, and wherever possible interoperable to specific quality standards.

Under Expanding Access, 7 items including

iv. We recognise that there are different routes to open access (green, gold and other innovative models) which need to be explored and potentially developed in a complementary way.

v. We recognise that the long-term preservation of the increasingly digitized body of scientific publications and data requires careful consideration at the national and international levels to ensure that the scientific results of our time will be available also to future generations.

vi. We recognise that further work is required to optimise increasing public access to peer-reviewed, publicly funded published research and its underlying data and that international coordination and cooperation will provide for an efficient transition to “open access”.

Canada's minister is Gary Goodyear, Minister of State for Science & Technology

video: changes impacting scientific publishing

Below is video of me presenting a modified version of my 2012 CALJ conference talk "Springtime for Publishers" to an NRC Research Press audience in Ottawa.

I will be presenting some related topics (with less of an open access focus) May 5, 2013 at the Council of Science Editors conference.  The session is scheduled at 4:15pm and is called Culture Shock: Managing the Change in Publishing.  I will be presenting with Cameron MacDonald of NRC RP.

A few notes about the presentation below:

• as indicated in the talk, I'm using the "springtime" language as a hook to hang concepts of change and revolution - I in no way want to indicate that the changes in academic publishing are comparable to the multi-country struggle of the Arab Spring
• I said the We the People minimum for response was twelve thousand - at the time it was actually 25k signatures, and it's now 100k signatures
• I said the Jenkins report (a Canadian report about research & development) but what I meant was the UK Finch report about access to government-funded research (see executive summary or full report - both PDFs)

---

Here's the deck I am presenting from:

Springtime for publishers - 20120711 from Richard Akerman

Since the presentation, there have been two important developments:

• On July 16, 2012 the UK government announced it would "open up publicly funded research"
• On February 22, 2013 the US government announced its response to the We the People petition (which by then had reached over 65,000 signatures): Increasing Public Access to the Results of Scientific Research - also see White House blog post Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research

Twitter archive from Canadian Association of Learned Journals 2012

Here is the Storify of the livetweeting from CALJ 2012.  There were also some side discussions that I will capture in another post.  The hashtag was #calj2012.  @scilib is me.

CISTI / DataCite Canada - presentations for Open Access Week 2011

Two presentations for Open Access Week 2011:

Introduction to DataCite Canada

Karen Morgenroth (CISTI) & Wendy Watkins (Data Centre- Library); Monday, October 24, 2011; 2:00-3:00pm; Room 235 Library [Carleton U, Ottawa]

...

Karen Morgenroth will discuss DataCite Canada's technical solutions for registration. It will also look at DataCite Canada's beta project with several Canadian data centres, including Carleton University.

Carleton's pilot involves the Millennium Scholarship Foundation Research Data holdings, a unique and valuable collection rescued by the Data Centre. Wendy Watkins will provide an overview of the resource, its importance to scholarlship and the progress of the project to date.  Assigning persistent identifiiers to this collection will mean that scholars and students will be able to find and use the resource in the future.

from Carleton Library - Scholarly Communications: OA Events

Also see this document (PDF) from CARL with information about registering for in-person or webcast.

Open Access to Data: New Initiatives and the Challenges of Data Management

Date: Thursday, October 27.   Time: 1:00-3:00

Location: Ante Chamber 3129DV,  U of T Mississauga.

Join us for a panel presentation and discussion of new initiatives and challenges associated with opening access to national, regional, municipal and research data.

...

Panel members: 

• Steve Czajka, OLS, OLIP, Supervisor, Information Planning, City of Mississauga Planning and Building Department, Policy Planning Division
• Ron Jaros MES, MCIP, RPP, OLS, OLIP, Planning Manager, Information and Intelligence Team, Region of Peel
• Diane Carley, Digital Initiatives Analyst,  Project Manager - DataCite Canada, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information
• Andrew Nicholson, GIS and Data Librarian U of T Mississauga Library  
• Berenica Vejvoda, Data Librarian, Data Liberation Initiative Representative, Map & Data Library University of Toronto Libraries.

from University of Toronto (Mississauga) - Join Us for 2011 Events

For other events from Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) members, see 2011 Events @ CARL Libraries.

Twitter:

• Karen Morgenroth @kmorgenroth
• Diane Carley @dianecarley
• DataCite Canada @datacitecanada
• DataCite @datacite

AusGOAL: licensing for Australian government information

Licensing framework for Australian government information.

You will find very few references to ‘public sector information’ on the AusGOAL website.  That’s because AusGOAL is focussed on open access and licensing of ‘publicly funded information’.  We are partnering with organisations across a range of sectors that produce or administer publicly funded information, with the ultimate aim of uniting all of Australia’s publicly funded information, including PSI, under one open access and licensing framework.

AusGOAL blog - AusGOAL is Online - July 7, 2011

Main site: http://www.ausgoal.gov.au/

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/AusGOALgovau

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)

Via the OKFN open-government mailing list: AusGOAL is Online

open access to publicly-funded EU research and data

In a speech to the LIBER 40th Annual Conference (Liber 2011) conference, Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda stated that the European Commission will be extending open access requirements so that it covers all EU-funded research as a principle, and she mentions that she is working to extend the current OpenAIRE infrastructure to include scientific data.  She also talks about the key role of research librarians to preserve scientific research & data.

She briefly discusses the Europeana repository, including full-text search, and a goal to hold 30 million digital objects by 2015.

Here's her presentation (YouTube video)

In case you're wondering about the first library she mentions at the beginning, I think she's referring to Nineveh.

She has a blog http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/neelie-kroes/ and frequently tweets from @NeelieKroesEU

The Liber conference tweeted from @liber2011bcn and used hashtag #liber2011

Video link via @carenmilloy via @ccbuhr

SPARC 2008 liveblog experiment

Just an experiment with CoverItLive - may fail totally, we'll see.

enabling IR compliance by pre-populating

I wanted to highlight some great work by Mark Leggott and his team at UPEI in building a system that demonstrates how you can connect a bunch of services and technologies together using a good platform, in order to get a powerful combined experience.

In brief (in my understanding), the Repository in a Box takes as input the metadata of your institution's academic output, then based on that metadata creates accounts for individual academics listing all of their papers, and on a per-article-record basis adds information from SHERPA/ROMEO about the policy of the publisher on OA, and an OpenURL link so you get to publisher and other appropriate copies.

So in a case where the policy allows deposit of the post-print PDF from the publisher, you're one click away from depositing that article.  If not, the author has all the metadata needed to find the right version to submit.

I think this is brilliant.

The only thing I've seen that is similar is BibApp (see Code4Lib 2007, and IDEALS@UIUC: BibApp Presentations).  I saw that at Open Repositories 2008.

official press release about NRC repository

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CISTI has released its official PR on the upcoming repository.

NRC Publications Archive: Extending the reach and increasing the impact of NRC research

It includes some clarifications about what will be stored and the extent of access that can be provided.</marketing-mode>

Steve has some notes about the underlying technical architecture.

Mandatory IR deposit as of 2009 for National Research Council Canada

From an internal email (with permission)

[The NRC Senior Executive Committee] SEC has established a policy making it mandatory, starting in January 2009, for NRC institutes to deposit copies of all peer-reviewed publications (articles, proceedings, books, book chapters) and technical reports in [the forthcoming NRC Institutional Repository, to be called] NPArC. The SEC has also approved an update to NRC Form 22 Licence to Publish (Crown Copyright) that will explicitly state NRC’s intention to deposit these publications in NPArC.

As this blog is by no means an official source of information about my organisation, if you have any questions I ask that you go through regular NRC or CISTI communications channels.

http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/newsroom/index_e.html

http://cisti-icist.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/media/newsroom_e.html

UPDATE 2008-07-23: There is now an official press release from CISTI.

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

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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
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