Census of Marine Life, Open Access Gem

Following on the open access and marine themes of the past few weeks, the Census of Marine Life is a terrific open access resource.

The census, carried out over ten years, was an impressively massive effort involving:

A DECADE OF DISCOVERY
2,700 scientists
80+ nations
540 expeditions
US$ 650 million
2,600+ scientific publications
6,000+ potential new species
28 million distribution records and counting

Much of the census research is freely available in different forms on the site, including research articles published in PLoS ONE. The site is a treasure trove that yields new and fascinating information with each visit.

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AU and Open Access

Be sure to check out Antioch University’s open access dissertations this week. And if you’re on the New England campus, be sure to ask Environmental Studies faculty member Jim Gruber about his upcoming article in the open access journal Conservation and Society.

Jim sporting the OA t-shirt he won during last year’s Open Access Week.

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Students’ Right to Research

As a student trying to get this week’s assignments done, open access may seem only tangentially related to you and your education. Actually, it’s vitally important. And here are a few reasons why from the folks at The Right to Research Coalition:

• The current system puts students from smaller schools at a disadvantage: due to the staggering price of journal subscriptions, not even the largest, most well-funded institutions can provide their students with the complete scholarly record. Students at smaller or less well-funded colleges and universities must make do with their fraction of access their library can afford. Students at community colleges, who are a significant portion of students in higher education, suffer even more severely.
• Researching beyond the degree: many students, especially on the graduate level, pursue degrees in order to become qualified researchers. Whether they become professors, doctors, lawyers, or entrepreneurs, they will continuously rely on access to research in order to make an impact in their respective field. Yet, students’ access to journals expires along with their library card at graduation. If they take a job at another university, that institution may have a very different level of access than what they need, and if they take a job outside of the university setting, they will no longer have the library to provide them any access to journals.

These are just a few of the reasons; there are more worth considering. Take a few minutes today to learn why open access is important to you. Stop by the library, read the OA handouts, and enter our raffle to win gift certificates to Donna’s or Hannaford.

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Open Access: Free the Research

Woo hooooo! Open Access Week is here! Hard to contain your excitement, isn’t it? If you weren’t around for last year’s global event promoting OA, and are wondering if anyone other than librarians should be interested, here’s how the organizers describe open access:

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

The best OA introduction is still Open Access 101 from SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition). This great animated video (~3 minutes), explains the scholarly information landscape and why we need open access:

And check out A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access (PDF), which explains two ways the research community provides open access, through OA journals (more on those tomorrow) and OA archives or repositories.

Be sure to stop by the Library between now and Friday to pick up information about Open Access, chat with your librarian, and enter our Open Access raffle. And stay tuned to RFoD for more information throughout the week.

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Open Access at Antioch

Here are a couple of ways Antioch is supporting open access:

• ANE’s Environmental Studies doctoral candidates deposit their dissertations in the OhioLINK ETD (Electronic Theses and Dissertations) Center, an open access repository, as do doctoral candidates in Antioch’s PhD in Leadership and Change program.
• Dr. Carolyn Kenny, a faculty member in Antioch’s PhD in Leadership and Change program, is co-editor-in-chief of Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy, an open access journal.
• ANE faculty members, such as Jim Gruber, submit articles to open access journals.

Jim sporting his new OA t-shirt.

And here are some other actions Antioch could be taking:

• Antioch’s leadership could commit resources to developing an institutional repository, similar to the one at The Ohio State University, its Knowledge Bank.
• Faculty could pass a resolution, similar to ones passed by faculty at Harvard, MIT, and many other universities, requiring researchers to deposit articles and other work in an open access repository.

That’s a start. Let’s get going!

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An OA Journal for You

Open access journal publishing is one way that scholarship and research can be made available to the worldwide community, and a good place to find OA journals is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Here are some examples from browsing the DOAJ subject lists:

• Under psychology in social sciences: Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, Current Research in Social Psychology, Gay and Lesbian Issues and Psychology Review.
• Under ecology in earth and environmental sciences: Avian Conservation and Ecology, Ethnobotany Research and Applications, Urban Habitats, Green Theory and Praxis, Conservation Evidence.
• For organization and management (business and economics in DOAJ): International Journal of Business and Management; Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy; Information Technologies & International Development.
• And education journals (listed under social sciences): Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, Early Childhood Research & Practice, Educause Quarterly, Innovate: Journal of Online Education.

Most OA journals are peer reviewed, and journals from DOAJ are included on the ANE Journals A-Z list.

You can also search DOAJ for articles rather than browsing journals. Look for the Find Articles link in the upper left of the homepage.

Have you read an OA journal today?

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Open Access 101

SPARC (The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) has produced a great animated video, Open Access 101 (~3 minutes), explaining the scholarly information landscape and why we need open access:

And be sure to check out A Very Brief Introduction to Open Access (PDF), which explains two ways the research community provides open access, through OA journals (more on those tomorrow) and OA archives or repositories.

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