Two students and a volunteer team of programmers and designers recently unveiled the Open Access Button. The OA Button is a browser-based tool that allows people to report when they’ve run into a paywall while trying to access material online. The OA Button is very easy to use. You simply… read more
Archives for November 2013
Open access monographs
The momentum towards open access journal articles picked up substantially this year. Even though we’re still a long way from the ideal world we wish we had, where all academic scholarship can be freely read and used by anyone, anywhere, at least we are well on the way. More and… read more
OER bill introduced
A bill was introduced into the U.S. Senate that would create a competitive grant program to create open educational textbooks – meaning textbooks that are freely available online. The bill, called the Affordable College Textbook Act, was introduced by Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Al Franken (D-MN). Senate bill 1704: A… read more
New preprint repository: bioRxiv
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has launched a preprint repository for the biological sciences called bioRxiv. bioRxiv is a place for scientists to deposit their unpublished manuscripts. This is similar to the preprint repository, arXiv, which has been in existence since 1991 and serves mainly researchers in physics, mathematics, and computer… read more
Letter in Support of FASTR
The leaders of dozens of universities have added their names to a letter written in support of the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR). If passed, FASTR would provide for public access to the results of much of the government-funded research in the United States. SPARC letter: http://www.sparc.arl.org/letter-congress-higher-education-community-supports-FASTR
Digital Public Library of America
The Chronicle featured a post about the DPLA Tuesday morning, so I thought I’d go over and check it out. DPLA, the Digital Public Library of America, has as its goal to aggregate the records of mostly open content from libraries, archives and museums all around the country. So, for… read more
