Comments for COAR

Comment on Maximizing the visibility of research outputs: COAR call for action by IC, NU

IC, NU — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 15:59:46 +0000

The matter is not as black and white as you make it.

Elsevier made specific changes, and engaged in specific actions that allow it maintain a tighter grip on scientific research, and even affect laws on its distribution. What I read above is not an aimless attack but a concerned letter in response to these specific actions taken by Elsevier. For example, I learned above that (shockingly) that if you made a few changes to you manuscript in peer review, the new Elsevier pre-print guidelines prohibit its posting on the arXiv. Because, apparently, the free work of the editor and reviewer was some Elsevier added as “value”? RMS, do you consider this a positive change?

Furthermore, perhaps your comment is tongue-in-cheek, but the Open Access Only publishers you list would get you laughed out of any academic department. Bentham is considered an “academic vanity press” and “predatory” (see the full report at http://carbon.ucdenver.edu/~jbeall/Beall's%20List%20of%20Predatory,%20Open-Access%20Publishers%202012.pdf ).

No one is trying to take away the rightfully obtained copyrights of Elsevier, it is a matter of Elsevier’s business model being essentially a racket: papers are free (funded by taxpayers), editors are free, then Elsevier sells back the same work to the same researchers (the taxpayer pays again) at absurd (this is key here) prices. Meanwhile, Elsevier lobbies the lawmakers to prevent any possibility the taxpayer won’t have to pay up dearly (keyword) to read the taxpayer-funded research.

Comment on Maximizing the visibility of research outputs: COAR call for action by Alicia Wise

Alicia Wise — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:29:17 +0000

Hi Norbert,

Perhaps the best response is a simple one. Your readers may be interested to read for themselves a summary of Elsevier’s open access options at http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/intro.cws_home/open_access_mechanisms

I am very happy to talk to you, or any COAR member, at any time. With kind wishes,

Alicia (@wisealic)

Comment on Maximizing the visibility of research outputs: COAR call for action by RMS, KUL

RMS, KUL — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:05:49 +0000

This is yet another exaggerated attack on Elsevier by the same people who have benefited from publishing in Elsevier and the like to reach their present academic positions. Please, be civil, stop attacking Elsevier, they are only seeking to protect their rightfully obtained copyrights. Instead, start supporting open access publishers and journals (eg. Hindawi, Bentham, MDPI…) by actually publishing your “best papers” in them and not just blogging about OA.

Comment on Maximizing the visibility of research outputs: COAR call for action by Trix Bakker, Vrije universiteit Amsterdam – University Library

Trix Bakker, Vrije universiteit Amsterdam – University Library — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:47:55 +0000

Open access has to be promoted and not restricted like Elsevier does. It’s great that COAR is taking a stand in this case and supports the boycott against Elsevier.

Comment on Interoperability Resources You Can’t Live Without by Wolfgang Riese, ZBW

Wolfgang Riese, ZBW — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:50:28 +0000

Hi, here at the ZBW – German National Library of Economics – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, which is the world’s largest specialist library for economics the focus for “Interoperability Resources”, with our open access repository EconStor, lies on: OAI-PMH, file exchange based on ReDIF (from RePEc) and web services for Linked Open Data. EconStor currently (Nov., 2011) hosts approximately 32,000 full text oa documents. It is important for us to share our metadata with e.g. economistsonline, LeibnizOpen and BASE. This we do achieve through OAI-PMH dissemination. As a DINI certified repository we offer special sets for the ddc and document types of the available oa documents on our server. For the best possible quality of the harvested metadata we not only offer Dublin Core but also DIDL/MODS a format with a much finer granularity of information. As a aubject repository in economics we also offer a special service of disseminating the metadata via RePEc and SSRN two of the most renowned service providers for economics and social sciences. By integrating LOD for standardized vocabularies – currently STW and JEL – we try to enhance the user experience of our visitors. In the near future we also plan to use the additional sources of the SWD, TheSoz, Agrovoc and DBpedia via the STW Web Services to semantically enrich the search and ingest facilities of EconStor.

Comment on General Forum – Interoperability Challenges by Fredrick Kiwuwa Lugya, Makerere University

Fredrick Kiwuwa Lugya, Makerere University — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 15:08:13 +0000

After a discussion with colleagues from Makerere University Library and Consortium of Uganda University Libraries, the following are the challenges we see coming as a result of OA Initiative:
1. Before, authors could bear with the challenges of doing research and continuously edit there research papers as per the publisher’s standards without worrying about publishing costs. Now that a research has to pay for publishing costs, it means that researchers from poor countries will fail to be promoted because they cannot publish their works in some of these very prestigious journal titles.
2. While universities can include such publisher fees as part of their budgets to give to researchers to publish their works, this will create and add to the already existing politics among these poor universities and will create low research output. Researchers may lose motivation as they may failure to withstand the challenges of politics.
3. Marginalized disciplines and professions like Library and information science, may not gain from such budgets as more prestigious disciplines will continue to enjoy such budgets and priority will be given to them.
4. To have quality research in IR, it will require having editorial committees so that researchers can have their research considered for tenure. The challenge with this is sustainability of such committees requires funding that the university may not have in place.
Solutions:
1. Need to have a statement in our OA policies that commits universities to have such budgets and give guidance how different disciplines can share without marginalizing the poor disciplines.

Please contact me on skype ID for further discussion. flugya1

Comment on Resources by COAR

COAR — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 15:54:39 +0000

Thanks for the hint. The link has been updated.

Comment on Resources by Stellenbosch University

Stellenbosch University — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 07:21:43 +0000

Please update the IR Wiki link above to point to:
http://wiki.lib.sun.ac.za/index.php/SUNScholar/IR

Thx

Comment on Interoperability Resources You Can’t Live Without by Maurice Vanderfeesten, SURF

Maurice Vanderfeesten, SURF — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:32:33 +0000

Just a comment; the Knowledge Exchange Working Group for Interoperable Digital Repositories is working on the theme “authority files”. Because many repository administrator employees would like to have an auto-fill-in function that automatically completes the metadata fields while typing. Yet these type-suggestions must come from an international authority. Otherwise many typing variances result in ambiguation. These authoritive names can be grouped around for example: author names, journal titles, publisher names, academic organisations, funding bodies, etc.
Knowledge Exchange IDR WG

In September 2011 a Library seminar was held around ontologies and classifications. http://seminar.udcc.org/2011/programme.htm

I would be nice for COAR to keep track / create an inventory on 1. what the authority files are. 2. what their web-location is and 3. what an ‘authority’ in what respective context. -technical- 4. what API standards they use to make repository systems easily adapt auto-fill-in functionality.

The big step is aligning all political organisations for COAR to be authoritve in semantic interoperability for repository and related systems.

Comment on Major Challenges by Frank Manista, Jorum/Mimas

Frank Manista, Jorum/Mimas — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:55:07 +0000

We also use DSpace, and have found it very useful in moving us forward as an open repository. Previously, we had a split, as JorumOpen and a repository with resources carrying more restricted licences. One main issue creating some problems with interoperability is re-licensing those resources which do not carry a CC licence. It is very difficult to track down the depositors, not to mention getting the 3rd party stuff sorted. Secondly, on a more technical end of things, authorisation using Shibboleth can often lead to problems, particularly when some institutions use Athens. On our end, we often cannot do anything if another institution’s contract with Athens, for example, has not been renewed properly.

I think one of the major barriers to implementing interoperability guidelines is a lack of communication among institutions. There remains some significant distrust, which means that the ability to share and find resources is not always as easy as it should be.