|
|
Weekly News Digest
 |
October 23, 2018 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
|
Harvard University Unveils New OA License for Researchers
The Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication introduced the voluntary Individual Open-Access License (IOAL), which all Harvard researchers can use regardless of whether they are faculty members—for example, they can be administrators, librarians, post-docs, or students. It gives everyone the same benefits: Harvard and authors both get non-exclusive rights. This means that authors have more rights to reuse their own works than would be given to them by standard publishers; they retain ownership and copyright. And Harvard can make the works available in its university OA repository.The office notes, “The IOAL is a key step for Harvard staff and students who want to open their scholarly articles, and share them on the web, reuse them in publications, conferences, teaching, or other purposes.” For more information, read the news.
Clarivate Analytics and the Chinese Academy of Science Highlight Top Research Areas
Clarivate Analytics partnered with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to publish their fifth annual report, “Research Fronts 2018” (registration required). It identifies 138 prominent subspecialties in 10 broad areas of the sciences and social studies determined by an analysis of clusters of highly cited scientific papers (aka “core papers”) from 2012 to 2017.According to Clarivate Analytics, “Understanding the latest developments in a given field provides insights into future trends—this could help researchers looking for new areas of research, assist with policy decisions on funding and patent applications or to make informed decisions on planned collaborations with other research institutions.” For more information, read the blog post.
figshare Publishes Report on Open Data
figshare released “The State of Open Data 2018,” its third annual report of survey results on attitudes toward and experiences with open data and articles from industry experts. It finds that open data is increasingly important to researchers. Other findings include the following:- 64% of respondents revealed they made their data openly available in 2018, a 7% rise on 2016
- Data citations are motivating more respondents to make data openly available, increasing 7% from 2017 to 46%
- The percentage of respondents in support of national mandates for open data is higher at 63% than in 2017 (55%)
For more information, read the blog post.
Twitter Makes 'Bad-Faith Actor' Accounts Available for Research
Twitter announced that it is “releasing all the accounts and related content associated with potential information operations that we have found on our service since 2016. We had previously disclosed these activities, but are now releasing substantially more information about them to enable independent academic research and investigation.” This effort is part of Twitter’s goal to provide regular updates on attempts by foreign entities to interfere with political conversations on its platform. The datasets it is releasing are composed of more than 4,600 accounts and more than 10 million tweets. “For our part,” Twitter says, “we are committed to understanding how bad-faith actors use our services. We will continue to proactively combat nefarious attempts to undermine the integrity of Twitter, while partnering with civil society, government, our industry peers, and researchers to improve our collective understanding of coordinated attempts to interfere in the public conversation.” For more information, read the blog post.
Deloitte and Georgia Tech Study How to Improve Public Higher Education
Deloitte’s Center for Higher Education Excellence joined forces with Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities to release “The Future(s) of Public Higher Education,” which “lays out five new models to address the new realities of and demands on public higher education institutions and improve the student experience,” according to the press release. They are the Entrepreneurial University, the Sharing University, the Experiential University, the “Subscription” University, and the Partnership University.The report also identifies common elements that can introduce system-level changes, including effective leadership, a new focus for the university system office, and an institutional culture that puts students at the center. For more information and details about the five university models, read the press release.
Cambridge University Press Makes Four Journals Gold OA
Cambridge University Press announced that four more of its subscription-model journals will move to gold OA as of Jan. 1, 2019: Epidemiology & Infection, Genetics Research, Primary Health Care Research and Development, and Netherlands Journal of Geosciences. Fiona Hutton, OA publisher at Cambridge University Press, says, “Flipping these titles to open access will increase both the visibility and the impact of the high-quality research they contain. This in turn, will strengthen their position as highly influential publications in their respective fields. These are fields that are embracing OA and flipping will help the journals to better serve their communities.”The most-downloaded articles this year from each journal will be freely available until the end of October 2018. More Cambridge University Press journals will move to OA in 2020. For more information, read the news.
The Library of Congress Starts a Crowdsourcing Program
The Library of Congress (LC) launched a crowdsourcing program so the public can help “improve discovery and access across our diverse collections through transcription and tagging.” It is looking “for people who are ready to be inspired and engaged by the stories inside the Library’s incredible collections—whether they connect with extraordinary historical events or the recognizably mundane.”According to the LC, “The program is grounded in what we’ve learned through our previous experiences with participatory projects at the Library, including image description in Flickr and our newspaper captioning pilot Beyond Words.” It is also designed to exemplify the LC’s FY2019–2023 Strategic Plan. For more information, read the blog post.
EFF Debuts the Coders' Rights Project to Protect Computer Security Researchers
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) rolled out the Coders’ Rights Project “to connect the work of security research with the fundamental rights of its practitioners throughout the Americas. The project seeks to support the right of free expression that lies at the heart of researchers’ creations and use of computer code to examine computer systems, and relay their discoveries among their peers and to the wider public.” EFF is seeking to protect computer security researchers who use their talents to help the public instead of hacking for nefarious reasons.In conjunction with the project, EFF published “Protecting Security Researchers’ Rights in the Americas,” which highlights the human rights standards that lawmakers, judges, and the IACHR (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) “should use to protect the fundamental rights of security researchers.” For more information, read the news.
Wolters Kluwer Health Offers Online Resource Centers to Medical Societies
Wolters Kluwer Health created an online solution for its medical society partners that provides access to comprehensive digital libraries of journals, books, videos, and other multimedia resources. The first partner to sign up is the Orthopaedic Trauma Association (OTA), which offers the solution as OTA Online Trauma Access. Members can search within books and journals from Wolters Kluwer’s Lippincott portfolio and get direct access to continuously updated textbook chapters.For more information, read the press release.
BMC Takes Stock of Recent Accomplishments
BMC rolled out its “Annual Review 2018” research-in-progress report. “Over the past year at BMC, we’ve been working as hard as ever to improve our publishing services, continually innovating to meet the needs of our authors and the wider research community,” says Rachel Burley, publishing director.The company is piloting a project to increase transparency in the submission and peer-review process, and it is working on expanding beyond biomedicine into physical and applied sciences by introducing new journals in these fields over the next year. Additionally, from July 2017 to July 2018, BMC published almost 32,500 OA articles in 300-plus journals. For more information, read the blog post.
Send correspondence concerning the Weekly News Digest to NewsBreaks Editor
Brandi Scardilli
|
