Open-Access

For once, I won’t write about a day here but about a week: this week is the Open Access week (OA week). In this fourth edition, it’s not time anymore to explain one more time what is Open Access (but if you still want to read about it, read the Wikipedia article or Peter Suber’s overview). This year, this week is defined as " an opportunity […] to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research". ...

Three years ago, I wrote about JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments. JoVE was a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. I recently discovered that since 2009, JoVE is now just a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. You can debate at length on whether JoVE was Open Access (as I thought) or not. I just think it’s sad although I understand their motives: in a recent exchange with them, they wrote they “handle most production of our content [themselves] and it is a very very costly operation”. ...

Aaron Swartz, a 24-year old hacker, was recently indicted on data theft charges for downloading over 4 million documents from JSTOR, a US-based online system for archiving academic journals. Mainstream media ( Reuters, Guardian, NYT, Time, …) reported this with a mix of facts and fiction. I guess that the recent attacks of hacking groups on well-known websites and the release of data they stole on the internet gave to this story some spice. ...

BioMed Central is one of the main Open Access publishers in the world of Science, Technology and Medicine. On a side note, that’s where I published my two articles (in Proteome Science and the Journal of Circadian Rhythms). One might think that, given their support to Open Access, they would also support Open Source software and Open Format documents. For the software side, it’s not very clear. Although they ask authors to consider releasing software described in publications under a free (or at least open source) license, they also support and advertise for a bunch of proprietary software. While it’s not a bad thing per se (it enlarges the number of potential authors), it’s sad to see they don’t cite popular free software like OpenOffice.org (to write your article), Gimp (to edit your figures) or Zotero (for reference management). These are the three main software in each category but the free software world has many more of them! ...

In my previous post, I was glad to see that the Journal of Visualized Experiments ( JoVE) was now indexed by PubMed. I then spent some time watching some very interesting videos. And I realized that something is missing … In my mind, I thought that third-party archiving (like arXiv or self-archiving) was one of the mandatory requirements for Open Access journals … and I was wrong. It seems JoVE is not giving the (technical) possibility to download the publication from their website (all what you can download is the abstract in text version). Now that this publication is a video and not a text/PDF version, it’s a problem for me (who cares?) and the Open Access movement (imho). ...

JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments is a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. Think of a YouTube-like service for the life-science community, add a quality control before publication and you’ll get the picture. As many other Open Access scientific journal, JoVE is now indexed in PubMed, the life-science publications directory. It’s nice to see interesting, open and innovative initiatives getting a “recognition” like this. ...

A few days ago, I was sad to see that the Association Electronique Libre (AEL) website was down and only replaced by two measly tags. For those who didn’t know it: The Association Electronique Libre is a belgian association protecting the fundamental rights in the information society. The Association Electronique Libre supports the freedoms of speech, press, and association on the Internet and any electronical mediums, the right to use encryption software for private communication, the right to write software unimpeded by private monopolies, the right to access and preserve public domain and free digital information. (from an old copy of the AEL website) ...

After the promotion of Open Access (see Bernard Rentier’s blog) and a history of publications in Open Access journals (see this last article from the Cyclotron Research Center in PLoS), the University of Liege is slowly slowly publishing Open Source software too. The last free software published is exams, an assessment management system (for on-line exams, …). They chose the GNU GPL 2, apparently without the possibility to upgrade to version 3 (I don’t know if it’s deliberate or not). And you can download the source code here. ...

In a somewhat strange move, Microsoft Research is going to sponsor BioMed Central 2007 Research Awards. Lee Dirks, director, scholarly communications, Microsoft Research: “We are very supportive of the open science movement and recognize that open access publication is an important component of overall scholarly communications.” I hope the other Microsoft divisions are going to follow this move and sponsor (or release their products as) Open Source and free software projects … More details on the announcement here.

Cambridge University Peter Murray Rust discovered he cannot have access to his article he paid for an Open Access publication in an Oxford University Press journal. This caused some discussions on /. but, as usual, it’s better to first have a look at Peter Suber blog to have an objective view on this.