The Omnibus Appropriations Bill that was recently passed by Congress, included a provision that will greatly improve access to taxpayer-funded research. Under the bill, federal agencies (with research budgets more than $100 million per year) within Labor, Health, and Human Services and Education will be required to provide the public… read more
The Simpsons teach us about copyright
I was getting caught up on my Hulu backlog and found a very funny episode from the Simpsons about movie piracy and copyright infringement. It does a good job of poking fun at the extreme lengths Hollywood (and our government) will go to protect the profits from the movies they… read more
Public Domain Day
January 1st of every year is Public Domain Day. This is a day to celebrate the items that have entered the public domain. In the United States, we’ll have nothing to celebrate this year, as nothing will enter the public domain until 2019. That is because the 1976 Copyright Act… read more
SCOAP3 starting January 1st
SCOAP3 will start operations on January 1st, 2014. SCOAP3 is a partnership among libraries, funding agencies, and research centers. SCOAP3 works with publishers to make key journals in high energy physics open access. Partners of SCOAP3 pay into a central fund that is then used to pay the publishers for… read more
Posting articles online
Faculty and researchers have a long practice of sharing their published articles. For a long time this was done through personal requests – via mail, telephone, and email – but for the past ten to fifteen years, faculty have been posting copies of their journal articles on either personal webpages… read more
OA Button
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
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
