SCIENCE’S PIRATE QUEEN; The Verge, February 8, 2018

 Ian Graber-Stiehl, The Verge; SCIENCE’S PIRATE QUEEN

"The legal campaigns against Sci-Hub have — through the Streisand effect — made the site more well-known than most mainstay repositories, and Elbakyan more famous than legal Open Access champions like Suber. The threat posed by ACS’s injunction against Sci-Hub has increased support for the site from web activists organizations such as the EFF, which considesr the site “a symptom of a serious problem: people who can’t afford expensive journal subscriptions, and who don’t have institutional access to academic databases, are unable to use cutting-edge scientific research.”

The effort may backfire. It does nothing to address disappointment scientists feel about how paywalls hide their work. Meanwhile, Sci-Hub has been making waves that might carry it further to a wider swath of both the public and the scientific community. And though Elbakyan might be sailing in dangerous waters, what’s to stop idealistic scientists who are frustrated with the big publishers from handing over their login credentials to Sci-Hub’s pirate queen?"

Cloudflare Terminates Service to 'The Pirate Bay of Science'; MotherBoard, February 9, 2018

Rebecca Flowers, MotherBoard; Cloudflare Terminates Service to 'The Pirate Bay of Science'

"On February 3, the Twitter account for Sci-Hub tweeted a screenshot of an alleged email from Cloudflare, the content delivery network provider for Sci-Hub (which acts as an intermediary between the user and website host), informing Sci-Hub that its service would be terminated in 24 hours. At the time of writing, the main Sci-Hub domain is inaccessible on the web, but the mirror sites mentioned in the screenshotted email from Cloudflare are still active.

Cloudflare’s termination of service is due to a court injunction against Sci-Hub, a Cloudflare spokesperson told me over the phone. That order was handed down by a federal judge in November when the American Chemical Society, another academic publisher, won $4.8 million in damages against Sci-Hub. The decision also included an injunction requiring search engines and internet service providers to block Sci-Hub, a digital blockade unusual for the US."

Should Open Access And Open Data Come With Open Ethics?; Forbes, July 20, 2017

Kalev Leetaru, Forbes; Should Open Access And Open Data Come With Open Ethics?

"In the end, the academic community must decide if “openness” and “transparency” apply only to the final outputs of our scholarly institutions, with individual researchers, many from fields without histories of ethical prereview, are exclusively empowered to decide what constitutes ethical and moral conduct and just how much privacy should be permitted in our digital society, or if we should add “open ethics” to our focus on open access and open data and open universities up to public discourse on just what the future of “big data” research should look like."

Intellectual Freedom and Open Access: Working Toward a Common Goal?; American Libraries, June 25, 2017

Jennifer Putnam Davis, American Libraries; Intellectual Freedom and Open Access: Working Toward a Common Goal?

"How do the principles of intellectual freedom and open access intersect? That was the topic of the “Intellectual Freedom and Open Access: Working Toward a Common Goal?” panel discussion, sponsored by the Intellectual Freedom Round Table, which addressed the relationship from several different perspectives."

Public deserves open access; Daily Press, June 10, 2017

Marisa Porto, Daily Press; Public deserves open access

"American writer Walter Lippman once wrote, "The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear."

His quote describes perfectly the mission of a newspaper and its staff.

That mission remains at the heart of why Americans should be concerned about the state of the Freedom of Information Act around this nation.

This year alone, journalists from my news organization have filed dozens of FOIA requests. The topics they asked about ranged from bus accidents to crime statistics to how millions of dollars of taxpayer money was spent on a private business venture at our local airport. The last request sparked a statewide investigation, prompted a change in state law and has caused the firing of the airport director and the resignation of one top city official — so far...

Playwright Arthur Miller once said, "A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself."

Let's keep the conversation going."

The findings of medical research are disseminated too slowly; The Economist, March 25, 2017

The Economist; The findings of medical research are disseminated too slowly

"As more researchers submit preprints and make their data available to others, they may find the comments they receive regarding their work helpful. Even the kudos of publication in the premier journals may slowly fade in the face of data about a piece of work’s actual, rather than potential, impact (see article). Having survived three and a half centuries, scientific journals will no doubt be around for a long time yet. With luck, though, they will return to being science’s servants, rather than its ringmasters."

A Scholarly Sting Operation Shines a Light on ‘Predatory’ Journals; New York Times, March 22, 2017

Gina Kolata, New York Times; 

A Scholarly Sting Operation Shines a Light on ‘Predatory’ Journals

"The open-access business model spawned a shadowy world of what have been called predatory journals. They may have similar names to legitimate journals, but exist by publishing just about anything sent to them for a fee that can range from under $100 to thousands of dollars."

Open Science: Beyond Open Access webinar; Library Journal, February 21, 2017

Library Journal; Open Science: Beyond Open Access webinar

"Open Science: Beyond Open Access

Presented by: Dove Press & Library Journal

Event Date & Time: Tuesday, February 21st, 2017, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM ET / 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM PT

Collaboration can be a major driver for success. When data is shared among researchers, analysts and stakeholders, the opportunities for innovation and development increase exponentially, particularly in the medical and science fields. To be most effective, the Open Science framework demands more than simply sharing data–it requires dedication, transparency and responsible publishing.

Join this webcast to learn from our panel of experts as they discuss the challenges and benefits of Open Science in the context of global health and medical concerns. They will explain how the disruptive concept of Open Data can reshape and improve the nature of research and results.

Panelists

• Dr. Eric Little, VP of Data Science, OSTHUS
• Dr. Robin Bloor, Chief Analyst, The Bloor Group
• Andrew Johnson, Research Data Librarian/Assistant Professor, University of Colorado Boulder

Moderator

• Rebecca Jozwiak, Editorial & Research Director, The Bloor Group"

No Deal: German Universities Prepare For Cut-Off From Elsevier Journals; Intellectual Property Watch, 12/16/16

Intellectual Property Watch; No Deal: German Universities Prepare For Cut-Off From Elsevier Journals:

"After licensing negotiations between German university libraries and Elsevier failed at the beginning of the month, over 60 university libraries in Germany are preparing to be cut off from hundreds of journals of the British publisher, after a standoff over pricing and access.

The university libraries organised in the DEAL initiative rejected an offer made by Elsevier earlier this month for a first nationwide licence, because of an aggressive pricing and flaws in the access models...

With the stop of the negotiations access to future journal editions be cut off on 1 January, when current licenses are expiring. But there will also be no access to archived editions of journals licensed under “individual e-packages for the economic sciences in particular,” according to the message."

Deep Dive: Open Access and Transforming the Future of Research; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 11/4/16

Gennie Gebhart, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); Deep Dive: Open Access and Transforming the Future of Research:

"Open access depends on more than removing cost barriers. It also means giving the public freedom to use research. Under the current academic publishing model, even the simple act of sharing can be a crime.

When Diego Gomez, a Master’s student in Colombia, shared a colleague’s thesis with other scientists over the Internet, he was doing what any grad student would do: sharing research he found useful so others could benefit from it. But the author of the paper filed a lawsuit, and Diego’s act of sharing became a copyright violation punishable by four to eight years in prison.

In the U.S., activist Aaron Swartz also met unjust charges on 13 criminal counts for downloading millions of articles from academic journal database JSTOR. The charges would have put him in jail for years under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

If other users see Diego’s or Aaron’s cases and fear the consequences that can come with copyright infringement allegations, everyday activities like sharing academic resources can become intimidating. These cases remind us that sharing and building on existing research is integral to the open access vision. That could mean anything from translation to remixing to large-scale analysis. In an open access world, these innovative, collaborative actions would not be criminal."

Elsevier’s New Patent for Online Peer Review Throws a Scare Into Open-Source Advocates; Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/1/16

Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education; Elsevier’s New Patent for Online Peer Review Throws a Scare Into Open-Source Advocates:

"Patents on software can be controversial. And often, so is the company Elsevier, the giant journal publisher. So when word hit the internet starting on Tuesday night that Elsevier had just been awarded a patent for an "online peer-review system and method," reaction from people aligned with the publishing and open-source worlds came swiftly on Twitter and in other online venues, much of it reflecting suspicion about the company’s motives...

The concern revolves around the patent Elsevier received for its five-year-old "article-transfer service," a propriety online system the company uses to manage journal-article submissions and the ensuing peer reviews."

Stand Up for Open Access. Stand Up for Diego.; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 8/9/16

Ana Acosta and Elliot Harmon, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); Stand Up for Open Access. Stand Up for Diego. :

"The movement for open access is not new, but it seems to be accelerating. Even since we started following Diego’s case in 2014, many parts of the scientific community have begun to fully embrace open access publishing. Dozens of universities have adopted open access policies requiring that university research be made open, either through publishing in open access journals or by archiving papers in institutional repositories. This year’s groundbreaking discovery on gravitational waves—certainly one of the most important scientific discoveries of the decade—was published in an open access journal under a Creative Commons license. Here in the U.S., it’s becoming more and more clear that an open access mandate for federally funded research will be written into law; it’s just a matter of when. The tide is changing, and open access will win.

But for researchers like Diego who face prison time right now, the movement is not accelerating quickly enough. Open access could have saved Diego from the risk of spending years in prison.

Many people reading this remember the tragic story of Aaron Swartz. When Aaron died, he was facing severe penalties for accessing millions of articles via MIT’s computer network without "authorization." Diego’s case differs from Aaron’s in a lot of ways, but in one important way, they’re exactly the same: if all academic research were published openly, neither of them would have been in trouble for anything.

When laws punish intellectual curiosity and scientific research, everyone suffers; not just researchers, but also the people and species who would benefit from their research. Copyright law is supposed to foster innovation, not squash it."

Zika Data From the Lab, and Right to the Web; New York Times, 7/18/16

Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times; Zika Data From the Lab, and Right to the Web:

"Dr. O’Connor’s decision was the most radical manifestation of a trend already underway. In early February, more than 30 of the most prominent academic journals, research institutions and research funders signed a “Statement on Data Sharing in Public Health Emergencies” in which the journals agreed to make all articles about the Zika virus available free instead of charging their subscription fees, which can be hundreds of dollars.

The journals also agreed to consider articles that had first been posted for comment on public forums like bioRxiv, which is hosted by the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. The funders agreed to make everyone receiving their money share data as widely as possible...

“I never planned to be an evangelist,” he said. “I was happy toiling in anonymity, so this is a surreal experience. We all grew up in the same system: You do a study, you submit it to a journal, and your place in the hierarchy depends on the quality of the journal it appears in.”

“If it’s all you’ve known, you assume it’s the right way. But if you’ve got data that can contribute to the public health response during an epidemic — is it really yours to hang onto?”"

Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?; Ars Technica, 6/7/16

Glyn Moody, Ars Technica; Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it? :

"In 1836, Anthony Panizzi, who later became principal librarian of the British Museum, gave evidence before a parliamentary select committee. At that time, he was only first assistant librarian, but even then he had an ambitious vision for what would one day became the British Library. He told the committee:

I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect...

The example of The Pirate Bay shows that the current game of domain whack-a-mole is not one that the lawyers are likely to win. But even if they did, it is too late.

Science magazine's analysis of Sci-Hub downloads reveals that the busiest city location is Tehran. It wrote: "Much of that is from Iranians using programs to automatically download huge swathes of Sci-Hub’s papers to make a local mirror of the site. Rahimi, an engineering student in Tehran, confirms this. 'There are several Persian sites similar to Sci-Hub'."

In this, people are following in the footsteps of Aaron Swartz, with the difference that we don't know what he intended to do with the millions of articles he had downloaded, whereas those mirroring Sci-Hub certainly intend to share the contents widely. It would be surprising if others around the world, especially in emerging economies, are not busily downloading all 45 million papers to do the same."

The Future Of Open Access: Why Has Academia Not Embraced The Internet Revolution?; Forbes, 4/29/16

Kalev Leetaru, Forbes; The Future Of Open Access: Why Has Academia Not Embraced The Internet Revolution? :

"One of the most remarkable aspects of the story of the web’s evolution is that the collective output of the world’s universities has remained largely absent from the open online world, even as most other forms of information have shifted to some form of open online access. In the case of encyclopedias, entirely new forms of collaborative knowledge documentation like Wikipedia have emerged, while journalism has shifted to free advertising-supported distribution and even music and videos are increasingly legally available through ad-supported streaming services or affordable licensed download services.

Academic papers, the lifeblood of the scholarly world of academia, have resisted this transition. To those outside academia it might be surprising that most universities don’t publish all of their books, papers, presentations and course materials on their websites for the world to access...

Yesterday Science published a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at Sci-Hub, one of the most infamous academic pirating sites, which provides free access to more than 50 million illegally acquired papers. One of the most fascinating findings is that its download traffic comes not exclusively from the developing world for which journal subscriptions are often claimed to be inaccessible, but also extensively from major Western universities which likely have legal subscriptions to the journals already. One of the reasons for this, the article claims, is the cumbersome and difficult-to-use web portals that university libraries provide to their holdings, making it incredibly difficult to locate a paper even if the university has a legal subscription to the journal. Having spent more than a decade and a half in academia at multiple institutions from public to private, I can personally attest to just how difficult it can be to navigate library portal systems to locate a particular paper...

As the drumbeat of open access continues to grow, the fierce debate over the future of how academic research is published and distributed will only rage louder. In parallel, as the trend towards open access expands to data sharing and replication, the pressure to change how academia does business will reach a breaking point where change will become inevitable. In the end, it is a fascinating commentary that the world of academia, from which the modern web sprung, has been among the most resistant to change and one of the last to embrace the internet revolution."

Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet; New York Times, 3/15/16

Amy Harmon, New York Times; Handful of Biologists Went Rogue and Published Directly to Internet:

"On Feb. 29, Carol Greider of Johns Hopkins University became the third Nobel Prize laureate biologist in a month to do something long considered taboo among biomedical researchers: She posted a report of her recent discoveries to a publicly accessible website, bioRxiv, before submitting it to a scholarly journal to review for “official’’ publication.

It was a small act of information age defiance, and perhaps also a bit of a throwback, somewhat analogous to Stephen King’s 2000 self-publishing an e-book or Radiohead’s 2007 release of a download-only record without a label. To commemorate it, she tweeted the website’s confirmation under the hashtag #ASAPbio, a newly coined rallying cry of a cadre of biologists who say they want to speed science by making a key change in the way it is published...

The delays prevent scientists from showing off their most recent work to prospective employers or benefactors. They have also, some researchers say, begun to look faintly absurd against the general expectations for speed and openness in the not-so-new digital age. With the rapid spread of the Zika virus, for instance, several journals signed a statement promising that scientists would not be penalized for immediately releasing their findings, given the potential benefit for public health, in turn prompting some scientists to ask, why draw the line at Zika?"

Should All Research Papers Be Free?; New York Times, 3/12/16

Kate Murphy, New York Times; Should All Research Papers Be Free? :

"Possibly the biggest barrier to open access is that scientists are judged by where they have published when they compete for jobs, promotions, tenure and grant money. And the most prestigious journals, such as Cell, Nature and The Lancet, also tend to be the most protective of their content.

“The real people to blame are the leaders of the scientific community — Nobel scientists, heads of institutions, the presidents of universities — who are in a position to change things but have never faced up to this problem in part because they are beneficiaries of the system,” said Dr. Eisen. “University presidents love to tout how important their scientists are because they publish in these journals.”

Until the system changes, Ms. Elbakyan said she would continue to distribute journal articles to whoever wants them. Paraphrasing part of the United Nations Charter, she said, “Everyone has the right to freely share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”"

Libraries’ Love Your Data Week raises awareness among research universities; Penn State News, 2/5/16

Penn State News; Libraries’ Love Your Data Week raises awareness among research universities:

"During the week of Feb. 8, university research libraries across the United States, including Penn State’s University Libraries — @psulibs on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram — are participating in a grassroots social media campaign to spread awareness about the importance of documenting, sharing, preserving and making available research data.

Love Your Data Week — hashtag #lyd16 — is about recognizing the ways in which individuals can start caring for data now, adopting consistent practices, modeling and implementing them for generations to come. Managing data in a conscionable way, with attention as well to affordances for reuse, is both a responsibility to the scholarly record and an important public good.

University students, in particular, are learning and researching in an era of increasing compliance with federal funding agencies’ requirements for public access to research results, including data. The themes of Love Your Data Week prompt faculty and staff to ask: How do we teach students to be responsible stewards of their scholarly outputs? How do we instill in them an awareness of potential future users of their work — a perspective that affects how data gets shared or not, is made accessible or not?"

Sara Fine Institute presents: Christine Borgman, "Big Data, Open Data, and Scholarship": Mon Feb 29th 3.00pm - 5.00pm, University of Pittsburgh

Sara Fine Institute presents: Christine Borgman, "Big Data, Open Data, and Scholarship" :

"Monday Feb 29th 3.00pm - 5.00pm

University Club, Ballroom A, 123 University Pl, Pittsburgh, PA 15260

"Big Data, Open Data, and Scholarship"

by Christine L. Borgman

Distinguished Professor & Presidential Chair in Information Studies

University of California, Los Angeles

Scholars gathered data long before the emergence of books, journals, libraries, publishers, or the Internet. Until recently, data were considered part of the process of scholarship, essential but largely invisible. In the “big data” era, the products of these research processes have become valuable objects in themselves to be captured, shared, reused, and sustained for the long term. Data also has become contentious intellectual property to be protected, whether for proprietary, confidentiality, competition, or other reasons. Public policy leans toward open access to research data, but rarely with the public investment necessary to sustain access. Enthusiasm for big data is obscuring the complexity and diversity of data in scholarship and the challenges for stewardship. Data practices are local, varying from field to field, individual to individual, and country to country. This talk will explore the stakes and stakeholders in research data and implications for policy and practice.

Join us Feb. 29, 2016 at 3pm at the University of Pittsburgh’s University Club (Ballroom A). This event is free to attend and no RSVP is required. A reception will follow."

Librarians Find Themselves Caught Between Journal Pirates and Publishers; Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/18/16

Corinne Ruff, Chronicle of Higher Education; Librarians Find Themselves Caught Between Journal Pirates and Publishers:

"The rise, fall, and resurfacing of a popular piracy website for scholarly-journal articles, Sci-Hub, has highlighted tensions between academic librarians and scholarly publishers.

Academics are increasingly turning to websites like Sci-Hub to view subscriber-only articles that they cannot obtain at their college or that they need more quickly than interlibrary loan can provide.

That trend puts librarians in an awkward position. While many are proponents of open access and understand the challenges scholars face in gaining access to information, they are also bound by their contracts with publishers, which obligate them to crack down on pirates. And while few, if any, librarians openly endorse piracy, many believe that the scholarly-publishing system is broken."