The Scholarly Communication Group at UT Libraries organizes periodic brown bag discussions on a variety of schol comm topics. These brown bag sessions are open to anyone, although the primary audience is UT Libraries staff. They provide an opportunity to talk through either current or emerging issues for the Libraries and… read more
Dept. of Labor adopts open licensing policy
The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has adopted an open licensing policy that requires all intellectual property created under the competitive award process to be licensed with a Creative Commons attribution license. This will allow the public to use, share and build upon the work funder by DOL. More information:… read more
Publishers requiring ORCIDs
Several publishers have announced that they will require author to use an ORCID identifier during the publication process. Those publishers are: The American Geophysical Union, eLife, EMBO, Hindawi, IEEE, Science journals, ScienceOpen, and PLOS. These publishers join the UK’s Royal Society and several funding agencies in requiring ORCIDs. This is fantastic news… read more
Institutional repositories and academic social networking sites
The University of California Office of Scholarly Communication has a really great blog post about the difference between open access institutional and subject repositories and academic social networking sites like Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Here’s the post: http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/12/a-social-networking-site-is-not-an-open-access-repository/ I particularly like the table they created to demonstrate the differences:
Open Access explained via cartoon
Editors of Lingua step down
Inside Higher Ed reports that “All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua, one of the top journals in linguistics, last week resigned to protest Elsevier’s policies on pricing and its refusal to convert the journal to an open-access publication that would be free online.” This is… read more
David Ernst coming to UT Austin
As part of the Year of Open programming, David Ernst, the Executive Director of the University of Minnesota Open Textbook Library, will be on the UT Austin campus Thursday, November 5th. He’ll be giving a talk on Open Textbooks: Access, Affordability, and Academic Success at 2:00pm in the Texas Governors’… read more
UC OA policy extends to all UC employees
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 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
