Wednesday, August 31, 2022

New Four-Year, $4 Million Open Climate Campaign Will Open Knowledge to Solve Challenges in Climate and Biodiversity - August 30, 2022

 

New Four-Year, $4 Million Open Climate Campaign Will Open Knowledge to Solve Challenges in Climate and Biodiversity

August 30, 2022

Mountain View, CA 30 Aug 2022: Creative Commons, SPARC and EIFL today announce a new 4-year, $4-million (USD) grant from Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, to fund the Open Climate Campaign.

This grant, which builds on $450,000 (USD) in planning funds from the Open Society Foundations, will fund a four-year campaign to accelerate progress towards solving the climate crisis and preserving global biodiversity by promoting open access to research.

“While the reality of climate change and the resulting loss of biodiversity is certain, the research about these global challenges and the possible actions to tackle them are too often not publicly accessible. In order to solve these pressing problems, the knowledge about them must be made immediately and freely open to all,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director at SPARC.

“The Campaign has assembled experts from across the fields of climate change, biodiversity, open science, scholarly publishing and open education to develop a campaign that we believe will lead to the open sharing of research outputs as the norm for researchers, governments, funders and environmental organizations,” said Rima Kupryte, Director at Electronic Information for Libraries.

The Campaign will:

  • Bring attention to the issue of access to knowledge on climate change and biodiversity.
  • Work directly with national governments, funders and environmental organizations to create open access policies and make it easier to share their climate change content.
  • Identify, engage and contribute to draft international frameworks to include open access policy recommendations.
  • Identify important existing climate and biodiversity research publications not already open access and help them move to open access where possible. We will also explore tactics to facilitate changes in publisher actions to ensure climate and biodiversity research is open access.
  • Engage with researchers, universities and policy makers in traditionally excluded geographical regions to ensure inclusive outcomes throughout.

“Climate change is the most pressing global challenge facing humanity. When research and data are closed behind paywalls and people are excluded from the conversation, progress is stifled and we all lose out. This campaign will ensure inclusive, just and equitable access to the essential knowledge we will all need to fight the climate crisis,” said Catherine Stihler, CEO at Creative Commons.

“OSF is thrilled to partner with the Arcadia Fund to support Creative Commons, SPARC, and EIFL, global leaders of the open access movement, to launch the Open Climate Campaign. The quick response from the international research and publishing communities to make all research on COVID-19, and now monkeypox, openly available, demonstrates that to properly address the world’s greatest challenges, research needs to be open. OSF has called for all research to be made openly available, since we helped to define open access to research twenty years ago. I believe the Open Climate Campaign will serve as a model for opening research in other critical fields,” said Melissa Hagemann, Senior Program Officer at the Open Society Foundations.

More information can be found at openclimatecampaign.org.

About

Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that helps overcome legal obstacles to the sharing of knowledge and creativity to address the world’s pressing challenges.

SPARC
SPARC is a non-profit advocacy organization that supports systems for research and education that are open by default and equitable by design.

EIFL
EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) works with libraries in Africa, Asia Pacific and Europe to enable access to knowledge for education, learning, research and sustainable community development.

Arcadia Fund
Arcadia is a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. It supports charities and scholarly institutions that preserve cultural heritage and the environment. Arcadia also supports projects that promote open access and all of its awards are granted on the condition that any materials produced are made available for free online. Since 2002, Arcadia has awarded more than $910 million to projects around the world.

Open Society Foundations
The Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, are the world’s largest private funder of independent groups working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights.

Media Contact
Nate Angell <press@creativecommons.org>
Director of Communications & Community
Creative Commons

Category:Open access Open Climate Campaign Open data Press

Tags:open access, Open Climate Campaign, open science, press release

[...]

Monday, August 29, 2022

‘Wind in our sails’: University of California hails White House guidance accelerating public access to federally funded research - August 26, 2022

 

‘Wind in our sails’: University of California hails White House guidance accelerating public access to federally funded research

By admin on Aug 26, 2022 01:17 pm

Statement from the University of California Libraries A year is a long time in the world of scientific research. The omicron variant of COVID-19 was identified in November 2021. The James Webb Space Telescope launched in December 2021 and sent back its first images just last month. Access to the latest science is the best way to solve today’s problems and accelerate future discoveries — and that is why the White House guidance issued this week to make federally funded research freely and immediately available is so important.  A 2013 Obama-era policy established a requirement that most federally funded, peer-reviewed []

Thursday, August 18, 2022

Pathways to Open Access: Open Infrastructure and CDL - John Chodacki - August 18, 2022

Pathways to Open Access: Open Infrastructure and CDL

By John Chodacki on Aug 18, 2022 10:22 am

The Pathways blog series highlights CDL’s efforts on various pathways to open access and illustrates how diverse approaches can complement and reinforce each other–and how they can raise productive tensions that push us to think more critically about the work we do. We believe this kind of approach can move us toward true and comprehensive transformation of the scholarly communications landscape. What is the strategy described in this post? In this post, we focus on open infrastructure. While this topic is not always prominent in discussions about open access, it has become an essential part of our strategy at CDL and underpins […]

The post Pathways to Open Access: Open Infrastructure and CDL appeared first on Office of Scholarly Communication.


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Recent Articles:

Pathways to Open Access: Library Publishing/Repository Services and CDL
Pathways to Open Access: Transformative Agreements and CDL
Why the UC Research Data Policy is Important
Campus Partner Highlight: Mitchell Brown reflects on the success of eScholarship at UC Irvine
IEEE and University of California Sign Transformative Open Access Publishing Agreement

ARL applauds NSF Open Science investment - August 16, 2022

ARL applauds NSF Open Science investment - 

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) commends the ongoing commitment of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to open science. NSF has announced awards for 10 new projects focused on building and enhancing coordination among researchers and other stakeholders to advance FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data principles and open-science practices.

The inaugural awards in NSF’s Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable, Open Science Research Coordination Networks (FAIROS RCN) program represent a pooled investment of over $12.5 million in open science from all directorates comprising NSF. This program is particularly unique given that the 10 projects are composed of 28 distinct NSF awards (detailed below) representing many organizations and institutions in the United States seeking to advance open-science efforts.

The NSF Solicitation 22-553 for FAIROS RCN supports groups of investigators to communicate, innovate, coordinate, and standardize research practices, training, and educational activities across disciplinary, organizational, geographic, and international boundaries to achieve the goals of FAIR and other open-science guiding principles. Research coordination networks are a form of awards that NSF makes to advance scientific practices and standards broadly across multiple research fields. These RCN awards will be for three-year projects. The managing program director for this new NSF solicitation is Martin Halbert, the NSF Science Advisor for Public Access.

Research libraries are key partners on campus to advance open-science practices. Many ARL member libraries provide services and infrastructure to support open-science initiatives and research data–related activities and best practices. Research libraries foster community building and support researchers across disciplinary areas. These services often include consultations, workshops, technical tools (such as institutional repositories and statistical software), and more.

Click here to read the original press release.

Tuesday, August 16, 2022

Pathways to Open Access: Library Publishing/Repository Services and CDL - Catherine Mitchell - August 16, 2022

 

Pathways to Open Access: Library Publishing/Repository Services and CDL

By Catherine Mitchell on Aug 16, 2022 08:47 am

The Pathways blog series highlights CDL’s efforts on various pathways to open access and illustrates how diverse approaches can complement and reinforce each other–and how they can raise productive tensions that push us to think more critically about the work we do. We believe this kind of approach can move us toward true and comprehensive transformation of the scholarly communications landscape. What is the strategy described in this post? This post discusses the California Digital Library’s eScholarship Publishing and Repository Services as core pathways to open access at the University of California. Ellen Finnie’s prior post in this series focused on the […]

The post Pathways to Open Access: Library Publishing/Repository Services and CDL appeared first on Office of Scholarly Communication.


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Recent Articles:

Pathways to Open Access: Transformative Agreements and CDL
Why the UC Research Data Policy is Important
Campus Partner Highlight: Mitchell Brown reflects on the success of eScholarship at UC Irvine
IEEE and University of California Sign Transformative Open Access Publishing Agreement
Thousands of older dissertations from UCSF newly available in eScholarship

Thursday, August 11, 2022

Pathways to Open Access: Transformative Agreements and CDL - Ellen Finnie - August 11, 2022

 Pathways to Open Access: Transformative Agreements and CDL

By Ellen Finnie on Aug 11, 2022 12:14 pm

The Pathways blog series highlights CDL’s efforts on various pathways to open access and illustrates how diverse approaches can complement and reinforce each other–and how they can raise productive tensions that push us to think more critically about the work we do. We believe this kind of approach can move us toward true and comprehensive transformation of the scholarly communications landscape. What is the strategy described in this post? This post explores one path to open access: CDL’s efforts to advance transformative agreements.   UC’s strategy for this pathway is grounded in the what UC stakeholders refer to as the “moral []


A Best-Selling Textbook Is Now Free - Inside HigherEd - August 11, 2022

 A Best-Selling Textbook Is Now Free

A popular chemistry book's jump from a publishing titan to an OER pioneer could be pivotal for the open access movement. For the author, it's also a fitting tribute to his late son.

Liam Knox 

August 11, 2022

"John McMurry's textbook Organic Chemistry has helped millions of students across the globe pass the infamous gauntlet of its namesake class -- also known among stressed-out pre-med students as "orgo" -- since the book was first printed in 1984.

For his bestseller's 10th edition, McMurry has decided to part ways with his longtime publisher, the industry giant Cengage, which has published the book since the beginning. He recently sold the rights to OpenStax, a nonprofit based at Rice University that is dedicated to developing open education resources (OER), learning and research materials created and licensed to be free for the user.

That means for the first time, the digital version of Organic Chemistry and its accompanying solutions manual -- usually priced at almost $100 -- will be available for students to download free."  [...]

Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Why the UC Research Data Policy is Important - Agnes Balla - August 10, 2022

 Why the UC Research Data Policy is Important

By Agnes Balla on Aug 10, 2022 12:31 pm

What do a court case victory over PETA, recovered research data from a ransomware attack, and a dispute over Alzheimer’s data have in common? They are all front-page examples of UC stepping in to protect its investigators and data assets to ensure continuity of research. However, there are plenty of other examples of UC’s commitment to protecting the ability of its employees to conduct research that often don’t catch the eyes of news outlets. They include, for example, sifting through regulations affecting research, working with funding agencies to clarify proposed policy changes, executing complex research agreements to further collaborations, and []

Monday, August 8, 2022

Campus Partner Highlight: Mitchell Brown reflects on the success of eScholarship at UC Irvine - August 8, 2022

 As the celebrations of eScholarship’s 20th anniversary continue, we turn our attention to our longstanding relationship with UC Irvine and our successful partnership on both the repository and journals sides of the program.  UC Irvine boasts ​​10 journals and 59 campus department homepages in eScholarship, showcasing the breadth of research at UCI – in the arts and social sciences, as well as earth, biological, and medical sciences. To date, open access (OA) content on the UCI eScholarship site has received a staggering 13.5 million views: if one of the goals of OA is to reach a wide readership, then UCI []