Tag: open access

CREOS hires three postdoctoral associates as a part of Mellon Foundation award

By on August 16, 2021

The 2020 Mellon Foundation award to CREOS to fund three postdoctoral associates for two years each is ramping up for September 2021 after a one-year delay due to the pandemic. Faculty members Stephanie Ann Frampton, Roger Levy, and Rebecca Saxe, along with CREOS staff and library staff Ye Li and Mark Szarko, will be thought partners and mentor the incoming postdocs.

  • Corey Johnson, PhD, Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford University, will work with Stephanie Frampton, associate professor of literature and faculty director of the MIT Programs in Digital Humanities, to conduct a research project to advance equity and accessibility of archives and special collections. Johnson is considering a focus on digital access to indigenous collections when the original materials were only intended for a limited audience.
  • Suman Maity, PhD, Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, will work with Professor Roger Levy in Brain and Cognitive Science to conduct a research project on computational social science for scholarly communications and open and equitable science.
  • Ashley Thomas, PhD, Cognitive Science, UC Irvine will work with faculty member Rebecca Saxe, John W. Jarve (1978) Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, to develop a new course at MIT and conduct research on tools for rigorous and reproducible research.

For more information about Johnson, Maity, and Thomas, please check the CREOS website. We are looking forward to having them join us in September and October. 

SolarSPELL: The Solar Powered Educational Learning Library

By on March 21, 2017

Laura HosmanAccess to high-quality, relevant information is absolutely foundational for a quality education. Yet, so many schools across the developing world lack fundamental resources, like textbooks, libraries, electricity and Internet connectivity. The SolarSPELL (Solar Powered Educational Learning Library) is designed specifically to address these infrastructural challenges, by bringing relevant, digital educational content to offline, off-grid locations. This talk will examine the design, development, and deployment of this for-the-field technology that looks simple but has a quite complex background.

SolarSPELL is a portable, ruggedized, solar-powered digital library that broadcasts a webpage with open-access educational content over an offline WiFi hotspot, content that is curated for a particular audience in a specified locality — in this case, for schoolchildren and teachers in remote locations. It is a hands-on, iteratively developed project that has involved undergraduate students in all facets and at every stage of development.

Laura Hosman
Hosman is assistant professor at Arizona State University, holding a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and in The Polytechnic School. Her work is action-oriented and focuses on the role for information and communications technology (ICT) in developing countries. Presently, she focuses on ICT-in-education projects, and brings her passion for experiential learning to the classroom by leading real-world-focused, project-based courses that have seen student-built technology deployed in schools in Haiti, Vanuatu, Micronesia, Samoa, and Tonga.

Event Details
Location: E25-202
We will provide lunch; please bring your own drink and your questions.

Information Science Brown Bag talks, hosted by the Program on Information Science, consists of regular discussions and brainstorming sessions on all aspects of information science and uses of information science and technology to assess and solve institutional, social and research problems. These are informal talks. Discussions are often inspired by real-world problems being faced by the lead discussant.  

April 19, 2017 12 - 1pm

Come Together Right Now: An Introduction to the Open Access Network

By on October 11, 2016

Officially launched just over a year ago, the Open Access Network (OAN) offers a transformative, sustainable, and scalable model of open access (OA) publishing and preservation that encourages partnerships among scholarly societies, research libraries, and other partners (e.g., academic publishers, university presses, collaborative e-archives) who share a common mission to support the creation and distribution of open research and scholarship and to encourage more affordable education, which can be a direct outcome of OA publishing. Our ultimate goal is to develop a collective funding approach that is fair and open and that fully sustains the infrastructure needed to support the full life-cycle for communication of the scholarly record, including new and evolving forms of research output. Simply put, we intend to Make Knowledge Public.

Rebecca Kennison is the Principal of K|N Consultants and the co-founder of the Open Access Network. Prior to working full time at K|N, she was the founding director of the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, a division of the Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, where she was responsible for developing programs to facilitate scholarly research and the communication of that research through technology solutions. Rebecca has worked primarily in the scholarly publishing industry, including production leadership roles at Cell Press, Blackwell Publishing (now Wiley-Blackwell), and the open access publisher Public Library of Science (PLOS), where she was the very first employee.

Event Details
Location: E53-212
We will provide lunch; please bring your own drink
Space is limited; RSVP here

Information Science Brown Bag talks, hosted by the Program on Information Science, consist of regular discussions and brainstorming sessions on all aspects of information science and uses of information science and technology to assess and solve institutional, social and research problems. These are informal talks. Discussions are often inspired by real-world problems being faced by the lead discussant.

October 18, 2016 12 - 1pm

Towards an Open Science Publishing Platform

By on February 8, 2016

Vitek Tracz photo

Bring your lunch and join Vitek Tracz and Micah Altman from the Libraries’ Information Science program for this February Brown Bag. This program is suitable for those already published and those looking to be published.

The traditional way of publishing new findings in journals is becoming increasingly outdated and no longer serves the needs of much of science. Vitek Tracz will discuss a new approach being developed by F1000, an Open Science Platform, that combines immediate publication (like a preprint) with formal, invited, and transparent post-publication peer review. This bypasses the many problems of the current journal system and, in doing so, moves the evaluation of research and researchers away from the journal-based Impact Factor and towards a fairer system of article-based qualitative and quantitative indicators. In the long term, it should be irrelevant where a researcher publishes his or her findings. In addition to this this new way to publish research, Vitek will also describe the other two components of the F1000: F1000Prime, an article-level recommendation and evaluation service from over 12,000 leading researchers, and F1000Workspace, a set of tools to help authors to discover literature, collect reference libraries, write articles, and collaborate.

About Vitek Tracz
Tracz has studied mathematics, cinema, and art history, collaborated on a feature film, and developed the first mobile phone navigation company. An early internet presence, Tracz launched BioMed Net, an online community for scientists in 1996, and Biomed Central, the first open-access journal, two years later. He founded the Current Opinion journals and piloted other innovative publishing projects before tackling his latest initiative, F1000, whose “Open Science Platform” supports publication of all findings (negative results, case reports, observational studies) and features speedy publication, open peer review, and includes source data for easy replication.

Location: E25-117

February 23, 2016 12 - 1pm

MIT Libraries supporting Open Library of Humanities

By on February 5, 2016

logo olhThe MIT Libraries have joined the Open Library of Humanities’ (OLH), an academic-led, all open access publisher of humanities journals. The platform, which has funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, covers its costs by payments from an international library consortium, rather than any kind of author fee. The platform hosts peer-reviewed open access journals in the humanities, as well as OLH’s own multidisciplinary open access journal.

The platform is also supporting a new journal, Glossa, created when the entire editorial team of the Elsevier journal Lingua resigned and started a new open access journal with the same focus and scope as Lingua. The editorial board made the move when they proposed to Elsevier that Lingua should become an open access journal, with reasonable article fees paid by a new consortium. The goal was to make the journal free to readers and authors. Elsevier did not agree to the plan.

Elsevier claims the rights to the name Lingua, so the new journal will be called Glossa. But according to Kai von Fintel, MIT Professor of Linguistics, “in the eyes of the community [Glossa] is the rightful continuation of Lingua…a colleague suggested the alternative name ‘Zombie Lingua’ for the Elsevier project, which I hope will stick,” von Fintel says.

In his blog, von Fintel calls upon linguists to “not assist Elsevier in standing up a new journal that usurps the Lingua goodwill. Do not serve on the editorial team, do not submit articles, do not review for them. I certainly won’t.” The linguistics faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee have pledged to support these principles and Glossa as the “true successor” to Lingua. Conversations are said to be underway on other campuses.

For more information:

 

Explore design visualization and integration in the International Journal of Architectural Research

By on January 5, 2016

IJARDesign creativity and integrated visualization are explored in a special issue of the International Journal of Architectural Research (Archnet-IJAR), available now on Archnet. Jack Steven Goulding and Farzad Pour Rahimian served as guest editors for the November 2015 issue (volume 9, issue 3), which presents nine papers from leading scholars, industry, and contemporaries. These papers provide an eclectic but cognate representation of AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) design visualisation and integration, not only uncovering new insight and understanding of these challenges and solutions, but also providing new theoretical and practice signposts for future research. The entire volume is available for download.

Established in 2007, Archnet- IJAR is an interdisciplinary, fully-refereed, open access, scholarly online journal of architecture, planning, and built environment studies, edited by Professor Ashraf M. Salama, head of Architecture at University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland. Supported by two co-editors, Farzad Pour Rahimian and Remah Gharib, IJAR has two international boards (advisory and editorial) that ensure the quality of scholarly papers and allow for a comprehensive academic review of contributions spanning a wide spectrum of issues, methods, theoretical approaches, and architectural and development practices. IJAR provides a comprehensive academic review of a wide spectrum of issues, methods, and theoretical approaches. It aims to bridge theory and practice in the fields of architectural/design research and urban planning/built environment studies, reporting on the latest research findings and innovative approaches for creating responsive environments.

Archnet-IJAR is indexed and listed in several scientific and research databases, including Avery index to Architectural Periodicals, EBSCO-Current Abstracts-Art and Architecture, INTUTE, Directory of Open Access Journals, Pro-Quest, Scopus-Elsevier and many university library databases. The journal is archived, in its entirety, in Archnet, the most comprehensive online community for architects, planners, urban designers, interior designers, landscape architects, and scholars working in these fields, developed by the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network.

To submit articles for future issues of IJAR, visit the online submission page.

Downloads of open access articles hit new monthly peak

By on November 12, 2015

dspace screen shot de weck article heavy downloadsIn October 2015, downloads of the 18,000 articles deposited in DSpace@MIT in accordance with the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy topped 180,000. This was a new record, leaping beyond the prior bar of 123,000 set in September.

Among the top 10 most downloaded articles for the month of October 2015 were:

Readers downloading these papers come from many walks of life. One recent reader wrote:

“I am a ‘semi-retired’ physicist who is attempting to keep up with the literature in the wild west ( Idaho Falls, Idaho ) It is very difficult to obtain original journal access and inter-library access is very slow ( usually ).”

Other readers’ comments are available through the oastories.mit.edu web service, where you can click on a map and see what readers from a particular country are saying.

To view download statistics, visit the Open Access Article Statistics site.

To have your article appear in these statistics, MIT authors may deposit a manuscript to the collection by logging in to DSpace@MIT.

This news is part of a series of regular reports on activity related to the Open Access Articles Collection in DSpace@MIT, which was launched in October 2009 to house articles deposited in association with the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy.

Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing, Copyright & Licensing, MIT Libraries

New milestone for MIT Faculty Open Access Policy

By on September 2, 2015

A new milestone was reached in collecting articles under the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy : 43% of the articles published by faculty since they adopted their Policy are now being shared through the Open Access Articles Collection in Dspace@MIT.

As of the end of July 2015, downloads of the 17,400 articles deposited in relation to the Policy topped 3.3 million, with over 83,500 downloads during the month.

Recent readers included:

  • A researcher and inventor who used a paper for a presentation at a conference, writing “I’m privileged to cite this paper…Thanks for making this paper freely available!”
  • A PhD candidate in the UK without access to papers on human factors in blood transfusion, who read “Systems thinking for safety and security,” by William Young and MIT Professor Nancy Leveson, indicating that it (and related papers) were “invaluable. Many thanks.”
  • A researcher in New Zealand reading about power in organizations who wrote “wow – thank you – this is an amazing initiative.”

Recent readers come from many walks of life and corners of the globe, including:

  • a journalist in India trying to make a deadline,
  • a French ophthalmologist working with imaging tools,
  • a physical therapist from India,
  • an amateur aviation aficionado, and
  • an independent researcher of prison reform.

Other readers’ comments are available at the Scholarly Publishing website.

One of the most downloaded articles in the Open Access Articles Collection, July 2015

One of the most downloaded articles in the Open Access Articles Collection, July 2015

Among the top 10 most downloaded articles for the month of July 2015 were:

To view download statistics, including on a global map, visit the Open Access Article Statistics site.

MIT authors may deposit a manuscript to the collection by logging in to a form at DSpace@MIT.

This news is part of a series of monthly reports on activity related to the Open Access Articles Collection in DSpace@MIT, which was launched in October 2009 to house articles deposited in association with the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy.

Ellen Finnie Duranceau, Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing, Copyright & Licensing, MIT Libraries

 

FASTR Act for public access to research passes first hurdle in Senate

By on August 3, 2015

On July 29th, a US Senate panel approved the Fair Access to Science and Technology Research (FASTR) Act, a bill that would require the largest federal agencies to make the peer-reviewed research papers they fund freely available to the public. The bill now moves to the full Senate for a vote, and has been introduced into the House.

This bipartisan measure, if it is approved by both chambers of Congress and signed by the president, would ensure that the 2013 White House requirement from the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) would remain in place in future administrations.

Both FASTR and the White House directive require federal agencies that fund over $100M in research annually to make articles they fund openly accessible within 12 months of publication.

Representative Doyle, one of the supporters in the House, explains that this bill matters because it “will give the American people greater access to the scientific research they’ve already paid for. …[and] will facilitate the dissemination of new knowledge within the scientific community” which “will accelerate innovation and economic growth.”

More information: