open access week

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation as part of Open Access Week at the Ontario College of Art and Design University (ie. OCADU) on "predatory" open access journals. It seemed to be well-received at the time and since then I've gotten some positive feedback as well. So I thought I'd share the slides here in case others find what I did at OCADU useful in their own work. What I talked about is along the same lines as a post I published a while back on Some perspective on “predatory” open access journals. First of all, I'd like to thank Chris Landry of the OCADU Library for inviting me…
It's been kind of a crazy week for me, so I haven't really had much of a chance to contribute to or even read a lot of the Open Access Week calls to arms out there right now. So I thought I would kind of commandeer my Friday Fun silly lists habit and redirect that energy to open access. So here it is, from Peter Suber: Open access: six myths to put to rest The only way to provide open access to peer-reviewed journal articles is to publish in open access journals All or most open access journals charge publication fees Most author-side fees are paid by the authors themselves Publishing in a…
With Open Access Week next week, there could be no greater open access-related news here in Canada than that the three granting councils are coming together to draft a common Open Access Policy. Of those agencies (Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council and Canadian Institute of Health Research), the CIHR already has a OA policy in effect. The process will be to first release a draft policy based on the CIHR one and then consult widely in the various communities that are involved and come to an agreement for a new common policy…
As I mentioned way back on October 22nd, I was kindly invited to give a talk at the Brock University Physics Department as part of their seminar series. The talk was on Getting Your Science Online, a topic that I'm somewhat familiar with! Since it was coincidentally Open Access Week, I did kind of an A-Z of online science starting with the various open movements: access, data and notebooks. From there I did a quick tour of the whys and wherefores of blogs and Twitter. There was a good turnout of faculty and grad students with lots of great questions and feedback, some more skeptical that…
It seems that Brock University in St. Catherine's, Ontario really likes me. Two years ago, the Library kindly invited me to speak during their Open Access Week festivities. And this year the Physics Department has also very kindly invited me to be part of their Seminar Series, also to talk about Getting Your Science Online, this time during OA Week mostly by happy coincidence. It's tomorrow, Tuesday October 23, 2012 in room H313 at 12:30. Here's the abstract I've provided: Physicist and Reinventing Discovery author Michael Nielsen has said that due to the World Wide Web, “[t]he process of…
Ah, #OccupyScholComm. The perfect Open Access Week topic! And just like the broader Occupy protests movement, the aims and policy pronouncements of the "movement" are perhaps not as vague as they might seem to the casual observer. Basically, #OccupyScholComm is about scholars rejecting profit-driven toll-access publishing and taking back the control of their own scholarly output. Or something like that. Anyways, it all started with this tweet from OpenAccessHulk: OA HULK WANTS TO KNOW WHO TO OCCUPY! ELSEVIER!? ACS!? HARPERCOLLINS!? YOU NAME IT, OA HULK WILL OCCUPY AND SMASH! #…
As I mentioned a few days ago, the kind librarians of Brock University in St. Catherines, ON invited me to give a talk as part of their Open Access Week suite of events. I've included my slides for the presentation below. There was a small but engaged group of mostly librarians that turned up. Please don't let the high number of slides deter you from zipping through the presentation. A good chunk of the slides only have a couple of words on them and another good chunk are screen shots of xkcd strips. The slides are in our IR here and on Google Docs here. I'd like to thank Barbara…
The kind librarians at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario have invited me to help them celebrate Open Access Week! Their rather impressive lineup of OA Week events (and I'm not just saying this because I'm involved, believe me) is here. My part is a talk I'm giving on Wednesday: Wednesday, October 20 2-3:30 Exploring Open Science Join John Dupuis, Head of the Steacie Science & Engineering Library, York University, for a discussion of how Science and Technology academics and publishers are responding to the growing open access movement and the changing nature of research in…
It's Open Access Week this week and as part of the celebrations I thought I highlight a recent declaration by the Open Bibliographic Working Group on the Principles for Open Bibliographic Data. It's an incredible idea, one that I support completely -- the aim is to make bibliographic data open, reusable and remixable. Creating a bibliographic data commons would lead to many opportunities to create search and discovery tools that would be of great benefit to scholarship, education, research and development. I won't try and explain the details of the declaration since it's released under a CC…
A few weeks ago Bill Gasarch published his Journal Manifesto 2.0 on the Computational Complexity blog. Basically, his idea was to start a scholarly publishing revolution from the inside: Keep in mind: I am NOT talking to the NSF or to Journal publishes or to Conference organizers. I am NOT going to say what any of these people should do. I am talking to US, the authors of papers. If WE all follow this manifesto then the problems of high priced journals and limited access may partially go away on their own. To be briefer: To the extend that WE are the problem, WE can be the solution. It's a…