June 26, 2012

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About

The HOAP Update list is designed to share monthly updates, conversations, and information about the Harvard Open Access Project (HOAP). This is the first update of these monthly updates and is presented in wiki format. All future updates will be made available via links to the list's public archives on the public updates wiki page.

Publications and Related Research

  • PUBLICATIONS FROM MIT PRESS: MIT Press recently published the Kindle edition of HOAP Director Peter Suber’s newest work, Open Access, as part of their Essential Knowledge Series. They will roll out a dozen other digital formats over the course of the summer; a print edition is expected in mid-July. An anthology of some of Peter’s articles on OA from the past ten years will also come out in early 2013. Both books will themselves be OA one year after publication.
  • DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS: Two doctoral students, Haswira Nor Mohamad Hashim and Heather Morrison, are currently writing dissertations on OA, for which Peter is serving as an external examiner. Hashim is pursuing a degree from Queensland University of Technology in Australia, while Morrison is pursuing a degree from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

Events and Public Policy

  • WHITE HOUSE PETITION: HOAP helped muster signatures for a White House petition calling for a federal OA policy that requires “the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form.” According to the petition site’s rules, any petition that collects 25,000 signatures in less than 30 days receives an official response from the Obama administration; the petition reached that mark in just 14 days of its posting. The petition was created by Access2Research, a group of Open Access advocates that includes SPARC’s Executive Director, Heather Joseph, and former Berkman Assistant Director, John Wilbanks. We’re awaiting the White House response!
  • WORLD BANK LAUNCHES OA POLICY: In April 2012, the World Bank announced that it will implement a new Open Access policy for its research outputs and knowledge products, effective July 1, 2012. According to a World Bank press release, “the new policy builds on recent efforts to increase access to information at the World Bank and to make its research as widely available as possible...the Bank launched [today] a new Open Knowledge Repository and adopted a set of Creative Commons copyright licenses.” The policy will effectively make World Bank research freely available online without charge or restrictions via the Open Knowledge Repository. Peter Suber participated in a panel that discussed the World Bank’s new OA policy and global development at the May 21, 2012 launch event.
  • ABA AND HLS CO-SPONSOR PANEL ON COPYRIGHT AND FEDERALLY FUNDED RESEARCH: In an ABA and HLS co-sponsored panel moderated by Jonathan Hulbert, University Attorney at Harvard and Vice-Chair of the Committee on University Intellectual Property Law, Peter Suber, Simon Franzini, a Harvard Law School Cyberlaw Clinic student, and Mark Seely, Elsevier General Counsel, discussed copyright aspects of federal OA policy. The panel discussion, “Public Access to Federally Funded Research: Copyright and Other Issues,” was recorded and recently posted online. Notably, Mark Seely conceded that the National Institute of Health OA mandate, and other similar OA policies, are lawful (see minute 8 of the recording; the question was picked up again for clarification and further discussion at minutes 16 and 18).
  • BUDAPEST OPEN ACCESS INITIATIVE: For the ten year anniversary of its landmark convening in 2002, the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) reconvened this February, with plans to release a statement of recommendations for the next ten years. Peter Suber was the principal drafter of the BOAI statement ten years ago and is convening the effort to draft a new statement. In a February 2012 blog post, Melissa Hagemann of the Open Society Foundations announced and outlined the principles that would underlie the reconvening: We plan to develop a set of recommendations which will help guide the movement over the next ten years. We will be exploring issues of sustainability, what we can do to further support OA in developing and transition countries, and what implications OA has for measuring the impact of research, and encouraging its reuse. But just like the first meeting in Budapest, we will be keeping the agenda as open as possible. We want to encourage the creative thinking that led to the conception of Open Access in the first place, thinking that has inspired a global movement which cannot now be claimed by any single institution, but is a testament to the power of a good idea to spread across institutional boundaries and disciplines.

Work and Consultation with other Institutions

  • “A GUIDE TO BEST PRACTICES FOR UNIVERSITY OPEN ACCESS POLICIES”: HOAP Principals Peter Suber and Stuart Shieber, in collaboration with the Office of Scholarly Communication, are currently drafting A Guide to Best Practices for University Open Access Policies. When the draft is ready, the team will share it with major partner institutions this summer, soliciting feedback, contributions, and endorsements. They hope to release the first public version in the fall.

Technical Developments

  • TAGTEAM 1.0: HOAP and the Harvard Library Lab, led by Peter and Dan Collis-Puro, have soft launched their open source social tagging tool, TagTeam 1.0; an official launch is coming soon. On his blog, Dan describes TagTeam as “an RSS/Atom/RDF aggregator that allows administrators to remix and republish feeds on multiple levels...it also allows for the filtering of tags – additions, substitutions, and removals in a flexible ‘tiered’ filtering system.” Peter will use TagTeam to enhance the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) as a way to alert the OA community of new developments and to organize knowledge of the field. Anticipating wide use beyond the OA community, Dan and Peter will continue work on TagTeam 2.0 over the summer and into the future. TagTeam was funded by the Library Lab, conceived by Peter, and coded by Dan at the Berkman Center.

Ongoing Work

  • FEDERAL RESEARCH PUBLIC ACCESS ACT: HOAP continues to work with allies, especially SPARC and the ATA, on strategies to pass the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), a bill which would require free online public access to a very large portion of publicly-funded research in the United States.
    • For extensive notes on FRPAA, see the wiki page devoted to the topic
  • SOCIETY PUBLISHERS & OA JOURNALS: Peter and Caroline Sutton have been maintaining an OA spreadsheet that lists over 600 OA journals published by scholarly societies from across the globe. The spreadsheet is openly editable.
  • OPEN ACCESS TRACKING PROJECT: HOAP continued to build and manage the Open Access Tracking Project (OATP), soon to be enhanced by the transition from Connotea to TagTeam.
  • OPEN ACCESS DIRECTORY: Peter and HOAP research assistants Emily Kilcer and Andrea Bernard continued to update and expand the Open Access Directory (OAD).

Related Resources

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