The University of California has expanded the reach of their open access policy by including all UC employees. The Presidential Open Access Policy builds on the Academic Senate open access policy and will include scholarly research authored by clinical faculty, lecturers, staff researchers, postdoc scholars, grad students, and librarians. You can… read more
Open access
Open Textbooks save students $1.5 million
The University of Minnesota announced today that the Open Textbook Network has saved students $1.5 million dollars through the adoption of open textbooks. The Open Textbook Library has over 200 open textbooks that anyone can use. For more information about this exciting achievement, see the official announcement: http://discover.umn.edu/news/teaching-education/u-ms-open-textbook-network-reports-student-savings-15-million-open-textbooks
OA Spectrum Evaluation Tool
SPARC has announced the launch of the Open Access Spectrum Evaluation Tool. The tool provides a concrete way to analyze the openness of a particular journal. The tool measures journal policies regarding reading/reuse rights, author posting rights, machine readability, compliance with funder & institutional mandates, and other openness indicators. Five hundred… read more
Academia.edu and open access
I just read an interesting blog post about Academia.edu by Gary Hall: http://www.garyhall.info/journal/2015/10/18/does-academiaedu-mean-open-access-is-becoming-irrelevant.html Academia.edu (and ResearchGate) come up quite frequently when I talk with faculty, postdocs, and grad students. I’ve always advised that it may be a good tool to use if you are trying to network with your colleagues, but… read more
What's the deal with Open Access?
Knowledge unfortunately isn’t free. Much of the research being conducted at universities, colleges, and institutes around the world is written up by professors, graduate students, and research associates and published in toll-access (subscription) journals. Anyone lacking a subscription to that journal will not be able to access the articles published there. This… read more
Repository competition for OA Week 2015
UT Libraries is having a competition to celebrate Open Access Week and to get library staff involved in using the repository. A permanent library staff member may participate by uploading content to Texas ScholarWorks (either on behalf of someone else or uploading their own content) or by talking to someone else… read more
Discrete Analysis – a diamond open access journal
I just came across a blog post about a “diamond” open access journal called, Discrete Analysis. It’s being described as diamond open access because neither the readers nor the authors pay. The journal sits on top of the arXiv infrastructure but maintains the traditional peer review process. The journal will… read more
How has open scholarship helped you?
The Advancing Research Communication & Scholarship (ARCS) conference happened for the first time this past spring. One of the conversations from that conference was about the negative information some people hear about sharing their scholarship more openly. You know, the “if you share your data you’ll get scooped” warning. The… read more
Travel Scholarship Available
Are you interested in creating better access to research and educational materials? Do you want to help make that a reality on the UT Austin campus? If so, please consider applying for a travel scholarship to attend OpenCon 2015. OpenCon is an academic conference for students and early career researchers… read more
FASTR reintroduced
The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) bill has been reintroduced with bipartisan support. One difference between FASTR and the White House memo of a couple years ago, is that FASTR requires an electronic copy of a journal article resulting from publicly-funded research to be made available within… read more
